AN AMERICAN AROUND THE WORLD
Being an Account of a Circumnavigation of the Globe in the Years 2030 to 2039, by GLEN BAUM.
I was born in La Jolla, the son of a ruined country, and I grew up in ignorance of the world and its ways; but I knew it was out there, and that I was being kept from it. On the night of my twenty-third birthday I stood on the peak of Mount Soledad and looked out at the ocean’s wide waste. On the horizon to the west faint lights blinked like red stars, clustered together constellationlike on the black lump in the blackness that was San Clemente Island. Under those red pricks of light strode the never seen foreigners whose job it was to guard me from the world, as if my country were a prison. Suddenly I found the situation intolerable, and I resolved then and there, kicking the rocks of the summit into a cairn as a seal of my pledge, that I would escape the constraints put upon me, and wander the globe to see what I would. I would discover what the world was really like; see what changes had occurred since the great devastation of my country; return, and tell my countrymen what I had seen.
After some weeks of thought and preparation I stood on the stub of Scripps pier with my tearful mother and a few friends. The little sloop that had been my father’s bobbed impatiently over the waves. I kissed my mother good-bye, promising to return within four years if it was within my power, and climbed down the pier’s ladder into my craft. It was just after sunset. With some trepidation I cast off and sailed away into the night.
It was a clear night, the Santa Ana wind blowing mildly from my starboard rear quarter, and I made good time northwest. My plan was to sail to Catalina rather than San Clemente Island, for Catalina was rumored to have ten times as many foreigners as San Clemente, and it also had the major airport. In my boat I carried a good thick coat, and a pack filled with bread and my mother’s cheese; nothing else I could obtain in La Jolla would have been any use to me, I reckoned. I crossed the channel in ten hours, on the same reach the entire way.
To the east blues were leaking into blacks by the time I approached the steep side of Catalina Island. Its black hills, ribbed by lighter black ridges, were starred by lights red and white and yellow and blue. I sailed around the southern end of the island, planning to land on a likely looking beach and walk to Avalon. Unfortunately for my plan, the west side of Catalina appeared to be very sheer, beachless rock cliffs, unlike any similar stretch of the San Diego coast; and it was now that time of the dawn when everything is distinguishable but the colors of things. Through that gray world I coasted (in the island’s lee the wind was slack) when to my surprise a sail was hauled up on a mast I hadn’t seen before, against the cliff. Immediately I tried to veer back out to sea, but the boat tacked slowly out ahead of me and intercepted my course. I was contemplating steering into the cliff and taking my chances there, when I saw that the only person aboard the other boat was a blackhaired girl. She put her boat on a parallel course after crossing ahead of me, and brought her boat next to mine, staring all the while at me.
“Who are you?” she called.
“A fisherman from Avalon.”
She shook her head. “Who are you?”
After a moment’s indecision I chose boldness and cried, “I come from the mainland, travelling to Avalon and the world!”
She gestured for me to pull down my sail; I did, she did likewise, and our boats came together. Though her skin was white, her features were Oriental. I asked her if there was a beach I could land on. She said there was, but that they were patrolled, like all the island’s shore, by guards who either saw your papers or took you to jail.
I had not foreseen this difficulty, and was at a loss. I watched the water lap between our boats, and then said to the girl, “Will you help me?”
“Yes,” she replied, “And my father will get you papers. Here, get in my boat; we must leave yours behind.”
Reluctantly I clambered over the gunwales, pack in hand. My father’s boat bucked emptily. Before we cast off from it, I took a hatchet from the bottom of the girl’s boat, reached over and knocked a hole in the bottom of mine. Surreptitiously I wiped a tear from my eye as I watched it founder.
When we rounded the southern point and approached Avalon the girl—her name was Hadaka—instructed me to get under the fish in the bottom of her boat. She had been night fishing, and had a collection on her keel that I was unhappy to associate with—eels, squid, sand sharks, rockfish, octopus, all thrown together. But I did as she said. I lay smothering, still as the dead fish over me, as she stopped to be questioned in Japanese at the entrance to Avalon harbor; and I sailed into Avalon with an octopus on my face.
When Hadaka had docked the boat I quickly jumped up and acted as her assistant. “Leave the fish,” she said when they were covered. “Quick, up to my house.” We walked up a steep street past markets just opening. I felt conspicuous, for my smell if for no other reason, but no one paid any untoward attention to us, and high on the hill surrounding the town we slipped through a gate and were in her family’s little yard garden. To the east the sun cracked the floor of America and shone on us. I had left my country behind; I was on foreign soil for the first time in my life.
“Well, that’s Chapter One,” Steve said. “He’s on Catalina!”
“Read some more!” Mando cried. “Keep going!”
“No more,” Tom said from the door. “It’s late, and I need some peace and quiet.” He coughed, and put his bee gear down in a corner. He waved us out: “Nicolin, you can keep the book for as long as it takes you to read it—”
“Yow!”
“Wait a minute! For as long as it takes you to read it aloud to the others here.”
“Yeah!” said Mando as he hungrily eyed the book.
“That would be fun,” Kristen said, glancing at Mando.
“Okay,” Steve agreed. “I like it that way anyway.”
“Well then, get home to supper. All of you!” Tom shooed us out the door with some dire warnings to Steve about what would happen if the book should come to harm. Steve laughed and led us down the ridge path, holding the book up triumphantly. I looked out in the direction of Catalina with whetted curiosity, but clouds obscured it from view. Americans were on that island! How I longed to travel there myself. My battered toe thumped a rock and with a howl I returned my attention to the ground beneath me. Down where the trail divided we stopped and agreed to meet the following afternoon to read some more.
“Let’s meet at the ovens,” Kristen said. “Kathryn wants to do a full batch tomorrow.”
“After the fishing.” Steve nodded, and skipped down the beach path, swinging the book overhead.
But the next day after fishing he wasn’t so cheerful. John was on him for something or other, and when we got the boats pulled out of the river Steve was ordered to help sort and clean the fish. He stood still as a rock staring at his pa, until I sort of nudged him and got him to walk away. “I’ll tell them you’ll be late,” I said, and beat it up the cliff before he took his frustration out on me with more than a glare.
Up at the ovens Kathryn had the girls at work: Kristen and Rebel were pumping the bellows, all flushed with the effort, their hair streaked with flour. Kathryn and Carmen Eggloff were shaping the tortillas and loaves and arranging them on the trays. The air above the brick ovens shimmered with heat. Around behind the corner of the Marianis’ house Mrs. M. was helping some of the other girls knead barley dough. Kathryn stopped bossing Kristen and Rebel long enough to greet me. “Go ahead and sit down,” she said when I told them Steve would be late. “Mando and Del aren’t here yet anyway.”