But Enough About You: Essays Read online

  The next day, after Burke and I spend hours trying to warm the Cessna engine, we set off for Nome, into pink twilight, toward the United States’ westernmost parts. I swigged from a bottle of port. My face showed signs of frostbite and my hands were claws, so the port was very welcome and warming.

  I looked through the windshield at Norton Sound, a forbidding stretch of ice water. Back in 1925 one of the serum runners, a famous musher named Leonhard Seppala, risked crossing Norton Sound rather than take the longer, coastal route. In Alaska, even today, people speak of Seppala in reverential tones.

  At this stage of the 1925 serum rum, the entire world was watching. A headline read: NOME SITUATION CRITICAL; ALL HOPE RESTS IN DOGS.

  Off to our right, the dying sun cast shadows over snow-covered mountains that looked like enormous dunes of white desert sand. We landed at Nome and to our enormous delight found that it was an oasis of plug-ins. We hitchhiked a ride into town, whose main street was being decorated to greet the front-runner.

  The next day we stood on Front Street along with two thousand other people, nostrils steaming vapor in the sun-bright cold. We heard a helicopter—a news chopper—buzzing above Mackey. A booming voice over a loudspeaker announced the news in ritual wording: “We have a dog team on the street of Nome, Alaska!”

  And suddenly there was Lance Mackey and his dogs, led by a phalanx of Iditarod trailbreakers on snow machines. The cheer went up, and stayed up. I am not a sports person, but this was thrilling.

  He finished in 9 days, 21 hours, 38 minutes, and 46 seconds. A day longer than Martin Buser’s record, but Mackey finished with all fifteen of his dogs, a record in itself. The last person to finish this year would be Timothy Hunt, who would pull into Nome six days later. Of the original sixty-seven starters, fourteen teams scratched and one withdrew.

  Governor Sarah Palin telephoned Mackey. We listened in on their conversation over the loudspeakers.

  “We love ya!” said the governor. Mackey said, “Say hi to Todd for me.”

  Mackey was presented with a check for $69,000 and a cherry-red pickup truck. I looked at the dogs. They were pawing the ground, barking and howling, oblivious to all the fuss. They wanted to keep going.

  The next day, as we were boarding a plane a bit larger than our Cessna, passengers were talking about how Mackey had spent his victory night. Not soaking in a hot tub or being massaged but arm wrestling at the Breakers Bar.

  “He won the middleweight,” someone said. “Then he won the women’s. What a guy.”

  —Forbes Life, December 2009

  THE HISTORY OF THE HOTEL MINIBAR

  Volume II: Rome to the Present Day

  78 B.C.—Hiltonus, an innkeeper weary of being rudely woken in the middle of the night by Roman legionnaires demanding wine and salted nuts, creates the concept of the minibar by installing in each room a chest containing miniature bottles of wine and salted nuts. Guests are asked to write down what they consume on a slate, but instead write taunting sentiments—“We came, we saw, we ate your cashews”—causing Hiltonus to abandon his experiment and ushering in a thousand-year hiatus in further attempts at in-room hospitality.

  A.D. 1096—Crusaders passing through Malta en route to demonstrating their Christianity by slaughtering Muslims overwhelm island hotel keepers with middle-of-the-night requests for armor repair kits (forerunner of the modern sewing kit) and yew tree bark (forerunner of modern aspirin tablets). When checkout clerks attempt to charge the crusaders for the items, they are beheaded. Pope Suburban II issues a bull excommunicating “any who pilfer salted almonds and beverages without just recompense,” but Antipope Inclement III counterasserts a divine right to free snacking (Jus Pretzelonis) by anyone engaged in the holy work of killing Muslims. The issue becomes mired in canonical courts and is not resolved until 1922.

  1400—The proprietor of London’s Tabard Inn, a gathering place for Chaucer’s pilgrims, installs “minny barres” in the rooms. Inside are miniature bottles of holy water “Personally blest by St. Thomas” (actually unblessed Thames water), pints of ale, and capon drumsticks. Ingeniously, the drumsticks are tied to strings that ring a bell at the front desk, signaling clerks with clubs to burst into the room and beat the guest until payment is tendered.

  1570—The Hamburg clockmaker Johannes Gluck devises his famous “Honor Bar” for the local hotelmeister Adolphus Kempinski. Something of a misnomer, the Honor Bar contains a hidden steel trap similar to those used to snare beavers and water rats that clamps down violently on the hand of anyone reaching for cocktail wieners or beer, unless they have first inserted coins into a slot.

  1772—The manager of Paris’s famed Hotel de Luxe stocks his bars-de-minuit with prophylactic sheepskin “envelopes” for the convenience of his male customers wishing to avoid le syph or le clappe.

  1861—On the eve of his inauguration, a thirsty Abraham Lincoln attempts to open the minibar in his room at the Willard Hotel, only to find that the key will not fit. His bodyguard, Pinkerton, offers to shoot off the lock, but Lincoln demurs on the grounds that this might further divide the nation. Lincoln’s gaunt and drawn appearance during his inauguration is attributed to his lack of refreshment the night before, but the incident, widely commented upon, enhances his aura of selflessness and nobility. An early sketch for the Lincoln Memorial by the sculptor Daniel Chester French depicts the president philosophically contemplating a locked minibar.

  1905—Senator Robert “Fighting Bob” Smollett of Wisconsin denounces hotel minibars that require keys to open them as “un-American” and campaigns for president on a platform of outlawing them. His campaign fizzles, however, when it is pointed out to him that there is no presidential election in 1905.

  1924—F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes his roman à clef A Minibar as Big as the Ritz, about the Princeton man Biff Billington, whose beautiful, crazed Southern-beauty wife, Zouella, ruins him financially by opening a sealed jar of macadamia nuts.

  1975—Minibar fraud reaches a crisis as more and more hotels report that guests are emptying the contents and refilling bottles of scotch with iced tea and bags of M&Ms with gravel. Hotel owners petition the government to make minibar abuse a federal crime. During heated Senate hearings, Democrats assail the high prices of items, which they say drives normally honest guests to “desperate acts.” Republicans counter that hotels have the right to charge what the market will bear, “and then some.” The issue becomes key in the 1972 presidential election, but unfortunately “Fighting Bob” Smollett died in 1921 and is ineligible to run, except in Chicago.

  1995—The luxurious Encomium Hotel in Bangkok becomes the first to stock its minibars with live prostitutes.

  —Forbes FYI, March 2002

  TWO IN THE BUSH

  Africa is a place that people fall for hard. And a place that sometimes falls on them hard. One friend of mine got trampled nearly to death by a bull elephant and returned with a shattered rib cage. Another friend was blown up by Osama bin Laden in Dar es Salaam. (He survived.) Another had an AK-47 pointed at him by a twelve-year-old. But one day my friend Peaches announced, “We’re going. Here are your malaria pills.” And so I found myself at the Royal Livingstone Hotel in Zambia, watching the sun set over the Zambezi River at Victoria Falls and listening to the honk and snort of hippo, a sound I had known only from zoos.

  Normally, countries that begin with “Z” make me a bit nervous, and this was the second Z-country in one day (we’d entered through Zimbabwe). But I was all at peace. The only discordant sound in that first, dreamy African twilight was the abrupt shatter of glass: my Pimm’s cocktail being knocked over by a vervet monkey with the alacrity of a Times Square pickpocket. He wanted the cucumber. Next morning at breakfast Peaches had her bread roll snatched off her plate. But as African dangers go, these were manageable. At the river’s edge there’s a two-foot-wide Maginot Line of jagged rocks and an electrified fence, to keep out hippos and crocodiles. The previous April, the Zambezi rose and crocodiles came swarming onto the la
wn. That must have made for a lively happy hour.

  We dined that night by candlelight, with bats flitting overhead, on roasted sweetwater langoustines, Zambezi bream, and rabbit pot stickers. After, we drank brandy and smoked in the bar, one of the most splendid I’ve seen on any continent. It was deserted except for us. On the wall, in large letters, are the words:

  . . . Commend me to the merry midnight frogs . . .

  —DR. LIVINGSTONE

  Livingstone was the Scottish missionary-explorer who opened southern Africa to exploration in the process of attempting to abolish the local slave trade. He was possibly the last person to be disappointed by the spectacular falls here. He came upon them in 1855 while trying to establish a commercial river route. He loyally named the 1,860-yard-long, 355-foot-deep falls after his queen. The local word for the falls was Mosi-oa-Tunya, “the smoke that thunders” which is more accurate than “Victoria Falls.” The cataract sends up plumes of mist and vapor. As you walk along opposite the falls it appears to be raining up. This was January: The water was low and we could see the rocks in detail. From March to May, when the water is high, all you see is a wall of furious white froth.

  Hours later we were in a six-seater Cessna 3,000 feet up, looking down on the intersection of four countries: Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana, and Zambia. Peaches pointed, and there below I saw my first elephants in the wild, a thrilling sight.

  Our home for the next two nights was Chobe Chilwero, a very cool fifteen-“chalet” lodge on a height above the Chobe River, about ten miles from where it joins the Zambezi. It was hot and unusually dry for the time of year, but ideal for game viewing because, lacking rain puddles, the animals must go to the river to drink.

  Our host said, “If you leave your room, please call us and we’ll escort you to the lodge.”

  “Why?”

  “We do get elephants and buffalo inside the electric fence. And lions.”

  “Lions?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you do if you’re . . . confronted by a lion?”

  “Make as much sound as you can.”

  “That would probably happen automatically in my case.”

  “Actually, the tendency is to become very quiet.”

  I perused a book showing photos of an actual lion charge. The caption said, “If you run, you die.”

  I read to Peaches from Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen’s memoir. Thunderstorms rumbled in the distance. At four, surfeited on scones, clotted cream, and iced coffee, we set off with our guide, Chika.

  We drove through teak woodland and saw an elephant within five minutes: a thirty-year-old bull with two broken-off tusks. Chika switched off the engine. The elephant approached, and for the first of several times that afternoon, I found myself trying to roll up a window that did not exist.

  Someone in the vehicle leaned forward with a camera, causing the elephant to flare his ears. This is arresting when it occurs six feet from your face.

  “Don’t move,” Chika said. The elephant lumbered off.

  We saw marabou stork, comical, professorial-looking birds that like to perch in dead acacia trees. Also francolin and guinea fowl; Egyptian geese and yellow-billed stork; vultures; and baboons, creatures for which I developed no liking.

  We emerged from the woodland into the wide river’s grassy savannah. Everywhere there were hippos and elephants, hosing themselves down with mud, their version of combination SPF 30 and insect repellent. Also snake eagles; tawny eagles; puku antelope; spoonbills; blue-cheeked bee-eaters; impala.

  Toward sundown, Chika pulled over at a bend in the river called Puku Flats. We drank gin and tonics and ginger lemonade to the ferocious roar of baboons. “Male dominance,” Chika said with a smile. The women in our group rolled their eyes in a knowing way. The baboon din and the incipient feasting of the mosquitoes made me grateful to be spending the night behind electric fencing and insect netting.

  On the way back we saw our first lion. Doubtless she saw us before we saw her. She was difficult to make out even with binoculars, but I was grateful for the distance separating us. Chika circled around, and minutes later we came up behind her. She was on the go. Someone in the vehicle shifted abruptly. Chika said with distinct urgency, “Don’t move.”

  It was late now. Chika raced back to the park gates. He arrived ten minutes late and got a stern scolding from the rangers, who take the 7:00 p.m. closing time seriously. At night the Peaceable Kingdom becomes Nature Red in Tooth and Claw. It’s a jungle out there.

  We dined that night on spatchcock chicken and venison meatballs (“kudu, impala, and a bit of whatever’s on hand,” said chef). The merry midnight frogs kept up a steady chorus. We played anagrams by lantern light, which attracted impressively large beetles. The distinguished British biologist J. B. S. Haldane was asked what a lifetime of science had taught him about God. He replied, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”

  We went out the next morning for five hours. It was hot. What had seemed remarkable the day before now seemed almost commonplace.

  But the evening lingers in memory. Chika took us for a cocktail cruise on the river. We passed a beach teeming with hundreds of baboons, and nudged up against sleeping crocodiles and an immense scrum of hippos. There were three dozen or so butting up against one another, by my rough calculation an aggregate of fifty tons of hippo. (What was God thinking the day he invented the hippo? “Let’s have some fun”?) “Very dangerous,” Chika said, backing away. “They have killed more people than any other animal in Africa.”

  The sky blazed red and orange. We drank cold white wine and nibbled on dried mango and jerky strips. Chika opened the throttle and pointed the bow over the glass-smooth surface toward home. A warthog was waiting for us at the dock.

  To judge from the omnipresent signs warning of armed response, Johannesburg is more dangerous than the bush. It leaves a confused twin impression of bougainvillea and concertina wire. We drove past Nelson Mandela’s house. The day before, he had buried his son.

  Our hotel was the Westcliff, overlooking the zoo. As we took high tea on the terrace amid smart-looking ladies, we listened to the animals below settling in for the night. These were by now familiar sounds to us, now dissonantly mixed with the electric yelp of ambulance and police sirens.

  The porter expressed satisfaction over the fact that our room (406) had recently been vacated by Brad Pitt. The view from Mr. Pitt’s bathtub might just be the best in all Johannesburg. We drank martinis in a room festooned with trophy heads, zebra-skin armchairs, and fading photographs of the queen bestowing silver cups on hunky polo players and dined on baked oysters and springbok osso buco.

  At nine the next morning we were at the station in Pretoria to board the Blue Train. It takes up to eighty-two passengers three times a week between Pretoria and Cape Town. There are eighteen cars, forty-one cabins, also bar, dining, and smoking cars. We had a double bed and a bathtub. The train rides on air-spring cushions, and all the cars are air-sealed to one another, producing a smooth, whisper-quiet ride. The interior is polished brass and Italian birch wood with blue inlay. A twenty-seven-hour train ride during which the main activity is being stuffed with rich food and copious drink is not an aerobic experience, but certainly a pleasant one.

  The scenery coming out of Pretoria consists of shantytowns and prisons. This is sobering and gratitude inspiring. You count your blessings. By night we were crossing the great Karoo Desert to the flash of lightning and streak of rain through the windows. It was cozy inside the dining car. We sat under a mural of Victoria Falls and ate Cape Malay mussels and duck Mpumalanga and rock lobster and drank lemony sauvignon blanc. The next morning we came out of a long tunnel into the drama of the Hex River Valley and saw our first vineyards. We arrived in Cape Town at noon.

  The Mount Nelson Hotel is an opulent pink pile nestled between the city gardens and the foot of Table Mountain. It was baking hot—January is high summer—so we sought the pool, which we shared with thirsty red-eye pigeons who resemb
le hungover doves. That night we ate at a harbor-front restaurant called Bahia, where a 25-knot wind knocked over wineglasses and created mayhem.

  Next morning we took the cable car up Table Mountain. From 3,500 feet up you see it all: the perfect harbor that the Dutch found in 1652, where they could water and provision their India-bound ships. The aboriginal Khoi name for Cape Town was Camissa—“place of sweet waters.” Only a handful of cities can match it for topographical drama: San Francisco, Rio, Vancouver, Hong Kong.

  Robben Island is seven miles from the harbor. We arrived in midafternoon. It is essential to visit Robben Island. It was here between 1961 and 1991 that political prisoners under apartheid were incarcerated. You’re taken to a limestone quarry where prisoners were made to break rocks for eight hours a day in furnace heat, scorching their eyes and lungs. One day in 1995, 1,200 former prisoners returned here. Nelson Mandela, now president, was among them. He placed a small stone on the ground in the pit, and one by one the others did the same. The cairn is there.

  You’re shown Room 5 in B Sektion, Mandela’s cell from 1964 to 1982. Our guide had been a prisoner here himself for seven years. “The thing that kept us going,” he said, “was that we were convinced that we were right.”

  A half hour from Cape Town, on the other side of Table Mountain, is the microclimate of Constantia, where the first wine grapes in Africa were planted hundreds of years ago. At Klein (Little) Constantia vineyard, we tasted wine that had comforted Napoleon on St. Helena. A few minutes drive down a road lined with agapanthus and eucalyptus, we came to the vineyard and restaurant of Buitenverwachting (“Beyond Expectation”). It’s well named.

  We lunched with its owner, Lars Maack, a transplant from Hamburg, on a perfect meal of quail saltimbocca and grilled yellowtail and blesbok. It must be the finest restaurant in South Africa and is dreamily situated. You look at vineyards crawling up the sides of a mountain whose top is swept every day by clouds. Lars’s wines win prizes. He has problems that would be considered unusual in Bordeaux or Napa: baboons.