But Enough About You: Essays Read online

  To get to Easter Island, or as its inhabitants call it, Rapa Nui, you must go via Tahiti or Santiago, Chile. If you go through Santiago, voyager, beware: Don’t even think of bringing along something to eat. That includes, as one of my unhappy traveling companions found out, trail mix (nuts and dried fruit, notorious purveyors of contagion and plague). She spent two hours in detention filling out paperwork and forking over a two-hundred-dollar fine. A woman in line with her was reduced to tears as she explained to an implacable bureaucrat that the dried lentils the dogs had sniffed in her bag were for a favorite dish she had come to Chile to cook for her dying mother. She finally exploded: “We got rid of Pinochet—for this?”

  It was a longish trip, twenty-eight hours door-to-door. Oddly, for all that time spent in the air and in airports, I crossed only two time zones. I started in Washington, D.C.; Easter Island shares about the same longitude with Salt Lake City. By the time you arrive, weary, sticky, your trail mix forfeit, you really do have a sense of being . . . out there. But also of exhilaration, because you finally made it to Easter Island, home of those strange monoliths called moai, the ones you first saw a half century ago on the cover of a book by a Norwegian explorer.

  The place to stay is the recently opened explora Rapa Nui (the small e is intentional), also called the Posada de Mike Rapu. The architect is a Chilean who trained in Barcelona, and it shows. I found myself staring up at the ceiling, all bright pine and intersecting planes. (Or maybe it was the martini.)

  We clomped off the next morning with our engaging guide Sam, in a light drizzle that soon cleared to a bright, cool day. It’s small, Easter Island, just sixty-three square miles, triangular, and volcanic. Thor Heyerdahl made his fame in the 1950s with his book Kon-Tiki, in which he postulated that the island was first settled by aboriginal South Americans. That thesis has since crumbled, and Mr. Heyerdahl is not held in esteem in Rapa Nui. When I asked Sam about him, his handsome face creased into an exclamation of disdain. “Thor Heyerdahl?!” he said. “He wrote so many things that are not true!”

  More recently anthropologists have determined that the island’s settlers arrived from Polynesia, perhaps as early as A.D. 450. The earliest moai, those distinctive, indeed, unique, Easter Island statuary, date to about 1100.

  We hiked through rain-wet brush and eucalyptus groves. Everywhere, there was bright yellow lupine and purple grass. And there in the distance was the “quarry,” Rano Raraku, the volcano cone where the Rapanui carved their moai.

  As we approached, you could see them: improbable figures protruding from the earth along the slope of the volcano. Sam asserted that the word moai means “face alive of the ancestor.” I liked that, though there are other translations. There are some 887 moai on Easter Island, 397 of them at the quarry. The Rapanui carved them over perhaps eight hundred years. Overpopulation and dwindling resources eventually brought civil wars, at which point they stopped erecting moai and started knocking them over. Since each clan and tribe put up its own moai, they became collateral targets in the wars. By the time Heyerdahl arrived, most of the statues were lying on their backs or faces. Many still are, and walking past them, seeing them so forlorn, you think of Shelley: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings / Look on my works, ye mighty and despair.”

  Along a beach not far from the quarry is Ahu Tongariki, a sight to give you a shiver: fifteen immense moai standing on a long plinth (the ahu), looking like pieces in a titanic chess game. In the 1960s, a tsunami triggered by an earthquake in Chile swept through here and knocked over the entire site. A Japanese company contributed funds to restore the site in the 1990s. It’s haunting, all the more so for Sam’s casual mention that “Rapanui people also practiced cannibalism.” He showed us a petroglyph of a tuna, along with hundreds of carved dots beneath. “Each one,” he said, “represents a dead child.” I didn’t have the heart to ask how they died.

  Our days fell into a pleasant routine. We hiked in the morning, then returned to explora for lunch. One day, the staff arranged a picnic under a coconut grove on a beautiful white-sand beach. (Oddly, there are only two beaches on the island.) Afternoons, we did another archaeological-themed hike. By day’s end our muscles felt nicely tired.

  They saved the best for the fifth and last day. Our guide was Terry, half American, half Rapanui. If that sounds exotic, another of our guides, Niko, is half Rapanui and half Croatian.

  We started at the edge of the island’s single runway. It is more than three kilometers long. Why? It’s leased by NASA for use as an emergency landing strip for the Space Shuttle. It’s never been used for that purpose, but there it is, making Easter Island the ultimate cargo cult, awaiting the great bird that now will never come.

  There was a stiff wind blowing from the west as we hiked up the side of Rano Kau, hearts and lungs pumping. We rested overlooking over a fierce cliff with great ocean swells breaking at its base and exploding into foam. We continued to a cypress grove, then a fragrant eucalyptus grove, and finally emerged 1,063 feet above the ocean, on the rim of the volcanic crater. Below we saw three small rocky islands, furiously assaulted by the sea.

  It was here starting about 1600 that the Rapanui held their annual “Bird Man” contests to pick tribal leaders. These were the ultimate in Ironman Triathlons. Contestants from as many as fifty-four tribes or clans would gather. On the appointed days, they would climb down the cliffs from the volcano’s lip, plunge into the sea, swim through shark-water to the islands, then climb—somehow—through the boiling surf and razor-sharp rocks, to the nests of the migrating sooty tern. The object was to return through the water and back up the cliff with the egg intact. You try it.

  You can see the petroglyph depictions of Bird Men who actually made it carved into the rocks. They are stirring sights and ones to make you glad that your own life is differently ordered. Bird Man contests continued until 1867, when Catholic missionaries arrived with alternative suggestions for choosing tribal leaders.

  On the other end of the island is Ana o Keke, the Cave of the Virgins. Here, young girls were kept out of the sun to “whiten”—as our guide put it with amusement. These pale virgins were the Bird Man’s prize. A kilometer or so from their cave is a porous, resonant stone that was used to signal the keepers of the virgins that a new Bird Man had been crowned. Niko demonstrated, putting his lips to a hole in the stone and blowing with all his strength, producing an eerie blast.

  The spell Easter Island cast was slightly altered for me on my return, when a publisher friend told me that Dan Aykroyd went there in the 1970s along with a writer for Saturday Night Live. They dropped acid and, inspired by the moai, came up with the Coneheads.

  —ForbesLife, November 2009

  A SHORT HISTORY OF THE HOTEL ALARM CLOCK

  Volume IV: Ancient Egypt to the 1980s

  1340 B.C.—The desk clerk of the Luxor Suites Hotel fails to waken Alexandrian grain merchant Memhotep, who is consequently tardy for his important meeting with Rekmos, grand vizier to Pharaoh Thott III. The fastidious Rekmos expresses his displeasure by forcing Memhotep to eat dung beetles while being suspended upside down over a pool of Nile crocodiles. Memhotep twitches for the rest of his life and exhibits a morbid fear of dung beetles. On his deathbed, he continually asks the time. His son Shephotep (“The Punctual”) continues in the family trade, taking with him on business trips caged roosters to wake him up. Innkeepers take note and begin offering rooms with caged bedside cocks at premium prices.

  212 B.C.—Emperor Shi Tzu tasks his court with devising a means of waking him one hour before sunrise so that he might get a good start on pleasuring his six hundred concubines. For the next twenty-three years, an estimated fourteen thousand engineers labor to invent a fail-proof emperor-waking instrument, but fail, despite impressive contemporaneous advances in the fields of astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and wonton, in the process bankrupting the imperial treasury and encouraging invasion by Mongolian warlords, who look upon Shi Tzu’s obsession as a sign that he is wufen nuxi (“
one brick shy of a load”). The Great Waking-Up ensues, precipitating centuries of unrest.

  A.D. 197—Timex, a Greek slave in the household of the Roman general Drusus Nervus, is tasked by his master with devising a foolproof means of waking him during the ill-fated Fourth Germanic Campaign before hordes of howling Allemani tribesmen do it by crushing his skull. Timex experiments with candles placed on the heads of goats and sheep, but abandons the scheme when animal rights advocates complain to the emperor in Rome. Instead, he installs candles on top of beehives. The bees become annoyed when the flame burns down and sets fire to their abode, which encourages them to sting the soundly sleeping general, thus rousing him from his slumbers. A contemporary account of the death of Nervus (“swatting and scratching himself, howling mightily for mud packs and cursing his servant”—Livy) persuades historians that he may have died of anaphylactic shock and not from an ax in his skull. The method catches on throughout the Roman empire, making Timex—who at Nervus’s dying command was placed alive on his master’s funeral pyre—originator of the buzzing-type alarm now prevalent in hotels throughout the world.

  500–875—Irish monks introduce the concept of the “alarm” clock during their missionary travels through heathen Europe, banging spoons on pots over their heads every morning precisely at 5:45 a.m., while simultaneously shouting biblical passages in Greek and Latin. The monks are able to reckon the time accurately by the morning steam rising off cow pies. This practice of “rude awakening” (exsomnolentia molestias) is not broadly popular among their converts and results in a number of on-the-spot martyrdoms.

  1065—The first Norman conquest fails when Norway’s Harald Hardraade, who is to join forces with Tostig of Northumbria and William of Normandy against Harold II of England, sleeps through his primitive alarm at the Stavanger Odin Inn. Harald dismembers the staff and threatens to decapitate the Odin Group chairman, Ragnar Mintpillow. Mintpillow sends Harald a written apology but gently suggests that Harald was “pig-drunk” on honey wine and “would not have woken up if Thor himself had tattooed the theme from Pippi Longstocking on [Harald’s] forehead with walrus tusks”—and then cc’s everyone involved in the invasion. Under pressure from Tostig and William, who are eager to get on with the Norman conquest, Harald backs off his threat to pursue the matter in the courts, but he remains rancorous, and at the victory celebration in Hastings one year later, beheads two Norman knights who tease him by calling him Harald Haardetowakeup.

  1791—Louis XVI, fleeing the Revolution with his family, stops at an inn in the town of Varennes-en-Argonne. His chamberlain urges the monarch to press on, but the king insists that he is so hungry he could eat a horse (cheval) and orders an eight-course meal that causes him to fall asleep. He sets the alarm clock in his room to wake him at “V” (Latin for five), but neglects to wind it, since as king he is accustomed to other people doing that for him. He is arrested at Vxx.

  1919—President Woodrow Wilson, staying at the Crillon Hotel in Paris for the Versailles Peace Conference, sets his bedside alarm clock to wake him in time for his speech at the opening session. But anarcho-syndicalists, hoping to sabotage the conference and precipitate World War II, sneak into the president’s suite and depress the ALARM button so that it will not go off. Wilson sleeps until late morning, when maids force open the door and vehemently demand to change his sheets. Wilson returns to the United States and has a stroke. Fourteen years later, Hitler rises to power on a platform of rearmament, Aryanism, and hotel alarm clocks that will “make the world tremble.”

  1927—The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York installs electric alarm clocks in every room. Juan Trippe inaugurates Pan American World Airways.

  1928—Pan American World Airways nearly goes under as vast numbers of passengers staying at the Waldorf-Astoria fail to show up on time for their flights. President Coolidge asks Congress to appropriate money for the development of a reliable hotel alarm clock that can be operated by an “average American simpleton.” The effort fails.

  1957—The Soviet Union launches Sputnik. President Eisenhower is handed a top-secret CIA report revealing that Sputnik’s real mission is to jam electric hotel alarm clocks so that American businessmen will sleep through important meetings, thereby giving the Russians the edge in competing for hydroelectric, tractor-building, and steroid-manufacturing contracts. Congress steps up the pace of hotel alarm clock R&D.

  1961—President Kennedy vows to “put a functioning alarm clock on the moon so that our astronauts will know when it is time to return to earth.”

  1972—The Hilton Hotel chain installs “easy-to-use” AM/FM clock radios in their rooms. Cumbersome, boxy, hard-to-use, and in some cases radioactive, they malfunction and, no matter what music station they are programmed to play, jolt guests awake in the middle of the night with a fierce buzzing that causes them to dream that they are being electrocuted and to wet their beds.

  1974—The Confraternité Internationale des Hôteliers commissions master Swiss watchmaker Dieter Zeitz to design a hotel alarm clock so simple that it can be programmed “even by drugged rock ’n’ roll musicians in the dark.” Zeitz produces the Dum-Klock (later renamed EZ Clock). It is a triumph of simplicity, but still requires the user to distinguish between “am,” “pm,” and “FM,” resulting in a failure rate of 67 percent. Despondent, Zeitz pens a scathing indictment of human intelligence and gives up clock-making for the study of eugenics.

  1984—Hotels worldwide introduce the “digital” alarm clock. Slightly more complicated than its “analog” predecessor, it features a SNOOZE button. It is hailed as a breakthrough, but unless it is precisely programmed in combination with the MUSIC, SLEEP, GMT SYNCH., ELEV., and LAT/LONG switches, the alarm goes off every five minutes starting at 2:30 a.m. Because of the high number of smashed alarm clocks, an impact-resistant titanium outer shell is subsequently added, along with half-inch bulletproof plastic facing and backup battery-operated power plant. The clocks are then heat mounted on the bedside tables, which in turn are bolted to the floor, making it necessary for guests wanting to silence the clocks to smash them repeatedly with the steam iron or toilet seat.

  1986—To stem the flood of requests for wake-up calls resulting from the introduction of the digital alarm clocks, hotels install WAKE UP buttons on the room telephones. The buttons are not connected to the switchboard, but to a sixteen-minute-long recording of a ringing telephone, followed by a recorded announcement that the hotel has been hit by an earthquake. The system is designed to encourage guests to study the 23-page alarm clock user’s manual chained to the clock, entitled, “Please to Pushing the Ante-Meridien Function/Preference Switch, While Bewaring of Electrical Shock!” as well as the Malay-English Dictionary of Technical Terms, provided for guests attempting to program their clocks to wake them with soft classical FM music within one quarter hour of the desired rising time.

  —Forbes FYI, April 2001

  PLAQUE TRACKING

  I spent this winter in London, specifically in Chelsea, near the Thames embankment. The first day, on my way up Tite Street to the corner grocery, I noticed three contiguous Victorian row houses, each sporting a gleaming blue-and-white enamel plaque.

  The first indicated that the house had been the residence of a medical and political eminence named Lord Haden-Guest; the second, of Oscar Wilde; and the third of a composer with the quaint pseudonym of Peter Warlock. The name Guest you might recognize from his grandson Christopher’s movies, most conspicuously This Is Spinal Tap. Oscar Wilde you know all about. He lived in this house but clearly didn’t spend enough time there with his wife and children. Maestro Warlock was new to me.

  The next day, a block north, I turned the corner and was arrested in my tracks by another plaque. Mark Twain (“American Writer”) had lived here 1896–7. Twain would have been here when he received the dreadful cable that his beloved daughter Susy had died in Hartford; an event all the more heartrending as Twain’s wife, Livy, was incommunicado in the mid-Atlantic, rushing to her stricken
daughter’s side.

  Trying to clear my mind of that gloomy meditation, and now in need of a pint, I walked on toward the pub and three blocks later came upon the home of Bram Stoker, author of Dracula.

  Interesting ’hood, I thought. And so I became a plaque collector, a pastime I heartily commend in London. It’s free and the exercise will do you good.

  In a book appropriately titled London Plaques (Shire Publications, 2010), I learned that there are some 1,800 of them in the Greater London area. Charles Dickens leads, with ten plaques; Churchill has only five, but then he got a statue facing Big Ben and an immense floor tablet at the threshold of Westminster Abbey—in effect, England’s leading floor mat. The first person to be plaqued was the notorious Lord Byron; and—hmm—his is no longer there. Leafing through the book inclines you to agree with its author that this abundance of lustrous plaquery supports London’s claim to be truly the coolest city in the world.

  I decided that trying to collect all 1,800 was futile, so I confined myself to Chelsea. The fun was in connecting them like dots. This turned out to be strangely easy. On my way to meet friends at the Cadogan Hotel, where Wilde was arrested on the charge of gross indecency, I spotted a plaque a few yards from the hotel’s front door indicating the former home of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, actor, theatre manager, and Wilde’s great friend. Leaving the Cadogan and rounding the corner onto Pont Street, I saw another noting that Lillie Langtry had lived there. It’s said that it was her close friend Oscar Wilde who suggested to her that she try her hand at acting. She made her debut at the Haymarket Theatre, managed by Herbert Beerbohm Tree.