Voyager: Travel Writings by Russell Banks Page A

with eight guest rooms, set in a cane field at the foot of Mount Misery with expansive views of the sea.
    Here we settled for a few days, exploring the forested, mountainous backcountry by horseback, playing tennis on a grass court and croquet on the meticulously kept lawns, walking through spectacular gardens of hibiscus and bougainvillea, and sitting up late over cognac on the veranda, watching bats dart above the lawns while we talked of times past and times to come.
    This is the sort of experience that gave Caribbean tourism a good name in the first place and still generates most people’s fantasies of island travel. It’s what the tourist boards, airlines, hotels, and cruise lines advertise. But it’s a fantasy that has been too often clipped and cheated by reality, which is why so many visitors to the islands come home vaguely disappointed, feeling both gulled and gullible. Even so, the following winter the fantasists buy into it again. Because the reality that created and feeds the fantasy can still be found—at least in a few places out there it can—as we were discovering on St. Kitts, with variants available in some of the less-developed islands, like Saba and, as we later learned, Dominica, St. Vincent, and Tobago—so people sign on for the trip again and again. To connect the reality to the fantasy, however, one has to be willing to invent one’s own private itinerary and avoid the crowds, as we were doing, and, of course, be able to finance it—since the only way to travel cheaply in the Caribbean then and now is in a packaged crowd, or else to count on the kindness of strangers and rough it. And risk having to make collect calls home for money on a pay phone that doesn’t work, like the tattooed boys on Nevis.
    The second day on St. Kitts we rented equipment for scuba at the Fisherman’s Wharf in Basseterre and learned basic diving in Banana Bay. Another day, we chartered a sailboat and crossed the seven-mile channel to St. Eustatius, one of the most lovely and least developed of the Dutch Antilles, for a day and a night. There we climbed through orchids to the Quill, an eighteen-hundred-foot-high extinct volcano, and later visited Fort Oranje, where the American flag got its first foreign salute in 1776. The following morning, we sailed back to St. Kitts and strolled along the narrow streets in and around Independence Square in Basseterre, where eighteenth-century Georgian houses had been renovated and turned into artists’ studios and boutiques. Later, we were back at Rawlins Plantation, sitting on the veranda, dressed for dinner, aperitifs in hand, for all the world looking and acting like Chase’s elegant globe-trotting grandparents in the 1920s and not at all like who we were, a middle-aged, middle-class pair of professors gone a-courting in the 1980s. Actually, Chase was only thirty-eight then; at forty-eight, I was middle-aged. We listened to the chortle of ground doves and the quiet click of sugarcane in the evening breeze as the sun set at the edge of a sky gone to gray velvet streaked with plum, the sea a flattened pink-and-cobalt plain. For a few hours we believed that we had never been this contented in our lives.
    Maybe it was Chase, maybe it was me, I can’t recall now, but one of us popped our blissful Caribbean bubble and brought meback around to the subject of my second marriage and its turbulent end. I know it sounds absurd, I told her, but on some level I truly believed that by marrying Christine I could somehow shuck the guilty weight of having married Darlene. I thought it would nullify the first marriage in a way that a divorce couldn’t. I hoped it would nullify the divorce, too—although I had no idea at the time that it was merely the first of what would eventually be three. And the abandonment of my child. That, too. It all—marriage, divorce, abandonment—felt like a serial crime to me. And marrying again was supposed to expunge my criminal record—just as my marriage