The Godfather: Peter Corris on unseen places
I’m unlikely to do any major travelling again and, reflecting on this, I fell to thinking about sights and places I’d like to have seen and never will. Oddly, this wasn’t a melancholy reverie. It pleased me to have these ruminations and my list wasn’t long.
I’d like to have seen Niagara Falls, the Black Hills of Dakota and the Mississippi River. The Falls have all sorts of associations with books and films and with the feats of those who went over them in barrels and across them on tightropes.
Settler occupation of the Black Hills was one of the many betrayals of the Native Americans documented in one of the books I most admire, Dee Brown’s Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee (1970).
The Mississippi has no particular literary associations for me. I read the Mark Twain classics when young but found them wordy and tediously philosophical. No admirer of American’s myth of itself, it’s the physicality of the US that I’d like to have seen – the majesty of the Falls, the beauty of the Black Hills and the might of a river a mile wide.
I travelled in the Pacific a little but never saw Tahiti, Samoa or Honolulu. With a distant and loose family connection to Fletcher Christian, I’d like to have seen the black sands of Tahiti where the seeds of the Bounty mutiny were sown. For the other places my interest was sparked solely by reading and rereading: I must have read Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence (1919) three times, and his magnificent Pacific short stories like ‘Rain’, ‘Red’ and ‘The Fall of Edward Barnard’ innumerable times. Without the particular thrill Maugham’s writing gave me I doubt that I’d have become a writer myself.
What else? The Isle of Man where my paternal grandfather and his forebears hailed from. I had three chances to go when I was in Britain: once I was too ill; once I didn’t have the money and another time the ferries weren’t running at the right time for me. My daughter went and reported that I hadn’t missed much but I’d still like to have breathed its air.
The Andes? No. The Great Wall of China? No – that Jack Nicklaus’s son was permitted to hit a golf ball from the top of it killed whatever slight magic the wall may have had for me. Everest? No. I’m sure the mountain is impressive, but I’ve disliked everything I’ve ever heard about Tibet and have no wish to go there. The Sahara? No, one glimpse from afar was more than enough.
As befits a writer, the remaining place is one of fantasy, of the imagination – a coastal village, perhaps in Spain or Portugal or Greece, with a white beach and blue water. With sun-bleached stone houses rising up from the shore along narrow winding cobble-stoned streets. With a shady, fan-cooled bar set back from the beach boardwalk, serving local seafood, salad and cheap crisp wine.
No tourists. I am there for the warm season; I am friendly with the proprietor and the locals and, magically, I can speak the language and even dance given encouragement and enough drink taken. I’ll never see the Mississippi or Pago Pago but I can get to that village any time I please.
Great column as usual Peter, with a beautiful cadence. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was a favourite of mine too, similar to The Day the Sky Fell Down by Keith Willey, detailing a similar story of the Sydney tribes. (I’ve actually been to that little village in backwater Greece, but unfortunately drank too much retsina and embarrassed myself, so my when I return in my memory I stick to beer.)