WHAT THE WEATHER WAS
A Few Introductory Comments
by Allyn Crosbie
When I got old enough to be curious about it, I asked my mother where I was born.
“You were born en route,” she liked to tell me. “In a lower berth of the Super Chief, heading west through Kansas, twenty-five miles out of Dodge City. In the middle of nowhere, just prairies, no place to stop, and an army nurse helped me deliver. What a night.”
“So what happened then?”
“We just kept going west, till we hit the Pacific. You were my child who was born on the way to somewhere else. From the beginning.”
She died before reading my first published contribution to the world of “somewhere else,” which appeared in the old Getaways magazine just before it went under. I wrote about the Super Chief, until the early 1970s the rail queen of the American prairies. She would have liked that. I was more impressed by the names of Truman Capote and Joan Didion, who were also contributors to that issue. Their names were listed far above mine, but still. I had found my niche, and Capote and Didion were there with me.
I’ve come a long way from the prairies of western Kansas. I’ve experienced a freak snowstorm on the road to Chartres. Traveled the romantische Strasse on the back of a motorcycle. Been buzzed by a Swiss Air Force jet on top of Mount Pilatus. Spent hot afternoons on Maho Beach on the island of St. Maarten, dodging sand whirlwinds a mere fifty feet below the final approach to runway ten at Princess Juliana Airport, where one can count the rivets on the bellies of the jumbo jets as they pass overhead five seconds before their wheels meet the tarmac. And, after some time had passed, I was even able to write dispassionately about my hot and humid luncheon cruise down the Brenta Canal that was followed by the worst case of food poisoning I had ever experienced. (One small shrimp, one dollop of tainted mayonnaise. A night from hell.)
Traveling can be a disorienting occupation, but for me places stand still, like paintings. They wait for me and speak a language I understand, and the grammar of this language anchors me on familiar ground. The geometric shadows of the architecture of cities, the gentle movement of outgoing tides at dusk, temporarily, at least, assure me of the order of the universe. In dreams my feet lead me to doorways I recognize. I wake to the aromas of remembered mornings.
I have not, like Jan Morris, climbed Mount Everest, or sampled the exotic nights of Havana that Pico Iyer so vividly describes. I’ve just made a life getting on and off of planes and trains, attempting to create new perspectives of what I discover where I end up. I move my body from place to place, and like a porous wick it absorbs every image, every mood of the weather, the aroma of every field of poppies.
I’ve had modest successes, but so far the story that might make the pages of National Geographic Traveler or the annual Times Magazine travel issue has eluded me.
“And therein lies the rub,” Gail Barba, my agent-cum editor, recently pointed out. “Your writing has become too solitary. The purpose of writing about exotic places is to excite. To take others along for the ride.” She waved some galley sheets in the air. “Where are the living people? Why do you leave out the breath and blood of the places you claim to love?”
I responded that I earn my living from many places on the map, and cannot always expect to find company. Which, of course, was not the point.
“Well, that must change,” she said. “So I’ve got a challenge for you. It includes everything you tell me you like to write about — an ancient city, a recent murder trial with plenty of blood and sex, and an opera in development with a libretto by a reclusive, possibly insane, poet. Focus on these things. Here’s the file. When you’re ready, I’ll send the photographer on down. Don’t disappoint me.”
I packed for what I thought would be a routine week in central Italy. I was to write twenty thousand words — including profiles of “living people” — and move on.
The pages that follow are about what happened instead.