Read Online The Best American Essays 2016 by Jonathan Franzen - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jonathan Franzen
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and her eyes say something like “at last.” The trouble is that in our own time an actual honeymoon has little to do with an “at last” anymore. For almost all of us it is silly to go on a honeymoon for privacy. The couple plots their trip to a remote island where they will at last stare uninterrupted into each other’s eyes, but they do the plotting alone around their kitchen table.
The guidebook’s cover had a picture of Kauai from above on it. I don’t know why a Kauai guidebook would have anything else. Kauai is, in my opinion, irresistibly appealing from that angle. From above, Kauai looks like a fat oyster with a barnacle in the middle. The barnacle is a volcano. Its natural attractions are appointed evenly to its shores: the huge canyons in the west; the long sunny southern coast (where we would be staying); the more populated “Coconut Coast” in the east, with its rivers and waterfalls; the sharp, serrated ridgelines around Hanalei in the north, with perfectly flat fields at their feet running out to deep beaches.
The perfection of Kauai’s roundness is fully comprehended when you open up the guidebook and look at the road map on the inside cover. There is a perimeter road, but it cannot connect through the rugged Na Pali coastline in the northwest. So the island is round, but you cannot go ’round it, and unless you are exploring it by boat it might as well be long and skinny.
We arrived at our hotel at 1:00 a.m. The lobby was part of an enormous hall with an open-air atrium in the middle of it, which housed (if that’s the word) a tiny jungle. As we checked in, we could see parrots perched sleepily on the boughs of the trees, and, looking through the trees, all the way out to the audible surf. As I remember it, we woke up noonish the next day. We slept late because of jet lag, but also because it was so dark outside. Where I come from, when the rain starts it sprinkles and spits. Here, as I stepped out our door, the first raindrop fell from the sky and made a wet spot on my shirt the size of my thumb. A half hour later we were walking by the lobby and tropical rain teemed into the atrium like nothing I’ve ever seen. It was awesome, but the awe was like what one would feel at watching the ocean finally invited indoors. It set off some hardwired anxiety about flooding.
Swimming in the rain through the turns and lobes of the fern-girded “lagoons” of the resort; a manmade waterfall rumbling on your head, cocooning you concussively in a membrane of water; sitting in the 100-plus-degree hot tub while cold rain makes little iridescent crowns on the water like the surface is simmering and steaming—that is really neat. But you can only do so much of it. In fact I think that one’s body can only handle so much of it. We went to a place that the resort called a library—really a bar—and played checkers with wrinkled fingers.
The next day, with the rain not letting up, all paradise-specific plans were pretty much kaput. I thought maybe we could visit the nearby botanic gardens—this seemed rain-compatible—but on the phone the gardener informed me that the entry road had just washed away in an avalanche. Then this same guy, unprovoked, told me that if we were thinking of snorkeling at some point, this kind of intense rain would make the shallow snorkelable waters muddy (this being the sort of place where the material from the road had ended up), which are the conditions in which sharks mistakenly bite people. Then he added, as if in consolation, “The nice thing is it never rains this hard.” The rain did abate for an hour that afternoon. We found a small sandy gap between the jagged volcanic rocks on Shipwreck Beach outside our hotel and carefully boogie boarded among them. Until, that is, a Hawaiian family showed up with their own boogie boards, and the matriarch almost ran me over with a stony face that said “I don’t see you.”
I won’t pretend to be one of these people who likes
The guidebook’s cover had a picture of Kauai from above on it. I don’t know why a Kauai guidebook would have anything else. Kauai is, in my opinion, irresistibly appealing from that angle. From above, Kauai looks like a fat oyster with a barnacle in the middle. The barnacle is a volcano. Its natural attractions are appointed evenly to its shores: the huge canyons in the west; the long sunny southern coast (where we would be staying); the more populated “Coconut Coast” in the east, with its rivers and waterfalls; the sharp, serrated ridgelines around Hanalei in the north, with perfectly flat fields at their feet running out to deep beaches.
The perfection of Kauai’s roundness is fully comprehended when you open up the guidebook and look at the road map on the inside cover. There is a perimeter road, but it cannot connect through the rugged Na Pali coastline in the northwest. So the island is round, but you cannot go ’round it, and unless you are exploring it by boat it might as well be long and skinny.
We arrived at our hotel at 1:00 a.m. The lobby was part of an enormous hall with an open-air atrium in the middle of it, which housed (if that’s the word) a tiny jungle. As we checked in, we could see parrots perched sleepily on the boughs of the trees, and, looking through the trees, all the way out to the audible surf. As I remember it, we woke up noonish the next day. We slept late because of jet lag, but also because it was so dark outside. Where I come from, when the rain starts it sprinkles and spits. Here, as I stepped out our door, the first raindrop fell from the sky and made a wet spot on my shirt the size of my thumb. A half hour later we were walking by the lobby and tropical rain teemed into the atrium like nothing I’ve ever seen. It was awesome, but the awe was like what one would feel at watching the ocean finally invited indoors. It set off some hardwired anxiety about flooding.
Swimming in the rain through the turns and lobes of the fern-girded “lagoons” of the resort; a manmade waterfall rumbling on your head, cocooning you concussively in a membrane of water; sitting in the 100-plus-degree hot tub while cold rain makes little iridescent crowns on the water like the surface is simmering and steaming—that is really neat. But you can only do so much of it. In fact I think that one’s body can only handle so much of it. We went to a place that the resort called a library—really a bar—and played checkers with wrinkled fingers.
The next day, with the rain not letting up, all paradise-specific plans were pretty much kaput. I thought maybe we could visit the nearby botanic gardens—this seemed rain-compatible—but on the phone the gardener informed me that the entry road had just washed away in an avalanche. Then this same guy, unprovoked, told me that if we were thinking of snorkeling at some point, this kind of intense rain would make the shallow snorkelable waters muddy (this being the sort of place where the material from the road had ended up), which are the conditions in which sharks mistakenly bite people. Then he added, as if in consolation, “The nice thing is it never rains this hard.” The rain did abate for an hour that afternoon. We found a small sandy gap between the jagged volcanic rocks on Shipwreck Beach outside our hotel and carefully boogie boarded among them. Until, that is, a Hawaiian family showed up with their own boogie boards, and the matriarch almost ran me over with a stony face that said “I don’t see you.”
I won’t pretend to be one of these people who likes
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