Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [63]
When you fly over the coast of Georgia, press your face to the glass. The land below is flat, emerald green, and cut with water. Creeks and rivers meander in tight switchbacks, snaking their way through mudflats to the sea. Above the trees, smokestacks of paper mills rise like watchful gods. Before you land, you’re already in a different world. There is something in the air, something ancient that makes you move more slowly. You turn a corner, you catch your breath, and the pale color of the sky reflects back the sheer measure of your soul.
In the dead of summer, three weeks after Caroline’s wedding, we flew to Jacksonville, Florida, and after a side trip to Disney World and a VIP tour of rockets at Cape Canaveral, we caught the last boat of the day, the R.W. Ferguson from Fernandina Beach, and set off for a nearby barrier island. It would be our first real vacation together.
“You want to take a trip, madam?”
His asking had been both shy and nonchalant. We were sitting by a cornfield in Connecticut, and he was fiddling with the laces of his red Converse high-tops. The field was near the Sharon Playhouse, where I was doing Isn’t It Romantic. The day before, he’d looked at me quizzically and said he’d never been with someone whose career was so important. My eyes opened wide. Was that bad? “No,” he said. “It’s attractive. I think that’s what makes us work, that we’re equals.”
He had driven up the Taconic the night before to surprise me, announcing himself in lipstick on my dressing room mirror. I’d dashed off the stage, changed quickly, and found him in the July night, smoking a cigarette near the parked cars with one of the crew.
We’d had long weekends alone or with friends at the Cape, Martha’s Vineyard, my parents’ country house on Long Island, and his mother’s in New Jersey. And there had been a rafting trip with his cousins that June in Maine, where we’d spied a moose up close. This would be different. Ten days in close quarters, testing mystery, the mainstay of romance—with no possibility of retreat for a night or an hour.
“Someplace neither of us has been. Someplace we can discover together.”
It touched me that he thought of it like that, as a way for us to grow closer. A place that would be ours. It felt grown-up.
I knew at once where we should go.
“How about Alaska? Or Taos!” he said. “I’ve always wanted to go there, and you’d look sweet on a horse.”
“Too hot,” I countered. And I told him about a place I’d known about for years—Cumberland Island, off the coast of Georgia.
I’d first heard of Cumberland in college, when friends camped there over spring break and brought back tales of an island as large as Manhattan, with ruined mansions and feral horses roaming on white sand beaches. I was hooked, then promptly forgot about it. In 1983, I read an article in The New York Times travel section, a paean to the island by Lucinda Franks. I clipped it, and for three years, it had followed me, dog-eared, from sublet to sublet. Without having set foot on Cumberland, I was already in its thrall.
There are places one falls for as deeply and as devotedly as for a lover. For reasons you can’t quantify, the alchemy of air, light, and smell call to the most primal part of you and conspire to make you theirs. I’ve been moved by Santa Fe, Paris, and Seville. I’ve reveled in Rome, Telluride, and Guadalajara. I’ve been awed by the deserts of Morocco, the spires of Wyoming’s Wind River Range, and the painted depths of the Grand Canyon. But it wasn’t love I felt.
Sometimes it’s the place where you grew up that says, You belong to me. No matter how long I’ve been away, when I come back to New York City in a taxi over the Triborough Bridge and the afternoon sun shifts off the steel skyline and blinds me, I feel it. In the heavy July of privet tinged with sea salt on the East End of Long Island, where I spent nearly every summer until I was twenty and many since, I know it. And in an empty theater, with the ghost light on and the darkness, warm and velvet like a dinner jacket my father once wore, it’s mine.
But it can