We watch as bald eagles, blue herons, Canadian geese and sea otters make their way around the inlet below our cottage. An Orca whale pod cruises the chilly Pacific waters beneath a parade of white sails floating by. The noon sun is hot and the air astringent, and except for the occasional drone of a pontoon airplane taking off from Deer Harbor, the sound is silence.
We are on Orcas, an enchanted island between Seattle and the Canadian border, the place where Charlie spent her summers growing up, where she and I first met, and where we were married in the quaint Emmanuel's Episcopal Church. We come back here when we can. We absolutely had to make it the terminal point of our journey around the world, before finally going to our home-home in Virginia.
The night we arrived, we were the guests of the Ketchams, who have lived on Orcas for three generations. At dinner, I talked to a Ketcham relative in his forties who almost certainly, and not incidentally, is wealthy many times over. He has traveled only a little, and he wanted to tell me about a recent trip to Nicaragua.
"I came back feeling deceived," he said to me. His choice of words caught my interest.
"How, deceived?" I asked him.
"I went down there expecting wholesale misery. Nicaraguans are poor. They have nothing to speak of. They make do. The poverty is appalling."
"You just described most people of the world. We just visited them. We know," I told him.
"But I can only speak for Nicaragua and for myself," he went on.
"Where was the deception?" I asked.
"They were HAPPY," he exclaimed, laughing nervously so that the others in the spacious living room looked at him. He threw out his arms in my direction as if to punctuate.
For the last couple of weeks, as we rounded the shoulder of the Pacific on the final leg of our journey, Charlie and I have talked and thought about what this trip has meant to us, what it has taught us, how it has changed us, and what we could summarize about our experience that would make sense to those who have never chosen to take a trip like ours. Wrapping up is hard to do. It can be done, of course, with cliches and trite terms. We do not want to come across as ingrates or grumblers, and yet we want to be honest about our feelings too, at least as far as the depths of our perception and intelligence will allow. Our conclusions may leak out of us like water from a faulty tap. The drips will haunt us over the coming weeks and months. But for right now, what strikes me as worthy of mention is the issue of deception.
The man I spoke to at dinner is a part of a middle-aged generation of Americans that, more than any other before it, actually bought the idea of acquisition as happiness, thereby bouncing the Preamble of the American Constitution beyond where it was intended to go. This generation believed--and still believes for all I know--that more stuff would bring more status, and more status would bring contentment, which could be called "happiness." Money is all, the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega of the universe.
"It is a terrible lie." The man paused for an instant to think. "But the lie is our truth. We believed the advertisements and commercials. No other generation did it quite so deeply. How do I change now? How do I live differently? The belief I grew up with is a religion." He laughed again nervously. "It'd be like declaring the falsehood of God."
"You got these thoughts from a single trip to Nicaragua?"
"Yes. I did. How can they be happy with nothing, and we are looking for happiness with everything?"
We, he and I, had traveled different distances to reach the same conclusion. With two exceptions--Zimbabwe and regions of Peru--we have met a world that looked to us to be a rather happy and contented place. Even in the townships outside of Cape Town which are like our black ghettos used to be, all through India and Sri Lanka, in Latin America, and especially in the poorer districts of Brazil, in Indonesia, and everywhere in French Polynesia, where less always somehow seemed to offer more, people with "nothing" verily wallowed in the most priceless human possession: the companionship and love of their families, their communities, their friends, and the beauty of their environment.
Charlie and I were led to wonderment everywhere we traveled. How can people be happy with so little materialism? We learned the answer, but we did not figure that deception in our American society and ourselves was part of the equation.
"Do you mean that you are not happy with all your privilege and all that you own?" I asked the man at dinner.
He shook his head. "That's not the point. I am happy. I never knew that you could be happy without the stuff--the houses and SUVs and the boats. I just did not think it possible."
The selling of the deception on every level awoke us with a slap when we landed in America a week ago. We had traveled in many countries where commercialism exists, of course, but in neutral balance. Sure, new shiny Mercedes cars travel the roads in New Zealand, for instance, but there are also jalopies and lots of older cars. There are no billboards. The drumbeat is muted and slow, where it exists at all. Living outside America for as long as we have lived, we forgot that we are supposed to exist to BUY, and the amnesia certainly brought us peace. We relaxed in that non-commercial atmosphere and vowed to import the same indifference toward things when we came home. Right now we could not give a hoot about money or what we own or don't own. If we return home to a crunch, we know we can go back to that idyllic $12-per-night shack on the beach in Unawatuna, Sri Lanka, where we can look out over the lagoon and the Indian Ocean beyond. We can teach Molly and Fraser ourselves, at home. We can live on precious little; we know we can. But can we succeed on our own terms in this place, the Land of the Free Introductory Offer? Or, as my friend on Orcas Island thinks, does the deception come as a part and parcel of living in America? If I were to answer the question right now, I'd say we don't stand a chance in hell.
Meanwhile, we will spend a few more summer days on this paradisiacal island. But shouldn't we remind ourselves that the glory of this natural setting is only available to the very rich and, paradoxically, to those few who have plumbed the deception and live without things--and those like us who are their guests?