College . 06/02/2008 12:57 AM . Tim Raveling

Click here to read the first installment of “Down in Kokomo.”

Click here to read the second installment of “Down in Kokomo.”

Click here to read the third installment of “Down in Kokomo.”

When we awoke early on our last full day in Bermuda, a cool sea breeze was blowing in off the ocean. A cruise ship was coming in from the northwest, huge on the horizon. We packed quickly and walked back up into the dockyards. A ferry ride across the bay to Hamilton was only four dollars a person, so we waited an hour and walked onto it, joining the sleepy crowds of people making the daily commute from Sandy’s Parish to work in Hamilton. The trip was only ten or twenty minutes, low rumbling of the engine as the waves glided by, and then we disembarked with our packs back onto the streets of Hamilton.

We decided to eat a last good meal there before our return journey, and stopped in at an Irish pub for massive double-stacked burgers and plates of fries. Then, cinching our packs, we headed back east across the island on foot. We made a brief stop at the Hamilton botanical gardens, beautifully tended, a wide showcase both of the island’s natural flora as well as some imported specimens, each graceful tree labeled with a small paper card set in the grass in front of it.

On our way west from St. George at the beginning of our venture, we had cut south so as to follow the south shores for a while before turning back north to Hamilton. If you look at a map of Bermuda, the eastern side of the island is shaped like a ring, with the two “fingers” of Hamilton and Sandy’s parish hooking out to the west, and St. George’s island connecting by bridge on the northeastern side. On our way back, we reconnected with the railway trail on the northern side of the ring. This part of the island was more agricultural, more spread out, with farms here and there and old, sprawling coastal estates overlooking the black rocks of the north shores and the brilliant blue of the ocean.

At the end of the railroad trail, where the old railway bridge to St. George island had once stood, we cut inland. Just before the long bridge out across St. George’s bay to the airport was a park and wildlife reserve called Tom Moore’s Jungle. Moore was an Irish poet and minstrel in the early nineteenth century who was, in 1803, appointed Registrar to the Admiralty in Bermuda. While there he wrote extensive poetry inspired by the island, especially the calabash tree; Tom Moore’s Jungle is one of the tracts of land Moore loved to walk and write in.

The place had been recommended to us by Uncle Mike, our large tattooed friend in Hamilton, as the perfect place to sleep without attracting attention. We were also interested in a mark on the map right beside it—Tom Moore’s Tavern. We’d already eaten out that day for lunch, but this was our last night, and the name conjured up images of some slope-roofed backwoods establishment flanked by jungle and banyan trees and frequented by locals.

The terrain as we cut off the main roads and into the preserve seemed to confirm that. Dirt paths, dense underbrush, occasional bodies of still green water visible in snatches through the trees, fringed by tangled mangrove roots.

We found a campsite under a tall tree and next to a deep sinkhole pool that looked by the color to be fed directly from the ocean via underwater limestone caves. The ground around it was soft and moist, but the grass was stiff enough to cushion us and keep us off of it, so we stashed our packs and headed back out to look for the Tavern.

It was, indeed, at the end of a dirt path in the jungle, and surrounded by underbrush. However, there were no cars in the wide gravel parking lot, and the lights inside were dim. We walked up to the windows and peered inside to see, not the coarse dark wood of the backwoods place I had imagined, but the white tablecloths, silver utensils, and crystal wineglasses of a five star restaurant. The menu, with entrees starting at three times the cost of our average restaurant meal on the island, confirmed the fact; Tom Moore’s Tavern was no place for vagabonds like us.

So instead we went back into the nature preserve and ate the last of our packed food, drank the last of the rum, and stayed up talking into the last night of our trip.

The day dawned bright and sunny and we walked out of the preserve with our packs packed tight for the trip home. It had been a great trip, but all of us were ready to get home and sleep in our own beds. We crossed the long and narrow bridge—no kind-hearted resident to give us a ride across this time—hugging the sides as cars swept past us, and breathed easier when we stepped off on the other side, where the lights of the airport blinked feebly in the bright sunlight.

We walked slowly down the road to the airport’s entrance and stepped under the awning where, ten days ago in the pouring rain, a taxi had picked us up and driven us into St. George. It was still early, but there was nothing much left to do; we cleaned up as best we could in the airport bathrooms and settled in to wait for our flight.

And our flight came, a few hours later. We passed back through customs and then made the short flight to JFK, and landed in D.C. late in the warm April evening. We went through the ritual of finding our car in the acres of Dulles’ long term parking and drove home, tired and triumphant, listening to music and pulling in home around nine thirty. We capped it off with dessert at a local restaurant and then I drove Lily home, an hour or so away.

Coming back, music blaring to keep me awake, roads empty and stars glittering through the orange haze of D.C.’s light pollution above, I thought about the trip. I’d half expected it to satisfy my wanderlust, at least for the time being. After this, I’d thought before leaving, I’ll be able to settle in for a while and focus on school and work.

It didn’t happen. Driving home at two in the morning, I didn’t feel any particular comfort in being back home, any contentment to just sit back and “relax.” I didn’t want more time in Bermuda, more time “on vacation”—I wanted the horizon.

No, I thought, flying home wasn’t the end of the adventure. It was the end of a prologue, the conclusion of a preliminary treatise. It wasn’t an experience unique to my “college life” before I get some responsibility and settle down to a steady career; it was a fragment of my post-collegiate life displaced to the present. Neither was it just a vacation, just an adventure, just a frivolous diversion from responsibility; it was an education.

Some are called to lives of lifelong scholarship. I am one of them. But my main teachers are not my professors or the works of brilliant dead men, though I’ve learned invaluable lessons from both. The world is my curriculum vitae, and my teachers are rain pooling on the window of a jet, iridescent oceans, big men with tattoos, narrow roads, sore feet, the rumbling engines of ferries, black rocks and white beaches, crumbling ruins, and stars glittering through the orange haze of Washington, D.C.

Tim Raveling is a freelance writer.



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