College . 04/21/2008 12:54 AM . Tim Raveling

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

I’d gone to sleep praying for sun; we awoke to pouring rain. Saint George is only one small corner of the island, and we were all anxious to see the rest of it, which wasn’t going to happen as long as we stayed based at the St. George’s Club. We baked some bread and crossed our fingers, watching the sky for that hopeful glimpse of blue.

Toward noon, the rain stopped, but the gray ceiling of clouds remained, brooding over the island and threatening renewed rain.

It was good enough. We canceled our stay for that night, gathered our packs, and set out on foot west out of St George toward the long bridge spanning Saint George island and the main central section of Bermuda. As we neared the bridge the wind picked up and the rain started to fall again, hard, and for a moment I wondered if we’d made the right move.

Then the clouds blew past and the whole western sky opened up and the sun infused fire into the iridescent blue of the bay. The wind continued to blow, stiff and cool with the moisture of recent rain, but the storm front itself had passed us by.

The bridge connecting Saint George Island to Hamilton Parish is rather long and has absolutely no shoulder for pedestrians, promising only the completion of a bike path addition at some point in the future. An American woman pulled up beside us as we were about to step onto it and offered us a ride.

“So,” she said as the bridge passed us by and we moved south along the St George Bay,

“where are you all from?”

She was an American living on the island, driving back to her home where she was hosting the Harvard girl’s choir during their visit to the island.

“Where are you staying?” she asked.

I gave what would become our standard answer. “Oh, you know. Around. We haven’t found a place yet.”

“I see,” she said, frowning. “Well, that’s certainly highly irregular. You should be careful walking, there isn’t much shoulder on most of these roads.”

She was right. For an island that doesn’t let tourists rent cars (they rent motorized scooters instead), almost none of the roads we walked on were designed for pedestrians, and the drivers, while good, rarely obeyed the speed limits.

Above: Scooters

We had her drop us a few miles past the bridge, thanked her for the ride, and continued our journey on foot. The sky was almost completely clear now and warming up fast, and we found ourselves heading deeper into the part of Bermuda that was responsible for the island’s high GDP. Huge, beautiful houses, white stucco and Spanish architecture, could be seen through the palm trees and foliage, behind high fences and padlocks. “No Trespassing” signs are as ubiquitous on the island as the mopeds and roosters.

Within an hour we were walking on another golf course. It was sunny now, and this course was much better kept than the one we’d seen in St George—expansive palm trees shaded the well-kept grass where the occasional incongruous rooster strutted, preening in the warmth after the morning’s rain.

We looked especially out of place now, on foot with our packs, but there were (according to the map) beaches to be had on the other side of the golf course, and if we were going to be in Bermuda, we were going to go to a beach.

This belief persisted until we arrived at an enormous, luxurious complex with security cameras everywhere, signs forbidding entrance, and a large sign reading “The Mid Ocean Club – Private Residential Area” planted to the left of a tree-lined drive. According to the map, the beach was only a few hundred yards beyond the signs marked “no entrance.”

Disheartened, but drawn on by the hope of sitting down on one of Bermuda’s fine white-sand beaches before the end of the day, we retraced our steps and continued west along the south shore of Smith’s Parish.

Above: Standing on the edge of one of the many golf courses.

Finally, as the day was drawing on, we saw white sand and blue water and left the road into John Smith Bay park and our first real beach. The wind was constant and chilly, but we didn’t care; the surf washed on the sand and against the rocks at the side of the bay and we were in Bermuda, on a beach. This, I thought, is the way it’s supposed to be.

We sat down and had some made-in-Bermuda rum and felt like pirates, albeit pirates stilled possessed of an unnaturally pale skin tone for this latitude. Stewart had burned his forearms two days before—on a completely overcast day, while it was raining. Now the lotion came out.

After reading and sunning for an hour, we continued west, bought some groceries for dinner, and walked into the miniature nature reserve called Spittal Pond. The day before we’d walked past a place called “Lover’s Lake,” a swampy little mud hole surrounded by impenetrable brush and thin brown grass. Spittal Pond, on the other hand, was a beautiful little body of water surrounded by high grass and, to the south, the jagged rocks of the coast itself.

We made camp there, in a small rocky cove facing the sea. Living outside, our biological clocks were set by the sun; the sun went down, and we went to sleep, scattered around the cove in the most comfortable places we could find

We awoke early to a clear, cold predawn sky. Our first night outside on the island had gone without a hitch, and the day looked to be a beautiful one. We started walking with the sunrise, north through the island towards the railroad trail that would take us to the island’s population and cultural center, the city of Hamilton.

Above: Endless beach.

The railroad had been built in 1931 and was just over twenty-one miles long, spanning the distance from St George’s, on the far northeastern tip of the island, to Sandy’s Parish, on the far western tip. It was, however, prohibitively expensive to operate and maintain; it was closed down in 1948 and, four decades later, converted into a hiking trail. Now all that remains of its presence is the deep passages carved into the island’s limestone and series of concrete and rusty steel pylons where the railroad bridges used to cross the salt water.

The railroad trail took us west along the coast. We passed through groves of shady and fragrant eucalyptus trees and neighborhoods, and walked several miles before making the cut south toward Hamilton.

Bermuda’s capital has been around since 1790, when the island’s government decided it wanted a place to call its own. Today, it’s also the economic capital of the island, housing the headquarters of several international corporations including Tyco International, Foster Wheeler Inc, and the Bacardi liquor-production corporation. Despite the economic presence, however, the official population of the city is less than a thousand—most Bermudians live in the parishes and commute into Hamilton on one of the islands ever-present pink buses.

We walked into town on foot, much to the amusement of the locals—“Happy campers!” one large, very jovial black man called out to us from the other side of the street. “Y’all happy campers? You look like happy campers!”

We were, indeed, happy campers.

Hamilton is a city with small-town values. The downtown looked like commercial district of any reasonably-sized American city, complete with traffic, construction work, and people walking the sidewalks in suits and talking on cell phones. It was when you looked closer, though, that you noticed the differences; the majority of those wearing the suits and talking on the cell phones were black, while construction crews and street cleaners tended to be whites and other minorities. Whatever else you can say about the links between race and economics in the States, things seem to have taken a different course here.

A man driving a car would often stop to chat with a construction worker or shout out the window at a friend passing on the sidewalk, women drying their clothes on third story apartment balconies shouting and waving to us as we passed.

Before lunch we passed the Bermuda Cathedral, a beautiful Anglican church built mostly of local limestone, resulting in a work of neogothic architecture the color of light cream, and surrounded by palm trees; somehow perfectly fitting to the island and the blue skies above. We had an amazing lunch at the Hog Penny pub, big hamburgers made all the better for a long morning’s walk.

Bermuda Cathedral.

And then it was time to fulfill a pact we’d made before ever setting off or even before knowing where we’d end up.

It had taken a while to decide what to get. The initial idea, when we were still thinking of Ireland, was some sort of Celtic cross. Obviously, as we were now in the tropics, that wasn’t going to work. On a whim, Stewart had looked up the motto of Bermuda and stopped, staring at his laptop.

“Quo Fata Ferunt,” he said, and translated: “Wherever the fates may carry us.”

It was perfect. This was the first step in what all four of us hope will be lives of travel; that single Latin phrase summed up our entire adventure perfectly. With that in mind, we made our way to the local tattoo parlor.

The artist was from Hungary and made a living traveling the world doing tattoo work; a few months in Spain, a few in Germany, and spring and summer here in Bermuda. His assistant was a big man, native to the island, with tattoos everywhere and a talent for creative use of profanity. His name was Mike—“Uncle Mike” to a kid, dressed in black and with a face full of metal studs, who stopped in to buy a gift certificate for his father. “It’s from mom,” the kid said, somewhat sheepishly. “She says she’s sick of dad’s snake being only half done, she just wants the damn thing finished.”

Uncle Mike was talkative. On hearing our standard claim that we were staying “around,” he immediately assumed the truth—that we were camping—and laughed out loud. “That’s amazing, man,” he said, and told us some places we could stay to avoid “the Man,” then told us some stories of his own run-ins with the Man—ending with a biological and hopefully allegorical suggestion of just what we could do to the Man.

Stewart and Max went first, getting the full “Quo Fata Ferunt” across the left shoulder; I went after Max, opting for just the initials “QFF” on the shoulder blade. I talked to the artist as he worked—his English was broken and thickly accented, but he was friendly. He wasn’t a tattoo artist by choice, he said; he had been a graphic designer in Hungary and made money teaching art classes, but the pay just wasn’t good enough. What he really liked to do was traditional art, especially charcoals. His studio showed it—a dark, perfectly executed portrait of Bob Marley hung in the center of the door next to tattoo designs and photographs of satisfied customers.

Lily wrapped it up with a Japanese character for “bloom, flower” on her back. We said our goodbyes and left to look for a place to spend the night, armed with plenty of advice from our tattooed friend.

“Wherever the fates may carry us.”

We walked north as the day wore into evening, looking for a place to spend the night. We’d found only small parks unfit for camping by the time we were nearing the northern point of Pembroke Parish. A single green spot—the sign for a park—remained on the map, at the very tip, and it was getting too late to turn back. Max’s feet were developing blisters from the walking, and we had to stop soon, but when we reached the final park, it was as small as the rest, a patch of grass on the coast with a few picnic tables and local fishermen sitting around playing cards.

We walked out and watched the sunset, wondering what to do, considering just sleeping right there and hoping for the best. Then, Lily spoke up. “I know what we can do,” she said, pointing to a small island perhaps fifty or sixty yards offshore. “We can just put our packs in plastic bags and swim out there.”

Visions of illegal immigrants crossing the Rio Grande flashed through my mind. “I’m not sure,” I said, “that’s the best idea.”

She wouldn’t be convinced, though, and changed into her swimsuit and dove into the water. She surfaced a few seconds later, then stood and waded out—the water between us and the island was only waist deep the whole way.

“Good enough,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

We portaged our packs out to the island, changed back into dry clothes, and settled in for the night. We’d done it again, thanks to Lily, and the grass on the island was as soft as a mattress. We passed the rum before bed and drifted off to sleep under the stars, the lights of ships entering and leaving the harbor blinking around us.

…to be continued.

Tim Raveling is a freelance writer.