Voyager: Travel Writings by Russell Banks Page A

several other lives already. I had moved by then from Peterborough Street to a cheaper, smaller flat on Symphony Road, and to pay the $36 monthly rent washed dishes part-time at the Rathskeller in Harvard Square. I wrote terrible Whitmanesque poems and neo-Faulknerian stories and spent the rest of my waking hours reading all the books listed on the syllabi of a friendly Boston University English major.
    Nonetheless, Christine was attracted to me. Obsessively so. Which astonished and pleased me. But that is another story, I said to Chase. I did acknowledge that my fourteen-year-long marriage to Christine and divorce were linked in important ways to the story of my prior marriage to Darlene and its brutal end, but they were complicated links, not simple cause and effect—even though mysecond marriage and divorce would never have happened if not for my first—and could not be quickly described. It was late at night at Scout’s on the island of Saba; it was time to pack our bags so we could depart early the next morning for St. Barthélemy. The present and future beckoned; the past could wait.
    But it can’t wait for long. Whether teller or listener, to get a story straight—which is, after all, one of the things I’m trying to accomplish here—one has to go back to its beginnings. Last April, my Miami friend, the poet Tom Healy, and I were biking the Overseas Highway from Key Largo to Key West and return—two and a half days, about two hundred miles of pedaling—when the past, or a crucial part of the past, came unexpectedly back to me. It was a tough ride. The Seven Mile Bridge between Knight’s Key and Little Duck Key was the worst of it, our bikes squeezed on the right by a low guardrail, while eighteen inches off our left shoulders, semis and RVs and tourist-laden cars blew by. Fifty feet beneath the bridge, the ultramarine waters of Florida Bay merged with the turquoise-blue Gulf of Mexico. It was very humid, in the mid-eighties, with a fifteen-mile-an-hour headwind and only occasional cloud cover.
    At least once a year, especially since moving to Miami four years ago, I’ve driven down the Overseas Highway by car to visit friends or participate in the annual Key West Literary Seminar. So I was surprised to find myself deeply and oddly stirred by traveling the same route on a bike, at ground level. Then I remembered. Fifty-three years ago, a wheezing, round-shouldered 1950s Greyhound bus from Miami dropped me off at a single-pump gas station in the fishing village of Islamorada. The bus lumbered back onto the Overseas Highway, old Route 1, and headed for Key West eighty miles beyond. I was lugging all my worldly possessions in an olive-green army-surplus duffel. I hefted the duffel to my shoulder and crossed the now empty road to a two-story, Bahamas-style rooming house with a wide porch that faced the highway.
    I was certain of that much; those images were clear. But the rest of my memories of those early months in Islamorada and then later in Key West were vague and uncertain, even as to when I was there exactly, and for how long. I know that I was very young at the time, in my early twenties. I tried telling the story to Tom but couldn’t get it right. I must not have been paying attention back then. Or else paying attention to everything that wasn’t worth remembering now, more than a half century later.
    I used to tell people that it happened in 1962 or ’63, when I was twenty-two or twenty-three. But a few years ago I gave a reading from a recently published novel at the Booksmith, a bookshop in Brookline, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. It was one of the several stores and restaurants and contractors that had given me part-time employment in the early 1960s. It was a nostalgic event for me and a kind of triumphant homecoming, and I told the audience that many years ago I had quit my job at the bookstore and hitchhiked alone down to Miami and ridden a bus out to the Florida Keys, where I rented a tiny