The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (49 page)

I contacted the Venice City Hall, got permission to visit the islands (many of them are barred to visitors), asked Gino Macropodio if he could help me find a boat—and if he would come with me.

“No,” he said. “I've put down the oar. And don't try and do it in a gondola. Gondolas aren't made for the wind. You need an outboard motor to be safe.”

“No way. I'm doing this with my own strength.”

“But not in a gondola.”

So he found me a wooden racing
sandolo
owned by a rowing club on a littoral island between the Adriatic and the lagoon. After I'd passed a rowing exam, I was given the boat—sky-blue and bright yellow, 24 feet long—and warned of numerous dangers. There was a crime wave in the lagoon. Albanians were running guns and stashing them on deserted islands. Mosquitoes carried West Nile virus. Certain gondoliers were fighting certain taxi drivers for the city's cocaine trade, so taxi drivers were capsizing rowboats.

 

Aside from encountering a woman sunbathing nude on the deck of a runabout, and some inquisitive monks on an island that had been given to an Armenian, in 1717, to establish a religious order (one asked if I'd discovered “the nymphs, the sirens, the women who live under the water”), I found that my first two days were uneventful. On the third day, on fire with adrenaline from my close encounter with the police, I rowed two miles, hard, for Bailer Island, where, out of sight, I tied my
sandolo
up to a navigational piling and fell asleep.

Nobody came to arrest me. Waking, an hour later, I rowed a couple more miles in the wind (barely easier than swimming), and wound up on St. George in the Seaweed, where, in the 1850s, John Ruskin was captivated by “the kind of scenes which were daily set before the eyes of . . . Titian.” A monastery had been founded there in the 11th century, and in the early 1400s St. Lorenzo Giustiniani, the first patriarch of Venice, after renouncing his wealthy family (“Christ died on a cross and you want me to die on a feather bed?”), lived there in seclusion, as did the young Pope Eugene IV. The monastery contained a library of rare manuscripts and paintings by Bellini, which were destroyed in a fire in 1716. Before the completion of a railroad bridge from the mainland, in 1846, St. George was the first piece of Venice that travelers encountered when arriving from the west, and it was the site of grand receptions intended to impress them. Eugenio Miozzi, the renowned Venetian bridge engineer, described the treaties hammered out in the seaweed as “anticipating by eight centuries the role of the League of Nations.”

I rowed for all that, aiming for the western side of the island. But the tide had shifted and was heading out fast. Whitewater broadsided the boat. I lost the
forcola.
Finally, I gave in and rode the current, like a surfer, to the east side.

The wind died as I rounded a corner and entered a canal-cum-driveway that led into the island's walled interior. A boathouse at the end had collapsed—rammed, it looked like, by a huge
topo,
which was still sitting there. I spied a mooring spot, tied up, jumped ashore, and immediately stumbled upon a matching pair of bronze door handles, scaled in rust, sitting in a pile of bricks, bottles, seaweed. They were heavy, and when I scratched them, dull gold shone beneath the corrosion. I stashed them in my boat. The way onto the island was blocked by the wreck, which had been turned on its side by whatever wind, current, or drunk had brought it here. I pulled myself aboard, balanced along the vessel's gunwales, and then dropped to the other side. I was in a room at the bottom of a stone staircase that clung to a wall with no visible means of support. Everything was powdered with flaked plaster. Vaulted ceilings were punctured by sunlit holes.

I decided to climb the unsupported staircase. Before I could reconsider this plan, I was 40 feet up in the air. I hugged the wall as I went, sidestepping pieces of fallen ceiling, and tiptoed, imagining that silence would make me lighter. On the top level of the building, the floor had collapsed in sections 10 feet wide. The wind blew hard through empty windows. It was a monumentally stupid place to go alone. But here was a pope's-eye view.

I tiptoed back downstairs, thinking that I would row east, to the former insane asylum. Now it was a five-star hotel. I'd find the concierge, ask if I could camp on the lawn, spend the evening at the hotel bar.

But I'd been enchanted by the stillness. Leaving the island's protected canal was like entering the jet stream sideways. The wind and the current had picked up, and I got snapped around a full circle and a half—like a skateboard trick. When I tried to flee back to St. George, I was hauled 200 feet to the Fusina Canal, the last dredged channel before the mainland. I began to row as I'd done with shirtless Gigi 20 years before, imagining that spirits were punishing me for taking the corroded door handles from the island. Door handles that saints and popes had grasped. I wanted to throw them overboard but couldn't take a hand off the oar.

I gave six hard pushes, came alongside a navigational piling, and grabbed—almost hugged—it. I'd been blown a quarter mile and could see the long bridge to the mainland. I turned on my cell phone for the first time in days. Crouching to get out of the wind, I called Gino. He didn't answer. And what was I going to ask him? When he was 12, he'd brandished a disastrous report card and told his mother, “The undersigned is
done with this.
” She'd told him, “Go work.” He'd lied about his age, got a construction job, saved enough money to buy a gondola, and became the fifth in a line of Macropodios to take up the profession. He never married or had children. He never joined the gondoliers' union. He never needed anyone's help. I lay in the boat, and an hour later called again.

He said, “Good idea tying yourself to the piling.”

“Yeah. But, Gino, how much longer is this wind going to last?”

“Who can say? It's the wind. It'll last till it's over. And now you see it's no joke out there in the lagoon. I told you you should have got a motor. Aren't you glad you didn't go in a gondola?”

“Yes.”

“Well, anyway, I'm going to move my car right now. Which is good luck for you, as it's in the parking lot on Little Trunk.” In the distance, I could see this island, which was devoted entirely to parking facilities.

“If you can meet me there, come meet me,” Gino said.

“I'll try. The wind seems favorable.”

Before I could change my mind, I started out, and as the whitecaps of broadsiding waves sloshed in, rowed not so much with my muscles as with my bones. A wave hit so hard I thought my arm might break. The car ferries and big ships and heavy commercial traffic that frequent a shipping lane grew closer. I was in serious danger here. If I lost control, I'd get swept away to the impassable margin between water and land which Venetians call the Dead Lagoon, or drift into the path of a tanker. Yet I managed to cross the Canal of Giudecca—clogged with intersecting wakes and metal hulls, which I'd failed to cross 20 years before—aimed for an empty slip at a
vaporetto
depot, barely dodged a car ferry, and banged into the dock. I tied up and lay down. I was on the floor of a maritime bus station.

“And now?” Gino asked, when we found each other. “What are you going to do? Don't you have a plan? This lagoon is very treacherous.”

Getting to Little Trunk had taken all my strength and ability. I needed Gino to help me. He was 80 and hadn't picked up an oar in 14 years. Whenever I asked him if he missed rowing, he said, “I've done my part.”

He looked at the
sandolo.
“You made it here by yourself. Nobody towed you?”

“No.”

“But you can't stay here.”

I pointed to a methane plant on Braid Island, 500 feet from where we stood. “I could make it to that. Or try and go under the bridge and camp on Second”—a trashy-looking island that I'd regarded with pity every time I'd crossed by road or rail into Venice. “Mostly, I'd rather sleep on a clean island, where there aren't any rats, and I don't think Second is a very clean island.”

“No. It's not so clean.”

We both started laughing. He put a hand on my shoulder. “The north lagoon is calmer. And, if you make it through the night up there, then row to Venice in the morning. Find a rowing club along the edge of the city, and ask them to keep your boat so you can meet me for lunch. I'll be in St. Mark's Square at noon.”

 

I steered for one of the mainland bridge's arches and slipped in. There were gray-white stalactites hanging from the ceiling, and gallery upon gallery of arched darkness. A sloppy concrete seam joined the newer automobile section to the old train trestle. The cold, damp air smelled ratty. I rowed out fast, and as I emerged by the squalid Second, littered with plastic detritus in medicinal shades of green and pink, I saw another island, about a mile away, its rolling, sunlit meadows rising, miragelike, from the water.

It was unwalled, and at the point of my
ferro
's spear was a floating dock and a red
sandolo
with two men standing beside it. I saw them see me as I approached. I waved, taking one hand off the oar. Spooked, the men untied and rowed off in a needlessly wide arc. I pulled up and took their place. Then I heard low voices. Tucked away in a slot of water behind the dock were two more men, dressed in black, in a red-and-black speedboat. One had silver teeth and a nose ring. Both had buzzcuts.

I said,
“Ciao.”

Silence. I turned away. The strong smell of pot followed me.

I looked at my map. I was on the island of High Field—a natural location for drug dealers. The rowers in the red
sandolo
had probably left with such haste because they'd seen my boat's colors and feared exposure by a rival rowing society. Hoping to appear Venetian, I lay low.

Then I heard a motor. A stocky teenage girl was hunched at the tiller of a purple-and-white speedboat, prow out of the water and bearing aloft its name (in purple script):
BABY FRAGOLA
.
She came in fast, blasting techno, holding the collar of a huge Presa Canario war dog. A clean-cut boy in a white speedboat followed. They tied up and went ashore into a grove of trees. Ten minutes later, they returned and both climbed into
Baby Fragola.
Behind them came a man with spiked hair, arms banded in tribal tattoos. The buzzcuts jumped to their feet. Slurred words drifted my way.

Spike: “I threw him off a bridge near St. Mark's.”

Buzzcut No. 1: “I smoked it.”

Spike: “Then I took my clothes off.”

A small wooden rat powered by a big American outboard arrived. A middle-aged man in a white T-shirt and khakis looked suspiciously at the island's inhabitants before coming ashore, followed by a salt-and-pepper Shih Tzu.

Spike asked for the time, and a buzzcut responded, “Five to eight.” Dinner. They started up their engine and jetted off toward Venice. I jumped onto the dock and walked up through the trees. In the middle of a large, open meadow, the mirage I'd seen from afar, I found the man and his dog.

I asked, “Is this a safe place to camp? With the drugs and all?”

He said, “The smokers are harmless. But this is a place where people come to fight.” He took a boxer's stance. “Looking for fights.”

Aside from Piazza San Marco, all of Venice's squares are called fields (
campi
). They used to be covered in grass, and served as arenas for boxing. In 1574, Henri III, before being seen off by a ceremonial artillery salvo from St. George in the Seaweed, watched a staged brawl that he described as “too small to be a real war and too cruel to be a game.”

“You're a foreigner?”

“Yes.”

“If fighters come, just say you're not from here. They'll probably decide to leave you alone. Now let me show you where the good fruit is.”

He led me down a slope to a tree bearing cherry-size plums, plucked one, and said, “No pesticides—delicious.”

I ate one and immediately grabbed another.

“Don't gorge yourself. Eat too many and you'll get the shits.” He squatted to mime this.

After he left, I had High Field to myself. It was ringed by trees, the high, open namesake meadow like a monk's tonsured scalp in the center. I discovered a handful of stone houses—an abandoned village—in a thick copse of trees.

At the top of the meadow, some benches had been set up under an open-sided shelter. The bleachers for battles. Nearby was a fire pit big enough to cook an ox. On a piece of planking were two competing graffiti:

 

Respect this sacred place.

Eat my penis you with your canoes of shit.

 

I lit a fire, simmered tomatoes and beans in a pan, undressed, and bathed with water that I'd brought in a huge rubber bag that doubled as ballast. A large, bright green grasshopper watched me from the graffitied plank. Then I put on pajamas, grabbed the pan and a spork, and looked out at the domes and bell towers of the city. Kekquakeà: a pajama-clad foreigner with a pot of beans and a pet grasshopper. He had found himself in the heart of Venice, alone.

 

By nine the next morning, I was back on the water, rowing toward lunch with Gino. The tide was out and the
secca
so extreme that I could submerge only half a blade. But a
sandolo
is designed to go anywhere. I quickly made it to the Canal of New Foundations, Venice's West Side Highway. I jay-rowed across six lanes of heavy traffic, threading like a skateboarder between a cab and a bus, and claimed a lane right up against a stone embankment. I got rocked hard, without interruption. Buses passed. Taxis. Runabouts. Rats ranging in comparative size from pickup to semi. Endless mopedlike skiffs.
Vaporetti
filled with tourists came one after the other, backing up at the floating docks and jamming me into pockets of churning foam, stone and metal on all sides. I began to tread water with the oar, hovering in place, something I'd seen gondoliers do but didn't know I could do. On my right was a city canal called the Stream of Beggars. A taxi cut me off and I rocked through its wake into the stillness.