Jeanne Baret, The First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe

A version of this article originally appeared in " The Travel Belles" Magazine:

http://www.travelbelles.com/2012/04/jeanne-baret-first-woman-to-travel-around-the-world/

Neil Armstrong.

Ferdinand Magellan.

Roald Amundsen.

Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.

The first men to set foot on the moon, circumnavigate the earth, reach the South Pole and climb Everest are well known to history. But the first woman to travel around the world? More than two hundred years later, few have heard of her.

And that’s a pity because Jeanne Baret’s story is a cracking good yarn. Her Hollywood-worthy adventures unfolded on a cramped wooden sailing ship calling at exotic destinations like Rio de Janiero, the Staits of Magellan, Tahiti, New Ireland, Mauritius and Madagascar. She made scientific discoveries, encountered indigenous people, and endured hardships ranging from starvation to assault.

All while disguised as a man.

Jeanne Baret was born to a family of poor day laborers in France’s Loire Valley in 1740. Highly intelligent and keenly interested in the natural world, she became an “herb woman,” versed in the healing properties of local plants and sought out by residents of her village for medical treatment.

In Enlightenment Europe, herb women were also in demand by practitioners of the newly-emerging science of botany. Formal education was still almost exclusively from textbooks at the time, so any aspiring scientist wishing to truly understand the natural world needed to consult with local people who knew it best.

One such scientist was the aristocrat Philibert de Commerson, who met Baret when he was studying plants near her home village. He was married at the time but fell in love with the quick-witted country girl who knew every tree and flower. Soon they were lovers, traveling the fields and hills collecting plant specimens. Eventually they moved to a house in Paris, where Baret bore Commerson’s son. She placed the baby in an orphanage, a not-uncommon practice in eighteenth-century Paris. The historical record is not clear, but Baret may have hoped that Commerson, whose wife had since died, would marry her and raise their child. Sadly, their baby did not survive and marriage was not forthcoming.

In 1765 the well-connected Commerson received a royal appointment to join an expedition led by the famed naval commander Louis Antoine de Bougainville. It was to be France’s first circumnavigation of the globe. The voyage was expressly charged with collecting specimens of flora and fauna that might have commercial value and could be grown in France or its colonies around the world.

French naval regulations prohibited women aboard ships. But Commerson needed an assistant, and Baret was eager for an adventure. So she bound her breasts in tight strips of linen, donned baggy clothes, and boarded the Etoile with Commerson in Rochefort harbor in December 1766.

From the beginning the crew was suspicious of the scientist’s small companion, who kept to Commerson’s cabin and never seemed to use the “head” or open-air toilet. A group of sailors publicly confronted Baret on the deck, demanding to know her sex. Tearfully, she “confessed” to being a eunuch, a state so horrifying to the sailors that they immediately backed down. Her story was plausible as Ottoman pirates had been known to castrate their captives. This brilliant deception hid Baret’s true gender while keeping her tormentors at bay regarding her identity.

"Eunuch" or not, Baret was subjected to the brutal hazing rituals inflicted on all new sailors during the traditional “crossing the line” ceremony at the equator. Dragged through the water with other seamen in a sail strung beside the ship, Baret was groped and pelted with chamberpot filth.

Her disguise proved a misery to maintain. Baret had little opportunity to wash her increasingly dirt-crusted clothes. The linen straps binding her breasts chafed horribly, causing her skin to break out in hideous, constantly-weeping sores.

When the Etoile finally docked in Rio de Janiero after months at sea, the little assistant was soon seen clambering though the tropical rainforest outside the city in voluminous, sweat-soaked garments. Baret gathered boxes of plant specimens for Commerson, who was laid up in his cabin with an ulcerated leg.

One plant she brought back was a towering woody vine with showy red flowers. Commerson named this impressive blossom “Bougainvillea” after his commander, whose ship Le Boudeuse had docked in Rio months earlier after a mission to evacuate French colonists from the Falkland Islands. This honor may flattered Bougainville into ignoring the renewed and spreading suspicions that Baret was really a woman.

The ships sailed for the Straits of Magellan. The air grew cool, then cold. Whales and seals appeared. Towering, snowcapped mountain ranges drew close to the sea.
Once the expedition reached Tierra del Fuego, Baret and Commerson spent days scaling rocky slopes collecting and preserving plant and animal specimens. They encountered tall, nearly-naked Fuegian aboriginal people and marveled at their ingenuity in adapting to their harsh environment.

Eventually the ships burst out of the narrow, icy passage into the radiance of the South Pacific. They came upon numerous palm-fringed coral atolls teeming with inhabitants, and dropped anchor at the largest of these islands, Tahiti. The archipelago was unknown to them when they arrived, although the first Western explorer, the British commander Samuel Wallis, had actually visited the islands the previous year.

The Tahitian people welcomed the ragged French sailors enthusiastically. Bougainville named the islands “New Cythera,” and praised their inhabitants’ beauty, friendliness and apparent innocence.

Months later, Bougainville wrote in his log that a group of Tahitians had surrounded Baret and immediately realized she was a woman, to the “shock” of everyone, including Commerson! The entry read, in part:
“..she well knew when we embarked that we were going round the world, and that such a voyage had raised her curiosity. She will be the first woman that ever made it, and I must do her the justice to affirm that she has always behaved on board with the most scrupulous modesty. She is neither ugly nor pretty, and is not yet twenty-five.”
Bougainville’s feigned surprise may have been due to a desire to avoid criticism for violating French naval regulations. Whatever the reason, Baret was now free of the need to maintain the fiction that she was a man. However, she became once again a target for the sailors.

When Bougainville’s ships arrived at the island of New Ireland, near New Guinea, the crew was starving. Attempts to land at islands beyond Tahiti, and on New Guinea itself, had failed due to hostile inhabitants or bad weather. Once the desperate, famished sailors finally came ashore and found food and water, they turned their attention to Baret, catching her alone on a beach. What followed was described only vaguely in the officers’ journals, but Baret was carried back to Commerson’s cabin, where she remained for weeks in seclusion while Bougainville’s ships passed through Indonesia and on to the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius.

There, in the first French territory they had encountered in two years, Baret and Commerson left the expedition. Why? Baret was once again pregnant. With the baby due before Bougainville’s ships could reach Europe it would have been impossible to hide the fact that a woman had been on board.

Baret and Commerson remained on Mauritius as guests of a hospitable governor. When the baby arrived, Baret placed her second son in the foster care of a local plantation owner.

During their sojurn in the colony Baret and Commerson went on an expedition to Madagascar, gathering yet more hitherto unknown species of plants and animals for the scientists in Paris. When they returned to Mauritius, however, they found all their boxes of samples and specimens neatly packed up for departure. A new, less-accommodating governor had arrived from France.

Commeson and Baret purchased a house on Mauritius, as no landlord would rent to the peculiar couple with the stacks of smelly and strange-looking preserved plants and animals. Commerson was never to return to his native country, dying in the house from an infection.

Baret remained on Mauritius for seven years. She met and married a French naval officer who was passing through on his way home. The couple returned to France in 1774 or 1775, with the boxes of specimens, which were duly turned over to the government. Baret and her husband settled in his home in the Dordonge and disappeared from history. However, records indicate she was awarded a comfortable pension from the French government. No one knows who secretly arranged for this reward, but suspicions fall on Bougainville.

Baret died at the ripe old age of 67, unheralded as the first woman to circumnavigate the world. She is a spiritual ancestor of those of us who today visit every corner of the globe because “…such a voyage raised her curiosity.”

I am indebted to the excellent book.“The Discovery of Jeanne Baret,” by Glynis Ridley, (Crown publishing 2010) for material for this article.

Big Night on Vashon

By the time we arrived I'd nearly stopped worrying about the timpano.

In the depths of a dull and foggy January we'd been invited to Vashon Island's renowned farm-to-table restaurant La Boucherie for a feast inspired by the 1996 movie "Big Night."

The film is the story of two Italian immigrant brothers, Primo and Secondo. Their Jersey Shore restaurant is failing because 1950s America is unprepared for chef Primo's authentic dishes. Customers demand spaghetti and meatballs with their risotto all milanese while the uncompromising Primo fumes in the kitchen. In desperation Secondo, the practical-minded manager, accepts a rival restauranteur's offer to invite bandleader Louis Prima to the brothers' restaurant to generate publicity. Primo pours his entire artistic being into this do-or-die evening. The meal's centerpiece is timpano, a monumental baked pasta dish the size and shape of the kettledrum for which it's named.

Like most Americans I claim to love Italian food but rarely eat it the way it should be served. Usually it's rushed plate of rotini and a glass of Trader Joe's prosecco while fast-forwarding through commercials. Or a Starbucks panino between meetings.

In Italy, a meal is meant to be savored over hours in good company. To eat Italian food as as we do is akin to walking away from the Thanksgiving table after a plate of stuffing, leaving your friends, family and the steaming turkey behind.

La Boucherie's invitation was a chance to pay Italian cuisine the respect it deserves. But....timpano? This imposing edifice consists of layers of pasta, hard-boiled eggs, meat sauce, more pasta, more eggs, and more meat sauce, heaped into a culinary cupola more suited to the nutritional needs of a World Cup soccer team than a middle-aged office worker. Maybe I'd just focus on the other courses.

The guests started trickling in to La Boucherie as sunset turned a foggy sky to gold. Most of us had no more than the nodding aquaintance that comes from the occasional exchange of glances over newspapers and smartphones on the commuter ferry to Seattle. We shouldered off our coats by the charcuterie case and peered over each other's shoulders into the dining room, where a long communal table had been set.




We seated ourselves made tentative introductions, then began filling plates with assorted antipasti. Tangy tomme cheese and soft, salty ribbons of house-made prosciutto:




Fava beans with curls of sharp Parmiggiano Reggiano:




Pasta and marinated vegetables, with slices of Vashon's famous "Bill's Bread," the kind that for years only friends of friends could get:




More cheese, with pear slices:




Servers refilled glasses of 2010 Chateau Ducasse Sauvignon Blanc from Bordeaux. Conversations began to sprout branches from the sturdy old trunks of island topics like wells, power outages and ferries: "This prosciutto is as good as what we had in Milan last year!" "I tried raising carrots like these once, but the deer had other ideas." "You really have a singing telegram business?"

More wine. Now came big bowls of Zuppa di Minestrone, a fragrant rich vegetable stew. The conversation ebbed a bit as the guests twisted off pieces of bread to soak up every drop.

By the time the Italian Flag Risotto appeared the first doubts began to surface. Perhaps I'd failed to pace myself properly?




But who could say no to such a beautiful dish? Perfectly tender rice, rich with Parmiggiano and colored with vegetables. A sip of 2009 Fattoria di Felsina, Castello di Farnetella Chianti, Castelnuovo Beradegna, Italy (the same wine served in the movie) and all was well. Now, what was my new acquaintance across the table saying about the picnic at KVI Beach?

In the movie, Primo and Secondo had also begun to have doubts. Their restaurant was filled with their neighbors: The shy florist and the expansive Cadillac salesman. The wizened old lady and the bombshell girlfriend. Wine flowed, music poured from the hi-fi, and the conversation had grown as animated as the hand gestures. But where was Louis Prima? He's coming, he's coming, assures the rival restauranteur, helping himself to more risotto. Primo pokes his head out of the kitchen door and says, "Let's eat!"

And on Vashon, eat we did. Pork Rib Ragu with Rigatoni was an unexpected combination, with dissolvingly-tender meat. My husband poked it thoughtfully with a fork. "I'm trying to reverse-engineer it," he whispered, "but I don't think I can ever make anything this good at home." "Mmmpf," I replied.



Then the moment arrived.

The timpano appeared, cradled in the arms of its creator for a formal presentation before going under the knife back in the kitchen.




This was it. The culinary equivalent of New Year's Eve in Times Square or running with the bulls in Pamplona. Something you do once in your life for bragging rights in perpetuity. When you define yourself as serious or Olive Garden. I turned to Steve. "I'll take a slice."

And as Hemingway might say, it was good. Very very good. Bright with tomatoes, soft with pasta, rich with eggs and meatballs. Bite after melting bite, the timpano disappeared by forkfuls until nothing was left but plate.




At this point in the movie Isabella Rossellini is lying on top of the table while the other guests are dancing in a rapturous swirl of contentment and fellowship. La Boucherie's customers, being from the Pacific Northwest rather than New Jersey, remained seated but no less enchanted. We laughed, we talked, we snapped pictures, acutely aware of sharing a remarkable experience here on our own tiny speck of rock in Puget Sound while the rest of the world raced heedlessly by.

A glass of 2011 Cooper Mountain Pinot Noir from Oregon and it somehow there was room for just a smidgen of beef tenderloin....





....and a dab of Roasted Pork with Winter Vegetables, with a sip of 2009 Otanon, Rioja Crianza, Aldanueva de Ebro from Spain:








Finally it was time for traditional Italian cakes, tarts & tiramisu...





...and crackling homemade biscotti with fiery Clear Creek grappa.






If you want to know whether Louis Prima ever made it to Primo and Secondo's restaurant you'll have to rent the movie. In the end, it didn't matter to their customers any more than it would have mattered to us at La Boucherie. The Big Night wasn't about money or celebrity or even timpano. It was about love: For artistry, for friends old and new, and for your community, whether it's a little island in the Pacific Northwest or the Jersey Shore or anywhere else in the world.

We stepped out of the restaurant's embrace in a warm bubble of laughter and Louis Prima music. Our goodbyes and thank yous condensed into clouds that floated up into the crisp air above Vashon into a night thick with stars.

Modernist Cuisine at Home

Seattleites are not noted for exuberance. We sit quietly in dark pubs, bright laboratories and dull cubicles. Our preferred "personal space" is vast, with the other person located, ideally, no nearer than Bellingham. Our fashion sense could best be described as "camouflage." We drive Subarus.

But beneath the Patagonia-and-pocket-protector facade lurks an inventive "why the hell not" streak. For example, after World War II we noticed we had a lot of extra aircraft engines lying around. So we bolted them to small plywood boats and invented hydroplane racing. The manufacturer of the Solo cup remains grateful to this day. In the 1960s one of our our own decided to string his left-handed guitar upside-down, play it behind his back and set it on fire at the Monterey Pop festival. Karaoke stylists belting out "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy" remain grateful to this day. In the 1990s a software engineer invented "Clippy," and well, not everything's a hit. But you get the idea.

So when former Microsoft engineer (not the one responsible for Clippy) Nathan Myhrvold got interested in cooking, he took a distinctively Northwest approach: Locking himself in a vast private laboratory (the "Fortress of Salsa-tude") he applied Science to food. "Science" in this case involved blowtorches, centrifuges and syringes, as well as bandsaws to dissect the appliances. I confess having a frequent desire to take a chainsaw to our balky coffeemaker, but Myrhvold is clearly more a person of action than I.

By all accounts the results were delicious. The "accounters" however, included no members of the general public, as Myhrvold's work required difficult-to-register-for-at-Macy's items like the $4,000 Pacojet instant ice-cream freezer ("handy tools for grinding tough ingredients such as fatty tissues and nuts into fine pastes.")

There was a book, "Modernist Cuisine." But at six volumes, 2,438 pages, 52 pounds and $600, it would never have fit between "Basic Deer Fencing, Illustrated" and my 50-year-old copy of "The Joy of Cooking" on our kitchen shelf even if we could have afforded it.

Thankfully these impediments to culinary adventure were removed last year with the publication of an affordable two-volume version called "Modernist Cuisine at Home." My husband being the kind of experimental cook who once described melting Brie as "a cheese pyroclastic flow" and calls testing a roast for doneness "taking a core sample," I snapped up a copy for Christmas.

The results have indeed been delicious. Steve has immersed himself, so to speak, the the art of "sous vide," following the book's direction to seal cuts of salmon in plastic bags and suspend them in a stockpot full of hot tap water for several hours until they develop a dissolve-in-your-mouth texture like meringue. Heavenly.

But as I devoured the last morsel and resisted the urge to lick the plate, I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd had something similar when I was a child. Then I remembered: Forty years ago my grandmother used to wrap fish in SaranWrap and poach it in the dishwasher. Her Salmon a la Kenmore was just as tender, though it occasionally bore a minute aftertaste of Jet-Dri if it hadn't been sealed tightly enough.


Don't tell Myhrvold or my husband, but sometimes there is nothing new under what passes here for the sun.

"Commuting" to San Francisco

"There's no boat."

It's a sweaty mile-and-a-half run along the Embarcadero from the Golden Gate Ferry terminal to the Blue and Gold Fleet's dock. But when you've misread the schedule and the other company's last trip of the day is in fifteen minutes, you duck and weave through the crowds like Seabiscuit.

We know ferries. Twice a day, regular as the tide, my husband and walk down the gangway to join the cargo of commuters shipped across Puget Sound between our little island and Seattle. We understand slippery docks, crowding and "schedules" that can best be described like the horoscopes in the newspaper: "For entertainment purposes only."

So it seemed reasonable to spend a recent visit to San Francisco doing what came naturally: Commuting by boat from the suburbs to the city.

Sausalito is a friendly little community whose wedding-cake tiers of houses gaze coolly back at the rolls of fog that tumble through the Golden Gate to engulf San Francisco's towers. The town is served by two ferry lines, or you can cheat and ride the bus across the Golden Gate Bridge. With good timing, it's possible to take BART from San Francisco Airport to the Embarcadero, wheel your luggage a couple of blocks to the ferry terminal, hop on a boat across the bay, and walk to one of Sausalito's hotels, most of which are close to the dock.

"Home" for this trip was The Gables Inn, a cluster of wooden Victorian buildings hugging a hill. Our room was tiny and a bit dark, but homey, with a sublimely comfortable bed, incongruously huge flat-screen television and deep jetted tub. Our wing had a private entrance under a tangle of jasmine vines, opening to a quiet street lined with expensive clothing boutiques and knickknack shops.

The big city shimmered across the bay, but at first we were content to relax nearby. We hiked around Sausalito's spiraling streets, admiring the dazzling views and cantilevered mansions. We folded real-estate fliers into our pockets like lottery tickets. We strolled along the waterfront for miles in the springlike 70-degree November sun, feeling we had somehow cheated nature and skipped a season.















But eventually we had to go to the "work" of San Francisco sightseeing. So we downloaded the ferry schedules and hopped a late-morning Blue-and-Gold Line boat back to the Embarcadero.

Once in the city, we gave ourselves over to the usual tourist sights: We walked down Lombard Street, watching tourist minivans zigzag dead-slow among the hydrangeas. We hiked up Telegraph Hill and circled the Coit Tower's muscular Depression-era murals before crowding into the elevator with the wisecracking operator. At the top we squished camera-bag-to-backpack-to-fannypack in a hubbub of German, Italian, French, Chinese and Brooklyn to snap the usual tourist photos. We hiked down to North Beach and ate authentic Pittsburgh-style sausage sandwiches stuffed with French fries. We ambled down to Fisherman's Wharf, expecting only t-shirts and ice cream and human statues posing for quarters under squealing seagulls. Instead we were pleasantly surprised by a maritime museum with a collection of historic vessels from a square-rigger to a houseboat.


Generally we felt smug at our carlessness. "Imagine," I said, "all those poor souls paying to park!" Like an old hand I had done my due diligence and knew there was no ferry service on Thanksgiving Day. We stocked up on nonperishable delicacies in the Ferry Building's shops on Wednesday night.





Thanksgiving dinner was local nuts, fruit, cheese, bread and salami, balanced on a luggage stand and washed down with an excellent Napa Cabernet. Not a single underdone drumstick or dirty dish in sight.

But as we knew from our lives at home, the ferry giveth and the ferry taketh away. In addition to the sprint-inducing schedule mix-up, we had to contend with a dearth of late-night boats, making a leisurely dinner in San Francisco proper nearly impossible unless we were willing to spring for a cab across the bridge, which we weren't. Fortunately there was plenty to eat in Sausalito, and we agreed to save the urban fine-dining extravaganza for another visit.

This time we were content to gather at the city terminal each dusk. We melded in with the briefcase-bearing office workers and the kids in their "Mt Tamalpais High School Red-Tailed Hawks" backpacks. We crowded aboard the boat, plugged our smartphones into an empty outlet and browsed the Chronicle online while others ordered beer and Bloody Marys at the bar. A group ooh-ed and ahh-ed as we passed Alcatraz. Glancing up from his phone my husband nudged me and murmured "Tourists!"

Air Lines

Point a camera at the sky and leave the shutter open for a while. Delicate patterns will appear like figure skaters' tracks across a frozen pond. Parallel but distinct. Graceful sweeping turns and slashing straight lines. Staccato dots and solid bold streaks.




According to the National Air Transport Association, a quarter of a million people are airborne at any given time worldwide. It's easy to ignore the ceaseless comings and goings over our heads, but a pause to look reveals the metropolis of motion we've created in the sky. Miles above our heads, every hour of every day, there are families and business people, rich and poor, the hopeful and the disappointed. They're laughing, talking, watching movies, eating, drinking, arguing, embracing, texting, and sleeping, just like those in the cities beneath them.

The evening high-rise worker, busy populating a spreadsheet by the Caravaggio light of a laptop while the custodians bustle past the cubicles, may not notice the jetliner burning past the office window's square of sky. But 35,000 feet above, someone's doing the same, while the flight attendants collect the last of the headphones and plastic cups.







The airlines talk of interconnectedness, of stitching families and businesses closer, of tying the world together. A look into the night sky reveals how literal those notions have become. We cast a net across the world and pull it tight, trying to squeeze the planet down into something smaller and more manageable.





It's easy to decry this endless hurrying to and fro as merely evidence of a global obsession with being somewhere we're not. But I think it's about more than just getting from one dot on the map to the next. Though no one individual dwells in it for more than a a few hours at a time, humanity has built a home in the sky. We've colonized the clouds. Our jetliners, military planes and light aircraft bring commerce, government and recreation up from the world below. Our civilization races over our our heads now as surely as it stands at our feet.









And it's spectacular.

Sun to Seattle: It's Not You, It's Me.

It's the official: We've broken up.

In hindsight we should have seen it coming.

For weeks now things had been cooling off between us. Sure, the days were bright and blue. Every morning the mountains glowed pink, and every afternoon Puget Sound blossomed with sails. But we could tell there was trouble if we'd really bothered to look.

Each day you were away for a little longer. We kept finding brochures in the mail for Hawaii and Tahiti. If we asked you about it, your answer was always, "Look at those gorgeous dahlias I brought you!"

So we ignored the darkening mornings. We shivered and put on extra layers of cotton and linen, leaving the wool tied firmly in last May's dry-cleaning bags. We dodged the fattening spiders and wiped the dew off the windshield and picked blackberries after work by flashlight.

But today we woke up to find you gone. The bed's cold and the lovely naked sky has pulled on lumpy gray fleece. The furnace kicked in with a faint cough of dust and the cats burrowed further under the covers. The lawn furniture we used to enjoy together is rattling in a cold breeze that's callously flipping the pages of the gardening magazine we left outside last night. There's a rippling curtain of rain on the horizon.


It's over, without so much as a post-it note or a text message of goodbye.

We hastily fold the furniture, drag the potted lemon tree under the eaves and dig the extra blanket out of the linen closet. We look at the sky and mutter, "Sure, we'll give you space. When your phone doesn't ring, it'll be us here in Seattle. But you'll be back."

Gimme Shelter: Lodging and dislodging on Long Island

Everything I knew about Long Island I'd learned from Billy Joel songs: Real-estate novelists dined in Italian restaurants and boys from the wrong side of the tracks longed for uptown girls. Never mind that my husband, who grew up there, seemed to fit nowhere within the Piano Man's oeuvre. I had all the information I required.

One day at the dawn of the new millennium Steve was suddenly seized by a desire to revisit his boyhood haunts. Since I'd already dragged him to all my life's key historic spots ("Look! There's the hospital in Portland where I was born!") I figured he was overdue to be indulged.

This being the pre-smartphone era, I dutifully booted up Expedia. The Northeast was sort of an amorphous muddle in my mind, the reverse of the famous New Yorker cartoon that showed the world petering out into China once you crossed the Hudson. Wasn't Boston just a suburb of New York City? Weren't all the towns embedded in a quaint matrix of New England countryside? Billy Joel notwithstanding, I pictured sunny rambles through verdant countryside dotted with white-spired villages. We'd stop for antiques and apple cider, share blueberry pie with taciturn but warm-hearted locals, and stumble upon a lovely old inn run by Bob Newhart.

Steve stopped me while the hard drive was still whirring. "We'll be there before Memorial Day," he said. "We don't need reservations. Let's be spontaneous."


Long Island in the flesh did indeed conjure up an old TV show, but not the Newhart variety. The Archie Bunker houses of Queens fled past our rental car's windows as Steve dodged and swore at a torrent of traffic. Suburbanization gradually increased as we drove east, and by midday we reached a shade-dappled town called Huntington.

After a pleasant afternoon with cousins we needed a place for the night. We wound from highway to parkway to throughway to turnpike, but nothing presented itself. A gas station attendant finally pointed us toward a blowsy two-storey structure in the middle of a vast parking lot.
If you squinted you might have gotten a vague suggestion of Colonial architecture from the brick trim and the white weathervane-crowned steeple tacked onto the roof. But if you didn't squint the overall impression was the structural equivalent of a small-town homecoming queen fallen on hard times after a couple of bum husbands, and bitter at getting laid off after the auto-parts store closed.

At reception a doughey young woman with auburn roots and glistening acne looked up from a copy of Glamour.

"A room? Everything's booked. No, I mean the whole area. Long Island's a popular place. Uh, I guess I could give you our bridal suite. It's all we have left. $300 per night." We dragged our luggage up to the second floor, suitcases banging on the worn wooden steps. Steve fumbled with the key.
Sniff, sniff.

"Do you smell smoke?" "It's nothing," my husband grunted as the key at last slid home and the door    swung open.

I am not one of those delicate sorts who swoons if someone lights a cigarette three blocks away. I grew up around smokers. My first summer job was in a late-1970s city engineering office so smogged by blue plumes coiling from the draftsmens' Kools that their loudest polyester shirts were nearly invisible on the far side of the room.
But the nicotine-saturated backdraft that poured out of the Bridal Suite would have felled Jean-Paul Sartre. The gouged, decades-old furniture, the peeling linoleum, the fly-carcass-speckled fluorescent light fixtures, all were tanned to various shades of ochre. R.J. Reynolds could have packaged and sold rolled-up swatches of the upholstery.
Without a word Steve grabbed our suitcases. We banged back down the stairs. Steve snatched back the credit card, piled me and the luggage back into the car and sped out of the parking lot in a hail of gravel.
By now it was getting dark on the Jericho Turnpike. Ahead, nearly obscured by the glare of oncoming headlights, a neon sign sputtered "Vacancy."
The quiet young woman behind the desk assured us that the motel was clean. "It used to belong to the state. Low-income housing. It was thoroughly renovated before the motel conversion."
We groped our way along a neat line of ancient bungalows illuminated by a single streetlight. Finding our unit, we opened the door. An acute stab of bleach and fluorescent lighting flashed out. Everything was indeed spotless, scrubbed raw as if by meth-addled Furies on work release. "It'll do," we said to each other, lobbing the suitcases onto a creaking twin bed. I fell asleep imagine the parkway's roar as crashing ocean surf.
Things seemed to improve the next morning. The tide of strip malls receded, revealing shoals of potato fields and islands of flowering dogwoods. Porsches and Mercedes crowded out Saturns and Subarus on the highway. We detoured into F. Scott Fitzgerald country along the North Shore, passing old mansions with white colonnades and new ones with towering arched entryways. We went for a short walk in a nature preserve filled with singing birds. We spent twenty minutes frantically brushing off the ticks we found creeping up our clothes.
As afternoon settled in we headed for the Hamptons. The week before the Memorial Day start of "the season" found the fabled enclave nearly deserted. We wandered past cypress battlements hiding mansions from commoners' gaze. Landscaping trucks rumbled by on otherwise deserted streets. We peered into the windows of closed shops, our reflections blurred by the cashmere and chintz and horsey wealth arrayed inside.
Now it was time to find another night's accommodation. "Riverhead," said Steve. "It's near here, but not snooty." We barreled back up the turnpike while darkness spread across the sky.
Just off an exit ramp a cheery chain motel beckoned. We cruised confidently into the driveway and up to reception. "I'm sorry," said the clerk. "We're completely booked. Long Island's really popular." "Is there anyplace else nearby?" I asked. The clerk winced. "There is," he said, "but I wouldn't go there."
"He just doesn't want to give his competition any credit," I said to Steve as we walked back to the car. "I'm sure it's fine."
The Greenwood Inn was set back from a secondary road in a dark grove of trees. A few lamps glowed feebly. We parked in the lightless gravel lot. A group of men lurked in a particularly dark corner. I was suddenly conscious of how the loudly the remote's chirp cut through the still air.
The reception office was suffused with a powerful smell of cooking: An oily, vaguely chickenish aroma with no obvious source. Intent on a portable television under the desk, a balding clerk in a dirty suit barely acknowledged us. "Sure," he grunted. "I'll give you our best room." In a scene straight from an old movie he took a metal key with a plastic-lozenge fob off a hook behind him. Scribbling our credit-card information on a pad, he pointed to the second storey. "Watch the stairs."
Under the lurkers' watchful gaze we unloaded our luggage and dragged it up a flight of splintered steps. The door creaked open to a room lit by a single overhead fixture. Somehow the chicken-cooking smell had intensified into the space, imbuing the air with an almost tangible greasiness. The carpet, which might have been red in some earlier decade, was a fantastic landscape of cigarette-burn craters, slashed valleys and threadbare basins. The bedsheets were merely the thinnest suggestion of tissue tucked under stained pillows. The blanket appeared to have been salvaged from the dumpster behind a medium-security prison. The floor yielded in places, spongy with dry rot. I flicked the bathroom light switch and got a lightning zap but no other illumination.
It was nearly midnight. Manhattan was a hundred miles away. We stared at each other. "Let's do this thing," said Steve. "Years from now we'll laugh about it."
Neither of us closed our eyes all night. We lay fully clothed on the bed as if our jeans and sweaters would somehow protect us from bugs and microbes. We breathed the chickeny air. We listened, tense and ready to spring into action, to the gravel crunching with nightlong comings and goings. Were those footsteps on the stairs? Was that a key scraping in the lock?
At last dawn filtered through the gray windows. We grabbed our suitcases and scrambled unshowered down the stairs. Relieved to find the rental car in one piece, we sped out of the parking lot and back onto the modern familiarity of the Long Island Expressway.
On the plane home we rubbed our sleepless sandpaper eyes and scratched at imagined bugs. The other passengers kept a respectful distance. Long Island fell away from the plane window. It was lovely; miles of forests and fields and sandy shores. Not a motel to be seen.
It's years later now, and Steve was right. I do laugh at the experience. I learned that even Billy Joel can't sum up a place in song. And that spontaneity is vastly overrated.