Death in Taormina

I want to tell you the true story of how I almost ended up as another dead body floating at The White Lotus beach resort in Sicily.

Okay, The White Lotus is a fictional hotel in a TV show. But the rest of my story is true. Watching the TV show has brought it all back so vividly.

Along with most of my friends, I've been obsessing over season 2 of HBO's The White Lotus. We've been discussing it at length in our group text chat as we await the season finale. Which character will the dead body shown at the start of the first episode turn out to be? What will happen to poor Jen Coolidge, every gay man's favorite dumb blonde archetype? And how did I not know who Aubrey Plaza was before this? 

Having been to Sicily, where this season of the show is set, gives me an edge over other viewers. The White Lotus resort may be only a fiction, but I recognize the filming locations quite well.

Which, as an aside, gives me the only beef I really have with the show. The hotel scenes are filmed in Taormina, but the beach scenes are filmed in Cefalù. If you know Sicily, you know why this is preposterous. Taormina and Cefalù are almost three hours apart by car, over winding mountain roads. The show's creators have taken excessive liberties with Sicilian geography and scenery for the sake of creating an idealized, fictional resort. Whatever. I expect this sort of thing from American TV. (But if I were Sicilian, I might be highly offended.) 

I say all that because it's significant for my story to know those two place names. Because this is a story about me, and Taormina, and Cefalù. This is the story of my Sicilian trauma.

I fell in love with the scenic beauty of Taormina in the 1988 Jean-Luc Besson film "The Big Blue." When I saw that film more than three decades ago, I had never traveled more than a few hundred miles from the Oklahoma town where I grew up. But I swore a solemn vow to myself that one day I would visit Taormina in the flesh and experience this breathtakingly gorgeous destination for myself. I had largely forgotten about my vow until a few years ago when my ex-husband Adrian suggested we go on vacation to Europe, and he let me choose our destinations. At long last, my dreams of Taormina were to be fulfilled.

It was the trip of a lifetime: romantic and adventurous and expensive as hell. After visiting Paris, Rome, and Tuscany, we landed in Catania on the island of Sicily and rented a car to drive to our hotel in Taormina. At the rental counter, the agent suggested that we might enjoy our drives in Sicily better with a convertible, and we enthusiastically agreed. But the only convertible available was a Volkswagen Beetle with a manual transmission. Confident that my stick-shift driving skills from my college days would come back like riding a bicycle, I again agreed. 

I began to regret this decision as we tried to exit the car rental parking lot, and I could not manage to put the car in reverse. Adrian lost his patience and we began to yell at each other, until another tourist got out of his car and took pity on us and showed me what to do.

Little did I know that the real horrors and humiliations of driving in Sicily were yet to come. My actual trauma — I mean real, bone-chilling terror that still lives in my nervous system today as low-grade PTSD — began in earnest when we got to Taormina, which is a diabolical maze of narrow, vertically inclined mountain roads winding up and down the rock faces of cliff sides dropping hundreds of feet to the ocean. 

We were there in the summertime, and to get to our hotel we had to drive through Taormina itself, a picturesque Italian village that's difficult to see through the clouds of tourists choking the streets in buses, in cars, and on foot, as thick as mosquitoes in the Florida Everglades.

In the center of Taormina, surrounded by charming sidewalk cafes and high-end clothing boutiques, we found ourselves behind one of those large tourist buses, inching our way up a steep hill, with other cars directly behind us. The convertible's top was down and our suitcases were in the back seat. One of Adrian's suitcases, purchased in Paris when his old suitcase literally fell apart while being repacked, was brightly festooned on every side with comic book superheroes: Superman, Batman, the Incredible Hulk, and so on.

On the hilly street in the town center, I struggled furiously with the gas pedal and clutch and brake, stricken with terror at the thought of rolling backwards downhill and hitting the cars behind us, or giving the car too much acceleration and hitting the bus in front of us. We lurched our way forward up the hill in small, violent bursts that made the car's tires spin and the brakes screech each time we started and stopped. Adrian began giving me helpful driving instructions again from the passenger seat, and in return I offered him kindly suggestions on how to sit in the passenger seat and be quiet. 

The Volkswagen's engine revved loudly each time we shot forward and then died each time we stopped. After a few minutes of this, the engine began to emit smoke, and the air was laced with the smell of burning metal. Throngs of tourists milling nearby stopped and took in the spectacle of two gay Americans in a convertible Beetle with a child's superhero suitcase in the back seat, yelling at each other and lurching forward and backward in barely controlled movements.

We made it safely through the town center without striking any other vehicles or pedestrians, and again I thought the worst was finally over. Then we got to our hotel, which was a more budget-conscious version of The White Lotus perched high on the cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean. I made a hairpin turn from the road into the long, steep driveway going several hundred yards up to the hotel, which felt like it ascended at a 45-degree angle from the road below. 

I slammed my foot down on the gas pedal to make sure we made it all the way up the hill to the front door, where we pulled our suitcases out of the back seat and checked in at reception. That's where I was informed that the parking situation for guests was to simply parallel park between other cars, anywhere along the driveway. The driveway we had just driven up. 

I cannot now describe parking the car there, because I have suppressed the memory. I know I did it, because Adrian didn't do it, and somebody did, but I couldn't tell you, for example, if the sun was overhead or if it was nighttime. The one detail I do recall with total clarity is that we looked at each other afterwards and made a pact that we would leave the car parked there for the rest of our stay, and would take taxis if we decided to show our faces in the town center again.

We relaxed once we made it to our room, which had a balcony overlooking the sea from high up on the cliffs. This is why people come to Taormina. To say that the scenery of Taormina is spectacular is akin to saying that Rome perhaps has a few antiquities worth looking at. In a 1979 travel review for The New York Times, Robert Packard wrote:

"If on a fine day the unsuspecting visitor [to Taormina] strolls to the parapet to look at the view, cardiac arrest may be the reward. There, hundreds of feet below, is the Mediterranean coastline studded with white crescent beaches between rocky promontories. To the left is a monumental Greek theater, refurbished by the Romans. To the right, high on a snowcapped peak, a thin trail of smoke pours from the volcanic mouth of Mount Etna. As a view, it is preposterous, an exercise in scenic overkill, and clearly its excesses are humanly irresistible."

Our hotel did not have beach access per se, but the next morning after breakfast we found our way hundreds of feet down an intricate series of sometimes hidden staircases and steep foot paths to a jagged, rocky coastline. Like kids on a playground slide, we climbed atop huge boulders just off shore and jumped from them into the frigid Ionian Sea, again and again. It was great fun and highly Instagrammable content.

But while climbing over some other smaller boulders in the shallows, my foot found a slippery spot under the water's surface, and I face-planted, with the force of all my body weight, into a half-submerged volcanic rock about 50 times larger than my head. My nose took most of the impact, and I was momentarily stunned by blunt force trauma. In a daze and gasping for breath, I struggled to find a solid hold on the rock with my hands so I could stand up again. Adrian was somewhere up ahead of me, finding his own way across the rocks, and did not witness or hear my fall. With only a slightly harder impact, I might have slumped over into the two or three feet of water, unconscious, and drowned within a few seconds. I understood in my bones that I could have died in an instant, and I pictured the whole scene in my head: the lifeless body of an American tourist, floating face-down in the Mediterranean, just like the one in the opening scene of The White Lotus season 2. Fear and adrenaline and stress hormones raced through my veins.

The adrenaline probably kept me conscious, and as my shock gave way to panic, I began to suspect I had broken my nose, and my mind raced ahead to imagine all the ways a broken nose would spoil the rest of our vacation. I found my breath and began to scream to Adrian to turn around and come back. When he got back to me he looked slightly annoyed. He surveyed the damage to my face, concluded that my nose was not broken and that the various cuts and scrapes from the volcanic rock would not leave lasting scars. He helped me find my way back through the rocks to the shoreline, where I sat on the sand and hugged my knees, my body shaking, my face aching and stinging. I didn't move for the next 15 minutes, as the fresh, visceral trauma of a true near-death experience in Taormina worked its way through my nervous system, settling in on top of previous layers of trauma from driving in Sicily. At the same time, I had to psychologically prepare myself to reckon with the climb back up the cliffside staircases and paths to our hotel, which loomed, hidden, at cruising altitude somewhere above us.

The following day we got wanderlust and decided to break our pact about leaving the car parked, and to visit some other part of Sicily on a day trip. We surveyed the options. The nearby volcano Mount Etna was interesting but would involve a lot of walking and hiking. The city of Palermo called to us but seemed altogether too much to bite off in a day trip. We settled on Cefalù, a seaside town halfway between Taormina and Palermo. 

The morning drive to Cefalù fully redeemed our decision to rent the convertible. I felt exquisitely chic with the top down, winding through mountainous roads and cutting through manmade tunnels in the larger mountains. I'd gotten comfortable enough again driving a stick shift that we had no more traumatic moments in the car. We laughed and played music on the stereo with the wind in our hair and filmed more enviable Instagram content.

Cefalù is dominated by single, massive mountain with a sheer vertical rock face that the Greeks who settled this place in the 4th century BCE called "head." The mountain overlooks a large village of medieval buildings, with a massive 12th-century cathedral rising high above them all. It calls to mind, more than anything, an ancient city in Game of Thrones — specifically King's Landing — except for the striped umbrellas dotting the single small beach that sits in the very middle of town. This beach is, of course, the one shown in The White Lotus, complete with Cefalù's medieval townscape and cathedral in the background, and viewers are asked to believe that the beach sits at the foot of the hotel shown in Taormina. Perhaps now you understand my outrage.

We visited the cathedral, explored the ancient streets, had lunch in town, and then took a boat out for a snorkeling trip. Unlike Taormina, the water in Cefalù was warm and inviting. There wasn't much to see under the surface, but we blissfully jumped from the boat into the Mediterranean, again and again. My memories of that day are all happy ones. Even lunch was great. No trauma in Cefalù. As the late afternoon sun began to wane and we prepared for the drive back to our hotel, I confessed to Adrian that I wished we didn't have to return to Taormina, and he agreed. It was a bitter prospect. 

After three decades of ardent longing to experience the "exercise in scenic overkill" that is Taormina, my dream destination was a series of public humiliations and near-death experiences. 

Some day, I'd love to go back to Sicily and see more of the island, but I would never set foot in Taormina again. Not even to stay at The White Lotus.

The Living

Tragedy struck in 1922, shortly after my grandfather's family had migrated by wagon train from Texas to Oklahoma. The seven family members who died that one horrific month, exactly a century ago, are buried together in a small cemetery in a rural town near where my mother grew up.

As many as 10 family members came down with typhoid fever, including my grandfather who was just a boy at the time. The survivors recalled desperately "turning from one sick bed to another" as they tried to comfort and care for those who were ill.

The person who looms largest in my mind here is my great-grandmother, Mary. The seven people who died that month were all her children and grandchildren. 

My great-grandmother Mary, in the white dress, circa 1912.
My grandfather was not yet born when this photo was taken.

I try to imagine myself in her shoes. I try to fathom the cataclysmic loss she suffered in such a short period of time. The sheer scale of it makes the mind reel.

I wonder how she survived. I don't mean surviving typhoid — I mean how did she go on living after such a personal apocalypse? How did she not die of grief? How did she not lose her mind? 

I asked my aunt Nova, the family historian, how she thought her grandmother managed to go on. 

"She didn't have any choice," Nova replied. "She had all those other kids and grandkids to look after."

"I can't go on. I'll go on," the existentialist Samuel Beckett wrote in his novel The Unnamable. So that's it. You go on because it's choiceless. Death will have its way with you, but so will life. You rise from the ashes, pick up the nearest spoon, and use it to put food in the mouth of the next hungry child, sister, husband, friend.

I exist today because typhoid failed to kill my grandfather, and because of my great-grandmother's resilience. A full century later, hundreds of people in my extended family exist for the same reasons. Babies are still being born today on this family tree. We are the living, and the ones who are yet to live.

For the rest of her days, Mary never went back to the cemetery where her seven children and grandchildren were buried. I don't fault her for that. She didn't want to forget about the loved ones she had lost. But I suspect that the wounds in her soul were so deep — unfathomable even for her — that to risk reopening them would have been too much to bear. Others around her, including my grandfather, needed her to go on, and that was the only way she could.

Remembering Our Place in Nature

At the end of my block there's an avocado tree growing in front of a 40-unit apartment building. Nobody seems to pay any attention to it, and right now it's heavy with fruit. Avocados are literally falling on the ground. Those babies are $4 or $5 each in the store. I brought these three home and will probably go back for more tomorrow. My friends in New York City laughed and shook their heads when I shared this news with them. I'm still trying to figure out the joke.

Those of us who live urban and suburban lives are largely (sometimes entirely) disconnected from the land and from the sources of our food. So it gives me a certain thrill to find a legitimate (and free) food source growing just a few steps from where I live in Miami Beach. I also found a banana tree in my neighborhood this year, full of fruit, but then someone cut it down. 

It makes me think of how my parents and grandparents lived. My mother grew up in rural Oklahoma. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, she would walk home from school along a dirt road, and pick an onion out of the ground as an after-school snack. An onion! 

My grandfather, at that time, was a sharecropper. Our family lived on someone else's farm and helped cultivate the land and the crops, and received compensation in the form of food they themselves had harvested. The stories passed down in my family about that time instilled in me, from a young age, an appreciation of what it meant to live off the land.

And it reminds me of places I've visited where people, even today, live closer to the land, closer to their food. Rural places, mostly, in Tuscany and Colombia and Canada and upstate New York. Places where it doesn't seem odd, at all, to walk outside and pick avocados or bananas or mangos or olives or apples from a nearby tree growing wild (or sort of wild). 

However small and insignificant it may be in the larger scheme, this gesture — picking these avocados and bringing them home and washing them and setting them aside and waiting to see how long it will take for them to ripen — is a gesture of reclaiming my relationship to nature. 

At some point this week or next (or the one after that) I will squeeze one of these avocados and know that it is ready. I'll enjoy it with a meal or by itself, and be satisfied knowing that at least this one thing in my diet didn't get trucked across the United States or shipped across the Gulf of Mexico, and I didn't pay $5 for a single piece of fruit at Whole Foods. And with this single piece of fruit, I'll be momentarily opting out of supporting the violent cartels that now control the $2.8 billion avocado industry in Mexico.

And it is also a gesture of remembrance, of how people survived before food became so industrialized, remembrance of a time and place when bringing home sustenance from a tree on your block didn't seem like something funny or anachronistic. It was just life. 

For tens of thousands of years, this was just life. When nature offered bounty you took advantage of it, with gratitude, with delight, and with full awareness that it's only temporary. The avocados, the bananas, the trees themselves, and even you. All of nature moves in cycles, and nothing lasts as long as you think it will. There will be dry seasons and fires and hurricanes, or the bees will fail to pollinate the avocado tree one year, or someone will come and chop down the banana tree. And one day the reaper will come and chop you down too. 

All of nature's bounty — which even includes us, no matter how far removed we've become from nature and from knowledge of our place in it — is temporary. Enjoy it while it's there, in whatever form you can.