TRAVELING in style : SPUR OF THE MOMENT

When I was in the shower in the morning, the phone was ringing too many times. As I depend on phone calls for a living, I always welcome the sound and jump for the phone. Yet whenever it seems there are too many calls, I take it as a signal that I ought to take a small walk.

When I came out of the shower, I looked out the windows. I live in a second-floor apartment on Central Park West in Manhattan, and the bedroom has three large windows, the one on my right looking out at the mid-town buildings that pierced, on this day, a cold midwinter sky, the other two windows looking straight out at the bare trees of Central Park.

When I looked to the right, the buildings suddenly caused me to hear the subway rushing underneath the street, heels clicking rapidly on pavement, the rustle and murmur of crowds, horns sounding, trucks coughing and sirens, always sirens, in the city. Usually, when I throw on clothes to go to work for my newspaper, I look out this window. Big city, get going.

But now I looked out the other two windows. As they are level with the trees across the street, you get the sensation of living in the woods.

I looked out at the trees and I called to my wife, who was in the other room, “Do you want to go someplace?”

“After the dentist?”

“Forget the dentist. Let’s go someplace right now.”

“To lunch?”

“All right.”

“Where?” she called.

I looked at the trees. “Nicaragua.”

She laughed. “Why there?”

“Because I’ve never been there.”

I took the phone off the hook and grabbed shirts out of a drawer. My idea was to be packed and out of the room in 15 minutes. The few vacations I ever had started like this. One rush of nerves, get a suitcase and walk rapidly out of the room, out of the house, out of the city and go anywhere. If I have to pause for more than a moment to worry about where and how, I sit down and don’t go. I know that all pleasure and health depends on surprises. I have been in newspapers for more than 30 years and know that it is the surprises you receive while covering the day’s news that cause the body to tingle to the point that it excludes almost everything except excitement.

I consider a vacation trip to be the same as looking for a story. Leave right now, and go someplace you don’t know much about. That way, even the airport is a surprise. Of course, I have a wife who loves to pore over maps and travel guides. Which makes us some match. In the last 20 years we have been practically nowhere. And right now, as I was packing, she was in the next room and thinking that the Nicaragua business was just foolish talk of a morning.

But this time, when she walked into the bedroom and saw that I was actually packing, there was at first the shrieks and near-tears, and suddenly, simply because it had been so long that we had been anyplace, she said she would risk all.

“Here, I’ll even plan this one carefully, just for you,” I said.

I made a phone call to my friend Kevin Cahill. He is a doctor who cared for Nora Astorga, the Nicaraguan ambassador to the United Nations, until she went home to Managua to die.

“You go to Costa Rica and then drive to Managua,” he said. “It’s the most beautiful drive I’ve ever been on. Don’t fly to Managua. It’s just another plane flight. Take the drive. It’s about five hours and you’ll love it.”

When I hung up, I said to my wife, “There! I got all the directions.” I reached into my top drawer and grabbed my passport. It was under a pile of papers. I never use the thing.

We bought tickets at the airport and flew to Miami for an evening flight to San Jose, Costa Rica. At Miami, my wife took our passports and tickets and waited in line at the counter while I went to get newspapers. When I came back she was in despair. “Your passport expired,” she said.

“So what? It has my name on it.”

“They won’t let you on the plane if she sees your passport is old.

I grabbed the passports and tickets from my wife and went up to the airline’s woman and waved the passports at her. “Here you go.” I stuffed the passports into my pocket. She gave me the boarding cards, and I walked away. We got on the plane to Costa Rica.

“We’ll just have to turn around and come back,” my wife said on the flight down. “They won’t let us in.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Your passport expired two years ago. Why didn’t you ever get a new one?”

“Because I hate passports,” I said. I do. I never have understood what they are for, other than keeping a lot of customs and immigration agents working at airports all over the world. The first passports were letters from Roman emperors carried by couriers who used them to commandeer horses when they were in distant cities.

The United States never had much use for them. We had tens of millions who came in from foreign countries with no identification papers at all and who proceeded to build a country. The passport only became important here after World War II, when after fighting for Democracy we immediately became afraid of it. As McCarthy flourished, the urge to inspect and control all Americans became irresistible. Frances Knight, in charge of passports for the State Department, saw them as the path to force every American to have an identification card.

Beyond controlling humans, a passport serves no use and is an infringement on my freedom. The only reason other countries now make so much of passports is that the United States does. Therefore, I hate passports on an international level. After lecturing this to my wife on the four-hour flight to Costa Rica, I proceeded to get off the plane and become ill the moment I saw the woman in uniform who sat at a counter as if judging a murder trial. She looked at me like I was a defendant.

“We’ll get sent right back,” my wife muttered. I handed the passport to the woman, and she pursed her lips in concentration and began to look through the passport and I stood there and tried to figure out what story I could tell. “How long have you had this job?” I asked her. She looked at me and shook her head. She couldn’t speak English. There it goes. I can’t even tell the woman a decent lie. I looked at the clock. It was after 9 p.m. There would be no way to get anybody from the U.S. Embassy. For sure we would wind up sitting in an airport all night.

The uniformed armed guard behind her looked over her shoulder. They looked at the snapshot, at me, at my name and birth date. She flipped through the pages and looked at the previous stamps. She held the passport as if to weigh it and she picked up this huge stamping machine and with a loud clacking, not unlike the sound of handcuffs going on a criminal, she stamped my book. Quickly she picked up a hand stamp and banged that onto one paper and after that another and now a third. The armed guard nodded. She handed me back the passport. The woman and the armed guard never had noticed the date on the passport. I walked on, although I must admit I was numb.

In San Jose, we stayed for a day at the Carriari, a hotel near the airport, that had about the best cup of coffee I can remember having and a huge swimming pool that was just cold enough to keep you moving. The place cost about as much as an American motel. You have to be nuts to go to some island and blow your bankroll.

We had dinner that night with Jim Dyer, who publishes the Tico Times, an English-language paper in San Jose. He has been in Central America since the times of the United Fruit company towns.

He asked me how we were going to Managua.

“Drive.”

He seemed dubious. “Why don’t you fly?”

“We’re driving in the morning,” I said.

He cocked his head skeptically.

“Is there something to be afraid of?” I asked.

“There is some violence in the area near the border, but not on the road itself, I don’t believe,” he said.

“Then what are we worrying about.”

“Just that you’re crossing borders. Airports seem a little easier.”

“I got a passport,” I said.

The next morning, my wife got behind the wheel of a rented car and we headed for the highway that runs all the way to Managua.

“Look at this,” I said. One sign read “Nicaragua” and the other said “Panama.” In America, the same green highway sign would say, “Indianapolis.”

My wife drove because I am one of the three or four males in the Northern Hemisphere who never has driven a car. I grew up in Ozone Park, in New York City, and never had $40 for a car. However, I had the A Train only a few yards away. I went to work on newspapers when I was 17. I never had enough money at one time to pay all my bar bills, so you could forget about a car. I also spent so many years in newspaper bars that it was insane to think of coming out into the early morning sun, after a full night bar-side, and driving a car. I wrote 200 of the headlines myself:”Two Dead, Three Hurt in Car Crash.” Forget it. I live in a city of subways and walking. Garage space for a car in Manhattan can cost $350 a month, which is immoral at a time when people sleep on the streets. My role in the automobile world is passenger.

So I let my wife drive, and I sat and gave orders to her to look at the parts of the countryside that I liked. The drive to the Nicaraguan border was exactly what Dr. Cahill had promised. Outside of San Jose, the land was rolling and beautiful, and as it grew flat it was still exciting because Nicaragua was that much closer. We stopped at a restaurant and had rice and beans, and the woman asked where we were going, and we said, Nicaragua, and she rocked her head from side to side, dubiously, but said nothing more.

Back on the road, my wife drove through emptiness and finally, ahead, a heavy man in fatigues stood in the center of the road with his hand out. When we stopped, I saw soldiers sitting on a bench under a shed.

The big guy smiled and looked in the car. He pointed ahead and we nodded, yes, that’s where we were going. He smiled and backed off.

We drove for some time and now the road ducked under trees and there were shacks that had been turned into offices and an old bus terminal and two guards standing in the road who held up their hands.

“Nicar-awa?” the guard asked.

“Yop” I said. I waved my bum passport. The guard took both passports and looked at them closely and stuck his head in the car and matched our faces with the passport photos. Again he flipped through all the pages. He handed them back to us. He now explained, in sign language and with a couple of English words, that the border to Nicaragua was about half a mile ahead and that there were Sandinista border guards there. I told him that would be fine. He nodded and stepped back and my wife started the car.

Right away, the other soldier jumped in front of us and began tapping the windshield.

“Rental,” he said. Now the first soldier’s mouth dropped open. “Rental!” He shook his head and waved for us to go back. Now an officer with a clipboard came running out of a house. He spoke English.

“You cannot take a rental car to Nicaragua,” he said.

“Why not? It is an American rental car company. I signed a contract. They know where to find me.”

He became vehement. “No rental cars in Nicaragua. Sometimes there is a mine on the road and the car gets blown up. The rental company in Costa Rica doesn’t get paid for the car.”

“Why not?”

“Because the people who rented the car get blown up with the car.”

“How can I get to Nicaragua then?”

The officer shrugged.

“Can I leave the car and take a bus?”

“There are no buses to Nicaragua. Our bus could get blown up, too. Our buses only go to San Jose.”

“Is there a bus on the other side from the border to Managua?”

“Yes, there is one.”

“Can I leave the car here and go to Managua by bus?”

“We do not care what you do. We must protect the rental car.”

We pulled the car over alongside a government office and got out.

I leaned against the fender and I said to my wife, “Do you remember when I came home from the shooting in Brooklyn and told you about the two dead in the street and nobody paying attention to them because the crowd was all around the car, looking at the bullet holes?”

“I thought you made it up,” she said.

“You just heard it for yourself. Central America is the same as Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn.”

Then we started to talk about Nora Astorga. She killed a general in Managua and caused the Somoza government to truly fall apart. Then she walked out of Nicaragua, over hills and through jungles, in a white dress and high heels. If she could do that, then we sure could walk a few yards into Nicaragua and get on a bus for Managua.

As we started to walk, the officer ran up and said, “Passports.”

My wife showed hers, and I handed him mine and he pursed his lips and inspected them, and handed them back, and we walked on the bumpy road under the trees and between empty fields, and now ahead there were soldiers with automatic weapons and of course they were on the alert for Contras or American troops, but they relaxed when they saw my wife. Right away, one of them said, “Passports,” and once more nobody noticed that mine was invalid. We walked over the border and asked a soldier if there was a bus for Managua.

“Thursday,” he said.

It was now Tuesday. With a sigh, we turned around and started back to Costa Rica. First we showed our passports to the same Sandinista guard who had just looked at them. Back at the Costa Rican crossing point the officer who had checked us out called for our passports. This time he took the passports and walked into a house. He returned and proudly showed us that he had stamped them to show that we had returned to his country.

We got into the car, and my wife started on the four-hour drive back to San Jose. We stopped again at the restaurant by the road, and the woman looked at us, and we told her that we had not been allowed into Nicaragua.

“The boom” she said, meaning gunfire.

“No, they wouldn’t let us go with the car. It’s a rental.”

“Why didn’t you say that to me? I would not have let you leave here. You cannot take a rental car over the border. People can go. But not rental cars.”

We ate and drove back to the hotel outside of San Jose. The next morning we got up and took a plane to Managua and we were in Managua within an hour, I guess. We were there for a few days, and there was excitement and sadness and so much to see. But then when we got back to New York, all we did was tell people about the eight-hour drive to nowhere, on the day we learned that in Central America, just as in Brooklyn, a car truly is more important than a person. Still, today, our ride to nowhere was the best vacation we ever had.