Once, while hanging around a beach outside of Sydney, Australia, I sat under a tree, wrote in my travel journal and wondered briefly what it would be like to never return home. I loved the ocean, and here was a vibrant, energetic and creative city, hugged by the biggest and bluest ocean in the world, and although I had nothing but a couple of backpacks and the possibility of working “under the table” as a desk clerk at the youth hostel where I had been staying, it seemed a tantalizing chance to continue a weird and wonderful adventure I’d embarked upon four months before.
At that moment a sprightly old man of about seventy or so appeared over the sand dune. He walked over to where I sat, greeted me with a kind and hearty Hello and began to chat. It was far from the first time on the trip that total strangers would interrupt their daily life to meet with me, and it had long since stopped surprising and perplexing me. I gathered that there’s just something irresistible about a young, obviously solo female traveler, especially one who so clearly was far from home.
We spoke for awhile about the quiet, remote beach on which we stood, the Aboriginal carvings in the stone that lined the shore and how much we loved the water. After a while he told me that he had actually just come from a nude beach; he gestured vaguely in the direction from which he had come and said casually that he especially enjoyed the freedom and camaraderie of being among like-minded (and like-bodied, I presumed) souls. Being the ever-polite woman that I am, I gave a noncommittal nod. Nude beaches only interested in me in the abstract; they neither offended nor fascinated me in particular. So people hang out with their goods, uhm, hanging out in public places. Big deal. I go to the beach for the water, not for the view, and frankly I found a bathing suit — even a one-piece number — to afford just the right amount of freedom that I needed, thankyouverymuch. But hey, if you like that sort of thing, the whole nude beach scene, more power to you.
The man sized me up and offered to take me to his favorite nude beach, this time in Sydney. He said that Sunday mornings were the best times to go, as that would be when the city’s entire nudist population liked to come out in full force. I shrugged and said something inane like, “Uhm, maybe, but I’ll have to check my calendar.” As if backpackers with dwindling bank accounts have such whirlwind social engagements.
He then offered me a ride back to the city. It was late in the afternoon, and the beach — which had been only sparsely populated just an hour or so ago — was now completely empty, save for myself and Mr. Nude Beach. In spite of myself and all those wise warnings from parents and teachers and Inside Edition reports, I agreed. We had a quick coffee at a cafe near the station — where I thought briefly to myself that I could have easily extracted myself from the situation, politely declined his offer of a ride and hopped on the next train back to Circular Quay and the Opera House, an hour away, but noooooo – and then piled into his little Toyota sedan car for the long ride back to town.
I don’t remember much about the ride. He talked most of the time, but I only half-listened. The other half of me was staring out the window at the mesmerizing ocean that spread out just a few hundred yards from the highway. It stretched far into the horizon, where it disappeared into the sky, and all I could think of was, My God, well done, well done. The blue heaven of my dreams.
Of course, a tiny, tiny part of my mind was also screaming into my ear: “What the f*** are you doing hitching a ride from an old geezer you met near a freakin’ nude beach??? Are you out of your f***ing mind?” Clearly, I was not thinking properly.
That tiny part of me grew and grew, as the sky grew darker and the ocean receded into the shadows. When I saw the sparkling lights of the city appear from around a corner, I breathed an audible sigh of relief, but he didn’t notice. He just kept yakking about how wonderful the nude beach was, how light and airy one feels, unburdened with the social pressures of dress and appearances, and I felt the hot chocolate I had consumed in the coffee shop burn in my stomach out of sheer nervousness.
I gave him directions to drop me off at the nearest train station within the city limits, not wanting to give him the address of my youth hostel, a large, well-maintained and fortunately relatively secure building in the red light district of King’s Cross. (I know, I know, but during the daytime it’s quite a friendly and comforting place, if you can believe that.) He did wrangle the phone number of the hostel out of me — which he could have easily used to find out the name and location of the hostel itself — but at that point I was so relieved to finally be out of his car and into the relative safety of a bustling Sydney train station that I didn’t care. I ran into the nearest waiting open car headed to King’s Cross and collapsed into an empty seat. What a day.
He did call that Sunday morning and left a message inquiring about when and where he could pick me up. Feeling guilty but oddly relieved at the same time, I ignored the message and tore up the paper with his number on it. Although I suspected that nothing untoward would have happened to me — after all, if nothing happened to me on that long evening ride back to the city on Saturday night, most likely nothing would happen to me on a public beach on a bright autumn Sunday morning — I thought it would be best if I didn’t press my luck. I never heard from him again, and I finished up the remaining two weeks I had left in Australia enjoying the beaches and neighborhoods around the city with my hostel friends, unmolested and carefree.
Ah, youth. So exciting, so adventurous, so….stupid.
I committed more than a few odd and reckless mistakes on that long trip several years ago, and they all came tumbling back into memory as I read through Nancy Mehagian‘s memoir, Siren’s Feast, An Edible Odyssey
If you lived through the Sixties and still remember it, the excesses of this book might shock, if not entirely frighten you. If you lived through the Sixties and don’t remember it, well, this might jog a bit of your memory and release a bit of nostalgia into your brain. Mehagian is that rare creature who is proud to admit not only that she lived and survived the Sixties, but that she remembers it all in crystal-clear detail. Nothing in her colorful life escaped her mind’s sharp eye — not the colors, smells and sounds of a Moroccan bazaar, not the horrors of the year-and-a-half she spent at Holloway prison in London, and not even the dizzying, otherworldly sensations she experienced as a very willing participant in the active drug scene in Europe and Asia at the time.
As I read through this book, the feelings it aroused in me ricocheted from fascination to disgust to disbelief to horror to something that I can only describe as “Girl, you are soooo going to pay for this down the road.” I’m still young enough to remember what it was like to be twenty, aching to be free from the strict parental controls of the home, in emotional agony while I watched my younger brother get away with coming home at all hours while I endured ten o’clock curfews and inquisitions about my whereabouts (Mom, if you’re reading this, I’ll forgive you if you’ll forgive me). Perhaps most children of immigrant parents (especially if they’re like me, who immigrated with the parents at a young age) face the same dilemma, particularly if they come from traditional cultures: girls must face far, far more restrictions on their movements, even as adults, than the boys ever do. And I — and Nancy — was no exception.
Like Nancy, I rebelled and literally set off on my own around the world, first in Japan and later to farther, more diverse and “exotic” places. Mehagian, however, did so at a time when the Lonely Planet guidebooks had yet to be written and published; when the “hippie trail” really did mostly consist of young men and women dropping out of society in search of cheap drugs and ecstatic experiences; and when vegetarianism was considered almost a cult practice. Today, of course, you can find folks from all walks of life on the dusty back roads of India, from vacationing IT professionals in high-tech gear to soccer moms in REI duds finally free from their children’s relentless schedules to middle-class kids like I was in 2001.
Mehagian’s adventures included running the first vegetarian restaurant in Ibiza; working briefly as a dancer and hostess at a seedy Syrian bar; hiking the pilgrimage trail to the holy cave of Amarnath in India; falling under the influence of a shady character in Tangier; and having sex. Lots and lots and lots of sex.
She doesn’t hold back when she describes her more intimate adventures, and it’s often when she does write about her sexual encounters that her prose falters. Mehagian is not a breezy writer but a thoughtful, careful one, and although it’s not clear whether or not she kept a journal throughout her travels, she is meticulous in describing even the tiniest details of her life, particularly if they involved food (and they often did). That can be very tiresome in the hands of a mundane novice, but Mehagian avoids that and instead offers stories that seem to have happened only yesterday rather than forty years ago. Her eye for detail is extremely keen, and for that I’m grateful, for she provides the reader with a very close look into corners of the world that will likely forever remain shut from our Westernized life.
Sadly, the paragraphs that gloss over her many affairs disappoint, mostly because they tend to throw up too many romantic cliches, the kind you find in dimestore romance novels that describe orgasms as cosmic miracles. I’m the first person to admit that great orgasms can be mind-shattering events, but only the truly gifted writers can manage to evoke their awesome power and magic without sinking it in a mire of trite prose. Mehagian is a wonderful writer, with a capacity to bring people and places to life and have them leap off the page in waves of intense prose, but even I have to say that the coy, purple paragraphs surrounding the afterglow of love physically manifested got very old very quickly.
If I hadn’t had my own brush with youthful rebellion and its attendant mistakes — many of which are cringe-worthy to this day — I would likely have dismissed Mehagian’s book as a tiresome collection of stories by yet another self-indulgent, disaffected and privileged suburban teen who couldn’t wait to punish her parents for being responsible and industrious. But since I can relate to her youthful angst and remember well what it’s like to have to search for one’s identity and place in the world at a later age when most, I embrace her book as the coming-of-age saga that she means it to be, laced with healthy servings of cayenne and plenty of optimism and heart. Like I, you might find yourself sometimes silently yelling at the young Nancy and her frustrating naivete in the face of continued mistakes and terrifying dangers, but you can’t help but cheer her on as she plows through every heartbreaking setback with a lot of determination and more than a little grace. She is candid in her depiction of herself as a far too impressionable girl with a hypersexualized, overly romanticized view of the world, but refuses to apologize for who she is and what she wants out of life. When she finally finds the home and purpose in life she’s seeking, it’s a well-earned happy ending. Or at the very least — since Mehagian is alive and well and continues to run a successful massage therapy and natural healing consultancy in California — a happy ending to a tumultuous but ultimately satisfying part of her life. I’m grateful that she chose to share much of that wonderful life with us.
By the way, if you’re at all interested in the history of the Armenian diaspora following the Turkish massacre of Armenians during and immediately after World War I, Mehagian offers a compelling and personal account of her own family’s role in those tragic events. Justifiably proud of her heritage, she weaves her family’s extraordinary history into her own personal search for meaning, culminating in some beautiful insights at the close of the book that serve as a testament to her people’s resilience and fortitude in the face of such horror and unspeakable inhumanity. If you know nothing about Armenians and their legacy to the world, this accessible story is a good place to begin understanding them and their past, present and future.
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