A beautiful day, finally, with so much sunlight filling the blue sky that I thought I was in Bermuda, looking out over Harrington Sound instead of Queens. On all my trips to Bermuda, I’ve never spent much time looking out over Harrington Sound, but this morning I was staring so hard at photographs of the view from a terrace that I burned through to some sense memory of actually being in the vicinity. I was trying to figure out the location of a rather imposing pile, dating from 1929 and unimaginatively called the “Manor House.” 

It began with a real estate ad in today’s online edition of the Times. The Bermuda pink of the — for Bermuda — palatial façade must have caught my eye. I could not resist the slideshow of the two-bedroom unit that has been carved out of, or perhaps created alongside, the old mansion. It wasn’t terribly interesting in itself, except as an example of grandeur cut down to modern size. But the view of a strange old tower, connected to a boathouse apparently, ignited the sort of curiosity that inevitably leads me to Google Maps. I had to know where the place was. 

Make no mistake: Kathleen and I are not in the market for a $1.3 million pied-à-terre in Bermuda. (I will omit discussion of the fact that this property can indeed be owned by foreigners rich enough to meet Bermuda’s steep net-worth requirements.) My interest in locating the Manor House was absolutely and purely idle. But it was not the less obsessive for that. I have to know where everything is nowadays. Give me an address, and I fly off on my browser’s satellite for an overhead view. It’s a bit more intrusive than a drive-by, because I can peer into backyards (and back forties), but I feel not the slightest compunction about being surprised to discover that certain affluent relations live very close to a major airport. Or happy to know that a friend’s mother will be only a block from the subway when she moves next month — which I can tell even though I’ve never been to that part of town. When there’s nothing new to snoop into, I revisit the homes of my youth, two of which have been rather unbecomingly “improved” since my day. (I’d have torn them down.) 

Harrington Sound, rather witlessly described in the Times ad, as “a scenic inland lake,” is simply a body of seawater that is almost but not entirely surrounded by the bits and pieces of volcano-top that constitute the Bermuda Islands. (Perhaps more precisely, it is a slightly submerged bit of volcano- top; but it is full of seawater and in no sense a “lake.” The reference to “inland” would be ludicrous if it weren’t necessary to make it clear that ocean beaches are not part of the deal.) With one exception, I’ve only seen the Sound from the back seat of a taxi, on interminable rides between Hamilton and St George’s. Bermuda is about as long as Manhattan, but getting from one end to the other involves roads barely wider than driveways, traveling through an extended version of Central Park’s Ramble. Harrington Sound always seems to take forever to drive around. You might see a sailboat, but usually not. It is quiet, but without being interesting or inviting. What was this Manor House place doing on Harrington Sound? And where the hell was it? 

I perused what I considered to be the likely shores, to the north and the east. There are some pretty big “properties” in those parts, but nothing correlating to the images in the slide show presented itself. In this way, an hour passed. Over and over, I coursed from Castle Harbor to Pink Beach, ignoring the Mid-Ocean Club and trying to recall the year in which the black denizens of Tucker’s Town were evacuated to make room for a golf course, surrounded by homes of the rich one of which is owned by our own Mayor Bloomberg. Nothing.

As you can see from the slides, the front of the Manor House is very unusual (for Bermuda), with its peristyle entry to an interior courtyard. I tried to guess the orientation of the building from the shadows, but all I could really tell was that the house didn’t face north. Finally, I cheated. I looked for and found other real estate listings. One of these placed the Manor in Smith’s, the parish that includes Pink Beach (which Kathleen and I visited twice, long ago) and the south shore of Harrington Sound. Further investigation revealed that the Manor is “steps away” from the Bermuda Aquarium and from a restaurant called Rustico’s, both of which are in a village the name of which no one ever mentions, perhaps because, according to the maps, it’s “Flatt’s.” 

The first time that Kathleen and I visited Pink Beach, the atmosphere of luxe was neither calm nor voluptuous enough to soften my conviction that my beard was seriously unkempt. I needed a trim! Kathleen discovered that there was a barber shop in nearby Flatt’s, and, Flatt’s’ being nearby, I suggested that we walk from the hotel. This turned out to be a memorable mistake, one that still takes up a full page in our virtual album of holiday horrors. When I called Bermuda’s roads driveways just now, I hope you didn’t think that they’re fitted with correspondingly reduced sidewalks. There are no sidewalks (not outside of Hamilton, anyway). So you are walking in a narrow lane with the traffic. You are walking in the lane because the edge of the lane is shielded by the low-lying canopy of riotous wildnerness growth that serves Bermudians as free natural fences. And because you cannot walk in the low-hanging shade, you walk in the hot sun. Every once in a while, you get a glimpse of Harrington Sound. By the time you get to your destination, after a walk that ought to have taken fifteen minutes for sheer mileage, instead of forty, you are no longer speaking to your traveling companion. She, at any rate, is not speaking to you. 

So it’s not without reason that I have no recollection of walking under the quaint footbridge that, just east of Flatt’s — not that I had any idea of being near to the end of our ordeal — connects the Manor House to the picturesque boathouse. You can see the bridge from the satellite as well as from the slideshow, and it is mentioned in a description of the Manor House that appears on the “See Smith’s” page of Bermuda-online.org. According to the Web page, the Manor House used to be called “Deepdene,” and — what a small world it is!— it turns out to have been built for “an American millionaire, Charles Ledyard Blair and his first wife who was related to the Bermudian Butterfield family. Blair was from Blairstown (New Jersey) and imported non-Bermudian architecture.” I’ll say! But let’s stop at Blairstown, which is (as regular readers know) where I went to prep school, at an institution of the same name as the builder of Deepdene. 

Finding the Manor House, I was released by a quick burst into carefree possession of the useless information that I had sought all morning. That ought to have been the end of it, but I been out in the virtual sun too long, and now the real one took me back to Bermuda as well. It has left me feeling as though I were there yesterday. I can feel the heat and smell the air and hear the lilting accents. That I would no longer ask for a Tanqueraymartiniupwithanoliveandnottoodryplease makes it even easier to be satisfied with the imaginary trip. 

I am of course not much of a traveler. I was explaining this to Tito, the Peruvian barber who keeps my beard trim, only yesterday. He asked if I had ever been to South America or if I had plans to go, and I said that, no, I didn’t travel much, and when I did, I preferred to go to Europe (although when that’s going to happen next is beyond guessing). I added that for an eighteen-month stretch, beginning in 2008, I did not leave Manhattan Island. That made him laugh. When he goes home to Lima, he told me, his friends ask him what New York is like, and he has a terrible time explaining the boroughs. Queens, for example — what is that? Tito shrugged. “New York,” he tells them, “is just Manhattan Island.” But to them, an island is something that sits in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and is topped by a few palm trees and grass huts. They can’t imagine that the dense forest of skyscrapers that they’ve seen in the movies actually sits on an island. 

I forgot to tell him to direct his friends to Google Maps.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 21st, 2011 at 6:00 pm.