Melanie McGrath - Motel Nirvana

A heav’n on earth …’

JOHN MILTON

The road north up through Tucson towards Oracle is known as the Magic Mile, although quite why it’s difficult to say. The kind of stores and services littered along it suggest a highway favoured only by truck drivers en route to somewhere else. Just where the mile begins there is a series of blacked-out bars with billboards made up of women’s torsos, announcing ‘24-hour show girls’. From the slow lane on the Interstate all you can see of the Magic Mile is a row of gargantuan cardboard legs in spike heels and garter belts the colour of cotton candy.

It’s a busy road, though, not because it runs up to Oracle, which is a sclerotic little nowhere of a place, but because a few miles beyond that town lies an oracle of another kind, as much of a draw to apostates and New Age types as Lourdes is to Catholics.

What drew me to this oracle was a set of circumstances sufficiently strange to warrant explanation. It began quite by accident in western Belize some years ago, in a ramshackle town called San Ignacio, near the border with Guatemala. I had become entangled in a brief and unhappy love affair from which I made a cowardly escape very early one morning by stealing away and boarding a bus heading to Dangriga, a swamp town on the Caribbean coast. There I found a boarding house and resolved to lie low. Creosote tar sweated from the stilted shacks gathered around the little harbour and the air was so sullen that it was difficult not to be lowered by it. At night liverish land crabs scuttled from their holes and took over the streets, like an army of dismembered hands. Every structure in Dangriga not actually made from mud was covered in it. A few lugubrious rastafarians hung about what passed for the centre of the town, which was separated from the swamp all around by a blue fug of burning weed. Dangriga’s only source of income, so far as I could make out, came from bussing snapper, lobster and the occasional barracuda to the inland capital. The men who could afford a dugout or a one-man, flat-keeled dory would put out at night and bring in their catch early the next morning. Those who had no boats became assistants to the others, or rastafarians – or both. The women would pass their mornings gutting and drying whatever fish were surplus to the day’s requirements on long lines of twine, hung over the doorways of the shacks and serving, incidentally, as mosquito nets. By two in the afternoon, everyone was asleep. There would be no-one left to talk to, nothing much to do but roll up a reefer, tune the radio to the station that played ska and marimba and settle down to watch the pale brown sea. I spent many days of distant, peaceless reverie like this.

Absolutely nothing that was not already on show had ever happened in Dangriga. No wars, no revolutions, no great passions of any sort. Dangriga’s history was without secrets.

According to my map a huge uninhabited atoll group called Turneffe lay directly out to sea from Dangriga. I would often sit wall-eyed in front of that brown bay and imagine Turneffe in the distance as a lush, mudless Eden. Without the listless daydream of Turneffe I like to think that I should have gone mad in Dangriga. I should not have done so, but I like to think it all the same.

About four years later I met the man who owned Turneffe, or at least, a little part of it. At least, he managed a little part of it for someone else. His name was Ray Lightburn, and he had some environmental project going, he said. Ray was what is commonly known as a charismatic – huge, commanding, almost insanely driven. He’d been a prominent trade unionist in Britain in the sixties, and he possessed a store-cupboard of anecdotes about political heavyweights he had known and met. Whether they were true or not didn’t seem to matter. Like many charismatics, who are after all expected to be emblematic rather than real, Ray was his own parody. Obviously, he liked it that way. In any case, back in Belize he’d made his political ambitions evident by sinking himself into the environmental movement and conspicuously raising the cash from a Texan oil billionaire with ecological leanings to buy up part of Blackbird Caye in the Turneffe cluster. Blackbird Caye was to all intents and purposes uninhabited at that time; a hippy with too much leisure on his hands had set up a little diving school on one side of the island, but it was Ray who got the money together to transform the Caye into what he envisioned would be an eco-tourists’ paradise. As he saw it, the islands’ future rested in tourism of one sort or another, and the only means to prevent them from becoming sites for honeymoon hotels and Clubs Méditerranées was to preselect the market. Ray was a prophet of the inevitable. The idea that the islands might be purchased to be left pristine evidently had not occurred to him, or if it had, he had dismissed it out of hand. Ray had a name to make. The Texan billionaire, Ed Bass, was perhaps his means to this end.

There was a large dolphin population down at Turneffe, which (until Ray stepped in) had enjoyed almost no contact with human beings. Ray’s idea was to hire a scientist who would take out crews of paying guests on ‘scientific’ expeditions to mark and tag these creatures. Ray didn’t really seem to know the details. ‘What species of dolphin?’ I asked. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I leave those things to the scientists. This is a great project. I believe in it.’

The scientist, a singular marine biology student, had accepted the post of tour guide cum researcher in order to complete her Ph.D. In exchange for accommodation and the use of a research boat the student would drag along on her expeditions a pack of dew-eyed puppies who had endowed the neighbouring dolphins with a range of miraculous capabilities, from an ability to heal inner children to the composition of sonic messages that would seek out and shrink malignant tumours. The eco-tourists would put out to sea each day, heady with expectation, and return in the afternoon in a state of mystic transcendence or savage disappointment, depending on whether or not there had been a sighting. The student’s job was single-handedly to control the mob in whichever mood, a task she went about with benign and systematic brutality.

Moored a little way off the coast of Blackbird Caye near to the eco-tourist compound was a reproduction Chinese junk, the Hercules. According to Ray, the junk was the scientific outpost of a project called Biosphere 2, a futuristic venture based in the Arizona desert. From time to time a limpid woman in a wetsuit would appear on the deck of the junk and wave at the lone scientist and her pride of tourists. The crew of the Hercules did not welcome visitors, said Ray.

This was just about all I knew of the Biosphere. I had come across a few speculative articles in the press and a few figures, such as the fact that the project had swallowed the $150m raised by a Texan magnate called Ed Bass (the same Ed Bass whose interests included Blackbird Caye), through a holding company, Space Biosphere Ventures. I knew that Biosphere 2 was the largest experimental closed environment on the planet – three and a bit acres sealed virtually airtight by a metal and glass frame – that eight people had been shut inside and left to get on with things, which they hadn’t managed quite to do, because the oxygen levels in the bubble had begun inexplicably to fall, necessitating the introduction of a new supply from outside. There had been rumours that Bass was influenced by a New Age cult led by a charismatic worker-poet whose aim was to begin life again somewhere out in space. Extraordinarily for these times, I had never seen an image of the Biosphere.

The last tourist bus has already left by the time Caboose and I turn off the highway onto Biosphere range. It is June, start of the rattler season – the heat so intense it pushes the air into strange, eddying flues and pulls at the ligaments in the throat. My fingers have fused to the wheel of the car and become woody and aged. Up ahead a paved track runs off the road and leads to a forlorn sentry house with a uniformed guard. Bumping across the cattle grid it feels as though I have crossed a border and am somewhere liminal that is not a part of America at all.