Toward the end of the thread, I posted the following list of my "dream destinations:" Let's see... Norombega, Quivira, St. Brendan's Island, the Aurora Islands, Mayda, El Dorado, and the Painter's Wife's Island.... No one seems to have caught the joke -- or maybe they just weren't amused. All of these are places that once appeared on actual navigational maps, but never actually existed. As Raymond Ramsay described them in No Longer on the Map, they were not purely fanciful places like Atlantis; they were places that serious cartographers actually mapped at the time they were supposed to exist. These errors were sometimes continued for generations, explorers trying time and again to find those places so clearly marked on their maps. Ramsey published in 1972, so he missed at least one such nonexistent place that remained on the maps right up to 2012: Sandy Island, New Caledonia. So now I must add another item to my list of dream destinations!As I worte in my follow-up to GeckoGo:
"My point was that I have come to realize that my true dream destination does not exist. Any actual place on earth will fall short of my dreams.In a strange way, my travels seem to parallel "The Neverending Story." Recall that in that story, Fantasia was gradually disappearing, swallowed up by the Nothing -- the Nothing spread because humans stopped believing in fantasy, and fantasy worlds can only exist while humans believe in them. They exist in the imaginative mind. In this sense, as soon as I stepped ashore on the real Borneo, the Nothing swallowed up my fantastic Borneo. An image of it still exists in my imagination, but I take it no more seriously than I do a fairy tale.Example: Borneo. Since childhood, the very word Borneo seemed magical: it conjured up images of the "wild woman of Borneo," with her wild mane of hair; images of red-haired apes peering down from above, in a place so green that no paint nor photograph can capture it; images of mist-shrouded mountains rising above a mysterious green forest. But the real Borneo, while it does have mountains, rain forests, and red-haired apes, somehow never presented them in the magical way that my dreams pictured them. The Borneo of my dreams was a land of enchantment; the real Borneo is a geographical place on earth, with earthly cities inhabited by earthly people.
Whereas Antilia, of the Seven Cities, because it never existed, can never disappoint -- it will always be whatever you imagine it to be."
This is the downside to travel. Whenever we try to reach Fantasia, we only succeed in destroying it a little more. Sometimes this is true even if we only visit in the pages of a book. In 1988, Errol Fuller published Extinct Birds. He wrote so beautifully, and filled the book with such stunning illustrations, for awhile, I dreamed of going the the Mascarene Islands. But when I thought about it, the reason I wanted to go there was because of what used to be there -- the dodo, the Rodriguez solitaire, the Réunion solitaire, an extinct parrot, an extinct pigeon. Of course, I wouldn't see any of these if I actually went. The same was true of Wake Island, in the mid-Pacific: the Wake rail used to live there; now it lives nowhere. Two more Fantasias taken by the Nothing -- and my dreams haunted by the ghosts of birds.
I managed to save one Fantasia -- the one time I made a conscious choice to leave a good book unfinished. The book was Song of the Dodo by David Quammen. At the beginning of the book, Quammen recounts Alfred Russell Wallace's adventures in the Aru Islands, searching for butterflies and birds-of-paradise. The Arus, as painted there, were a perfect dream destination, a cluster of islands shrouded in dark, mysterious forests, with exotic flora and strange animals and birds, and a native tribe in their primeval purity. So when, in the last chapter, Quammen made his own trip to Aru, I slammed the book shut, never to read that last chapter. I preferred to keep alive the images I had of Wallace's Aru.
And the ghosts of birds haunt my dreams: Lesser `Akialoas, fading out as I awoke in my tent on the slopes of Haleakala. They seem to say: Lele au la, hokahoka wale iho -- "I fly away, leaving disappointment behind."
