Republican Party Reptile Part 15

Saunders, if he was doing anything, was doing nothing that didn't come naturally; 250 years ago Governor Bruere of Bermuda complained, "The Caicos trade did not fail to make its devotees somewhat ferocious." And one official replied, "Sir-you'll have business enough upon your hands if you go about to rectify that, for there is not a man that sails from hence, but will trade with a pirate." Especially if he's offered a deal like the one the DEA was offering Saunders. The DEA, by its own admission, had undercover agents promise Norman Saunders $250,000 a week to refuel drug planes. We had an interesting discussion one night in the bar of the Third Turtle Inn. Everyone-foursquare businessmen on fishing vacations, fat American tourists, the kitchen help, me, honeymoon couples-I mean every one of us said we'd refuel dope planes for $250,000 a week. What wouldn't we do for $250,000? After a certain number of drinks some pretty frightening admissions were heard.

Later I would go back to Miami and root through complaints, indictments, affidavits, and so forth. In a sworn deposition, a DEA special agent with the unprepossessing name of Gary Sloboda said . . . well, he said all sorts of things. The doc.u.ment rambles on for sixteen pages, chronicling what amounts to a lot of big talk. No presence of an actual drug is mentioned anywhere. And every person who talked to Saunders about dope was some kind of DEA agent, informant, or plant except one loudmouth French Canadian named Andre who stumbled into these bull sessions and began announcing what a scam artist he was. Despite the palaver about astronomy-sized payoffs, it seems Saunders was given only sixty grand and ten of that was to pay off a fuel bill run up by an informant's business partner. Smokey got $2,500.

The hard evidence presented to the grand jury was yet less magisterial. Various meetings were secretly tape-recorded. Here's a sample page from the transcript: SMOKEY-Let's say, lets say it was about two thousand just for them at the airport CONFIDENTIAL INFORMANT: Huh SMOKEY-(Unintelligible) C.I.-How do you know?

SMOKEY-(Unintel.) C.I.-One of those black haired SMOKEY-(Unintel.) C.I.-I don't know a f.u.c.king thing about SMOKEY-(Unintel.) SAUNDERS-(Unintel.) SAUNDERS-Let's say OK look at some figures. Lets say we're talking about two thousand each, that's just throwing out some numbers (Unintel.) If you give two guys in the tower four thousand, two times four is eight thousand, and (unintel.) SMOKEY-Alright f.u.c.k em.

I watched the videotape where Saunders stuffs $20,000 into his pants pockets. I mean, the man's not at the Ramada for his health. Somebody does say, "Here's twenty thousand," and he does stuff it into his pants pockets. Other than that it was hard to tell what was going on. The tape was shot with a pinhole lens stuck through a wall at the level of an electrical outlet. What I saw was mostly knees and behinds. The drug agent and the drug informant talked about drugs. The ratchet-jawed Canuck kept putting his two cents in. The DEA guys reiterated everything they said, obviously for the benefit of a hidden microphone. The only words from Norman Saunders that I could make out were: "We're talking about fees. A sort of finder's fee." As of this writing Saunders is finding himself in prison, bail set at $1.1 million.

It seems to me the Drug Enforcement Agency picked the Turks and Caicos as a nice lackadaisical place, a place with a friendly NATO-ally administration, a place that was an easy target. No stonewalling commies or angry armed peasants or touchy blackpower governments here. Governor Turner said the very reason the Turks and Caicos are popular with drug smugglers is that the people are law-abiding. "There's no violence, no rip-offs, no shakedowns."

And they are lovely islands. And the Third Turtle really is first-rate-excellent food, big, airy rooms opening onto terraces above the beach, great bar. And the expanse of wilderness is wonderful. There's no clog of high-rise condos or clots of dippy shops and prissy restaurants, just miles of verdant land aroil with bird and lizard life where perhaps no human has stood since hungry Carib Indian invaders chased edible Arawak natives into the brush.

On Providenciales I took my Jeep an hour's trip out a near-impa.s.sable track to eight miles of untouched beach and cliffs. I found a little cove between two great rocks where the waves came up on Clairol sand. I took my clothes off and all morning disported myself like Brooke Shields in Blue Lagoon (about as much chest but more stomach).

Back at the Third Turtle I was writing in my notebook-"Drugs-can't find any"; "Pirates-a lot of hooey"-when I heard the unmistakable bellow of the redneck Gulf Coast man of affairs, the p.e.c.k.e.rwood entrepreneur, the Snopes with an M.B.A. "Two hundert square miles of un-de-veloped beachfront. . . G.o.d d.a.m.n! I tell you what we gotta do! You know that Golden Door place? Where the fat ladies go? How about wunna them! And how about with a G.o.ddam cosmetic surgery clinic right attached? Huh? How 'bout that!? G.o.d d.a.m.n!!!" Ah. Well. I crossed out "a lot of hooey."

With Hostage and Hijacker in Sunny Beirut.

Boarding Middle East Airlines flight 804 from London to Lebanon, I was picking out the terrorist. The guy in the shiny suit who looked like Danny Thomas-it wasn't him. The exhausted mother with three children under three-it wasn't her. Then dozens of swarthy youths, bearded to the eyes, came trotting on board. They wore the off-brand blue jeans and pilled-up synthetic polo shirts that are the usual mufti of the Lebanese militias. "Allah akbar!" they shouted as the plane took off, which just means "G.o.d is great" but always sends a chill up my backside. As the hoot of the Moslem fundamentalist, it carries a meaning like "Jesus loves you!" would if Jerry Falwell and his friends were running around America murdering Episcopalians. I headed for the toilet to take a nervous leak and size up my flying companions. There was one bunch standing by the galley. I leaned in close to see who had the fragmentation grenade in his duty-free shopping bag. "Yalluh!" They jumped back in alarm. "Awk!" I did too. "CIA!!" said their horrified faces. What a letdown. With blue eyes and striped necktie, the most suspicious-looking person on the airplane was me.

I don't know why any of us was getting in a sweat. The only way to keep from being hijacked to Beirut these days is to buy a commercial ticket and fly there.

Beirut International Airport was a Weekly Reader current-events quiz made manifest. Here was the Amal in force. There was a blown-up Royal Jordanian pa.s.senger plane. And right at our wingtip was the pirated TWA jet. Somewhere off in the snakes-and-ladders maze of the Shiite neighborhoods, thirty-six American tourists were in a pickle. The whole scene set me to thinking about the villainy of human motivation, mostly my own. I mean, I was delighted for the excuse to be back in Lebanon. I like to hang around places where human nature is at its most baffling.

Lebanon sits on the thin neck of the Fertile Crescent, an arable strip no more than forty miles wide that joins the great basins of Mesopotamia and the Nile. From this flinder of spa.r.s.ely watered top spoil come our alphabet, our religion, and, in the form of the first agriculture, our civilization itself. Who holds "The Mountain," as the Lebanese call it, stands athwart the trade routes of Africa and Asia, controls the eastern Mediterranean, and has a grip on the remote-control garage-door opener to Europe or something like that. No fan of social chaos can help but thrill to tread ground fought over by Canaanites, Egyptians, a.s.syrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, French, British, more Arabs, and occasional U.S. Marines. It's been a five-thousand-year tag-team match, and, what's more, the crazy oafs are still in the ring. Philistines, Nazarenes, Israelites, peoples of the great Syrian desert, and strange firinghi European interlopers are, to this very day, tossing half nelsons on each other and flailing away with rabbit punches and illegal flying dropkicks.

A friend had sent one of Lebanon's innumerable "fixers" to meet me at the airport. "Mr. Bisgee! Mr. Bisgee!" ("P.J." is quite beyond the Arab tongue.) This sweaty, amiable little man shoved me in front of fifty people at pa.s.sport control, dragooned a porter, fended off a bribery touch from a Lebanese army officer, whisked me uninspected through customs, and put me in a chauffeured car. The Lebanese understand trouble. That is, they understand the only understandable thing about it. There's always a buck to be made when trouble's afoot.

Six months ago nearly all American newsmen were pulled out of Lebanon. Terrorism was one reason, but so was the lack of a "hometown hook." The only other Americans left in the country were seven obscure kidnap victims and some emba.s.sy duffs. Neither group lent itself to vibrant coverage. So what if man's fate might depend on the ugly events hereabouts? Stateside coverage dwindled to a few paragraphs in the international "Deaths Elsewhere" column. Now, however, Hostages II was playing, and scribblers, Nikon hounds, tape jockeys, and talking heads were in from the ends of the earth. The Lebanese middlemen couldn't have been happier if the Marines had invaded, and they might just yet.

I checked into the Summerland Hotel on the seafront in Beirut's south suburbs. The Summerland is a great three-sided, four-tiered resort complex with shopping center, health club, sauna, restaurants, and a beauty salon. In the Summerland's center court are three swimming pools, a spiral water slide, an artificial grotto with waterfall, a small-boat harbor, and a private beach. Two acres of deck chairs were covered with tan bodies. The smooth Arab girls wearing makeup poolside looked to have been teleported from a Westchester country club.

This doesn't match your mental picture of Beirut. But Beirut doesn't match any mental picture of anything. After ten years of polygonal civil war and invasions and air strikes by Syrians, Israelis, and multilateral peace-keeping forces, the place still isn't as squalid as some cities that have never been hit by anything but government social programs. There are zones of manic destruction, of course. The Green Line looks like an antinuke-benefit-concert alb.u.m cover. The Bois de Pins, planted in the 1600s, has taken so many rocket attacks that it's a forest of phone poles. Hotel Row along the Corniche was destroyed in the first year of warfare. The best hotel, the St. George, is a burned hulk. But its bar is still open and people water-ski from the beach there in all but the worst of the fighting. "What about snipers?" I once asked someone. He said, "Oh, most of the snipers have automatic weapons. They aren't very accurate."

Everywhere there are chips and chucks out of buildings and buildings missing entirely, but there are also cranes and construction gangs and masons and plasterers. Maybe nowhere else has a city been built and destroyed at the same time. Electricity is intermittent and the garbage hasn't been collected since the late 1970s, but the shops are full of all the world's imports. And with no trade quotas or import duties or government to enforce them if they existed, goods are cheap. Not an hour pa.s.ses without gunfire or explosion, but the traffic jams are filled with Mercedes sedans.

The Summerland itself sits bracketed by the bombed ruins of another resort and by a princ.i.p.al Amal checkpoint. At the checkpoint the wrong kind of beachgoer can be pulled out of his car and taken away and shot. Beirut is a sort of Ja.n.u.s-faced monument to the entire history of man. He will endure, but what a s.h.i.thead.

Anyway, drugs are cheap, about $50 a gram for cocaine. Some friends and I sniffed piles of it and emptied the minibars in two hotel rooms. About midnight it seemed like a good idea to go out. Street fighting had been desultory. We could probably make it to a nightclub.

ABC News had its headquarters at the Summerland. We stopped to say h.e.l.lo. It was "day 15," as they say in hostage crises, and everybody was settling in. We all figured the thing would be good for at least a month, maybe three. We stood around yammering wisely about Arab intransigence and how time has no meaning in the East. Then somebody, I think it was Chris Harper, ABC's Rome bureau chief, stepped out onto a balcony and stepped right back in looking like he'd caught the family dog playing the cello.

Directly below us on the wide flagstone terrace by the double-Olympic-size pool were thirty-two American hostages. The Amal had brought them to the Summerland for dinner.

Let me tell you, they looked terrible. I don't mean they looked abused. They just looked like American tourists do everywhere-elastic-waisted loaf-around slacks, T-shirts with dim slogans and embarra.s.sing place names, waffle-soled sandals worn with socks. These people had been thrust into a dramatic situation with vast international implications and, frankly, they weren't dressed for it.

I think history deserves at least rumpled linen suits and sweat-stained panama hats. And what's a possible world war without something to drink? But Amal is very opposed to that sort of thing. Instead everybody stood around for about two hours munching snacks and sipping fruit juice while waiters got a giant banquet table ready.

It was a Rotary Club men's breakfast in the middle of the night at Club Med with guns-sort of. The hostages looked confused. The more so since some reporters knew some Amal guards and were chatting them up. You could hear tourist minds clicking over-"Oh, G.o.d, they're all in it together." Which, in a sense, is true, but it's the kind of insight that makes for really tedious New York Times op-ed-page pieces on the role of the media.

The captive dinner guests, poor devils, were a bit wooden and formal at first. They had the eggsh.e.l.l walk and stiff solemn movements that come from long-acc.u.mulated fear. At least everyone on the terrace knew how they felt. You can't spend time in this part of the earth and not be familiar with the indissoluble cold softball beneath the diaphragm, the slow hyperventilation, the runny feeling in the bowels and wet flesh creepiness along the limbs. It sucks.

Maybe for this reason everybody behaved himself. There was no blast of camera lights or lewd thrust of microphones from the reporters. The hostages didn't whimper for mercy or ask the President to A-bomb us all. The Amal guards were casual, propping their guns against the stone planters and gathering in little groups to smoke cigarettes. They let their charges wander around the courtyard unescorted and amble down to the beach.

ABC had three telephone lines held permanently open to the United States, and the engineers wired one into a poolside phone so everybody could call his folks.

I wish I could say it was fascinating. One hostage began giving me a complete inside story of what had gone on since they'd been removed from the plane. I was scribbling madly on a napkin. "You've all been in communication with each other, then?" I said. "No," said the hostage, "I heard this on BBC World News."

Ridley Moon said he wanted a stiff drink. Victor Amburgy had had dysentery and had lost so much weight he was falling out of his pants. Kurt Carlson told me his younger brother, Bun, is the drummer for Cheap Trick. Jack McCarty said he and some of the others had been working up notes for a Hostage Handbook "Bring Toilet Paper" was one chapter heading. A little forehead-sized pillow is another good idea, he said, and told me how at one point when they were still on the plane they'd been forced to keep their heads between their knees for six hours. "I'd stopped smoking before this happened," said Kurt Carlson. Great events are something like doughnuts for all that's right at the center of them.

And so the reluctant houseguests went home with their hosts, though not before an Amal guard brought one guy back because he hadn't had a chance to phone home. Could we-journalists and hostages together-have overpowered the slack and outnumbered Amal guards? Could we have mounted fire from the Summerland's ramparts, phoned the Sixth Fleet and held out until rescue choppers arrived? It would be a marketable movie premise. Nothing like real guns to show how lousy popular art is.

I got into bed at 4:00 that morning with an uneasy mind. There are supposed to be U.S. spy satellites that can read the headlines on newspapers. I know there are radio listening posts all over the Middle East, and the Amal guys were on their walkietalkies all night. Every would-be Jimmy Carter antonym on the National Security Council must have heard about the dinner at the Summerland by now. It would be just like U.S. foreign policy to send Delta Force in an hour late. I could see it all-concussion bombs in the swimming pools, Hueys tangled in the beach umbrellas, and hyperadrenalinized Marine sergeants indiscriminately rescuing the wrong people from a bunch of sleepy room-service waiters. I left the door to my balcony open. If I was going to be dragged to safety and someplace American Express could find me, the last thing I wanted was a six-by-four-foot broken gla.s.s slider added to my hotel bill.

At the end of the Friday-night dinner the Summerland Hotel staff had brought out a huge cake with chocolate lettering across the top: "Wishing you all a happy trip back home." Sat.u.r.day morning the U.S. State Department announced the hostages' release. So did the Syrian government. Various networks and wire services carried the story. It seemed like a lot of people were getting their news from cake frosting.

In fact, n.o.body had gone much of anywhere. The thirty-two dinner hostages and the plane crew had been gathered in a school in a Shiite slum, the Burj Barajna. But the extraradical Hizbullah Shiites were refusing to cough up the four extra hostages they had stashed in a bas.e.m.e.nt somewhere.

Hizbullah wouldn't release the other four because . . . well, you have to understand Lebanese politics. It's sort of like a gang war because the militias are organized in normal Mediterranean friends-of-Frank-Sinatra style and control the drug traffic and smuggling. It's sort of like a real war because Syria, Israel, the PLO, etc. are irked at each other and commit most of their irksomeness on Lebanese territory. It's sort of like a race riot because every religious group thinks it's being treated like n.i.g.g.e.rs and thinks every other group should be. And it's sort of like an American presidential election because most of the worst things in life are. It's insane. It's incomprehensible. Everybody in the place ought to be whacked over the head. The whole business is almost as horrid as New York City during rush hour. (Though not, I think, as horrid as New York would be if our national system of checks and balances called in sick and Syria, Israel, Russia, the United States, Iran, and North Korea gave everybody who could make a flag free guns and a dump truck full of money.) Beats me. I went out to the airport and watched hot, grumpy photographers on stakeout at the TWA jet. I stood on top of the control tower and got something-a pistol, a finger, a rolled-up copy of the TWA in-flight magazine-pointed at me from the c.o.c.kpit window. There were a lot of reporters and TV producers talking into paper bags. This is because the militiamen call you a spy if you have a two-way radio, and also because the militiamen love two-way radios and calling you a spy at gunpoint is a good way to get a free one.

Nothing happening here. I went back to the Summerland and poked around in the ABC office. A newsroom had been created by hauling the beds out of five hotel rooms and shipping in 2,500 kilos of electronic gear. There were three bureau chiefs in the place, and correspondents, producers, editors, technicians, camera crews, drivers, and money men all yelling orders at each other while the open phone lines disgorged useful suggestions from the ABC bra.s.s in New York: "h.e.l.lo, Beirut. We have a report from the Muncie, Indiana, Advertiser-Wasp that the hostages have been moved to Senegal. Would you confirm?"

"h.e.l.lo, Beirut. Is Kahlil Gibran still alive? Could we get him on the wire for a Good Morning America phoner?"

"h.e.l.lo, Beirut. Radio New Zealand says five of the hostages have mumps."

I'm used to the quiet life of free-lance writers where we just go home and make things up. This looked more like the time my little sister knocked my ant farm off the dresser.

I sat down in one of the five hotel rooms and watched the tapes ABC was sending out, like I'd watch pay TV in any hotel room except with a mess of old coffee cups, wine bottles, room-service trays, and cigarette b.u.t.ts even worse than the one I usually acc.u.mulate. There was gunfire on the screen, gunfire outside too. Weird. Reminded me of those sixties acid wallows where, you know, like this is the movie and you're watching it, but, like, you're in it and . . . The medium is the message, indeed.

Darn good coverage, though, I thought: swell get-a-load-of-this-guy smile from Captain Testlake with that gun-waving Hizbullah bunny behind him, nice earnest hostage interviews (one guy told his wife to pay the mortgage, though I don't think that got on the air), and deeply important (if slightly dull-o) talks with Nabih Berri (who doesn't speak English worse than most people who've lived in Detroit).

I understand that back home there was a lot of argle-bargle about what the networks were doing during America Held Hostage: The Sequel. But you have to remember a television has two sides. I was up by the head. What came out the other end, I can't tell you. For all I know Eyewitness News starred Donny and Marie and featured commentary by Koko, the gorilla who uses computers to talk.

That night a young man named Jaafar Jalabi arrived at the ABC office. He was a friend of Nabih Berri and had been sent over to explain the real reason that the hostages hadn't been released. I liked him immediately. For one thing he was scared, and there's entirely too much bravery in Lebanon. Also he wore a Rolex. I have a personal theory that faithful, disciplined, highly principled, self-sacrificing people (in other words the people who are forever getting the rest of us killed) wear cheap wrist.w.a.tches.

Hizbullah, said Jaafar, was refusing to release its Americans because President Reagan had said in a speech, "I don't think anything that attempts to get people back who've been kidnapped by thugs, murderers, and barbarians is wrong to do." Who knows how Hizbullah threaded its way through the syntax in that statement. Jaafar admitted any excuse probably would have done. A bureau chief led him off to make everything clear to Peter Jennings and the American public.

When Jaafar was through I asked him how he'd gotten dragged into this. He said Berri knew he'd gone to college in the United States and therefore it was felt he understood America. (So much for the theory of "highly sophisticated Shiite manipulation of American public opinion." The last time a U.S. college student understood America, they shot him at Kent State.) "What's going to happen," I asked, "when the hostage crisis is over? Are the various Shiite factions going to . . . you know . . . ?"

"I've got a speedboat anch.o.r.ed down there," said Jaafar, looking toward the Summerland's little harbor, "and it's packed with food and supplies." That was something to remember. No matter how interested you are in social chaos, it's always a good idea to keep an eye on the emergency exit.

Sunday morning I went down to the school in the Burj Barajna. The Amal said this time for sure they were getting all the loose Americans rounded up and out of there. The ride over was a lesson in what a rescue mission would have required. My Lebanese driver couldn't find the place with a map. I suppose Delta Force could have stopped and asked directions like we did, but the Lebanese can be long-winded that way. My guess is our strike force would still be drinking tiny cups of coffee and trying to get out of buying a rug and a case of smuggled Marlboros.

The Burj was not really a slum, just an old neighborhood with haphazard alleys for streets and five-story stucco apartment buildings with gardens walled by breeze block. Dozens of these neighborhoods have been destroyed in the civil war, and creeping Miami Beachism was destroying them anyway before the war began. Small girls in what looked like first-communion dresses giggled in the doorways. Small boys followed the militiamen around and inspected the press corps' equipment. Moms, dads, and quite a lot of attractive teenage daughters were standing on the balconies and looking out the windows with the usual tenement dwellers' interest in local brouhaha. There were no chadors in evidence and not as many scarves as you'd see on the British royal family at the average horse show. This, then, is your howling mob of fanatical Shiites praying for martyrdom and dripping blood from the fangs.

The reporters were an uglier bunch by far. There were a hundred or more of them ganged up in the alley by the school. They looked as bad as the hostage tourists but fatter and meaner and dressed in even more ridiculous tropical travel clothes. With their panoply of tote bags, cameras, carryalls, haversacks, and phrase books, they seemed a kind of race of supertourists come to avenge the incarceration of their fellows. Indeed, it's been suggested for years that the Beirut media should form their own militia. G.o.d knows, there are enough of them. And it would simplify many news stories: "Tonight on Nightline Ted Koppel threatens suicide attack unless he meets own demands to free self!"

The Amal were wearing any old thing. Some had on Miller Lite T-shirts and designer Levi's, others were so laden with Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, sheath knives, pistols, spare clips, and ammo belts that they could hardly move. They looked like kids playing army. Which is what they are. The average age can't be eighteen. They're violently opposed to the imperialist, Zionist policies of the United States and will, however, if they speak any English, babble about which career they'll pursue in America as soon as they get a Green Card. They have better manners than I ever did as an adolescent. I suspect it's because they're getting to live out all those Mad Max fantasies in their own backyards.

I committed a breach of Shiite etiquette by kissing Jane Evans, a CNN camerawoman I hadn't seen in six months. One of the Amal kids admonished me with a smile. "You two, you are get married, huh?"

"Yes, yes, of course," I said.

"And have many children?"

Naturally they like to try their weapons. When the press got obstreperous because Amal wouldn't let anyone into the school, the kids cut loose with a dozen rounds of AK-47 fire. Your stomach muscles contract, you go into a crouch, chemical zaniness spurts through the bloodstream no matter how many times you've heard close fire and no matter that you know the guns are pointed in the air. It's funny, too, seeing a hundred sweaty, red-faced newsmen in silly golf clothes duck-walking backward at sixty miles an hour.

I can't tell you much about how it all ended. The next time you think to ask somebody about something "because he was there," think again. I was there. Some towel-head from Hizbullah marched up and down the street twice. There was a certain amount of what pa.s.ses for horseplay in these lat.i.tudes. "I blow you camera away," said one of the older Amal guys to a network crew. He aimed his pistol. He pulled the trigger. Click. It wasn't loaded. "Ha ha ha ha ha." There was a lot of standing around in the sun with no beer.

About 5:00 in the evening the Amal let a few crews and reporters into the school. "We take one of each kind of type," said a spokesman. "All English-speaking print media!" shouted my friend Robert Fisk from the London Times, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d. The lucky few got to stand around in the school for another couple hours while Hizbullah dignitaries gave free souvenir Korans to the hostages.

A convoy was standing ready behind Amal lines. I hustled for position so I could witness the send-off. But there are about seven ways out of the Burj and I picked the wrong one. The convoy went down another street and I was left watching a gaggle of French photographers bribe their way onto a balcony that overlooked nothing but more French photographers.

I felt rather forlorn. Here we were, the center of international attention, steeped in high drama, with danger on every side, and enormous expense accounts. Could we face the truth that lies in the dark corners of the heart . . . and admit we were having a really good time? No use, I supposed, asking the hostages to volunteer and stay for a while.

Moving to New Hampshire.

Not long ago I moved from New York City to a small town in New Hampshire. I didn't know much about country life, but I was in love with New England scenery. I wanted to do my writing in an atmosphere of pastoral serenity. And I felt a need for a healthier life. Also, I'd never had a roof repaired so I thought New York was the most expensive place on earth to live. Since many other city people are moving into the countryside, I feel an obligation to pa.s.s along what I've learned. I also feel an obligation to pay for my new roof.

When moving to rural New England, the first consideration is choice of a town. There are three kinds of towns in New England: towns that know they're cute, towns that don't know they're cute, and towns determined to become cute no matter what.

Towns that know they're cute are characterized by high realestate prices, frequent arts-and-crafts fairs, and numerous Volvos with "Save the Whales" b.u.mper stickers. It's Vermont, really, that specializes in this kind of town. You don't want to live in one of these. The "shoppe" signs are all misspelled, the arts-and-crafts fairs tie up traffic, and (it hurts to tell this to the people in the Volvos) Vermont doesn't have any whales.

Towns that don't know they're cute are even worse. Most seem to have zoning regulations requiring lawn ornaments and house trailers in every yard. You'll buy a beautiful home on Main Street and wake up the next morning to find someone else has bought the beautiful home directly across from you, torn it down, and built a gas station. And the teenage natives use the Meeting House's 1690 weather vane for rifle practice. This is painful to those of us with finer aesthetic sensibilities who'd like to make it into a lamp.

The right kind of town is the one determined to become cute. My own town, Jaffrey, is one of these. We're taking up a collection to repair the weather vane, and there's an effort under way to have our Main Street gas station spell Sh.e.l.l with an extra "e." Towns like Jaffrey have civic pride and local spirit, but they have their drawbacks too. Civic pride means committees. And there's always the danger of getting drafted. Last year we had an infestation of gypsy moths. My committee spent three weeks cutting oak leaves out of yellow construction paper and gluing them to tree limbs so sightseers wouldn't be disappointed during the autumn foliage season.

Once you've chosen a town, the next step is to choose a house. There is a general rule about houses in New England: the worse the architecture, the more authentically Colonial the house. If a house has a grand appearance, handsome layout, and large airy rooms, it's Victorian junk. But if you can't, at first glance, tell it from a mobile home, it was built before 1700. Of course, it isn't fair to say that. Very few mobile homes have five-foot ceilings, bas.e.m.e.nts full of water, or sill rot. Anyway, when checking for authenticity, make sure the rooms are the size of bath mats and that the electrical system looks horrid. Our colonial forebears seem to have been notably poor electricians.

One thing you will not have to worry about is your view. Every authentic Colonial house in New England has a splendid view. Just ask the real-estate agent. "View?" said mine. "Of course there's a view! Climb out this window onto the porch roof, Mr. O'Rourke, and shinny up that chimney-absolutely breathtaking."

Actually buying the house will be no different from buying a house anywhere else, except for the t.i.tle search. New England deed records go back 350 years, and in every one of those years somebody made a mistake. This results in unusual deeds. One property I looked at had fifteen acres. Two acres were in front of the house and the remaining land ran in a three-inch-wide strip fifty-five miles north to Lake Winnipesaukee. Be prepared to pay a large legal fee. "You know," said the local lawyer doing my t.i.tle search, "that land originally belonged to the Indians. I had to go looking all over for them. I looked in Aspen, Vail, and Sun Valley. They weren't there, so . . ."

And even after you've cleared the t.i.tle and paid for the house, it won't be called yours. My house is "the Yateman place." There hasn't been a Yateman in Jaffrey for fifty years. And I don't think a Yateman ever owned my house anyway. "The Yateman place" is just a device to rag newcomers. Though I have been a.s.sured that my house will eventually be called "the O'Rourke place."

"Everybody'll call it that," said a neighbor, "just as soon as you die there."

Another thing, no matter how stately the home or how much land or how many outbuildings, the only thing the natives will ever say about it is, "You know that place sold for eight thousand in 1976."

It will take time for you to get used to these country ways, not to mention getting used to the country itself. The climate, for instance-we have two seasons in New England, winter and getting-ready-for-winter. I was used to banging on my apartment building's pipes when I wanted more heat in the middle of the night. I've found this doesn't work with my own wood furnace. Nor are munic.i.p.al services exactly like the city's. I was putting trash out at the end of my driveway for three months before I noticed . . . well, I noticed three months' worth of trash out at the end of my driveway.

Just running simple errands is a problem for transplanted New Yorkers. We are brusque, fast-moving people. But there's an unwritten law in New England: Anytime you go anywhere to conduct any type of business, first you have to have a little talk.

When you go to the butcher shop, you're not going there to buy meat. It's a social call. Even if you've never seen the butcher before, you say, "How's it going?" and "Come on by sometime" and "Give my regards to your wife if you're married."

He'll say, "Black flies bad up at your place this year?"

You'll say, "Getting any wood in?"

And so on. Anything to do with pot roast is strictly incidental, and the subject cannot be raised politely for at least thirty minutes.

This frightens me. I know people do it to be friendly. I try to talk for hours with everyone I see. But I'm scared that if I call the fire department and yell "Help! My house is on fire!" I'll get someone on the other end of the line saying, "Ah-yep, fellow down at Antrim had his house on fire too. Must have been just about this time, 1981. Black flies bad up at your place this year?"

The local newspapers are a great help in catching the spirit of country life. These publications show that rural New Englanders live in a different world than New Yorkers, possible on a different planet.

I've been collecting items from the papers in my area. This headline was printed large on page one of the Monadnock Ledger: "Spaghetti Supper Set for Friday." It's the sort of headline we could do with more of in the New York Post. "Motorist Damages Yard in Hit and Run Accident"-that appeared on the front page of the Peterborough Transcript. And here, from the Keene Sentinel, is my personal favorite: "Maine Legislature Goes Home."

A story about the planning board in Jaffrey read, in part, "The planners did not decide on the subdivision last week. By the time the public hearings were over ... it was after 11:00 P.M. The planners did not think they should be making decisions when they were tired." It's hard to imagine Congress being that downright. I'd like to see a story in the New York Times saying, "Congressmen did not decide on the defense budget last night. The members of Congress did not think they should be making decisions when they were half-witted, corrupt, and drunk." But the most telling item I've found in my local papers read simply, "Money was found on Middle Hanc.o.c.k Road on Sunday, June 5." Eleven words which paint a picture of almost baffling decency.

Things like that will make you want to get to know your neighbors. Believe me, they'll already know you. New Englanders are not nosy. They pride themselves on respecting the privacy of others. All the same, they manage to know everything about you, and sometimes they'll let it slip. You'll be on the phone, making a long-distance call. "Operator," you'll say, "I'm having trouble getting through to my mother in Florida."

The operator will say, "You really ought to call her more often, and you haven't written her a real letter since Christmas."

Or you'll be shopping in a local store and the salesclerk, a total stranger to you, will say, "But that's not the kind of undershirt you usually wear."

The first of these neighbors you should get to know is the plumber. Marry him if you can. In some rural places the most prominent citizen is the doctor or the reverend at the church; not so in New England. It's the plumber, and for good reason. When your water pipes freeze and burst at 3:00 A.M., try calling an M.D. or a priest.

It will be easier to get to know the plumber, and everyone else, if you understand local values. One local value is early rising. Don't let on that you sleep until 10:00. It's considered hilarious. Personally, I sleep in my clothes with a coffee mug beside my bed. That way, when someone rings the doorbell at 5:00 A.M. to see if I'd like help stacking cordwood, I can run downstairs with cup in hand and pretend to have been awake for hours. Getting up early means going to bed early, and it worries people if you don't. When I first moved to Jaffrey, I was having a 1:00 A.M. nightcap when I heard a knock on the door. It was a concerned-looking native in a bathrobe. "We saw your lights on," he said. "Is anything wrong?"

The two most important New England values, however, are honesty and thrift. Honesty you've already seen exampled in Middle Hanc.o.c.k Road where someone found money and did what only a born and bred small-town Yankee would do and called the newspapers. This honesty is a great thing but dangerously habit-forming. On visits to New York I have found myself telling people, "Just charge me what you think is fair." And there is no polite way to express what people in New York think is fair.

More important even than honesty is thrift, not to say outright tight-fistedness. Money in the city is like money in Weimar Germany. You go to the Citibank cash machine, get a wheelbarrowful of the stuff, and shovel it out whenever you're told. Then you cross your fingers and hope to die before the Visa Card people process your change of address. But Yankees are serious about spending money. And they give advice at length on the subject.

"Drive over to Portland, Maine," they'll say, "and you can get two cents off paper towels." Or "There's a special on five-gallon cans of margarine at the A&P. Limit, six to a customer." And they're especially forthcoming with advice about what you should have paid for your house. "You know that place sold for eight thousand in 1976."

Besides changes in values, country life means changes in all your activities. Many city pursuits are inappropriate to the new venue. If you go jogging in Jaffrey, people will stop and offer you a ride. And having dinner at 9:00 is considered as bizarre as sunbathing on a roof. Do not, however, adopt local customs wholesale.

Fishing, for example, turns out to be less serene than it looks on calendars. It is a sport invented by insects and you are the bait.

Hunting is as uncomfortable and much more hazardous. Deer hunting, particularly, attracts Visigothic types from places like Worcester, Ma.s.sachusetts. I spend all of deer-hunting season indoors trying not to do anything deerlike.

Gardening is better. Everyone in New England will be eager to give you advice about a flower garden-too eager, in fact. By the time I'd spent a month listening to gardening advice, I was so confused the only thing I could remember was that you shouldn't plant bulbs upside down. This is nonsense, and I have a septic tank full of daffodil blooms to prove it.

Vegetable gardening is even more frustrating. The last hard frost in New England comes about July 10 and the first autumn frost comes about two weeks later. Then there are the racc.o.o.ns. If anything does grow, the racc.o.o.ns will take it and you'll have to call the Pentagon Rapid Deployment Force to get it back. What I do is just say I have a vegetable garden. I dig up some of the lawn, put on a racc.o.o.n suit, make tracks in the dirt, and go buy my vegetables at the local garden stand.