My Brother Gary

By the time my brother Gary was in his early-30s, he had acquired expertise for unearthing the most unusual places to eat and drink or the unlikely hole-in-the-wall whose name and setting belied what was behind its kitchen doors. Before culinary gurus Anthony Bourdain and Stanley Tucci became mainstream devotees with their food, drink and travel adventures, my brother was exploring cuisines. Gary developed a hunger for aboriginal cuisines and indigenous street food culture. Tracking down local specialties with time-honoured traditions was his forte, from haggis to ceviche to sushi to smalahove (sheep's head) to banoffee pie.

Gary worked in the dining rooms as a steward on the Norwegian Royal Viking Sea luxury cruise lines, travelling to some of the most exotic ports with off-the-beaten-path itineraries. Passengers were primarily wealthy retirees. Royal Viking Sea built the ships for lengthier round-trip luxury trans-Atlantic excursions and prided itself on single-seating dining, allowing guests to arrive in the dining room unscheduled. High atop the bridge, a restaurant and glass-enclosed lounge provided magnificent panoramas.

Gary took pleasure in telling us how he was assigned to care for British performer Jean Alexander, who starred as Hilda Ogden, and a couple of well-known actresses from the British soap opera Coronation Street. The actresses were on hiatus and travelling together on this particular voyage.

Gary's penchant for sampling local delicacies and immersing his inquisitive palate in new flavours had included domesticated rats in China. Anecdotes about communist China's economic reforms and open-door policy, which allowed the easing of its borders and restrictions to Westerners, is a story he never tired of recounting. A too-blunt observation was Gary's strong suit, and if he could repulse you in the process, it was a bonus.

Gary would purchase tchotchkes and traditional crafts from ports of call, such as decorative, papier-mache Russian lacquer boxes hand-painted with iconic, highly detailed scenes from folk tales on shore excursions. In the mid-eighties, I retailed these decorative items in my shop, Not Just Antiques, on Talbot Street at the foot of Market Lane in London, Ontario.

He purchased a large handmade Peruvian tapestry made from dyed, woven alpaca wool in the village outside of Machu Picchu that hung in the dining room of my Proudfoot Lane apartment. He would later abandon it in a dispute with a landlord. A traditional woven wicker rooster with a removable head presides on my parent's kitchen island that he purchased in China. The rooster's body is the resting place for his cremation ashes which we brought back from Birmingham, England, after his funeral.

In 1992, with only my brother's previous address and a verbal commitment to contact him, I arrived in Southampton, England, unannounced. Aware that he had recently moved, sold his catering truck, separated from his partner Colin, and did not have a telephone, I put fate in my hands. We had spoken long-distance weeks after my grandmother died and during the sale of my restaurant, La Cucina on King, which I owned with my parents, and before I sold my Palace Street turn-of-the-century cottage. We talked vaguely about taking a trip to Izmir, Turkey, but were concerned about the politics and unrest. After hours of siege, I remember reading that an extremist mob set a hotel ablaze in Sivas, killing 37 people where Aziz Nesin, The Satanic Verses translator, resided.

Travelling on the early evening express from London-Waterloo to Southampton and disembarking from my compartment, I bumped into my brother. Gary was in London for the weekend and was returning home in the carriage next to mine. He descended onto the platform beside me at the precise moment I did. By any measure, it was a remarkable coincidence.

A month later, I booked an inexpensive flight on a small overloaded turbo-prop plane. Gary and I were soon crossing the English Channel in the middle of a sudden, severe thunder and lightning storm for a vacation at the seaside town of Benidorm just outside of Alicante in Spain. Benidorm is a fishing village that turned into a mega-resort dotted with skyscraper hotels, pristine white, sandy beaches, palm-lined boulevards and promenades with a mountainous skyline.

With my grandmother's small inheritance, I had underwritten this trip. Exhausted, Gary slept most of the holiday with a few brief forays into the old port town for a local specialty of memorable sea bream with capers cazuela. We left a glowing review of the restaurant at the hotel's front desk despite the hotel clerk's indifference.

Into the Spanish interior, we travelled by bus to a Tasca for over-priced tapas owned by what turned out to be a German ex-patriot. Gary's malaise concerned me, as we were planning on travelling up the coast to Barcelona to visit architect Antoni Gaudi's Sagrada Familia Basilica. He was exhausted and could barely summon the strength to get out of his hotel bed. And thinking about it, I realized he was depressed. I believe this was the beginning of his lengthy battle with HIV.

Months later, back in Southampton, England, working as a waiter in an upscale Italian restaurant where Pizza Margherita (a sad concoction of out-of-season tomatoes, sketchy mozzarella, basil, and olive oil) was at the pinnacle of popularity. In the wrong hands, it was unworthy of the Italian sobriquet. One night after my shift, standing in a telephone booth on a cold and rainy February night, my mother relayed long distance that my friend Catherine had been brutally murdered by her husband. Attempting to come to terms with the horror and barbarity of Catherine's shocking death made for an extended period of despair and grief, and outrage.

Gary saw a posting for seasonal employment at La Sablonnerie, a 16th-century inn on the remote island of Sark in the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy that was agriculturally self-sufficient. A customer at the restaurant had told me about Sark's limitless seafood supply and the island's sustainable ethos. At the time, my brother and I were both devotees of the book, The Road Less Travelled, and the island of Sark, the last bastion of feudalism in Europe with a population of 600 residents, appealed to our adventurous natures and curiosity. Sark, long considered a hideaway from the stress of contemporary life, with its prohibition on cars, no airport or hospital, and a lack of modern-day tourism infrastructure combined, with its status as the last feudal outpost in Europe, beckoned.

Instead of cars, there were tractors, a ubiquity of rusty bicycles, and an assortment of carriages and carts for horse-drawn transport. Sark was once entirely Norman French, still evidenced everywhere on the island. Some older residents still spoke Sercquiais, a disappearing patois of Norman French that differs between Great Sark and Little Sark.

The day after Easter Sunday, we arrived by ferry from Guernsey to Sark's tiny Cruex harbour pier, a tower-like rocky outcrop. A narrow road accesses the harbour, surrounded by a jagged coastline with steep perpendicular cliffs through a 200-foot tunnel within the cliff face. We were greeted warmly by a resident holding a sign with our surname. He was the driver of a vintage horse-drawn barouche that our employer, Elizabeth Perrée, sent to take us to our cottage lodgings. The cottage's former thatch-covered roofs had been replaced with overlapping pantiles, as they were always at risk from fires.

We wound our way along the country lanes and marvelled at the daffodils, hyacinths, tulips, and other spring flowers already out in a blaze of spring hues. The driver took us down the tree-lined main avenue, past a sparse collection of essential merchants and low-built, white-washed stone cottages continuing down dirt roads to the interior pastoral countryside.

The hedgerows, cliff paths, valleys, and meadows possess a rich abundance of bluebells, primroses, dog violets, and celandines and are well-suited to sheep, rabbits and woodcock. Small shrubs of yellow-flowered gorse blooming on the windswept cliff sides, and the distinctive sweet scent of coconut and good vanilla was all-pervading on this crisp, sunshiny day. Soon we were heading towards the breathtaking isthmus, Le Coupée, which connects Great Sark to Little Sark. It towers above sea level on a plateau above its jagged cliff face. Sark, an island, is two islands connected by a razor-thin strip of land. There is a 260-foot precipice with a vertiginous drop on the left side of La Coupée, affording a dramatic view of Convanche Bay. To the right lies the expanse of La Grande Gréve Bay, accessed by the north end of La Coupée by climbing down a 100-meter cliff pathway with steps cut into the rock. When the tide is out, Gréve becomes a vast beach of golden sand and crystal clear water with cauldron-shaped rock pools, caves, and arches that we would spend many hours exploring.