Wednesday, July 07, 2004
Meeting the Neighbors
One of my many wonderful birthday gifts this year (months past, you totally missed it, TYVM) was a gift certificate to a dive shop. I’ve been treating my visit there to redeem it as, effectively, part of my upcoming vacation in tropical paradise. Kel and I went last weekend and I got a high-tech snorkle and some flippers and an underwater flashlight, because in three weeks we’ll be living next door to the sea with fish, dolphins and giant turtles filing a lagoon around which we will revel for a week.
Anticipating this little shopping trip in anticipation of the big vacation, I was reminded of Negril, where Kel and I vacationed after getting married (to each other). Our resort was a series of thatched huts perched on cliffs at the island’s western tip. There were some things about the place that weren’t perfect, but location wasn’t one of them. Our front door opened onto a small concrete patio that fronted the edge of the seacliff. As soon as we arrived we dumped our bags on the bed, got into our natation costumes, and hauled booty down steps carved into the stone cliff to a protected bathing lagoon. The water was clear and very blue, the sort of color that ony looks real in person and must, for purposes of emotional reconciliation, be considered impossible at all other times. Sunlight glinted off its purled surface with a perpendicularity that felt both natural and bizarre.
We’d had a long voyage to that point, planning a wedding on our own from 3000 miles away with very little guidance and no internet or email, then surviving the damn thing, roadtripping with a carful of friends to Philly where we had one night in a luxury hotel and then taking our flight to ja’mon-land… now that we were there, the place was palpably foreign and felt a bit unfriendly. But we had made it. The wedding was over; the honeymoon could finally begin. We just wanted to wash away a year or so of tension and stress, to immerse ourselves in the present. Floating in that crystal bay, strolling through chest-high water warm enough to poach an egg, I felt vitality creep back from my core to my soaking skin. All was well, and I was at one with it.
The next day we rented snorkel gear from the resort - fins, a mask, the works. I suited up and waded back into my private lagoon with the other pasty tourists, unweildy feet flapping in the shallows; I doused the inside of my mask with seawater and strapped it to my face, the soft rubber conforming to my brow and cheeks; I fit the snorkel in my mouth, wrapped my lips in and gripped the presumably sanitized bit with my teeth, my breath suddenly deep in my throat, a literal column of air which I pumped in and out in a now-patently-mechanical way. Finally I was ready to roll forward into the blue depths of the shallow sea. The water welcomed me, but I discovered instantly that I was far from alone in it, was anything but its master.
The water in which I had blindly waded the day before was suddenly richly populated with living things in startling variety and profusion. Fish swam everywhere and came clad in shimmering scales of unimaginable brilliance, each looking as if it were glowing with its own vital energy. Anenomes waved in the current, blue and red and yellow and colors with which I remain unfamiliar. Coral and urchins and starfish coated the seabed beneath me and I don’t even have names for what else now stood unveiled in the azure sea I’d invaded. My private bath seethed beneath its surface with beings I’d completely overlooked the day before. My eyes bulged against the glass wall of my goggles as I floated over this incredible world through which I’d stamped, thoughtless, insensate, just the day before. And as I sucked my air through my tube and tried to perceive what had materialized before me, I asked myself: How could I have been here, and missed all of this?