my life to live

In less than two months, I will be visiting the island of Roatan in Honduras.

Tell me what you know about Honduras, Roatan, and/or diving for people who’ve never dived before

O Pioneers!

Drummond Island

When I was 10, my father took my sister and I on a two-week trip around Lake Michigan, stopping in Mackinac Island for five days about halfway through. This trip did wondrous things for my appetite and my constitution. As a very young girl in Texas, I’d spent every day outside; after relocating to a sketchier neighborhood in Illinois, my mother was loathe to allow me to venture out of doors without supervision. In a short two years, I’d become the very definition of a bookish indoor child.

The Michigan trip changed all that. My father, my sister, and I roamed through every historical site we came across; we rode tandem bicycles around Mackinac; we flew kites on the lawn of our resort; we scrambled over rock formations; we cycled through a forest somewhere in the Upper Peninsula. One morning in Mackinac, I awoke at 6am, and took it upon myself to quietly slip out of our hotel room and down to the pebbly shore to watch the sun rise, then quietly slip back. The combined feeling of total autonymy and the deep connection with the earth was powerful; I wore its glow the whole day like a Renaissance saint carries its painted corona.

This trip would prepare me for a considerably more rugged two-week excursion the next summer, when we were invited to a family friend’s cabin on a remote private island in Lake Huron. To get to Espanor Island, you had to drive up to the very tip of the Upper Peninsula, take a ferry to Drummond Island, then take a jetboat to a little wooden pier. I both loved and hated Espanor. It had no plumbing or electricity, so we usually took baths in the lake—which I liked—but had to contend with a scary, pitch-black, fly-ridden outhouse in the middle of the night. The weather was satisfyingly damp and overcast the whole time, so many afternoons were spent reading strange old books by gas lamp in our rooms or on a screened-in porch. I wandered the many forest paths during non-rainy afternoons, sometimes coming across awesome surprises, like a labyrinth of silent fallen pines. In the evenings, we would light smoky fires in the great stone hearth of the lodge and dine on venison or fish. My favorite memory of the trip was making the walk around the island all by myself! True, it was only 1 mile around—but I had done it by myself.

I’ve never talked about it with him, but I’d like to think that my dad cherishes the memories of these trips at least as much as I do. Because we took these trips when he was still our Daddy and we were still his Little Girls. It was, at least for me, the last summer before boys, before adolescence, before angst, before staying out too late, before learning to curse, before teenage tantrums. It was that magical lull in childhood: when a trip to the science museum was more fun than any homecoming dance; when libraries held more treasures than the mall; when independence didn’t mean car keys or cell phones, but a bike and an open wooded dirt path winding before you.

Memory #5: Life Is Like Jazz

August 2, 2007 ·

Sitting in our favorite Ft. Myers establishment, a Mediterranean beatnik cave called the Orpheus. The previous year we’d befriended the owner, an aging Greek man with a pointy face that masked his warm nature. Last spring we had capered around the lonely bar with two hippy-dippy local boys, following them like the Pied Piper from the beach to here to their trailer. They swayed and dipped and twirled with their guitars the whole way, their voices lilting into the heavy night air. Last night I had ended up on the stage with a reggae band, cajoled into singing Jimmy Cliff for the five people in the restaurant. I can tell you are a singer, twinkled one of the musicians when I had initially protested. I can hear it in your voice.

But tonight we were joined by a lively crowd in our beloved Orpheus. Between us and the live jazz band is a particularly rowdy family, among them a gawky girl-woman who could be a teenager or in her thirties. She is tall and whippet-thin in a white crocheted sweater and loose linen pants. Her heavy auburn bob is swinging and hitting her diamond-sharp cheekbones as she jerks back and forth with howls of laughter. She draws the attention, good and bad, of all the other patrons as they dine on their gourmet pizza. “What is wrong with her,” whispers one of my friends disapprovingly. We silently nod, half-agreeing with her unvoiced opinion of our fellow diner.

Then the trumpeter on stage is beckoning to someone in the audience, laughing and extending his arm. The audience follows his gaze and turns to see to whom he is speaking. The girl-woman shrieks with giggles and shakes her head emphatically, then crumples up her napkin and throws it on the table. She lopes on up to the stage, confidently takes the mic, and then as the band begins to play, she opens her mouth.

It’s like swaths of velvet floating out from the stage and over the audience, gently billowing over their heads before settling upon them, velvet the color of a day on the sand in the sunlight, of having too much wine, of your lover’s sleeping face by candlelight. And then she is no longer a girl-woman, but so obviously a woman, the kind of woman whose presence so bluntly reminds your 20-year-old spring-breaking self that you are really just a girl still, and that for you, womanhood still remains nebulously out of reach.

This is a photo of Mal Pais, Costa Rica, where I had the good fortune to visit during my week-long trip. It is one of the most stunning places I have ever visited: seemingly miles upon miles of pale sands in either direction, and before you, seemingly miles upon miles of warm, waist-high waters and faithfully rolling waves. Other elements add to its mystique: it’s a well-known enclave among the surfing community, so its beaches and dusty cafes are peopled with denizens from all over the world. Despite the myriad far-flung locales from which they hail, everyone here seems to have assumed the same ambiguous ethnicity—everyone’s skin turned to the same glossy, evenly hued copper (there are no sunburns here) and everyone’s wind-tossed ropy locks streaked with shades of gold and straw. You can watch these people for hours—calmly dining on spaghetti at outdoor tables, silently gazing at the waves from atop their 4WD aeries parked among the palms, resting on their surfboards before braving the steady current yet again—and never guess at how long they’ve been there or how long they plan to stay. This curious quality of having no past or no future makes one consider them more a natural part of the landscape, like native flora or fauna, than actual human beings. Furthermore, to reach Mal Pais (the mal is not in the name for no good reason), one must gamely venture through a jolting, jostling ride more suited to an SUV commercial on TV. The gorgeous vistas, the exotic population, and the remote location all combine to give the visitor a very distinct feeling of being at an otherwordly Eden at the edge of the Earth.

It so happens that there are many of these kinds of villages in Costa Rica: multicultural Love Parade hippie settlements where it is always summertime and the living is easy. In Costa rica, they call this Pura Vida, but it’s not unique to the country. In fact, there are places like this all over the world, sometimes inhabited by native citizens but usually with those who have decided to pick up and go. Perhaps they are starting a new life; maybe they are in between lives—it never matters.

What matters is this. Immersed in the waves at Mal Pais, I quickly remembered a basic lesson for anyone who has ever gamboled among powerful waves: give yourself up to the current, and you are more likely to conserve energy and get to where you want to go. In other words, surrender to nature. This is the exact opposite of what we as humans always do; in fact, the most defining characteristic of the human struggle is, well, the struggle. The struggle to swim against the current (see what I did there?), to play God, to stop time. We pump our skin full of chemicals to freeze the aging process and we devote thousands upon millions of dollars to innovations that allow us to do stronger, better, faster, harder what nature itself cannot.

In Mal Pais, rocked gently to and fro by the waves, I gathered my thoughts. I was not grinding my teeth at night. The only time I felt exhausted was before bed. The tropical heat was, surprisingly, not burdensome. I got to watch the sun rise and set every day, and those were not the sole times each day that I saw it. I was eating food that had been grown from the soil. Bathed in sunlight and lapped by saltwater, I thought to myself that the ocean current was rather like the heartbeat of the earth, and here in this little country flanked by ocean, they must be feeling it a little more acutely than those of us sequestered in our inland cities.

And even when I climbed out of the womb of the ocean, dried off, and made the perilous drive back to our rickety Montezuma hotel, I still felt that pulse. And even when I washed the sand out of my hair, took my clothes from where they were drying on the hooks and on the railing outside, and helped pack up the car, I still felt it. And even when the green mountain towns, shrouded in low-hanging cloud, turned into the lights of the city, I still felt it. I felt it as we pulled away in the airplane, and it was only when we touched down in the cold gray rain of Newark did I finally begin to feel its beat ebb and fade.

Yesterday I woke up in Costa Rica. Today I woke up in Philadelphia. Already my nose is sniffling again, my joints aching, my jaw tight from being clenched all night. Outside the sky is a whitish-grey—I know this not because I can see it from my window, but because of the bit of light that ekes its way in. Soon I will have to get out of bed and face the day. But I don’t want to wash these seawater kinks out of my hair, don’t want to trade my flip flops for rainboots, don’t want to put on moisturizer and makeup instead of aloe and sunblock…

Au revoir!

I’m leaving for Costa Rica for the week. Things possibly in store:

ziplining through the cloud forest
touring cheese factories and coffee farms
lounging in thermal springs
driving in a 4x4 down the Pacific coast
baking on the beach
attempting surfing
horseback riding
hiking through the rainforest
swimming in waterfalls
yoga every day

Unfortunately—or fortunately!—things definitely not in store include blogging, email, and cell phone usage. I most likely will have zero access to the ‘net during this time. But I do plan on taking plenty of pictures, and I also purchased a Moleskine (just to keep it extra “white people”). Gonna try my hand at this “writing on paper” thing.