Club Korsakoff, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (Jul 2005)

Urban pathways become so familiar so quickly, and I am threading my way along canals and down alleys through my favorite neighborhood in picturesque Amsterdam, the Jordaan. I’ve whiled away many an afternoon meandering through the junk shops and cafes of this district, scurrying from sudden showers and basking in alternate sunlight, but tonight my mission is different. I’m going out, to be social and around people, not going out to be out in the city but in my own head. Club Korsakoff, I was here last week and I haven’t been going out much really, have been in my own head more than out of it but I am winding down my little sabbatical here, my brief meditation on writing, I am frankly sick of the sound of my own voice echoing in my head and pouring onto my computer telling me stories about myself, in some ways I feel like I’ve been talking nonstop for three weeks except mostly it doesn’t get outside of the closed loop of my mind and the laptop, and I would like to hear someone else’s stories for a change or at least make a new one.

Along the canal and the walkway is narrow, I am piloting a monster of a bicycle alongside the rilling yet doubtlessly filthy water. I haven’t ridden the bike very much, trusting my feet more in the patchworked web of pedestrian, bicycle, tram, and car traffic and the bikes are by far the most terrifying, the Dutch are masters of pedal-powered locomotion and traffic rules are suggestions only, and weak ones at that. There are fewer people out tonight though, and it is about time I added my tributary to the delta of bikes flowing concurrent with the canals. I find the size of this one almost comforting, a heavyweight hunk of metal that is slow to start but once rolling near unstoppable, something that maybe shouldn’t be comforting but is, I like the massiness of it. Right down the last narrow cobblestoned corridor, and I reel to a halt and lock up my banana-colored bike, adjust my skirt and walk through the battered door painted flat black.

Inside I’m immediately engulfed in a cloud of chemical fog and a textured wall of sound, a sensory shock after the quiet of the night outside. I nod to the bouncer with the uncertain smile of one who can’t respond in Dutch if he chooses to question me, I wouldn’t even be able to understand the question. He nods back slightly, stoic, and I’ve passed the gatekeeper and push into the wall of hazy smoke to the bar. It’s not particularly crowded, and that’s a relief, there is room to move and breathe, if you can pretend the thick combination of artificial fog and cigarette smoke is beneficial to breathe. I give my uncertain smile to the bartender, he asks me something and I just point to one of the taps, I don’t even know what it is but with the twin barriers of language and noise I am just going to have to trust him. He turns out to be trustworthy, and I turn and lean my back gently against the bar rail, almost cuddling my drink, a prop to hide behind if necessary, and look around for the first time, I find I prefer to give everyone else a chance to ‘see’ me first if that’s what they want to do before I turn my attention to the constantly mutating social constellation, that way nobody has to get busted checking someone out, giving them the initial two second evaluation.

They are here, the gaggle of younger club kids I met last week, they’ve seen me and they are so happy to see me again, their exotic foreign friend, although I can’t imagine I’m that exotic I’m only an American. They are all younger than me, late teens or twenty-young, and it’s ridiculous probably but I do feel older, wiser, more experienced and cosmopolitan, all this despite my constant self-awareness as really nothing more than a small town girl from rural North Carolina who has somehow managed to stumble her way across the ocean to get here.

We greet each other with exaggerated joy, overdone hugs and a fake kiss on the cheek as if we think for a moment that we’re French and can get away with that without being pretentious. We talk, and laugh, and giggle, half the conversation lost in a swirl of sound and abrupt entrances and exits from the conversation as people hit the dance floor and then return, sweaty and smiling, it doesn’t actually matter if we can understand each other that’s not the point really. I slide into back into my social persona, a bit rusty since I haven’t been doing this regularly for a while, it’s a face that started to fit all too well when I was being aggressively outgoing in Seattle every night of the week. It’s a frivolous place, and it is appropriate to be frivolous people here, and I am smiling and laughing easily, my face mobile and expressive with ironic amusement, every gesture and expression slightly outsized to push through the sound and the dimness and let’s not forget the tequila, there is round after round of tequila and I participate in the first one but then try to demur, the impeccably gothed out girl who seems to be the social alpha won’t let me, she insists, I explain that I rode my bike here this time and I will have to get it back, and what she doesn’t understand is that if I keep drinking like this I will ride it straight into the canal, “We will pull you out,” she laughs back at me, we are friends at least for tonight, for tonight I have been fully embraced as part of their community, a mascot almost.

I didn’t mean to stay this long, but somehow the night has slid away and it is 4am and the music is fading out and the lights are coming up, you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here, and we spill out of the battered black door and scatter to unlock our bikes. I am privately planning to walk this bike home, I go to say goodbye but it’s not time for goodbyes yet this night isn’t over quite yet, there’s a bakery a few blocks away that will open at 5am and I am dragooned into the joining the cavalcade, I say dragooned but it’s not as if I’m resisting too much I don’t really want to go home yet either if we can keep this groove going a little longer.

I am walking my bike and they are all walking theirs as well, a silent concession to the drunk American gal, over the next few blocks different members of this group of five or so people drop back to talk with me, a rotation almost, and now here we are at the bakery but it’s not open yet, it’s not 5 am quite yet so we drop our bikes or lean them against the wall, not bothering to lock them up we’re the only people out here anyway. We sit down on the sidewalk and never mind the elaborate club outfits, who cares it’s the end of the night and the judgment is over. I lean over and rest my head on Yuri’s shoulder, the goth girl strokes my hair and we are still chatting but slowly, lazily, energy oozing into this odd cuddle puddle on a Dutch sidewalk in the Jordaan.

The light comes on inside and the ovens are firing up, we rouse ourselves and knock on the window, not yet, they need a few minutes to get the croissants going. I don’t stand up yet, Thomas is taking point on this transaction and I am going to lounge here on the sidewalk until my fresh croissant magically appears. It doesn’t take too long, and maybe time is elastic too, I’m not in a hurry or waiting for anything, this night has already been lovely beyond my expectations and anything further is a bonus, extra credit, and there is a warm, flaky, perfect pastry in my hands, butter still moist in the dough as the sun starts struggling up in the east.

Volcano Surfing at Cerro Negro, Nicaragua (Nov 2007)

“Maybe we should have stayed at this hostel instead,” I mutter as we walk into the Bigfoot Hostel. It’s a bit grubbier than our newfound homebase in Leon, but has a much compensatory social vibe that is definitely lacking in our Hostel of Silence, the Lazybones on the other side of the old town. Too late now and we’re only staying one night in this town, Leia left the beach yesterday and established our bulkhead in this city while Melissa and I stayed to soak up hammock-y sunshine and take surfing lessons, an endeavor which as usual ended with me spat out on the beach coughing up saltwater. It was good that Leia left a day early though, good I think for all of us, this trip has involved a lot of tension amongst travelers and it was nice for Melissa and I to have a day when we weren’t worried about somehow offending Leia, and good too for Leia to have a day when she navigated herself around Nicaragua all alone, building some confidence as a third world backpacker. It’s always frightening the first time you’re on your own with nothing but a backpack on a dirty bus, heading to a town you’ve never set foot in where you don’t speak the language, but she seems to have done just fine, booked us into the agreed-upon hostel and has also reserved our spots on the volcano surfing tour. We didn’t know it but if she hadn’t been here the day before we wouldn’t have been able to go today and today is the only day available, so victory all around and we have arrived at the appointed time in the lobby of the Bigfoot Hostel.

Melissa has bowed out, she is feeling too sunburnt and tired from our surfing endeavors to tackle the mountain, so it is just Leia and I and the tension has simmered down, that day of space really helped and I am hopeful that maybe we can end this trip as friends after all. The lobby is crowded, a milling group of tourists from a variety of first world countries, we’ve got Aussies and Americans and Germans and Brits, all lined up and ready to go do something exquisitely dumb. There’s a placard on an easel with a few pictures of the mountain and a description of what we are about to do, “after an easy 40 minute walk up the mountain” as the placard describes it, we will “surf down the slope of volcanic shale at speeds up to 75 kilometers per hour.” We are advised to bring at least two liters of water each, and that we have, maybe this will be the one freakin’ time I don’t end up dehydrated and panting on the side of a Latin American mountain and out of water.

Our guides are Australians, they are the ones who pioneered this activity. We are subject to a brief orientation prior to climbing into the truck, Cerro Negro is the youngest volcano in the world, appearing in the middle of a cornfield about a hundred years ago, erupting out of fertile farmland and growing quickly to a height of about a kilometer before settling in to smolder menacingly. Australians being the second-craziest group of travelers in the world (the first being the Kiwis), they naturally saw the mountain and thought, “I must surf that pile of geologically unstable rock and ash! How fast can we go??” It is actually more like sledding than surfing, but surfing sounds cooler so we are going with that.

Into the back of the truck, ten or twelve of us crammed onto hard benches and we rumble out of town, a pickup with a payload of multinational gringos. We will drive for about an hour, we were told, and the weather is perfect despite being in the tail end of the rainy season, the air is warm and soft and we are traversing through increasingly rural roads, turning off the highway onto dirt track branching off of dirt track through lush, verdant countryside and crop fields. Little kids run out of things that I can’t really call houses, more shacks or hovels, waving and shouting as they chase the truck and we are all smiling back, big grins you kind of can’t help it. We all laugh, what must the locals think of this truckload of tourists going up to the mountain to do their damnedest to kill themselves in new and creative ways? Life isn’t challenging enough for us, waking and working and caring for land and children and relatives day after day, we are jaded and spoiled and we seek the thrills of life in ever more outlandish fashion.

We stop at the entrance to the park, or conservation station, it is a little unclear whether we are paying an official fee or an unofficial bribe, the line is always blurry down here, one thing is certain though we are going to pay somebody for the privilege of our suicidal adventure. We are waiting for a while there, the reasons again not exactly clear, this also something to be expected in this part of the world, and we can see the mountain now looming sternly above us, a cone of black rock harsh and devoid of any gentling vegetation, it looks like something out of the Lord of the Rings, we are entering Mordor. We can see the storm clouds coming across as well, not impeding the blazing sun yet but we are worried because we need to beat the rain, we can’t do this in the rain.

Back in the truck with still no explanation of our pause there, explanations are things you learn to let go of. We approach the mountain, curving around it’s flanks, and our guide points out the steep slope that we will be going down, good god that’s intimidating, I know the angle looks much more intense than it actually probably is, magnified and distorted by my disbelief that I am actually going to throw myself down it towards the rocks below.

Final disembarkation. Out of the truck and our guide, the absurdly athletic blonde woman, distributes a bundled plastic grocery bag to each of us, this contains our protective jumpsuit and goggles. She starts pulling sleds off the top of the truck and we each get one of these as well, it’s about four feet long by two feet wide, with metal sheeting on the bottom. It’s not terribly heavy, probably just a few kilos, but its awkward as hell to manage, there’s no good way to carry this thing, and the fact that we are carrying our gear up the mountain is news to me although there’s no reason that it should be, perhaps in the back of my mind I temporarily forgot that I was doing Something Unsafe in Nicaragua rather than visiting a sanitized ski resort type of place, somewhere with a lodge at the bottom of the mountain and little gondolas to take me to the top, I had vaguely thought that maybe they kept the sleds stashed on the mountain but as it’s volcanically active and could erupt at any moment that wouldn’t make much sense now would it?

We start off towards the trail, picking our way through boulders of pumice. No tree cover and the sun is hot on our skin, the heat absorbing too into the black rock surrounding us and radiating back from all sides. We are moving fairly quickly and the slope isn’t steep yet, we are winding our way around the base first to access the trailhead, this is the easy part of the hike but it’s a lot less easy in the glaring heat, awkwardly toting my sled and bag of gear while concentrating on placing my feet on a relatively solid surface, this is less of a path and more of a goat trail really, the faintest of indications that this route may actually get you up to the top without confronting a sheer cliff face. Leia and I fall behind quickly, we are panting and sweating and taking water breaks after ten minutes. There’s a German girl back at our pace too, we are letting the testosterone-filled guys rush ahead with the crazy Australian guide and we all agree that we will not be pressured to meet an unreasonable pace, we will not feel judged we will get up this mountain all in good time and never mind the clouds coming in, I actually kind of want the clouds to come because some shade would be nice. We continue up and I can’t help but think of that Biblical quote that I am paraphrasing in my head, something about not finding shelter under the tree nor the rock, wherever that sinner was it probably looked something like this.

We catch up to the rest of the group, they’re waiting for us. Our guide explains that we have completed the easy part and the next portion of our ascent is the steepest, probably on ten or fifteen minutes but to be careful, they haven’t done as much maintenance on the path as they should have since the last time the volcano rumbled its rocks into redistributed patterns. She sets off again, disturbingly muscled thighs pumping in quick rhythm up and around the shoulder of the mountain and we trail after, coming around the corner to see a steep drop off to the right and how did we get so high already, Leia and I are leapfrogging each other as we take frequent breaks and the even the German girl has pulled ahead of us, I am going very slowly I will not be rushed and I am incredibly grateful that I packed my heavy boots after all, the leather strapped and laced around my ankles all the way up my calves is probably the only thing that has prevented two sprained ankles so far because these rocks are unstable, and there isn’t even anything pretending to be a path anymore just a pile of rubble to climb over with a menacing slope of horse sized boulders to the right and this stupid sled under my arm or the best way to carry it really to balance the weight is to sling it on my back and use both arms up over my head and down again to hold it center but then I can’t use my hands to balance or catch myself if I trip and I’m not sure I can do this, I’m not sure I can make it up this mountain the group is far ahead now so much higher so quickly and my foot comes down on a rock and it shifts and I stagger sideways a step and there is just barely even a steps worth of stagger room before I’d go off the edge here, tumbling down and over and there are no bushes or trees to soften the slope I don’t go over but I cry out, I am shaking now trembling and I can’t go on I can’t go up but I can’t go back down either I sink down to the ground I want to lay down and press my body to the most stable surface I can find and grip every point of contact possible, the grit is digging into my knees and I am all the way down now and still clutching my sled for some reason and I can’t do this, I can’t do this.

Leia is several feet above me, she turns and sees me crouched down on the path, I’m crying now and I hate crying and I especially hate anyone else seeing me cry, especially Leia who I haven’t been getting along with and especially that group of strangers further up the mountain who are just starting to realize that something has gone very wrong back here but we are down a lot closer to the bone that any pretense of toughness or competence because I’M SCARED and I’M CLUMSY ANYWAY and WHAT THE HELL I AM DOING SCRAMBLING UP A MOUNTAIN WITH A SLED and I am not moving from here I am not, I’m safe here right now with my hands clenched into the gravel holding onto this mountain as if there is some centripetal force trying to fling me off the globe spinning faster and faster but I am holding on here.

Leia puts her sled down and begins carefully picking her way down the path, this path was never meant for descent because everyone goes up this way and goes down on the other side on the sled, there is a part of my brain that is still coherent, a small place very small indeed that is separate from the wordless scream of panic that has taken over my mind and body and that part is amazed that she is coming back, it’s not like Leia’s much more physically competent than I am in fact she’s actually in much worse shape and has even less experience with this kind of thing, isn’t she afraid that she’ll teeter and topple over the edge? Her arms are out for careful balance, that helps this sled is a huge part of the problem but that’s all academic anyway because I am never moving again, sled or no.

She stumbles a little as she reaches me, rights herself and crouches down and only now that there are ears to hear it close by do I realize that strange sound I’ve been ignoring is me, nononononononononoicanticantiwontnonononononocantcantcantcantcantwontNO, that is all buzzing out of my mouth without punctuation or breath through the hitching sobs spasming through my core. She pulls my face up to meet her eyes, tells me to breathe and I do, I take my first breath that I can remember since this began but I guess I must have been breathing thank god for instincts. “Another one,” she commands, she’s holding my gaze and won’t let me hide, won’t let me bury my face back into the ground, and I take another breath, deeper this time, and now I’m breathing so I can’t make that sound anymore, I am still shaking but it’s subsiding a little bit. The first thing I say on purpose, “I’m not going up,” and she asks me if I want her to come back down with me, “I ca-ca-can’t go down,” the sobs stuttering through my words and “Keep breathing,” she’s not going to let me slide back down into panic. Each breath is a like a solid brick of air that I am forcing down past my teeth and tongue, scraping raw and solid against my throat, choking me but I know I need it. Our guide appears behind Leia, she has left the group up at the top and come back down here to see if she can help. She’s going to take the sleds, both of them in all of her freakish fitness but to be a little bit fair to us she built this path, some path but she climbs this mountain twice a day. She checks with Leia, will she be able to get me up the path, it’s only a little further up the rough patch and then we’re at the top. Leia says yes, I want to say no way, uh uh, but my input has not been requested.

“We’ll do it together,” she grips my hand firmly and I’m not entirely sure how she got me to let go of the ground but I am holding her hand now just as hard as I was holding the mountain. “We’ll go as slow as we need to, they can wait for us.” She pulls me up to a crouch, I put my hands out and slowly rise on trembling legs. We take the first step and my foot wobbles, I immediately sink back down on my heels. “It’s okay, that was our first step. Now we’ll take the next one.” And we do.

Time has warped and stretched with the elasticity that panic gives it, so I don’t know how long it takes us to get to the top. When we do, I’m surprised to see it only took us about 45 minutes to climb from the base to the caldera, “easy walk” my ass and I am angry now, so angry why weren’t they honest who could call this easy? I’ve stopped crying and everyone is looking at me with nervous smiles, I nod with embarrassment that I am fine, really. The group is going down into the caldera to check out the smoking vents of sulphur, a steep path down and then back up and you know what I’m gonna pass on that one, Leia stays with me while I keep breathing, sitting on a rock and looking out finally, looking beyond the next step and the landscape beneath us is absolutely stunning, a breathtaking expanse of rolling fields with occasional trees dotting it, it looks exactly like I imagine the African veldt looks like from the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, we are here on the highest ground for miles and miles and far off in the distance we can see other volcanic peaks rising in the clouds. I halfway expect to see a great herd of gnus crossing the plains but we are not in Africa we are in Nicaragua, and looking at something else has made me forget for a few minutes how scared I am. The group comes back, apparently we missed out the caldera was “so cool” but I am entirely comfortable with missing the “so cool” caldera if it means I have avoided another panic attack.

We set off now around the rim, the path is about two meters wide maybe with a drop off the mountain on the left and a drop into the cone on the right. I’ve been dragging my sled but I can’t do that here because if it slips off to one side it will start to drop and pull me with it. The guide is worried about me, will I make it and I think so, I’m carrying the sled under one arm and then the wind comes up, making a sail out of the plywood and metal that I’m holding and without even a moments pause I sink to the ground. She thinks I’m panicking again but I’m not, or at least not yet, I have a little more control now and simply tell her that she needs to take the sled, maybe this makes me a total wuss but I don’t care anymore, there is really no coming back from that screaming crying bit so I am just going to do whatever it takes to get all the way through this experience and be damned proud of myself for doing it at all. I crawl a few feet further on the path before I have the courage to stand up, it’s just so frightening with my center of gravity that high and the wind and the narrow path but I make it around the edge.

There’s a wide flat space here, yards and yards of level ground and I unclench for real for the first time since we set out. We suit up, coveralls and heavy gloves and goggles to protect us from the abrasive flying gravel. The guide shows us the ‘surfing’ technique, it’s rather counterintuitive with one hand on the rope, body crouched on the board, and the other hand held up in front of your face, they’re experimented with different postures and determined that this odd configuration allows for the most speed and the fewest crashes. Technically our hands shouldn’t touch the ground at all, we are to use our feet for braking but they have also learned through experience that there’s no overcoming the instinct that kicks in when you start flying down the mountain to fling your free hand behind you to stop, thus the gloves. She says, “New rule today, the girls are going first,” she’s afraid that if we see the guys flying down the mountain we’ll never get on the boards, she is particularly convinced that I am going to be the problem and who can blame her, but I am strangely sanguine about this part of the experience. It’s like skiing, really, and I ski sometimes, not well but I do it, and even easier because I will be sitting down it is all about getting my center of gravity as low as possible and there are no cliff edges to fly off or trees to run into so I’m pretty comfortable with this.

Leia, on the other hand, while fine going up the mountain is terrified of going down. We do some practice runs, baby steps, and we decide that instead of one of us going first we will go down together, I wish we could ride together or I could hold her hand on the way down but that’s not possible on these sleds, I have some strength to give back here but no method to share it, she’s going to have to do it alone.

We push off and head down the slope simultaneously, and it’s actually both easy and underwhelming, I start slow and then try to build up some speed but as soon as I start moving with any kind of quickness I shift my weight, or something, the whole caboodle goes awry and I get dumped on the gravel, pick myself up and start down again trying to build momentum for that final sharp drop but damn butt in gravel again, I get down the mountain just fine but it wasn’t terribly thrilling, just sort of thrilling. Leia is still slowly winding her way down the slope, going slow slow slow on purpose and I can hear the occasional yelp of frightened delight, she eventually slides to a halt at the bottom and we regroup to watch the boys bullet down, crash landing with whoops of adrenaline. Last of all our guide comes down, she’s not on a sled but runs down the slope, just barely keeping her heels before her head. We have surfed the volcano and successfully outrun the clouds, the sun is setting now and we are all laughing together now and anticipating the mojitos that await us back at the hostel, clamber out of our jumpsuits and back into the truck and back through the bucolic landscape that we just saw from the top of the mountain, and a full moon is rising between the trees overhanging the road and the air is warm and soft and it is a perfect, perfect, beautiful night.

Leaving Utila, pt. 2 (Dec 2008)

We are pleasantly tired from the first dive, it is more strenuous than one would think to fin slowly through deep, cold waters, and this warmth the perfect follow up, my muscles all more relaxed than I thought possible. Dozing, but not really asleep just slowed… all… the… way… down. Our captain points at a spot about 15 meters in front of the boat, he’s identified the second group’s location underwater by the bubbles breaking on the surface of the waves, I can’t even see what’s he’s pointing at but then again I usually can’t, the other day he pointed out tiny jellyfishes by the boat and I couldn’t see those either. A few minutes later the more experienced divers emerge and climb aboard. It’s only mid-morning but we discuss whether we’d like our lunch break now or after the second dive, I am firmly voting for now but only inside my head, I’m enough of a drag on this group as it is and if the majority wills a second dive right away then I will suit up and get back in the water. It’s strange, actually, because I learned all about pressure groups and surface intervals and I thought we had to do the break in between dives rather than after but I guess we’re not really going deep enough for it to matter.

They are wriggling out of their gear and switching tanks, and I exult inside we have decided to break for lunch now and who cares that its so early. Kerry unties the boat from the buoy and we motor off across the shining water heading for the Cayes, two of the many small islands in satellite around Utila and the only two that are populated. I have been hearing about “burgers on the Cayes” for weeks, and also am eagerly anticipating the absence of those pernicious sand flies that taint every beach experience on Utila, any relaxation spiced with the tension of looking for those tiny dots on skin harbinging welts that will stay for weeks. Also, this means I can stay lolled out on the deck for a bit longer.

Ellie comes around to each of us and asks what we’re having, the options it seems are burger vs. cheeseburger with optional fries. I’m not quite clear on why she is so concerned about this while we’re still underway, and ask her if she is going to be our waitress, or if we are anticipating service from a roller skated girl at the dock. No, she is radioing our order in so that it will be ready when we arrive, a clever circumvention of island time, manana time when everyone is slowed… all… the… way… down.

We dock the boat and climb off, Kim and I following Ellie and Etienne they know where they’re going on a narrow concrete footpath between shoulder to shoulder clapboard houses which are adorned with the most garish of Christmas ornaments possible, cheap shiny garlands draped over tropical bushes as we pass by in our bikinis and swim trunks. We turn into a shack on the right, just before the bright yellow bridge that connects the two Cayes, this is the home of the famed burgers. We get our drinks, water or soda, and sit down as a long picnic table to await our pre-ordered burgers or cheeseburgers with optional fries. The table is a little too high, I could easily rest my head on the forearms without bending my back, and we make awkward small talk, Barry is holding forth on something or other, about some travel experience he had in Mexico, he is doing that traveler thing of one-upmanship although no one else is competing.

Our burgers arrive and they are not the juicy grilled piles of beef I have been anticipating, there are burgers everywhere on this island but not any good ones, at least it’s not charred and the fries aren’t drowning in grease, I will definitely not miss the food on the island I want to get back to New York where I can eat something other than bad hamburgers, greasy fries, and the occasional taco. Paying for our food takes another interminable interlude and I am newly glad that I decided to take the plane tomorrow morning rather than trying to rush back for the afternoon ferry, otherwise I would be anxiously tapping my bare heel on the concrete floor and watching the clock like the impatient New Yorker I have come here to stop being for a little while.

We thread our way back to the boat on the ribbon of concrete through the village, or hamlet, or whatever word is appropriate for a tiny island covered in shacks, back on the boat and on the Sting Ray Point. I am sunning myself on the aft dock again and considering skipping the second dive to stay here basking, I am not sure I want to fall back into the cold dark water when I could be up here but I am leaving tomorrow, this is my last chance, there are no more mananas left for me here so I suit up with everyone else, one by one we roll back off the boat and slowly sink below the surface.

I am more comfortable this time, breathing deeply and evenly, and there is less coral here too which makes me glad. Divers usually go to the coral because that is where the interesting reef fish live, your best chance to see something cool, but I am happier over the sand patches where I am not swimming in constant terror of bumping into the delicate, ancient organism and destroying it and everything is distorted and looks closer and bigger and I can’t see anything other than what’s directly in front of me and can’t feel what the fins are doing and when we’re in the reef I am convinced that I am killing the fish rather than observing them in some ecologically friendly way. Down to the sand patch then, slowly equalizing and adjusting the pressure in my ears, eyes wide open and aware, aware, trying to be aware of everything around me and also every miniscule adjustment in my body to being here underwater where this mammalian body has no business being. We are looking for rays in the sand but no luck again this time, we see a flounder and I like the flounders, they are so awkward and ungainly, like large amoebas on the ocean floor propelling themselves along with cilia just like things I looked at through a microscope in high school biology classes. Again, though, they’re common and therefore we swim on, seeking the rare fishes or rays and there are rumors that whale sharks have been sighted here before.

Down and around and back over to the coral wall, and I check my depth gauge and look up I can’t believe I’m 60 feet underwater and feeling totally fine with that. Etienne thinks he sees something and swims ahead and deeper than we are supposed to go, we follow equalizing every few feet keeping the pressure inside our bodies and ears in sync with the water pressing in on us. It was nothing and onwards, and barrel rolling again to see the water around me, the visibility is better here than on the last dive, the water a lighter blue, aquamarine which literally means “water blue” and no imagination required there, sometimes we have to use the obvious word because it is the only one that fits.

We play with the garden eels on the ocean floor for a little while, they look like strings floating up from the sand but they recede down into their holes when we approach, and then slowly seek their way back up when we back off. We watch for a little while and then flipper a wave through the water back at them and down they go again, it’s a little bit like playing with those roly-poly bugs, I don’t think I ever knew what they are really called they were always just roly-polys to me. No rays, no whale sharks, and we slowly ascend once again and that is the end of my last dive here on Utila, and it is bittersweet as I lay back in the sunshine on the aft deck for the last time trying to squeeze every second of bliss out of this possible, I am stocking up on sunshine to carry me through the cold winter I return to tomorrow. They guy whose name I forgot teases me about going home tomorrow, he just arrived and is looking forward to weeks of sunshine that I am already looking back on. He suggests that I stay longer, so do Ellie and Kim, it’s a suggestion I’ve bowed to over and over for the past week but no more, I have to go home I am out of time here.

Back into the lagoon and to the dive shop dock, we unload the boat and rinse our gear out with freshwater and put it all back neatly. Kim has something she wants to do this afternoon I’m not sure what, so we part ways, I grab my pack out of the office and head across the street to the dorms where I’ll be staying tonight, no hot water but then again the water heater in the apartment I left this morning had broken anyway, a suicide shower with electrified knobs that has given me a couple of unpleasant shocks in the past couple of days. I dump my bag on the only available bed and decide I will wait on my shower, I will soak up the heat of the day until the cold water feels good. I grab my book, not that I will really read it, it’s more of a prop than anything, make sure I have my cigarettes and stake my claim on the hammock on the porch overlooking the water. I have my iPhone as well so I put it on shuffle and relax back into the sunshine, sweat sheening my body, my book falling from my listless fingers.

There are new people in the dorm today, new arrivals just beginning their stay here, replacing the divers I met last week, Haley and Jes and Jay and Gareth are already gone as if they were never here and now there is a talkative German guy and Chris, a Finnish guy who joins me on the porch. He browses through my iPhone while we smoke, he asks me what I’m doing and I gesture languidly at the hammock and myself in it, “Nice,” he approves, this is what he has to look forward to. Within the first few minutes of conversation he is urging me to stay longer, he just met me and I’m leaving tomorrow morning, but that is the way these things go ships that pass in the night or travelers who pass in the sunshine, no point chatting or bonding with new people now I am leaving tomorrow.

The sun sinks through the clear sky and I sweating more but it is moving towards being a gorgeous sunset and I don’t want to abandon this tropical sun for even a few minutes to take a shower so I stay in the hammock, sweat cooling on my brow as we take pictures of the sun painting the clouds pink and red and of the local kids jumping off the dock, stunningly silhouetted against the blazing orange sky. There’s a sailboat out there on the horizon as well, it does not get more picture postcard than this and I stay on the porch until darkness descends entirely and the evening cool is coming in and it is time for that cold water shower now, I am going out for my last dinner tonight with Kim and Laura and maybe the German dude and his friend will join us.

We are all puttering around the beamed dorm room at various cross purposes, showering or unpacking or some people are studying their SCUBA course books that was me a week or two ago, and we trickle back out to the porch to decide where to go for dinner. I am running low on lempiras and refuse to go back to the bank, but I want a good seafood dinner tonight dammit, no more bad burgers or tacos. Kim doesn’t eat seafood though so she’s not inclined to follow my suggestion out to Chepes Beach and the Champas Bar, where a weathered French man cooks the most delicious seafood I’ve ever had in my life. We decide to walk towards Chepes, there’s an Indian restaurant that might be open tonight, and maybe Dave’s is open but we’re not sure, most restaurants are only open a few nights of the week and not in a way that makes much logical sense. Laura has joined us, she’s a British girl who’s staying over at the Iguana Center, I can’t remember now if I met her through Kim, or AJ, or Haley and Jes who have left already. The German guy is interested in coming with us, but he and his friend need to stop off and check email first, we tell him “Dave’s, or the Indian place, or maybe Champas if neither of those is open,” and of course we end up at La Piccolo which is none of those places but not to worry, it is a small island, we can all be reasonably confident that we’ll end up at TreeTanic.

La Piccolo is an Italian restaurant, but they have kingfish on the menu and it’s delicious. I don’t even know what kingfish is, I think it’s a local word for some other kind of fish that I might recognize, but whatever it is it’s really good. AJ has joined us as well, she’s the gal from Minnesota or Montana or somewhere Midwestern or Western that’s really cold right now, she was working at Coco Loco bar for two days and then quit, she met Kim traveling a few weeks ago and they’ve been hanging out since. Or maybe they met through Nif, the New Zealander who is on a two year backpacking tour of Central America, the purveyor of the pot brownies that have been decimating everyone nightly, but Nif left yesterday or maybe the day before and has left this fragile friendship as her legacy.

Leaving the restaurant, and we wander further up the road away from the dock, we are walking AJ home she has decided to pass on TreeTanic tonight. There’s some discussion amongst this group of girls whether or not we’re going out at all tonight, I am trying to be easy and laid-back and not insist but it is my last night here. We meander back, stopping to talk to the hippies selling jewelry across from Evelyn’s Grill, Kim is talking to the guy for a while so Laura and I grab a section of makeshift concrete curb and wait, trying to ignore the smell coming from the ditch, it wasn’t noticeable until we sat down but there’s nowhere else to sit and we’re rather tired. Kim’s done now, we are back at the crossroads and yes, we have finally determined that we are going to TreeTanic after all, all the discussion was a moot point really. We turn away from the ocean and walk up Cola de Mico road, turning in at the Jade Seahorse on the left just before the next intersection, after that the road goes onward up the hill towards the airport to Bar in the Bush which is the really rowdy late night bar, the one I’ve never been to because I am here on this island alone and it has a reputation for being unsafe for women alone.

TreeTanic is a different story though, and I’m not alone tonight. The bar is packed as we push up the narrow staircase after walking through the mosaiced garden, the bar is built in a treehouse to look like the prow of a ship wrecked amongst the boughs. This place is a fantasy of found art, every surface decorate with mosaic glass and encrusted with seahorses or maybe rubber toys found washed up on the beach and blown glass marbles, you could spend hours looking at a tiny part of this complex and its not tiny, with garden paths winding up to the cabanas and bridges flung over fountains. It’s a clear night, not raining at last, and we get beers at the bar and then find a bench to sit on. Kim’s not drinking, she has a deck of cards and proffers that as conversation falters. Laura asks me quietly if “Kim is always quiet like this,” I say no, she hasn’t seemed so, but I’ve only known her a few days so what do I know and is it so bad to be a little quiet some nights, really the social pace of making new acquaintance is somewhat exhausting from time to time. I am feeling social tonight for sure though, I am going to make the most of this because I have been often alone the previous weeks and I am ready to soak up this wild otherwordly ambience for the last time. I see Ellie and her husband, wave and squeeze over to their side of the bar, we dove together for two days there is some sort of bond. I chat with them for awhile, and with the other guy they’re talking to, Dave I think his name is. He introduces himself to me, not remembering that he has introduced himself to me three different times on a previous night, a night when he was much drunker than he is now. We tease him about that for a little while, and then I drift off, there is Etienne so I talk to him for a while, he shares the joke about using the SCUBA hand signals applied to drinking, left fist to right shoulder means “low on alcohol,” left hand making cross motion across throat means “out of alcohol,” pointing to your buddy’s bicep means “you are alcohol donor, we will share alcohol.”

The bar is filling up even more and I wend back over to Laura and Kim, they don’t look like they’re having a very good time. Kim is drinking with us now at least which is good, I am on my last drink based on the lempiras I have left in my pocket. We chat a bit and then Laura’s stalker shows up, she’s told us about this guy and we ran into him at Coco Loco the other night. He’s the other volunteer at the Iguana Center, a tallish chubby nondescript man with no social skills and he has been clinging barnacle-like to lovely, socially adept Laura, and it’s a small island its hard to avoid people. He hovers nearby, turns for a second and we quickly make a break for another table, squeezing our way into a corner with Chris our Finn friend, there is a little more room to breathe back in this corner and we are hidden from the stalker dude. Chris is talking to a couple who recently arrived, we are laughing and trading travel stories about different places, this girl talking about stocking up on illicit pharmaceuticals in Korea. Chris is flirting with me, or trying to I think, and keeps saying that he wishes I were staying longer, “Stay” this is what you say to people who are leaving the island, “stay” as if it matters, as if there won’t be someone new tomorrow, “stay” as if you won’t be leaving too and sooner rather than later, nobody stays forever.

I see Kim through the crowd, my dive instructor who managed to get me certified through sheer force of will, hers not mine, I was wondering if I would see her tonight to say goodbye, a goodbye obviously more meaningful to me than to her, she sees her students leave every day. I squeeze through and say hello, she is drinking from a plastic tumbler not a paper cup and I comment that it looks like the ones in my apartment, the apartment that isn’t mine anymore. She tells me that it’s a bar thing, tourists get the paper cups and residents get their drinks in these plastic tumblers. The residents being those who stay for months or maybe even a year, I wonder where the line is between tourist and resident because its not as if anyone is really going to stay here, and stay here, nobody stays forever but whichever way it slices there’s no doubt that I’m a tourist with my paper cup.

Lizzie, the bartender, rings the bell to get everyone’s attention—there’s a snorkel test tonight. Ahhh, that’s why its so crowded here, that and the beautiful skies here in the rainy season. Someone has completed their divemaster training, and after months of diving and practicing skills underwater and completing all the other tests and training tasks, the snorkel test is the last. The new divemaster, a girl I didn’t catch her name but she’s been diving with Cross Creek, is seated on a bar stool and fitted with her mask and snorkel. Lizzie takes a two liter Pepsi bottle which has been filled with some vile concoction of various liquors, shakes it up to uproarious cheers, and then funnels it into the snorkel. I can see the divemaster’s eyes wide open, she is swallowing as fast as she can and remember she can’t breathe through her nose it’s in the mask, Lizzie keeps pouring and about a minute later the girl spits out her snorkel, there is a groan of disapproval and she puts the mouthpiece back in and starts again, Lizzie keeps pouring and then the girl has had enough again, that bottle is still half-full but apparently this is sufficient alcohol guzzling to be considered as passing the snorkel test, another round of cheers and she takes off her mask, she is a Divemaster now. Lizzie is pouring from the bottle into open mouths around the bar, she offers it to me but I demur.

With no warning rain starts pouring out of the sky, tropical rain pounding down. It’s a treehouse bar, an open air bar, there’s little shelter to be had and this place is packed tonight, I cram under an eave with a huddle of strangers not sure what happened to Laura and Kim, or Etienne or Chris or the other Kim or Ellie or Dave. I am on the outer edge of the huddle and still getting somewhat wet, which is bad because this is my last set of vaguely clean clothes and I need to wear this on the plane tomorrow, I can’t get soaked I don’t have time to dry out again. The rain slackens after a few minutes, not stopping entirely but enough that I leave the safety of the eave to say goodnight to everyone, I have to get back while I still have some hope of staying dry enough to fly tomorrow.

I wave, and hug, and we all make awkward noises about staying in touch, and how of course I’ll come back to Utila but if I came back in a few months these people wouldn’t be here, not even the residents like Kim drinking out of her plastic cup because she’ll be gone by March, it will be new people arriving and leaving daily and we won’t keep in touch, we won’t see each other again, I won’t come back and we know it, people leaving every day and not coming back and so the hugs are perfunctory, each turning their attention back to the new people that are here today, new acquaintances with whom they’ll roll off the boat, and have dinner, and go to the beach, and watch snorkel tests at TreeTanic and I am leaving tomorrow morning. “Stay,” they say one more time, but their eyes are already looking past me and that’s fine, it is, I have done the same thing myself time and time again in different places around the world and I push carefully down the staircase and out into the road, walking under the bright moonlight back to the dorm, the rain is still holding back for my walk so I am successful. I stop at a tienda on the way back and have just enough lempira to grab one more beer, when I get back I sit on the porch, climb into the hammock one last time looking at the moon over the water and the skies cleared again like the rain never happened except my hair is still damp, my bag is packed and ready to go before dawn tomorrow, I am leaving Utila and its like I was never here at all but I had today, I had the sunshine and the water and the bliss and I will take that back with me, it will stay here but I am taking it with me too.

Leaving Utila, Honduras (Dec 2008)

Today is the culmination of the month that I have been on this island. I was meant to leave a week ago, I had planned to finish my dive course and then head back to the mainland to visit Copan for a couple of days before flying back to New York, but my dive course took longer than expected, and a few folks advised me that Copan was definitely missable if I’d already seen Tikal, which I have, and it is easy to stay here on this relaxed tropical island paradise microcosm. That was a few days ago, and then I was going to leave yesterday, I had sorted out all the ferry and bus schedules and determined that I would absolutely have to leave no later than yesterday on the afternoon ferry in order to catch the bus in La Ceiba to San Pedro Sula and then find some hostel to spend the night at before my flight leaves the day after, it is cutting it too close otherwise and I know Central American buses aren’t that reliable.

But then there are two dives scheduled tomorrow for the North Side and I’ve been wanting to dive the North Side since I arrived, if I’d managed to finish my class earlier then I would have gone last week but I didn’t, so we pull out the ferry schedules again and determine that if everything goes perfectly and the boat gets back on time that I can catch the afternoon ferry today but it will be one hell of a hustle but I should get to San Pedro Sula in time. So that is the plan, and I will have my last day of diving and then begin the re-entry with public bus transit across the chaotic mainland to a dangerous major city where I will arrive at night, that is the new plan I have bought myself a few more hours on the island but then when I add up all the costs of ferry, taxi, bus, taxi, hostel, taxi to airport it is only a few dollars shy of the plane fare if I take the morning plane tomorrow at six, but sometimes the flight gets cancelled and if it is I am really stuck and there is no way I’d make my flight but the weather is clear, and the island is idyllic and I don’t want to leave. I book my seat on the morning plane for tomorrow and voila I have bought myself a whole day longer here.

The boat is leaving early, at 7am. I pack up my backpack and leave the key to my apartment on the table, I won’t be coming back here tonight, and walk down the main street to my dive shop, I’ll leave the bag there and then move over to the dorm this afternoon. There’s no one here, I’m the early bird and I sit down on the porch swing to wait, I want this day to be perfect, it has to be perfect it is the last day of paradise for me and I have made a lot of possibly stupid choices to gain this experience for myself and today is the payload. The divemaster, Etienne, arrives, he is shaking sleep out as he unlocks the shop and a little concerned, too, because nobody is back by the dock, and most of the staff of Utila Water Sports signed up for this so if they are not here what does that say about the dive?

We can only go to the North Side if the weather is clear and there was an intense rain shower at around 6am, I am worried that maybe Kate rolled over in bed, opened an eye to the weather and made the call to cancel the boat. More divers show up but no staff, and Etienne can’t reach anyone so we are all waiting at the dock, we assemble our gear in optimism and all agree that the weather is definitely clear enough now and the captain will come, the captain will come, the captain has to come I need today.

Kerry, our captain for today, putt putts into the lagoon dock on a dinghy, ties up and steps onto the dock. We are on, we are going, we are not going to settle for some lesser dive today and maybe we will even see a whale shark, a dive boat saw one two days ago even though it’s not the season and maybe we will too, after all it is my last day here and the cosmos should definitely be aware of that and reward me with a whale shark.

Etienne has finally heard from the staff, they are all viciously hung over, they just stopped drinking an hour or two ago so the boat has a little more room on it than we expected although still a respectable group, enough to make it worthwhile to burn the gas necessary to get around the island. There are a couple of middle-aged guys I haven’t met before, Barry who seems to be pretty obnoxious actually and the others are making quiet snide remarks about him behind his back, apparently he burns his air really quickly and tends to shove his mask up on his forehead, the hallmark of a snorkeler which is to say the hallmark of a non-diver which is to say the hallmark of someone who doesn’t belong on this boat. I try not to be uncomfortable with the quiet snideness, even though he is kind of grating, because I know that I am equally vulnerable to such mockery, I am the girl who tried to quit her Open Water class three different times, I have been having a lot of trouble with this and am a rank beginner to boot.

Another guy who’s name I forget, he’s much more pleasant to speak with and we chat a bit, about where we’re from and where we’re going and where we’ve been and what we did there, this is the conversation I have over and over and over it is the baseline conversation amongst backpackers and travelers. Kim has joined us, whose name is not actually Kim but she is using it as her travel name since people have trouble pronouncing her given name, Maayan. I am lucky that way, there are versions of my name in almost every language so sometimes I am Kate and sometimes I am Katerina and on occasion Katya.

So me, and Kim, and Etienne and Barry and the guy who’s name I can’t remember, and then Elly and her husband whose name I also can’t remember, they are an older British couple and both of their kids are divemasters here on Utila so they come down to visit, and dive, they are both divemasters too, and party of course, both of them are at least 30 years older than I am and they party harder than I do by a long shot. And Kerry, of course, the captain, also middle-aged and a local, he’s from here and has the lush accented English to show it. It was a welcome surprise to me, that English is the dominant language on this island rather than Spanish, and one of the reasons I was so reluctant to head for the mainland and travel alone with my crappy Spanish.

The boat is loaded, all of our equipment and air tanks and wetsuits and fins and masks and weights are in and we motor out of the lagoon, under the bridge and around to the north. The clouds have cleared almost entirely and I am leaning around the side of the boat to get the wind in my face and smell the salt spray, the air is the temperature of warm bathwater which is to say perfectly perfect, and look! Kim has spotted a rainbow, Kim is fantastic at spotting things, she is the one who saw the turtle the other day and the moray eel, too. This is going to be a perfect day.

At our first dive site and we suit up, Etienne is going to dive with Kim and I since we are only rated to 60 feet, the others will go in a separate group. I’ve assembled all my equipment on the tank already, I did that at the dock, buckling the vest onto the tank and then attaching the regulator and testing the air and making sure I have 3000 psi in the tank. I sit down in front of my tank, strap on the vest and then slowly stand up, have to go straight and lift all the weight of the tank and gear with thighs and knees and this is a little dicey because I banged the crap out of my knee a couple of days ago but it is fine now. I am moving very carefully on the boat now, because I’m top heavy and not that there are lots of waves or anything but I’m really good at falling down and with all the weight settled oddly on my back it will be even easier, I should almost just throw myself down on the deck of the boat and get it over with. I sit down on the center bench, my tank slamming down behind me, so that I can put on my fins and mask. It is poor etiquette to do so, which I know, and would certainly be worthy of a snide remark or two. Proper dive boat etiquette is that I should sit on the edge of the boat, with the tank hanging over into the air, and put on my fins and mask there just before rolling off backwards, but I just know that if I do that I will go flailing into the water before I’m ready, pulled over by the tank, and I’d rather knowingly breach boat etiquette. Yes, I am a rank beginner and I barely made it through my dive class and everyone on this boat knows it so I really don’t see the point in pretending otherwise.

Fins are on, mask is on, and I hate this part when my mask is on but I’m not yet in the water, I automatically try to breathe through my nose and it sucks all the air out of the mask and I feel like I’m suffocating, it comes naturally when I’m in the water but not out here in the air and I really want to just shove the mask up on my forehead but snorkelers do that not divers. I put the regulator in my mouth and begin the Vader-esque breathing, deep deep breaths and I use my air really fast because of it but this is such a strange thing to me that it’s more important that I take these deep, calming breaths, reassuring myself with every blast of oxygen that I am breathing, that’s more important than a longer dive. I cross my legs below the knees, make sure my vest is inflated, left hand on my weight belt, right hand pressed against my mask and reg to make sure I don’t lose them as a I tumble backwards into the water letting the weight of the tank carry me backwards.

I somersault completely in the water under the boat and then rise to the surface again, signal the captain that I’m ok with a fist touching the top of my head. Etienne is in the water already, and so is Kim, the other dive group is off and away in a different direction. We give the ok signal and then Etienne turns his thumb down, I hold up the air valve on the vest and slowly, very slowly release air. I’m wearing 12 pounds of weights on my belt to counter my buoyancy, Etienne wanted to weight me a little more because I descend slowly but that is on purpose, the first training dive that went so badly started off so badly because I dropped like a rock and I need to stay in control of this. The water is rising over my face, over the regulator and I’m officially breathing underwater now, rising up over my mask and inevitable that a little water leaks in before I get all the way under, once I’m in the pressure of the water around me keeps the seal intact but I will have a little saltwater sloshing around inside the whole time. Going down, slowly, and Etienne is watching me carefully to make sure I’m ok, I’m officially certified but he is aware that I have panicked underwater before. A few feet down and then hold my nose, blow air out to pop my ears and equalize the pressure. About twenty feet down and then he turns to lead us on our dive, and swims to the left. We follow, Kim and I, we are buddies which means we need to stay always in sight of each other which is more difficult than you might imagine with more than half of your peripheral vision cut off by the sides of the mask, she could be right next to me and I couldn’t see her and vice versa. They are a little ahead of me and suddenly it happens, I start choking my throat has seized up and I can’t breathe.

I grab Kim’s fin so that she knows I’m having a problem, she turns and sees and then grabs Etienne. I am pushing the purge button on my reg, this shoots air into my lungs with no cooperation on my part and this is the solution we found and the only reason I am diving now, that I can just dispense air when my body refuses to breathe. Etienne is worried, he is gesturing to make sure I don’t forget the purge button and shoot to the surface, I know and I’m fine, I stopped them just because in case I couldn’t solve the problem they should be there and they are. I’m breathing again, my airways are open, and I take a few more of those deep, calming breaths to make sure my body is no longer rejecting this air and we go on.

It’s dark, down here; we can see, but not very well, and we are swimming along a black coral wall dropping off endlessly, swimming along looking for interesting marine life there among the coral and I barrel roll to look the other way, that little bit of saltwater sloshes in my eyes and tries to go up my nose stinging a little, lazily looking up to the surface and seeing my air bubbles over me and then out into the darkening deepness where the reef falls off. That’s where we’d see a whale shark, if we saw one, and I wonder what it would be like to look into that endless water and see a fish the size of a building looming out of it. Anything could be out there, anything at all, and frankly if it were more than 20 feet away I wouldn’t be able to see it, wouldn’t know it was there but I am pretty sure it would know that I am here.

Deep breaths and we haven’t seen anything particularly amazing, some coral and parrot fish and a huge grouper and a school of snapper, and the wrasses which are incredibly common and so no one really cares about them but I love them, schools of bright blue fish the length of my hand swirling in the dappled underwater sunlight. I am not sure that I enjoy diving, the whole time I am kind of waiting for the dive to be over, for the moment I surface and breathe in the open air again, I am hoping we see something that makes it worthwhile and the north side is supposed to have much better marine life, it hasn’t been as fished out and damaged by divers and snorkellers as the more accessible areas around the south side of the island but we are not in luck today on this dive.

I am down to half a tank of air, it is time to turn back so we turn and swim back along the wall, I barrel roll again looking out at trackless, depthless ocean where things can come from any direction and the up/down orientation of gravity that reigns with an iron fist above the water is meaningless here. Water changes depth perception too, everything looks bigger and closer and I have to keep checking my peripherals that I don’t have anymore.

We ascend through a school of wrasses, break surface a few feet from the boat and swim back. I take my fins off and hand them to the captain so I can climb up the ladder, place my foot firmly, grip the rails with both hands and then that first step of the tank breaking free of the water and suddenly gravity is back, up is up and down is down and I step very carefully back into the boat, clinging to poles and railings and swaying my way back to the air tank holders to thunk my tank down. I shrug out of my equipment, and then move it all over to a new tank for the second dive, put my weight belt on the floor and shimmy out of my wetsuit, I’m shivering a little from our dive it’s much colder underwater too. We are still waiting on the other group to come back, Kim, Etienne and I sprawl out on the aft deck in the blazing sunshine. “Life is hard,” Etienne sighs. We solemnly agree.

(to be continued)

Understanding the Bomb, Hiroshima, Japan (Feb 2006)

I have planned an excruciatingly timed and precise itinerary for our trip to Japan, with train schedules mapped out weeks in advance and hotel reservations in place, there is no wiggle room. All of this information, web printouts, excel charts, confirmation numbers, directions, and train schedules has been painstakingly pasted into my travel notebook, so that all I need to at any given time is consult The Book to know where we are headed next and when we have to be there. Today is slated for a day trip from Osaka to Hiroshima to visit the Memorial Museum, just an afternoon and then we train back to Kyoto to spend the night, there is no time allotted for an overnight stay in Hiroshima.

The trains in Japan are amazing, they arrive precisely on time at the appointed track and these schedules are mapped out months in advance, the obsessive precision of Japanese transit meshes perfectly with my obsessive need for advance planning. We arrive in Hiroshima laden with backpacks, we will deposit them at a train station locker while we wander about, who wants to carry that crap around town and into the museum. We find the lockers, they take 100 yen coins which is about a dollar, perfect. Perfect, except we can’t manage to decode the mechanism, it takes several attempts of depositing coins and then trying to take the key only to get it stuck and then popping the locker back open and down yet another 100 yen coin; by the time we have successfully conquered the seemingly Byzantine but likely quite simple lock mechanism we are down about fifteen bucks, and I have forgotten to put my day bag with my computer in the locker but we are done fucking around with this thing, if I pop it open to stash my computer bag it is probably going to cost us another twenty bucks to get it locked again so I resign myself to carrying my computer, we have spent too much time here anyway we need to get moving.

Out of the train station and consulting The Book, we are to take a tram and Japanese precision, the tram pulls up right on time and we board, hoping that we will be able to figure out where to get off, that it will be obvious. The Japanese schoolgirls in their stereotypical pleated skirts and knee socks are openly staring at us, giggling and whispering behind their hands, and I wonder what they think of us on the tram with them in the city where our country annihilated their cousins and parents.

It’s obvious where we get off after all, step off the tram with my awkward bag bumping under my arm, it wasn’t designed as a computer bag it’s actually modeled on a bowling bag and I’ve probably overstuffed the thing. The first thing we see is the A-bomb Dome, a skeletal structure of rebar by the side of the river, the only structure remaining after the bomb leveled the city. It’s stark and ugly, it lacks all the beauty of traditional Japanese architecture, architecture that was too delicate to survive the blast. We contemplate, uncomfortably, and take tourist pictures, also uncomfortably, we are here to contemplate and take tourist pictures but it seems a little shallow and trite while our feet are stepping on ground that was covered in human ashes.

We walk along the river bank, stopping at various peace statues and memorials, there is one to all the children who died and then another huge structure with a stylized human figure on top crowned by an origami crane, the base of the sculpture is covered in long chains of delicately folded origami cranes. This memorial is for a little girl that survived the first blast, and as she slowly died of radiation poisoning she made origami cranes nonstop, there is a legend that anyone who completes 10,000 cranes will have their wish granted and she was wishing not to die, folding tiny pieces of paper over and over trying not to die, trying to have faith in a legend of 10,000 paper cranes.

She had reached something like 7,000 when she died. People from around the world send their folded paper to this monument to honor her determination and optimism, and there are tens of thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands of cranes piled up here and none of them made her wish come true.

We are somber approaching the Memorial Museum but I am still trying to maintain a critical distance, I do not want to be overwhelmed with the cheap emotional kneejerk reaction, not to say that its cheap that this girl died folding cranes after my country dropped a poisonous bomb on her city but the picture is bigger than one person and I am here to see the whole picture, that is why we came here. We take pictures of the eternal flame in front of the museum, it will burn until all nuclear weapons have been eradicated from the face of the planet, and then we go in.

The museum is a long, low U-shaped structure, its construction screams 1950s America. The first exhibit in the main entry hall consists of multiple dioramas of Hiroshima, before and immediately after the bomb. In the after diorama, there is only the A-bomb Dome and a tram snaking across a wasteland of ash. I am staring at this silently when I am approached by a smiling docent, he offers me a small paper crane. I’m not sure if I should accept, I’m not sure what’s going on here, he asks me where I’m from and I flinch a little inside when I say “America,” we are the ones we did this to them.

He welcomes me, and explains that he is one of many volunteers at the museum, they are very happy when Americans come here, and that his role is to explain the exhibits. The crane is a hospitality offering representing the desire for peace for all people. He tells me that the people of Hiroshima are very fond of their tram, it was the only thing other than the dome that made it through the blast and in the aftermath, the sight of the tram chugging across the city gave people hope that they could rebuild. We walk through the first hall together, he shows me the letters from Einstein begging the American president not to use the bomb he built, the military memos detailing potential target cities. I find it really interesting that Kyoto was stricken from the list, because someone pointed out that as the center of thousands of years of cultural history, if we bombed it the Japanese would never forgive us, there would never be peace. So Kyoto was spared, and the list narrowed down to three locations, three places less important and who makes these decisions, who decides which city will be spared and which will be obliterated. Until the actual day of the bombing it was still uncertain which city would be targeted, and a clear beautiful day sealed Hiroshima’s fate. Think of it, a day of clear skies and sunshine, when everyone is a little happier to see such crisp weather when they roll out of bed, smiling up at the sky and knowing it will be a good day or at least a little better than it would have been if it were raining.

We move on and my guide shows me other documents, he is explaining that while the bomb was an abomination that it also stopped the war, a war that would have involved a invasion of the Japanese mainland with a huge attrition factor. I knew this already but I certainly wasn’t going to say it out loud, not here, and I’m not sure if I’m comforted or saddened to see that the people here can have enough critical distance to understand that this horror visited upon them out of clear sky had its benefits, he says that yes, the Japanese culture had created a situation where the A-Bomb was the only way to end the war without a greater loss of human life, it took a nuclear blast to bring the Empire of the Sun into the reality of 20^th century warfare, the reality too that they would lose this war one way or another, that the Emperor and the Empire were mortal after all.

I thank my guide, he will stay in the main hall and I very carefully pocket my crane. He has said over and over that they are happy to see Americans who want to be educated about the bomb, Americans who want to understand the consequences of our country’s actions and its reasons, and I guess they have had 50 years or so to get here but I would hate us if I were him.

I continue through the museum, Debi, Chris and I have separated and we are moving alone and each at our own pace. I move through halls of information about nuclear proliferation and the science of an atomic nuclear explosion, a reproduction of the plane used to drop the bomb, films about all of these topics showing all the different aspects of this story, the how, the why, the when, the where, the who, the what. There are answers to all of these questions, even the why question, that’s what my volunteer guide was telling me about, there is an answer to why but I am not sure walking these halls if any why is ever going to be good enough, I guess that is the point of this museum and I am still keeping my critical distance I am not going to let this get to me.

There is a huge reproduction of a photo of crying bomb victims with their skin peeling off from the burns. Another volunteer steps forward to tell me that the Japanese people treasure this photo, it is one of only two photos taken on the ground in the immediate aftermath of the blast. The photographer was away from the main center of the blast and rushed to the site to try and help, and stopped to take two photographs of the victims before putting the camera down to try and treat the burning children. “We are very proud of him,” the volunteer says, “Because if not for him we would not have this memory,” this a place not about judgement but about memory and remembering and they will never forget this and that flame will burn for eternity until all the weapons are gone and the world can finally forget the atrocity that humans rendered on its surface.

I am not going to cry.

Into the next hall and it’s shadowy somehow, the lights are dimmer and I see the famous wall fragment with the shadows burned into it, and there are scorched and melted clothes and other small household items, this is what an atomic blast does to a pocketwatch. A lunch tin. The food inside the lunch tin. A belt. A knife. A plastic bowl. The next few cases of charred remnants puzzle me, but then. This is what an atomic blast does to skin. To fingernails. To hair.

The next hall goes beyond the blast to the aftermath, the survivors who weren’t liquidated leaving only shadows behind. Here there are pictures and relics of radiation sickness victims, an alcove exhibit about that little girl with her cranes. The cancers and mutant growths are pictured in all their anatomical detail. And here, in another alcove, there are drawings, stark crayon sketches. I move closer to one of them, it confuses me, the stick figures are dancing, they look happy or as happy as a stick figure can look. There are black puddles on the ground, some stick figures are kneeling by them and some are raising their hands to the black drops coming out of the sky, what is that blackness anyway, ash? If it’s ash, why are they so happy?

The plaque on the wall: this is a drawing from a child who survived the blast, a picture of what happened after, these people are happy because it is raining and all the water has been blown away and evaporated and they are so thirsty and now there is rain again.

The rain is black because it is poisonous with radiation and the ashes of the dead.

There is no more critical distance left in me, I am crying helplessly and I can’t take any more of this I can’t look at any more, I’m sorry so sorry and the docent told me that it was our duty to look, our duty to learn and see and not look away so that this can never happen again so that every person who leaves this museum leaves determined that this will never happen again never never never that we will always find another solution to our problems and our wars and our fights and that people will die yes its inevitable but they will never die like this again, they will never dance in the rain that is poisoning them and drink water that is filtered through the ashes of their families and be grateful for it.

I am not quite running but walking as fast as I can, head down through the rest of the museum and then outside in the clear, beautiful sunny day. Chris and Debi are still inside, I will wait here for them I can’t go back in. I am sitting on the wall by myself for about 15 minutes, and I calm down, the tears dry up, and I am composed when they emerge. We are all somber now, for the first time for all of us we are unable to be flippant. We don’t say much, we move slowly from the museum courtyard.

As we are walking back through the park, we cross paths with a couple of Japanese men. They stop us, smiling hugely, can they take our picture? Sure, that’s fine, so they snap several shots of the three Americans. They ask us where we’re from, New York and Seattle, how exciting, Ichiro and Matsui! They ask me if I am an artist, or a rock star, I am tall and blonde and wearing big boots and aviators I guess this is what they think artists and rock stars from New York look like. No, I’m not a rock star, they don’t believe me can they take another picture just with me, the incognito American rock star?

We are no more than 100 meters from where the bomb hit when they demand my autograph.