To the sea

My early formative years were mostly spent two doors up from a harbor with salt marsh perfume ever cloying the molasses air. Depending on the tide, I would gather our rag tag neighborhood crew and wile away entire Summer days ankle deep in the mud, collecting palm fronds for our make shift fort and weaving them loosely into roof and wall. We were technically squatting in an empty sailboat rack while the Burns family boat was moored for the season but they didn’t seem to mind much as we huddled and hatched plans for mischief. Ten minutes down the road, by car, was a sleepy beach with gentle, wide dunes riddled with ‘stickers’, as we called them, those menacing, barbed orbs that inevitably hitch a ride on your foot as you race to the ocean. We visited there less frequently than I would’ve liked, maybe every other week, as my Mother has a pathological phobia about sand (“Gross! It gets everywhere!”, she still protests). But we went often enough that I knew it as if my own backyard. I knew the best spots to wade across the lukewarm gulley, how to time our swim with the emergence of the fleeting sand bar and how to use dead horseshoe crabs as character actors in improvisational plays.

When I turned thirteen, my love for the sea waned. The beach became a runway, a place for being surveyed while huddled in chosen groups. The beach is where I first became self conscious, deeply aware of my frizzed hair and soft body. I was shapeless where there was a call to be round and round where there was an insistence on being flat. I kept my t-shirt on and swam less. I stopped sensing the place altogether, blinded by the spectacle of parading bikinis and deepening tan lines. Eventually, I took to the mountains, first for a few weeks at a snotty summer camp, which I rejected and we couldn’t really afford, and then for the entirety of the summer stretched between a rugged lakeside camp and our family’s one annual vacation to an Episcopal retreat center not unlike the setting for Dirty Dancing. I became a skilled paddler, both in canoe and kayak, a hiker and a climber. My relationship to the mountains, to the bodies of lake, river and trail, morphed with my relationship to my own evolving body. Deep in rhododendron, the musk of soggy leaves underfoot, I was happy. Paddling the narrows of the Green River, heart aflutter and arms braced to keep upright, I was transported. Here, I lost all sense of self; nature reigned supreme and I was simply a minor interlocutor romping amidst her majesty.

From there forward, I associated the beach with all things dull and dangerous, and the mountains with eternal, childlike wonder. Into my adulthood, this theme reverberated; there were three years of traveling to the north shore of the Dominican Republic so my then-husband could wind surf in advanced conditions, leaving me hot and bored on a lounge chair while a German DJ spun techno beats through frazzled speakers, a family trip to St. Barts where family dysfunction took on a particularly acute flavor and I was harassed by somebody’s rogue pet parrot while out for an escape run, or the time I joined my future in laws for an extended family holiday on Wrightsville Beach and apparently said all of the wrong things while manically coating myself in zinc and grimacing at the relentless August sun. There were exceptions; a frigid walk on Drake’s Beach near Tomales Bay on my first date with my husband, two weeks spent on the coast of Maine at an artist residency where beach was more rock than sand and the obsidian dunes along Icleand’s Southern coast where we wandered for hours in the perennial dusk of June.

We moved to the Green mountains of Vermont during the throes of the pandemic lockdown. Like waves of others, we saw an opportunity amidst the Covid upheaval to orient our lives in a direction we’d long desired. We were immensely privileged to be in a position to do so with solid employment we could easily uproot and a small amount of savings we’d pulled together after years of paying down debt. It felt like our moment as things aligned through countless Zoom calls and Docusign emails, and, suddenly, we were standing in the kitchen of an 1840’s fixer upper flanked by 8 acres of worn out but beautiful pasture. Views of mountains surrounded us; Scragg and Mt. Alice to our immediate East; Camel’s Hump to our distant WNW. We began work on restoring the soil, planting an oversized homestead garden, cover cropping across large swathes that would soon become an orchard and letting much of the land go wild. Ground nesting birds like Bobolinks and Red winged Blackbirds took refuge in the chest high grasses; bees from our neighbors hives made their way to the many perennials now flanking the field. I was living my mountain fantasy life, in disbelief, really, that we’d made it happen.

I was also anxious about it suddenly disappearing; circular thoughts of ‘life’s too good’ would thrum across my amygdala while out strolling with the dogs or speeding down a rocky trail. I remember walking through our field one late Summer evening before a routine mammogram the following day, saying aloud to the birds, “God, please don’t let me have cancer. Let me enjoy how good this is.” I’ve spent enough time in therapy to understand the root of such thinking but as I’ve reflected during the last nine months of post-Covid hardship, these moments have haunted me. And in some ways, believing I was living my most spectacular life has made recovery that much more bittersweet; is it easier to winnow back to a life of mediocrity than to go the distance to eternal, childlike wonder? Still, the mountains have held me. At my lowest, I could always see Mt. Alice from our bedroom window, tracing her ridge line with my finger, shutting my eyes and walking the memory of her tight switchbacks, overgrown brambles scraping at my ankles and shins.

In early February, my mountain convalescence was feeling more like imprisonment than salve. The sun has been stingy this winter. Rather, low slung clouds have been stubborn and territorial, claiming shadowy dominion over the whole of our sky on most days, so much so that I’ve taken to crying ‘Greyday! Greyday!’ into a make believe hand radio when we rise. When our friends texted us about joining them on a trip to the Caribbean, I cackled, “I hate the beach. Right?” Heath nodded. “Plus, that’s where I went with my family on that cray vacation. No way. Plus, a plane with other humans? No way. Plus, it’s expensive and it’s in like three weeks. No way.” 18 hours later we were booked on a flight and summer clothes were emerging from deep winter storage. The love of friends and a promise of sun yanked me into an atypical move and I thought, fuck it, maybe the pool will be nice.

As we pinwheeled in high gusts from San Juan to St. Barthelemey, I could see directly through the tiny charter plane’s windshield from my front row seat. (“Row” is pushing it; there are 8 seats total on these planes.) Tufted islands dotted the azure sea, like moss across the surface of a rock, and for the first time in many, many months I felt the prickling sensation of awe moving up and down my spine. The turbulence, typically a high anxiety event for me, only added to my enthusiasm as I turned to Heath to share in the fun. His skin was flaccid green and his eyes were closed tight. I laid a hand on his knee as the pilot dove towards the ground and came to a screeching halt. We’d made it through 9 hours of travel, a night spent in a seedy hotel room by Logan airport and the many potential triggers of traveling with a post-Covid body in a world that has clearly moved on. I immediately texted my support squad with a selfie of us emerging into the sun and ripped off my mask to take in the salty air.

Planning a trip with a body that still feels unpredictable is odd, mostly because I’ve never done it. Half of my suitcase resembled a mobile urgent care unit with our fancy testing device, Paxlovid at the ready, and two giant pill organizers. I mapped out the potential scenarios I might encounter, which basically came down to ‘more sensations’ or ‘new sensations’, and lowered my expectations to zilch. Once there, this wasn’t so straightforward. Making peace with limitations while at home has been hard- really, really hard-but doing so while on vacation felt even more isolating. For me, vacation has been synonymous with a gargantuan exhale, followed quickly by a good dose of hedonism. We’re not seasoned vacationers as we’ve prioritized other things like investing in our farm and getting out of debt, so the pressure to HAVE AN EPIC EXPERIENCE bore down as we unpacked our things and I realized how much pain I was in. I curled up, had a good pout and then joined the crew making rum cocktails in the kitchen.

Over the week we spent on the island, I found myself able to do more than I had predicted, and mostly without repercussion. No, I wasn’t bouncing out of bed for a morning run through the narrow roads of Vitet but I could steadily hike the massive dune that leads to Saline Beach and go for a swim. Pushing past the thigh breaking waves for the first time, I trusted my body to remember how to dive and then how to swim. I played like I had when I was a kid, leaping over the crested surface to the talc like sand below, like a wanna be dolphin with gangly legs and far less grace. No matter, the sea felt soothing and familiar, as if I had time traveled to my early memories of love for the ocean and eclipsed the many years in between that had sullied our affair. We started going to the beach twice a day with multiple swimming sessions each visit. In between, I’d sit on a towel and just stare at the horizon or watch the pair of Tropicbirds my husband had spotted on the Eastern side of Gouverneur Cove. As the midday sun ramped up, we’d retreat home for a picnic lunch and self imposed rest hour(s). I took to my book like I would’ve typically taken to whatever adventure I had planned, content with the slowness and quiet.

I did all of this while feeling perpetually half mast. A friend of mine who is also dealing with Post Covid rock and roll texted me just after we had landed, “ I hope you have many moments of feeling well enough.” Well enough became my guidepost. My chest never stopped aching, my stomach rumbled from the extracurricular french cheese and pate I nibbled here and there and I generally felt the familiar flulike symptoms that are a part of this really raw deal on a daily basis. Every time we’d get in the car to head to the beach or store, I’d give myself a little pep talk to try and quell the pain into tolerable submission. As I’ve said before, that all of this is invisible to those around you is by far the most harrowing part of healing. Scroll through my pictures from our trip and I look as effervescent as I did before I ever met this wicked beast.

I was listening to an interview with Rabbi Steve Leder yesterday on Kate Bowler’s show, Everything Happens, where he discusses the things he’s learned while ministering to the sick and grieving. “If you have to go through hell, and we all do at some point, don’t come out empty handed,” he guides, “But also know that no, the lessons were never, ever worth the pain.” Our trip was an antidote to coming out empty handed. I returned home with a profound sense of possibility that doesn’t require a perfect body or complete recovery- yet. I also mined my desire for being of the world again and made peace with the reality that Covid is no longer terrifying for the vast majority- and that’s ok. I wish I were one of you but I’m not- yet. Most of all, I mainlined connection with friends I’ve known for 27 years, the kind of people who show up exactly as themselves as you whittle your way through hell. Which, in turn, lets you feel more like yourself and far less conscious of the whittling. Knowing who will show up for you as you need it and how you need it is not worth the pain of discovery but I’m happy for the insight. Lastly, I think I might be a beach person again? Really? If my recent VRBO search history is an indicator, the answer is a solid yes. Paxos, anyone?