Waiting for weather, Big Sand Cay

Beyond this is Africa. Standing on the windward beach, staring out across the sapphire sea, on the other side is Senegal, Liberia, the coast once traveled by the slave traders, the rum traders. The beach is strewn with garbage, inexplicable plastic—an empty bottle from Oman that held sunflower oil, a full bottle of prescription pills, a container of mismatched doll shoes. Birds cry, night and day. They must be nesting in the shrubs, for they hover, screaming in sweet, high voices, when we walk past, and fragments of pale gray and brown speckled egg roll down the sand toward the water. The colors of the eggshells are blurred, as if windblown. Rising on the hill at the center of the island, across a stretch of low cactus, a graffitied cinderblock bunker, “property of U.S. government ” stenciled in fading official letters on the wall. The door is curtained with spiderwebs. Bars of a ladder lead through a square in the floor, down, down into something I don’t want to see. The square little room, illuminated by tropical sunlight, feels like a trap. The door to hell, I think—it just flashes into my mind, unpremeditated melodrama.

We sail five miles north to Salt Cay for a day, where people have scraped up salt every summer since the late seventeenth century. The small beach is thick with shells and sea glass. The buildings here have the soft corners of old brick. The old salt warehouse sits on a corner near the breakwater, falling apart slowly. Two men have come from conch fishing-shirtless, their eyes unfocused by sun and barometric pressure. The short one asks if I’m married. I tell him yes. I’m single, he says. I’m looking for a woman right now. You want to come and spend some time with me? This is island desperation--a small island, a shoal in the midst of an enormous sea, rough just now with whitecaps. Dude, I say, I don’t have time. We’ve got to get back to Big Sand Cay. I don’t have time? Is that how I explain myself? And what’s with the full disclosure? I have arrived here, looking for groceries, with a strange unstructured openness that seems to follow days on deserted islands. Any sentence seems almost as likely as any other.

Today the gentle waves coming off the Turks Passage were brilliant aquamarine under the sun. Now the wind is blowing from the east, across the spit of land. The moon is almost full. Over the billows of the wind, I can hear the birds. The sand glows even in moonlight. It is sublime, something so beautiful that it is full of terror--that gorgeous, transcendent fear you might feel before you are absorbed back into the elements.

Big Sand Cay, Turks and Caicos

“Columbus was a criminal,” the man driving the taxi toward the airport said, threading his way through the traffic, the roundabout decorated with thousands of pink, glossy conch shells. “We started a petition to get the government to take down that monument.”

Some people say Columbus first made landfall at the southwestern tip of Samana Cay in the Bahamas, between Rum Cay and the Plana Cays. In other words, out in the middle of what feels like nowhere. Nowhere people belong. The fisherman’s cottages are in ruins. The wildness of the beaches (up close they’re scattered with plastic bottles, half of a grocery cart from a Puerto Rican chain, what you might call civilization a current, a common wind direction away)—the seductiveness of waiting space, waiting to be inscribed. The beautiful corollary that whatever you write will soon be washed away, and waiting once again.

We sail down the southern coast of the cay after visiting the reef—a shark considers us, reminds us that we are objects of curiosity, not, never will be again, really, of this element, our amphibious breathing sacrificed, perhaps, for the ability to control fire). The coast is one long beach, pale yellow with a green fringe. It is calling, calling—the land ends but the reef continues, a white fringe of breakers marking it, a sliver of turquoise connecting that long island with a tiny island, two small peaks of land. The kind of place that looks, out here, almost human in scale. 

Rum Cay

Election day

Snorkeling solo

Secret reef

West Plana Cay

Coming into Providenciales, Turks & Caicos

Last post from Georgetown and the Exumas--when weather window opens,  we head east and south--next main port of call Luperón, Dominican Republic.

I wait for words and get the luxury of images. Images—but maybe more the feel of things. The wind and the texture of the sand and the color of the water and the memory of the water, the feel of the memory of water.

Tiny balls of digested coral, buoyant damp sand the tide leaves behind, granulated sand that really is so much like pale golden sugar. Rough black rock. I feel like a king of imagined subjects, of a beautiful, transient domain. The long, empty beach (a pattern of stranger’s footsteps, evenly spaced, oddly pronated, don’t distract me)—this border of the Atlantic—is neither here nor there, disappearing, renewed, if not here, somewhere.

Back around, on the town side. There are people eating hamburgers and drinking bottles of the local beer. White tourists, cruisers in their shorts and plastic shoes. Nice people. White people. Tan people, spotted by the sun. We all look alike. Suburban voices on the radio talking about where to go from here. We form a swelling whiteness, a sort of canker—a friendly, common disease. 

Exumas

Our sea journey from the air

My dad--badass?

My dad--Jesus?

Johnny Depp's private beach

Sailing dinghy

Snorkeling in a James Bond set, really

Hunting lionfish

Sunscreen tribal markings