Lost Worlds (21 page)

And then, like my Costa Rican whiteface monkey, it is gone. A shake of the head, a flick of the tail, and gentle dainty retreat into the dark scrub behind the palms.

I sit for a long time in silence, letting the joy-waves ride up and down my body. I don’t need the radio now. I don’t need company, or distractions. All those elusive fears, the loneliness, are gone.

For tonight, at least, I just need me.

Time doesn’t really exist anymore. My watch is stowed deep in the backpack and my body begins to respond to its own rhythms. Rhythms of which I’m too often unaware. I sleep when I’m sleepy or when it’s too hot to walk out on the open beach. I boil a packet of beef stroganoff for breakfast because I suddenly feel like eating beef stroganoff. Halfheartedly I try fishing in the shallows with the line and float and a bit of leftover beef as bait. But I think even the fish can sense I’m not really trying. And it’s too hot anyway. They’re doubtless off in deeper, cooler places doing whatever fish do down there in the heat of the day.

I scribble more thoughts to myself as I stroll through the surf in the early evening. And the beach just goes on and on—endlessly arcing away in both directions, mile after mile of soft pink sand unmarked by footprints or anything else that suggests the island has ever seen a human here before.

It’s all mine.

That one thought keeps dancing through my head like a woodland sprite. Rarely if ever have I felt so free and unencumbered by plans or projects or fears or uncertainties. I have no guides to worry about—or, as is more usually the case, to worry about me. I have no one to meet, nothing to do, nothing to say, nothing even to think, if I don’t feel like thinking.

And that’s what I’m enjoying most. The lack of thinking. For much of the time my mind is content to see without looking, to feel without analyzing. Just to be. To walk softly in the glimmering light…and disappear!

I am learning to expect nothing—to expect no expectations. So what comes? Lovely surprises, of course, all the time. The perfection of a shell in all its whirling wonder; the shapes in a piece of driftwood—two horses, a hand, a mountain landscape in miniature, a breast pertly nippled; the incredible life in a dead vine still clutching, strangling, a withered tree trunk. So many moments in a single moment!

Letting go, flowing with the flow of things, and, for a single second, being infinite.

I find myself walking on tiptoe even in the soft sand, so as not to bruise that special silence before dusk, before the noises in the bushes and the cool evening breezes that make the palm fronds go
clacker-clacker-clacker
.

And after all this today, more surprises tomorrow.

I’ve hardly begun.

Because I’ve slept during the day I feel like walking at night under a creamy half-moon and a canopy festooned with star patterns. The beach is a silver strip, edged by a sparkling sea that hardly moves at all: In the quietness of this night I meet myself again and rediscover so many things I’d forgotten.

Finally sleep eases in, so I spread out the groundsheet, bunch up the backpack as a pillow, and drift off with a final thought for the day: I hope all this never ends; I hope I never arrive.

On the third day—I think it’s the third day anyway—there’s a storm, a real humdinger. Out in the west, among the silhouetted islands, the sky is clear and bright. But in the other direction it’s as black as a mine shaft. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sky as black anywhere. The wind, a few minutes ago nothing more than a pleasant trade breeze, bashes into the palms like a prizefighter going for a knockout in the first round. The surf itself turns black, showing its true colors, discarding the simpering turquoises and royal blues, throwing off its limpid lappings on the shore, and gathering muscle by the minute. The gentle chitter of pebbles in the undertow is replaced by an ominous grinding and pounding as coral boulders, deeper down, begin to move against one another. The sea seethes up the pink beach, now turning blood red as the first egg-sized splatters of rain hit, sending up sprays of fine silica. It races far higher up the sand than before, pauses as if in frustration that it has failed to reach the tree line, and then tears back down the slope of the beach to consolidate itself in even higher, blacker waves that rise up like ancient battered walls to surge forward once again.

This is the ocean I love and admire. This is when you feel its strength and majesty—when you know it can destroy boats, men, houses, even whole communities, in the power of its latent spirit. You become too beguiled and entranced by its apparent docility in the Caribbean; you forget how oceans can shape and meld whole continents; you ignore its primeval force and nature.

But not now!

I find a hollow away from the gesticulating palms and flying fronds, up close to the sturdy thick scrub. And I watch as the rain thrashes the grasses, breaking them and pounding them into the soft earth. I don’t think I’d like to be a palm tree in this storm. They’ve learned the benefits of flexibility—they sway and bend and throw their fronds high like the outstretched gesticulating arms of Arab women at a wake—but each storm saps their strength, weakens their roots, stretches their fibrous trunks to the breaking point, and leaves them more vulnerable to the next onslaught. I’ve seen dozens of them on my walk, dead and discarded like driftwood, half buried in sand, their broken roots still screaming at the air—eternal reminders of battles fought and lost in the seething, scathing tumult of hurricanes.

I am lost in the power of the storm. Soaked, shivering (the wind is actually cold), and shocked by the suddenness of it all, I give myself up to its roar and its rage.

On and on, blacker and blacker, louder and louder. Maybe this really is a hurricane. With my radio out of action I’ve heard no warnings. My one hope is that Sam is comfortable and safe at home and not out on the ocean in this maelstrom. The growling and grinding from the surf is almost animal-like now. A fierce, teeth-tingling sound. Waves hit the shore like mortar shells, exploding in fury and froth, scattering rocks and shells and detritus up the beach and sucking the sand back into the depths with snakelike hisses.

I’m safe—or at least I think I am. I’m not a palm waiting for the final root-snapping blast. I have the luxury of sheltering in my sandy hollow and watching the spectacle like a young thumb-sucking boy at a circus. And I love it. I almost feel to be part of the storm’s spirit; I’m in the roll and heave of the black waves; I’m in the shrieking wind and the exploding rain-eggs. I’m out of myself and wrapped in the magic and mystery of it all….

What seems like hours later, the calm comes almost as suddenly as the storm. The wind dies. Waves toss in confusion like a restless army without generals and then subside, losing their dour color and adopting, chameleonlike, streaks of their previous blue and turquoise hues.

The beach is a mess. A battlefield of broken things marking the line of fiercest attack. Way up the sand a couple of palms have fallen. I can see the threadlike runners off the main roots waving like flags of surrender in the dying wind. The scrub behind the palms is still intact, a few discarded leaves and twigs, but otherwise undefeated.

There are coconuts everywhere, blown from the palm tops by the storm. I pick up a couple, smash their shells with a rock, and drink down the sweet liquid inside.

I’m drying out fast. The sun is hot again and the stickiness of air increases as the rain evaporates. The sand is harder now, compacted by the storm, and I begin my walk again on a firm surface. The beach seems to slope more steeply than before, its softer top surface stolen by the surf, revealing a coarser grain. Still pink, though.

There are shells and bits of shells everywhere, but they’re all empty. Are they merely the discarded garbage of the seabed or have the terrified occupants—conchs, hermit crabs, sea snails—fled to the deeps, abandoning their perfectly formed castles to the fickleness of the surf hordes?

Ridiculous thoughts. The occupants and their castles are complete entities. One can’t exist without the other. I’ve become a hurricane-harassed brain. Can’t think straight. But the thought persists. Why are they empty? And so many of them. Wonderful whorls of calcium, so finely etched and colored. Architects and engineers would benefit from studying their microstructure—Corbusian elegances of form-following-function; Miesian essays of detail and exactness of fit; Robert Graves’s blendings of colors and subtle wit, and a Gaudi-like robustness and flair for sheer arrogance and idiosyncracy of design. A universe of forms at my feet. A mathematician’s total knowledge all in one curled snail shell. Perfect three-dimensional geometry. All here.

I thank the storm for its gifts. And then I thank this little island. So compact, so rich, so whole. I am learning something here.

Back at home, Anne has a lovely poster on the wall in her studio. A photograph by Elliot Porter of lonely surf-pounded rocks on some island in Maine. But the words on the poster irritated me:

We have a marriage that has endured and strengthened over twenty-five years and at first I couldn’t understand the idea of her feeling alone. Alone from me, our cats, our lakeside home, and all the myriad details of our lives. But shimmers of comprehension were shining through, polished by the storm.

I think back to my sudden surge of loneliness a couple of days ago, that great gloom that fell over me for a few hours. And then I realize that I’d come through it with the help of that deer with the calm eyes. We couldn’t talk, we couldn’t communicate in the traditional sense, but the deer had restored the wonder—the knowledge—that I have always known somewhere deep down.

I come back to Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s book
A Gift from the Sea
once again:

We have to be alone to touch our inner selves. For if we cannot touch ourselves, how can we ever truly touch anyone else?

I pick up the shell again and stroke it. A thing so whole, so complete. A product of its own world, its own complex net of dependencies and threats and terrors and truths. And yet, by its very nature—alone. In my hand. And something to take home with me.

John Donne got it right and wrong. “No man is an island” makes sense in a hundred measurable ways. But ultimately we are all islands and if we don’t face up to that truth and rejoice in the possibilities of solitude, we miss out on one of the gifts of life.

This island has revived
my
island. This little lost world has given new life to my own personal world. Fears, loneliness, hurricanes, noises in the night—I can accept them all now. And love too. Love is larger now; deeper in—deeper out.

In another day or so, after many more miles of sand and scrub, I’ll be meeting Sam again. I’m looking forward to that. I remember the knowing way in which he caressed and held the frigate bird and stretched its wings to show me their size and their beauty. Sam, I’m sure, knows and loves this island, but he also knows and loves
his
own island, within. There is something complete about the man. A completeness I’m learning to find within myself, thanks to a deer, a storm, and a shell.

Funny, isn’t it? Perhaps all the answers are all around us. We merely have to pause, see, and understand.