Dealing with loss sucks. Everyone who has lost a loved one knows this in the extreme, of course. But when it comes to loss in its less intense forms, for example, a change of career, or your best friend moves abroad, or your children leave home, these aren’t normally recognized as things to lament about in polite society. One has to just get on with it, which is crappy, because the transition that follows isn’t exactly smooth sailing. It so happens that I’ve been dealing with these three aforementioned situations simultaneously, for almost a year now. They are entirely unrelated of course, just more like bad timing. A bit like losing your left shoe, then realizing you already lost your right one further down the road, and now you don’t know your way back because you also lost your map.
After Covid squashed tourism, and essentially froze our family restaurant business with it, my closest friend moved to Canada, then my teens inconveniently decided to grow up, and make it clear just how independent they are. It brought uncomfortable questions to the surface, such as, If my business isn’t really open, what is my role? or If my kids don’t really need me anymore, who does? These questions, amongst others, took their toll on my sleep, and I have only recently started to manage the insomnia by adhering to a strict evening routine, consisting of chamomile tea, a lavender-and-salt-filled bath, an assortment of over-the-counter natural remedies and a good hardback book. If I stick to the program, I can usually get through the night. If I waiver, and skip something on the list, I am the unwilling spectator of the 3am dawn chorus.
It was for this reason, that when D and I were invited to stay on our friends’ boat to see in the Ash Wednesday holiday, my first thought was not the warranted how delightful, but the more selfish how will I sleep? We graciously accepted and joined our friends, of course. We had a double bed in our own cabin to look forward to, so it’s not exactly as if we were expected to slum it. Conveniently, my son B had decided he would come home for the holiday, bringing a couple of his friends with him, and that they were willing to pet-sit. The boys arrived at our house in one car, and as they walked through front door, each towering overhead, B looked down at me to ask “Why are you here?”
“I live here, remember?” I replied.
“I thought you were going out on a boat” he said.
“We are, later this afternoon.”
He shrugged, and the 3 oversized boys headed through the house, and down towards the beach. Waiting for me to evacuate the property, I presume. Teenagers have this special way of making you feel so unwelcome. Even in your own home.
D and I were welcomed by our friends, The Captain and his wife, onboard their fabulous 4-berth catamaran, in time to watch the sun go down from the marina. When on a boat, looking back at land, one is treated to an entirely different perspective. This time last year, the empty expanse of beach in front of us would have been full of music, the scent of barbequed chicken and 300 or so travelers and revelers to celebrate the spring break Mardi Gras. Our island hasn’t seen that sort of activity since Cayman’s borders closed last March. We set sail at dusk, and as the beach became smaller on the horizon, I could feel the knot in my stomach easing as we put some geographical distance between me and my problems. We moored up amongst mangroves in the North Sound, and had dinner under the stars. Boating, relaxing and eating fresh seafood is what Caymanians do best over the Ash Wednesday holiday, and precisely what I needed.
D and I were given the ‘second master’ cabin, a delightfully cosy nook filled with a mattress fatter than a well-filled suitcase. I slept like a baby, and found in the morning that I was the last person to wake. “Did everyone sleep well?” I asked when I found D, the Captain and his wife on the top deck, each nursing a mug of coffee. “Slept like shit” came the reply. For once, I savored the smugness that came with the success of a good night’s sleep.
We lifted anchor, and sailed the catamaran around West Bay, to Seven Mile Beach, which had an early morning dead-calm mood about it. As we were tying up to a dive site buoy a green sea turtle raised his head to the surface to make eye contact. Welcome he seemed to say. Follow me…
I’m not a particularly experienced diver, but D use to be a dive master, and is a dab-hand at setting up our equipment so we can simply hop off the back of any boat to explore Cayman’s underwater playground. After a descent into the blue, we arrived at a collection of colourful coral heads, alive with a menagerie of butterflyfish, squirrelfish, parrotfish, damselfish, angelfish, grunts and a barracuda.
We followed our Captain, who had by some unspoken rule, become the leader of our dive. After passing the second collection of coral heads, he stiffened one hand to hold it sticking up vertically out the top of his head, the universal sign for ‘shark’, then pointed a finger from his other hand down towards the sandy bed, underneath a coral ledge. There in the shadows lay an eight-foot-long nurse shark, enjoying a morning nap, oblivious to the curious visitors that surrounded him.
Our attention was soon distracted from the snoozing shark, onto a brightly coloured parrotfish, bigger than a Labrador retriever. At first, I thought my mask was playing magnification tricks on my eyes. I didn’t know parrotfish can grow that big. I do know they eat coral, and then poo sand out the other end. That’s a sand-producing powerhouse right there, I thought. We followed the oversized fish for a short distance along the line of coral. Crossing over an open clearing of white sand, our captain with his wife ahead, D and I following side-by-side, several feet behind, the captain stops, spins 180 degrees to face us head on, and holds his hand upright to his head again. ‘Shark’. He then thrusts his hand from his forehead in a straight line, directly towards D and I. We automatically turn to look behind us, and there, coming straight for us at speed, is a shark. Everyone who has ever dived knows that to hold your breath while diving is not good, but I froze as the shark’s face came towards mine. In that moment, I was reminded of a scene in a movie about an American kid who discovers a secret commune on a remote island in Thailand; kid meets deadly shark head on, and shouts “No! I will not die today!” In the movie, the shark loses to the kid’s knife. But I don’t have a knife, nor the inclination to kill. When the shark is close enough to touch, I have two options, panic and do something, or stay calm and do nothing. Before I can decide, the shark has swum purposefully through the small gap between D and me, then drops to a lower depth effortlessly, reminding us that this is her territory, we are the foreigner, the proverbial fish out of water.
Wowed by this close encounter with a majestic carnivore, our group of four looped around, and started to head back towards the boat. I noticed the current had picked up, there were fish of all sizes being swept along gullies in the reef, going in the same direction as us. A fish drifting sideways or backwards is an interesting sight to behold, let alone whole shoals of them, flapping their fins hopelessly. After we had completed a full circle over the reef, our Captain made the shape of a half-opened book with his hands, the diving sign for ‘boat’. He then made a shrugging sign with his arms and shoulders, his hands wide, the universal sign for ‘I don’t know’. We gestured back that we equally don’t have a clue as to the whereabouts of the boat. It is not a small boat, so it beats me how we all missed it. Then everyone started shaking, with what I suppose was the giggles. It’s a strange sight, divers laughing, with eyes covered by cold reflective masks, and mouths fixed in a permanent O-shape around the regulator; only the shoulders are the giveaway that the diver is having a chuckle. There we are, in a sea full of sharks; lost and laughing. I don’t know why. Maybe the oxygen in the scuba tank made us delirious.
The Captain’s wife was low on air, so volunteered to return to the surface first, and established the location of the boat. She then gestured the direction in which we should go, and it took another 30 minutes to swim against the current to get back on board. The current had been so strong, we had drifted underneath the boat at speed, and much further along the coast than we had anticipated. By the time we were back on the boat, our ankles were sore from finning, and the waves on Seven Mile Beach had picked up into a swell. We didn’t care though, talking about the shark encounter and getting lost was far more exciting.
The captain got the boat moving quickly, away from the turbulent waves, and an hour later we were back in the North Sound, pulling into a safe harbor to pick up our extended group of friends. My daughter A, amongst other teenagers, was in the group, who all hugged me as they climbed on board. All except her. “What’s wrong?” I asked A. “My foot was stung by a bee” she hissed, as if I had personally hired the bee as a sniper. I didn’t have any anti-sting cream with me either. “She’ll come around” my friends said to me.
“Tourism will be back’ is the other kindness they extend when I get worried about the year ahead. They’re good like that, my friends. They know what to say to keep me going. And I know to keep them close. Except the one that got away to Canada, of course.
To survive this year ahead, the crippling pandemic, and the transitional years of my childrens’ late teens, I can see that the option of panic and do something isn’t going to cut it. Like the fish caught in the current, I’d only generate a futile flapping of fins, that would bear no consequence on my direction of travel. Stay calm and do nothing, however, appears to be the best way to get through this. It convinced the shark, after all.
