"Once on this Island"

When I was ten, my grandparents took my cousin and me, wide-eyed and enchanted as we were, on a cruise. Our ship stopped on Isle Cozumel (this photo). And so it felt appropriate to go back, 20 years later.

Jen and I pushed our way through the glimmering churning touristy mess of the docks and bought tickets to travel on one of the three ferries that travels the 45 minutes from mainland to Cozumel. The water was like a mood ring, blues and teals in shades previously unimaginable. Our ferry wallowed and plunged and dipped its way across.

We rode thirty-some miles around part of the edge of the island (it's a big island!), on this glorious bike road, which had been the car road, until a new car road was built farther inland, because it was being consumed by ocean.

The main town on the island was bright and loud and all tourist t-shirts and key chains and expensive gellato. But once we bicycled a few kilometers out of town, the craggy-beach wind-beaten landscape incited long appreciative sighs and imaginations of pirates, explorers. The crash of surf. How it all smells. These two lone trees like lovers, together weathering the battering.

Sometimes when you have to make a sentence about all of it, you just gotta make a sentence.

The ferry ride back was a bit long-suffering because it was so choppy: we could sit inside within tinted windows, like being pummeled around in a window-less box. Or we could sit outside, and grasp the horizon for stability, and get sprayed with shlooshes of cold ocean. We chose the latter. Our faces say it all. And the beautiful moon shown above us. Suffering and bliss come mixed together.