An open-mouthed sea swallows me back and away from the eye-gasm that is Bermuda, and though I wouldn’t have picked this place if the choice were left to me (and when it comes to my whacky montage of a family, it rarely is), I know that there isn’t a spot on this great rock that I’d ever regret embracing and allowing to stretch my soul a little more taut. Bermuda is dauntingly pristine, and sometimes it’s good to see places as such, to know that somewhere, bobbing around in an abyss of watery teal, lay a land unspoiled by modern muck and grievances. Visually so, it’s a tropical London, if London went as Key West for Halloween, arm-in-arm with the South of France as his date. Even while I peck at this board (more industriously, it seems, than the plumed creatures here; even they are lax at their work), my mechanical venue is framed in rocky hills that slope into the sea, dotted in houses the color of ice cream, pistachio and bubblegum and lemon sorbet. Knee-socked gentlemen toke oak pipes, and women float down rubbish-free streets in billowy skirts and all things linen, chattering about the forthcoming street fair. It’s all so very proper, yet no-frill and simple:
“Ooh, what’s that long-tailed bird overhead?”
“Yeah, that’s our native Longtail Gull.”
“That coral there looks like a brain!”
“Yes miss, that’s what we call Brain Coral”.
“This rum, it’s straight black!”
“Well, it’s Bermuda Black Rum, of course.”
Ha, calling it like it is. Pure genius.
Islanders have the key, man. Not always a terribly fascinating breed by a traveler’s comparison, but refreshingly unfussy, and inevitably inventive in their choices of pastimes (game of frog-skotch, anyone?). As always, I want to scratch at the underbelly of the otherwise touristed trenches, and wade into the local stream. I sniff around a local gathering for research, only to discover an expat-to-native ratio of extreme disproportion, with the expats claiming the shut out. An interesting clan, those ‘pats, but not the findings I’m after. I recognize a good subject in Shay, who stems from a Bermudian family tree rooting back three-hundred years, and through whom I unearth ancient tales and urban legends of the land (er, antithesis of urban. isle legends? *shrug*). When I’ve sifted through the fistful of locals, I’m left to paw at the ‘pats. I drift into conversation with a middle-aged couple I’m drawn to from the moment they effectively whistled on blades of grass and attempted to teach me. A quirky but seasoned film-making/screenwriting pair whose paychecks hail from Fly By Night Productions, and the whimsical moniker summoned the recent memory of an indie-doc-making ex-lover (a key prompt for being a yes to this retreat). I shook the thought and went off to coo at the sky’s harvest of stars while guzzling Rum Swizzles — and swizzle we did when at last we tried to rise from too-comfy hammocks. They passed my cool test with flying, pastel colors, until Nancy retired, leaving Terry’s roving hands to trespass ever-grotesquely along my upper thigh. Gagging reaction, a terse, flying-bullet retort, then it’s beddy-bye time for me…another island town awaits on the other side of morn.
Later the rains came. My first storm at sea. The others recede to the lounges to drink pink cocktails and sway to a Desperado-crooning piano man. But I charge on to the bow of the deck, to hug the slippery rails and reflect. The sea in any mood quells me, partnered by something else as capricious and twisting as I. The swell thickens and the rising turbulence makes the waves from the swimming pool fling five feet in the air, in time leaving a barren basin of tiles, strewn with old pacifiers and new condom wrappers (Or maybe just one. Or none, and I’m just preying on poetic license). I clutch in one hand a snifter of something bitter and brown, shivering on the rocks, and in the other, clutch my shirt closed, which clasps onto my body for dear life. Now’d be the time to recline to my cabin, but the salty spit feels so good on my fiery back, charred by the day’s sun that chased my tail for the entirety of a backroads bicycle ride along bell-curved streets dubbed with children’s storybook names like Rushy Road and Here ‘n’ There Way. My legs pulse and throb and my back is eaten raw, but it’s a victorious ache and the memory leaves nothing but a sweet, buttery goodness. The ride was nothing particularly special, except for that subtle voice that taps me on the shoulder and tells me to slow down, to breathe in the simple things – that this little nothing is going to be a sweet something in memory, and I realize that maybe stumbling on happiness really is a matter of enjoying life’s little nothings. So I slide down those dirt hills, pretending I’m in a storybook with landscapes made of butter, and feel my insides smile.
I awake to my mother slathering great gobs of cold yogurt all over my sol-beaten backside for lack of proper aloe, squawking, “See?” THIS is why I must watch you like a hawk! You can’t even be trusted to the sun!” And as I shriek and writhe in pain with each icy-fresh glop drenched over my pulpy skin, she manages to segue into my excursion planned for later that day — frolicking with the dolphins — and how I was to make sure to really converse with them “on a deeper level” and so on. “Ech! Yes Ma! Connect with the dolphins….Got it….Aaah-yyeeeee! OH that fucking hurrrrrts!!” My sister chortles, or something to that effect, as she straight-irons her hair to get primped for the beach, then proceeds to try on three different swimsuits and spritz diva-endorsed aroma to her fake ‘n baked skin. Mom halts mid-smear to choke on a fanning draft of her Glow, permitting me a brief break from my Yoplait torture-spa. I haven’t yet opened my eyes, and already my day is stamped with the bizarre emblem of my kin. I question inwardly, “Who ARE these people and why do they look like me?”
Last night out. Not truly memorable, or perhaps too sopped with black rum. I board the ship a final time. The Norwegian Crown gulps me down and whisks me away towards a fine horizon, and I watch as the island grows microscopic behind me. A sticky-sweet adieu to a place all too boringly immaculate for me, a textbook town watered down by fleeting passerbys and their regal-named ships. I prefer my travels a little more rumpled, a little less Easter egg. It’s all too exhaustively sugary for me. Save but those bell streets…They were just butter.
The Blyss Catalyst 