Island Dreams

Here’s my wee little home. My Bermuda. Such a tiny little speck in the midst of the huge, green sea. So insignificant in the vastness, but so huge in my heart.

I lived here from infanthood until I was fifteen. That’s half a century ago, but on our trip there this September, all those long decades fell away. I was a little kore again, feral and bright and naughty and energetic, occasionally vicious, sometimes tender, all about myself. I haven’t seen much of that self lately, through the Pandemic Years and the Cancer Ordeal. It was nice to see her again.

I’m not up to writing about the cancer ordeal yet. I will. But not yet. Boy, did that take it out of me. I’m fully into cronehood anyway, but that tipped me right the fuck into the depths of it. It sucked away a lot of my sense of humor and it’s only returning slowly. And the only way for me to tackle the Cancer Story is through humor. It’s just too grim otherwise. For the nonce, I’m in remission and if I stay here for another 3 1/2 years I’ll be ‘cured.’

But in the warm, humid, sweet airs of my home, that give delight and harm not, even though I’m too old and fat and stiff to gallop wildly down hills and along leaf-spattered trails, I remembered what it felt like to WANT to. To have that surging energy racing through my veins like heady drink, to run so far and fast that I skimmed the earth, to suck air deep into my lungs and never feel as if I had to stop. To become a horse, or a dragon, or a cheetah, or a cowgirl, or an international jewel thief, or a wolf queen.

I shapeshifted effortlessly when I was a kid.

If I had friends to play with, it was fantastic. If I didn’t, I didn’t care. I had my imagination and endless freedom, and it was all I needed. By today’s standards my parents were incredibly neglectful and I’m so very grateful for it. I walked a mile to my best friend’s house at age 4, walked to school along busy roads with no sidewalks by myself at age 5, and swam from sunup to sundown off the North Shore rocks without an adult in earshot from 7-9. If my dad got up at 2 and found me coming in the house at age 11 and asked what I was doing, “I felt like going for a walk” was an acceptable answer. No one helped me with my homework. It was my job to get straight As and be at the top of my class, and I usually was. (I liked school.) No one showed me how to floss my teeth, or use a tampon, or coordinate an outfit, or have table manners.

It’s not surprising that I was totally unfit for American adulthood, but boy, fuck, what a great way to spend a childhood.

I could be sad about it. My mother died when I was 10, leaving 5 kids, including a newborn, with an alcoholic workaholic father, and I got bullied in my posh British school for being unkempt and probably smelly. But I kept getting straight As in everything but Math and Needlework (yes, it was mandatory at my posh school, with sewing machines with foot treadles—there weren’t electric ones, at least not in my school. I sucked at it.) I had no idea that I was feral.

And right before my mother died, she finally relented in her ongoing battle to make me forget about my all-consuming passion for horses, and let me take riding lessons.

Anyway, that wasn’t what I came here to talk about. This post is really just for me, to have somewhere to go and remember this last trip home, the one where I rediscovered my childhood relationship with Amphitrite, and a core of innate sweetness inside the hard, foul-mouthed, mean little bitchy teenager I became. I’m an asshole—my Poseidon Work showed me that in all too stark terms.

But Amphitrite, the Mother figure of my enchanted childhood whose name I never knew, has showed me the other stuff, the buried stuff, the stunted roots of kindness and goodness that got mostly choked off as I grew up, but still exist.

I remember lying in the grass of our front yard at Chequers, the house by North Shore where we lived from when I was 7 to 9. It was night, and the moon was up, and ambient light wasn’t too much of a thing then in the mid-60s, when Bermuda’s population was about 20,000, and the stars were hanging like ripe bright fruit, practically pickable. I remember looking at the moon with eyes of worship, just as I do know, and wondering, even then, if I’d been a Moon Priestess in a previous life.

I remember jumping off the rocks into the little lagoon where we swam and fished, and diving right down to the bottom, clearly able to see, even without a mask, the purple and green and blue fans, waving their lace in the current, and the inky spines of sea urchins, which we’d pluck heedlessly from the coral and leave in the sun to die and stink. Once the little animal inside had rotted away and the spines fell off, a beautiful patterned white shell would remain. We never thought they’d disappear, them or the gorgeous pink coral reefs with vast herds of parrot fish and bream and sergeant majors and grunts and the occasional huge black snapper, the reefs that make Bermuda’s enchanted sands so vibrantly pink.

The reefs are bleached white now, and finding an occasional peacock-hued parrot fish or bright silver bream is cause for great excitement. When I was a kid, we’d dive and turn the mossy rocks over for the parrot fish, and they’d graze, their beaks making scraping sounds on the rocks, brushing against us like impatient cats to feed them more. Sergeant majors would nip until we were frantic. Every now and then a big barracuda would come hang in front of us, watching us with a big round eye as we levitated out of the water.

But even with the waters so sadly depleted, Amphitrite gave me magic. Twice, once on a snorkel cruise and once off the little beach next to our rental house, I encountered curled cuttlefish, bobbling upright in single file, almost at the surface, following each other blithely past me, gently dodging my outstretched fingers. I don’t remember ever seeing them before.

Somerset Long Bay was practically our own private beach, even though it’s public and attached to a nice little park. The big South Shore beaches are rightly listed as some of the most beautiful in the world, and we swam in ’em, but our best beach days were at our little beach, and the old NASA beach were my dad worked at the tracking station in the Apollo days. Cooper’s Island, its official name, is thankfully a wildlife refuge now, and few people even know about the beach let alone make the trek back to it—you have to hoof it almost half a mile, lugging all your beach crap, but it’s so worth it.

I show you.

David was overboard before we could unpack our beach bags.

Happy Suz

I left some of my dad’s ashes out there, where an obliging school of parrot fish showed me a nice little ledge. The bottle didn’t stay on it, but danced through the shafts of sunlight down to the sandy bottom, where it sat upright, still corked, right there where the cahows’ protected nesting area sits out in the water. He’d like that.

This is beautiful little Jobson’s Cove, by Warwick Long Bay (Bermuda has too many Long Bays, a ridiculously prosaic name for some otherwordly wonderful beaches), where I learned to scuba from cute Ronnie Linley when I was 16 or 17 and back home for a visit. Being there with my husband, kids (my younger pictured here smooching my head) and daughters-in-law, was priceless.

Dylan, Kailee and I stayed on and swam at Long Bay, where it was rougher, wilder and even more beautiful. Lots of sargasso weed washed ashore by the recent hurricane. Even that crap feels nostalgic.

But the only sea urchins I saw were in the Aquarium.

The sunset over ‘our’ beach, before a night swim that was so exquisite I can’t even put it into words.

Io Amphitrite.

I was for sure more myself there than I’ve felt for a long time. Too long. The ol’ man found some of his carefree spirit on this trip too. We both needed it badly.

Now I need to learn to find it without having to physically go home. To find that within myself, where clearly it still lurks underneath the crusted layers of age, and experience, and disappointment, and adulthood, and cynicism, and hardship, and rot.

A little girl who flings herself with heedless gaiety into life, morphs into a horse at a moment’s notice, and can’t wait to get home and find some notebook paper and write down a story she’s just thought of. Gods, I miss her.

And for maybe the first time, I love her.