A Little Kelp

When the still cold and pasty midwesterner first reaches an azure beach down in the tropical depths of Punta Cana, a sort of double calling come over him. First, he might wish that his skin color might quickly transform to ghost-like to something closer to the color fine clay, and quickly. It is not a particularly globetrotting characteristic to look as though you live trapped inside some basement on a farm in Iowa. The other is, of course, to dash out into the crashing waves as quickly as possible and get a feel of this otherworld known as rolling sea. So we dashed out into the five foot waves and felt the gently undertow at the backwash of waves glide over our feet as it pulling us by our ankles a little deeper, a little deeper, to where the warm water climbed over our chests and the three of us rocked there like large buoys, warm, and on a free ride. My sunglasses on, I grabbed them tightly in my hand, so that I could dive under the waves and get my hair wet, for I know that they would slip off at the first streak underwater and that would be that, no more sunglasses under the sun for this trip – these were prescription and so served as not only sun blockers, but as vision itself, a nice feature. We rode a series of fifty waves; at the down trough of the wave, we could feel the bottom at our toes; at the crest, we were in well over our head. Buoys out another hundred feet marked the end of the course, where larger and more rolling goliaths stood and erased the horizon line. This was good for now, "I think I'll head in to find a nice sun chair to sit in for a while," I told Julia and Carly, 16 and 12, two heads bobbing but touching with their toes and smiles as white as the skin of the back of my hand which I saw still carried the fine prescribed glass, so I slipped them back on, the water only up to my waist by now, but also at the ver point where the waves were crashing and jetting into shore as what looked like to me the perfect body boarding material. How could I resist. Children next to me were timing the crashing of the waves, diving with it, and being transported at the speed limit at least. I watched behind me for the next crasher. I took a couple of steps, ducked down and dove, head down into the whip of the wave and was carried for a good twenty feet, where I began to feel the sand at my belly. This was fun, I should try it again, I said to myself. As I stood up, the beach and the chairs and the people walking looked awfully bright and vivid. Weren't they a moment ago muted, dark, and gauzily yellow? I slowly lifted my hand up to my eyes and there didn't seem to be anything surrounding them, like big black prescribed lenses that would have been handy for such a trip. No, they had taken the ride along with me, no doubt whipped off at the contact of the dive, and so therefore somewhere bobbing along the bottom of the beach with those crispy bunches of kelp. Oh well, this trip, I considered, will be seen in technicolor.