Beneath the Skin
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: Bonaire, gathering ourselves to move on, with a tinge of sadness.
Beneath the skin
Last weekend, Lee and I headed out in the car to check out a new-to-us snorkel spot. When we got in the water, we followed our usual routine: he manages to get his fins on first, and makes a beeline for the drop-off at the edge of the reef. I trail along behind, struggling to catch up and trying to get his attention and tell him to slow down.
On Sunday, though, when I started kicking out toward the reef, I saw this most beautiful turtle, hanging out next to a coral head in the sandy zone behind the reef. I stopped, and watched it for a minute, then spent another couple of minutes diving down to get a photo. I tried to wave Lee back, but he was long gone, swimming toward the deep water.
In the last two months, I have snorkeled in front of our apartment most days, just floating around in the shallow water by myself (being in shallow water enables me to see creatures up close), barely moving. I see the same fish every day. I watch their behavior, their habits. I’ve learned which are skittish, which are fearless, which get more active later in the day. Some are aggressive toward their neighbors; some ignore each other. Some ignore me. Some swim along with me, as if I’m providing cover. I laugh into my snorkel. It’s not a beautiful spot—it’s mostly just rocks and rubble and old engine blocks that are used as mooring buoys—but being there, seeing it so repeatedly, is sort of magical. It feels like I’m gaining a tiny bit of understanding of a world I don’t otherwise see.
This is pretty much how we go through the world—this push-pull is so much a part of our relationship now that we have a code word for it: scuba diving (which is a little ironic, since we haven’t actually done any scuba diving on this visit to Bonaire). Years ago, when we started diving with our children, we quickly realized that there was always a conflict: keep moving to cover more distance (the children), or slow down to look at the tiny things. You can’t see cleaner shrimp if you’re zooming by, but if you stay in one spot, you might miss the eagle ray over there. It’s hard to choose (unless you’re trying to keep track of two rambunctious kids at fifty feet below the surface, in which case you keep your eyes on them no matter what).
Traveling presents us with this same conflict, writ large: the faster we move, the more we see. The slower we move, the more we understand.
When we went to Bali, we stayed in a small, family-owned hotel in a village outside of Ubud. We spent a month there, in one of their eight rooms, slowly coming to feel as if we were part of the family. One day, late in our stay, the owner said he’d like to take us on a walking tour of the village, so that we could “see beneath the skin.”
We had been walking around this village for three weeks at that point (okay, Lee had been walking more than I had, because there were dogs everywhere—I insisted on taking a taxi into Ubud each day so that I could get some steps with fewer dogs barking at me). That walk with Gus was one of the more memorable of our lives. We sloshed through a wet rice paddy, and chatted with the man who tends an ancient shrine, mostly abandoned. We watched as he stepped carefully along the rickety wooden bridge over the rivers, carrying a load of tools and cleaning supplies. We visited the community shower, which Gus told us most people continue to use, even though they have plumbing at home, because it’s the social center of the village. He also warned us that everyone would be naked. He was correct. He took us into a family compound, to see how the rooms were arranged. He asked, before we entered, if I had my period, because if I did, I needed to stay out of the central shrine. It was, in my experience of the world, an intensely private question. But in his experience of the world, it was completely normal.
If we had spent only a few days in Bali, on an island-hopping tour of Indonesia, I don’t imagine we’d have memories so richly-textured and specific. We’ve done that—landed in a country, rented a car, and seen as much as possible in a week or two. My experience of those places is often a blur; I have to look back at my photos to bring the memories to life, and even then, I only remember the things I could’ve seen on the internet or in a guide book anyway.
Slow travel is not for everyone, I realize. Even I have trouble reconciling myself to it sometimes. FOMO is real. We are (probably) leaving Bonaire next week, and I’m fighting off a familiar feeling of regret—I didn’t do it all; I wasted an opportunity.
But if you can, try slow travel sometime, because there is value in both approaches. You can see a lot of sights on a five-countries-in-ten-days kind of trip—go, go, go—but you may see every bit as much if you stop and sit. It’ll just look different.
From my writer’s notebook:
The United Kingdom has a law called the Treasure Act. If someone finds a metal object that might be more than 300 years old, they are required to report it within two weeks. It will be appraised and valued, and the finder may qualify for a reward. Museums will have the opportunity to acquire the item.
I read about the law because two men were sentenced to jail recently for violating the law. Using metal detectors, they found a hoard of coins, jewelry, and other artifacts dating from the ninth and tenth centuries. Instead of reporting the items, they tried to sell them off, piecemeal. It’s thought the entire collection was worth about four million dollars, but we’ll never know for sure, because so many pieces went straight into private collections.
Take care,
Lisa
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