lifeonthepike

I started the year wanting to write a lot of stories, but I got stuck on one in particular that I wanted to get out. It was the experience of having dinner every evening for a week with five strangers. I could not quite find a way to tell it. And then it came. I think.

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As I stood there on deck, Martin said to me, "Enjoy Barbados!" I guess it was time to go. There was no sign of George and Janet; Martin, Jackie, and Jenny were leaving on their own and had not offered their details, so I was off, having spent this week sailing around the Caribbean, in some ways wasted, but in many ways refreshed.

I have had it as a goal of mine for a few years to start "collecting people," for this is what a few of my friends do. They collect people. They embark on these travels and great adventures, whether it is for work or pleasure, and have slowly built up a network of contacts on half a dozen contacts. As I have lived where I am for the past two decades, I have come to realize that I will eventually leave. It would be nice when I leave I could go to some far-flung destination, a million miles from the go-go obsession of America, and settle down near the beach and near a jungle in which to lose myself, at least for part of the year.

And for this reason, I keep returning to the Caribbean. Based on stories told by my friend-collectors, I spent seven days around New Years floating around on a large four-masted sailing vessel - large enough to hold a couple hundred passengers and the crew to accommodate, but small enough to not bother with the cruise terminal in the islands we visited. Every morning we woke up as the ship was sailing into a small bay with a beach somewhere. After breakfast, we would drop anchor and they would tender us ashore, sometimes just to bake in the sun on the beach, other times to head off on small excursions and explore.

For me, traveling by boat is not about learning about a new culture and it is not about drawing up a travel resume. It is more about relaxation. It is about getting some sun, reading a lot of books, drinking a lot of tropical beverages, and eating a lot of food, hopefully some of it expertly prepared. This food subject, I could go off on forever. The truth is that cruise ship food is often expertly-prepared Sysco cuisine. Above average steaks and so forth, but usually brought onto a ship at the beginning of a week and by Wednesday you will notice there are no more fresh bananas and no more greens served alongside your food, because they cannot keep them from turning brown in that time. Even when you're docking on various islands, the logistics just don't work to bring much aboard every time. Which is sad.

It is ironic, though, because this is often how you enjoy life on a ship, and I think this is true for a ship of any size.

For the week that I was on the Royal Clipper, I sat down every evening and had dinner with seven strangers, and usually these dinners lasted for two or three hours. Well, a moment ago, I did say five strangers.

It began simply enough. I boarded in Barbados on a Saturday afternoon after the day spent in the sun. Royal Clipper does not check you in at a cruise terminal and run your passport there. They have you walk through the terminal and they take your bag. Then you cross the street and you walk up the gang plank. Mere mortals have to walk a quarter or half a mile down a long pier and then up a much longer gang plank AFTER they have gone through much of the formalities, but not us.

I walk up the gang plank and into the canopy-covered tropical bar on deck where they hand me a glass of champagne. I am standing next to a couple from Georgia who was standing in the terminal with me waiting to drop their bags. I kind of suspected that like the other couples I had met from Georgia on my travels recently their politics may be suspect, and as I live in Washington I tend not to mix as much as I did a couple of years ago. At this point, though, we were standing around and enjoying a tiki band while waiting to be called as a group into the lounge, which is how they did it on the Royal Clipper. Rather than take down your customs information, run your credit card, and prepare your ship ID in the terminal, they take you in groups of 20 or 30 people at a time and do it on the boat, as you are sipping champagne.

They printed a plastic ID card with my name on it which they could run on a laptop every time I came and went from the boat or whenever I ordered a drink. In reality though, I gave my room number a handful of times at the bar and the dining room and once or twice while boarding the tender to the ship. No wallet and no ID for a week would have sufficed quite nicely, and often did.

Boarding finished by dinnertime, and we had our bags, so I dressed for dinner and headed down. At the bottom of the ship's grand staircase, the head waiter greeted me.

"Two for dinner?" he asked, motioning to the woman behind me.

"Oh, no. Just one."

"Okay then. Right here." He led me down to one of two tables in the sunken center of the dining area. In many places I would say that it would seem like I was royalty to be seated so prominently.

I sat down next to five people. There was a couple from New Jersey, not far from where my mother was born. Then there were three from the United Kingdom. Not from England, though, well except Martin that is. Martin was traveling with his wife and sister-in-law, who were both nominally Welsh, although born in Poland and having settled in Wales when they were young enough to not remember. Martin's wife was Jenny who had some interesting things to say about the British national health system. His sister-in-law was Jackie who was herself a nurse. To some degree, Jackie and I became partners in crime at dinner time for the rest of the week, both being unattached. I found it funny though as Jackie is probably my mother's age.

A bit later, George and Janet sat down next to us. At first, I figured both to be in their sixties. All I really knew about them was they had been on the Royal Clipper or one of its sister ships a couple dozen times, preferring to come in the winter and stay for two weeks of cruising. They were English speaking and George was Canadian while Janet was English, having met a long time ago in England. Both were easy to talk to and they seemed to follow the strange British habit I have noticed where a man sits next to a woman and not another man at dinner time so we were all paired off boy-girl-boy-girl, so at least at dinner I got to know Janet a bit better than George.

We never sat with the couple from New Jersey again. They were quiet and did not drink much, whereas the rest of our group had a significant bar tab by the end of the week. Every night we seemed to collect a new couple. And every night George tried to buy me a drink or two. On the fourth night I insisted only on a glass of wine at dinner, as it was New Years, and the night before had been a bit of a pickle. On the fifth night, I bought a nice bottle of wine, and insisted the sommelier, a woman who knew me by name and by room and by preferred cocktail (a White Russian at the tropical bar, any time after noon), charge the bottle to his room and not mine. I made that bottle last two nights.

On the sixth night, a Republican named Rodney who held court at the Tropical Bar every afternoon from 3p.m. to dinnertime bought me a couple of top shelf drinks in honor of his birthday. And George, again, bought me a drink - Laphroaig, fancy whisky. But oh, speaking of Rodney. Every morning at 10a.m., just as breakfast in the dining room was closing, he would appear at the bar with some bacon and his own Bloody Mary mix. I think on the fourth day, and the fourth beach, Rodney started telling me his plans for the day.

"Usually I just take the tender ashore and maybe swim a bit. If there is a beach bar, I find it."

"You mean you don't ever go on excursions?"

"No. My girlfriend does that." Rodney's girlfriend had been in his life for a couple of decades, but they never married. In fact, Rodney was a fascinating individual. Regardless of his Republican leanings, the current tariff wars were screwing up his business - a business he owned in part because the company where he worked was shutting down and he knew what he was doing so he invested and bought it. "Usually she is trying to get me to go with her and I sometimes do, but this is my routine. I come on here to talk and meet people." I was there to meet people as well, but generally by the time the 2 1/2 hour dinner and other activities wore off in the evening, I was ready to have some time to myself and explore the islands in the morning.

So on this particular day, we were in St. Kitt's. We had docked at the main port for an hour or so in the morning and it was quiet there, as it was early. I enjoyed walking around a bit and did some shopping. The shop owners were generous and willing to make a deal. I had been in St. Kitt's before though, and I recalled the main town did not offer much. This was still true. It is kind of gritty, although unlike when I was there two decades ago the port area has built up considerably as a tourist shopping area. And after our shopping expedition, the boat moved a few miles down the island to a large beach area.

Beaches in St. Kitt's typically do not have a huge amount of development. Twenty years ago, there was nothing. There were only a handful of resorts on the island and much of the tourist activity was restricted to Europeans who had holiday homes. The same was mostly true, but one end of the island had developed a little - Hyatt for instance had a lease on a patch of land surrounded by a national park.

The beach where we dropped anchor was wedged between the main road to the national park and the sea. Both George and Rodney had spoken their intentions for the day - take the tender ashore and walk twenty minutes down to the other end of the beach to the Shipwreck Bar.

My intention was similar, but did not include the Shipwreck Bar. I intended to find a spot on the beach and read.

My intention was thwarted by a few different things.

I have come to prefer a chair on the beach, so when I came ashore, I stopped at the first beach club where I saw two fellow passengers from the ship. They informed me that you had to rent a chair - they were not free. The chairs were $20. And if you needed the rest room, you had to buy a drink. So I told them to enjoy themselves and moved on. I figured that maybe I could find a chair down by this "Shipwreck Bar." What I really wanted was a hammock.

After walking a bit, I encountered a beach bar right on the water - as in, the high tide was lapping at the edge of the steps. It seemed to basically be falling down, and into the water along the edge of the palm trees. But the beautiful thing about this place was there were hammocks.

There was a family of perhaps eight Americans sitting on the deck at the bar, with kids running around. I asked if the hammocks were free and they told me that yes, but they belonged to the bar. So I figured I had better buy a drink, and they warned me it was a one man operation. There was a man working the bar, and the kitchen, and the tables. At the moment, he was cooking, but he would appear sooner or later.

He did appear, and I bought the local Carib lager for $1.50 and sat down in the hammock. And along came George and Janet.

The thing I learned about George and Janet is that they were actually both 82. They tended to take it easy on these expeditions as a result, but both were quite active, and both had traveled all over the world in many years. George actually retired 22 years ago, at the mandatory retirement age for the Canadian airline he flew planes for!

"Well, you look quite happy! We're going down to Shipwreck!" I told him that maybe I would eventually find my way down there but not to hold his breath. I was happy where I was and was thinking that perhaps I would fall asleep there, and now knowing everyone on the ship would walk past me on the hammock I was not afraid of sleeping through the last tender either.

My plan was thwarted when it started raining, though, so I finished my beer and walked down the beach to Shipwreck, where a dozen of us managed to empty a considerable number of buckets of Carib at a similar price! About a third of what it cost on the ship. And this is why you go to out of the way spots on Caribbean islands.

There were a lot of other things I could talk about in regards to my adventures in the Caribbean. I could talk about the ceremony they had every time they hoisted sail, or what it was like to be in heavy surf on something that is actually sailing rather than motoring. Or my favorite subject, of how I tend to get insomnia in inside cabins. When I was back on shore after that week, I was video chatting with my girlfriend back home when she said, "You're falling asleep!" It was a sign I needed a rest.

There are many things I thought over the week. But still, one of the biggest was still the politics, and it bothers me a bit to the day.

At the time, we were in the middle of the government shutdown. The Trump administration was holding a wall hostage. Janet said to me on our second to last night, "Is there really anyone who supports this guy Trump? It just seems as if he is kind of stupid!" I don't think she would have said stupid without a few drinks, but I explained my own point of view, which was that it was satisfying to be on a boat that was not as full of Americans as is typical so I would not have to worry about it as much. But I did say that there were people around who I suspected. That dinner, the couple from Georgia had joined us, and they were very nice, sweet people. I think I mentioned that I had other experiences with couples from Georgia recently. There was an older couple I met when I was on vacation in November who had said, "It just seemed to be a lot colder back then," when referring to their childhoods, as if they were conflicted between believing their own experiences or believing what the media dogma they subscribed to was sharing.

On the final night, the couple from Georgia joined us as well.

After three or four courses and we were down to dessert, we started talking about the Grand Canyon. They were sharing how they had been to the Grand Canyon and how much they enjoyed it. I think they were talking about hiking to the bottom of the canyon with their boys.

"You know, you could not do that now. Not with the shutdown."

The man said, "No. Which is why we should just agree to spend the money on the wall. It's important."

"Do you really think having a wall is worth stopping everything in the whole country?"

"Yes, absolutely! It's a national emergency!" It was strange to see what seemed to be an educated man speak so absolutely on this subject.

Up until that point, I had not met anyone who firmly believed that it was an absolute necessity to build a wall. I had met a lot of people who felt it was a novel, creative idea, as in, "Why did we not think of this before? I thought there was a big wall along the border anyway so I'm surprised to hear there isn't one."

"Really? What do you think a wall will do? Are you really that afraid of having people who aren't like you around you? It won't really stop anyone anyway, and most of our immigrants are not actually coming from Mexico." To me, this is an affront. A lot of people have a generic belief that anyone from the south is a "Mexican," and they all are bad. I raised my voice a bit in defense of the idea that borders are meant to be open.

Our whole table went silent and we futzed around a bit trying to make conversations in ones and twos. After about ten or fifteen minutes of allowing things to return to normal, Janet said it was time to go relax; it had been a long day. I took my leave as well and went to my room to change back to shorts from my standard khakis and Hawaiian shirt dinnerware.

By the time I appeared at the Tropical Bar for the final night's festivities, the three from England and George and Janet were there already.

"That went well!" Martin told me. "History has proven that walls don't work anyway!" But the damage had been done, and that's how I felt the next morning.

My final morning I puttered around the ship and had some coffee and a banana before packing to leave. I said goodbye to a few people, and then I encountered Martin. I left the boat before I intended.

I spent a lot of time reflecting on that week and the people I met. I remembered what my friends in England told me a long time ago. "If you want to come join us, you have to tell us." They don't know when to invite me, since I live so far away. I feel now that I should have done this with Martin. I should have invited him to join me, in the sense that I should have invited him to share contact information with me. Americans are often too friendly too quickly, and that puts them at ill ease sometimes.

But still, sometimes we only come home with memories. And I have those and others from that trip.

"Watch out, there's another one over there!" Leila and I were dodging skunks as we made our way up the lawn towards Saxton Hall. "Normally they only come down from the woods in the fall." It was a close call. Our second of the night. We had been out walking all over Oneonta late that night - it was warm and finals were ending, and I was about to go home for the summer.

I remember scenes like this while sitting at home on a Friday listening to records. Right now, I am listening to The Pet Shop Boys, and the third piece off of their Discography LP from 1991 has an eighteen second intro that mostly sounds like crickets keeping a beat in the background.

I remember when I played on college radio, it was the perfect piece to accompany a 15 second promo tape, and the music would kick in just as the tape ended. And that's what I used to do. I could pretty much do whatever I wanted to do on our radio station - I went on at midnight on Sunday, not a hugely popular night for people to be up late, so there were not many listeners, but the ones I did have tended to be loyal and called in. I came on right after a guy named Irwin Gooen.

It was odd that Irwin had a radio show, but he was one of a handful of townies who had shows on our campus radio station. His he devoted to peace, love, and happiness. He was a self-described tree hugger. I used to think of him as just another old hippie, in Oneonta on the edge of the Catskills, not too far from where Woodstock took place, and with all the hills around the radio station had a real voice. Everyone always thinks of New York as urban, but the upstate part is really spread out, and hills and valleys pretty much cut us off in Oneonta from any real civilization.

But nonetheless, I spent my days and nights rambling around Oneonta as if it were a real city, and to me the old storefronts, Victorian houses, and grid pattern of streets felt more like New York and New York City than anything in Virginia or DC ever would. And I met guys like Irwin, who seemed as if they fit in with flower power 1969 New York as much as they did in my college era, years later.

Anyway, I usually showed up about fifteen minutes before the end of Irwin's show which he always ended with the long version of The Chamber Brothers' "Time Has Come Today," giving us a few minutes to chat as he packed up his gear, which mostly consisted of similar-era music, a bit more diverse from what was played on the local classic rock station including a lot of Grateful Dead, most likely bootleg, and most likely also quasi-legal to play on the air as the rights had not been granted.

On one particular night around the beginning of May, he had a companion. There was a woman with him, or somebody who appeared to be a woman, a few inches shorter than me, not thin but fairly attractive, and somewhat alternative in her dress, with bright red hair. I ended up talking to her a bit and Irwin ended up leaving for the evening right after I started playing music shortly after midnight. She was friendly towards me and we ended up staying on the air together forty minutes past when I normally signed the radio station off at two in the morning.

So the funny thing was that Leila was not a student. "So, how old are you anyway?"

"Well, I am not in college. I live in town."

"Oh really? Where?"

"I live on Cherry Street."

"You mean on the hill?"

Cherry Street was notorious. Our college took its place on the side of Oyaron Hill. In many places, Oyaron would be considered a mountain which was entertaining to those of us who grew up in upstate New York. Unless you're deep in the Catskills or around the high peaks of the Adirondacks, there are no mountains in upstate New York. There are merely hills which are minor conveniences to drive around or over, and Hartwick was on an inconvenient hill. And the easiest way to downtown when walking was down Cherry Street, a hill so steep that if you owned a house and were sitting on your side porch, you would be looking into your neighbor's bedroom twenty feet to the east.

Leila lived on the hill and I came to discover that she was only fifteen, about to turn sixteen, and living with her mother. But like many of the women of my adulthood, I was drawn to her for some reason. She was freakishly bright and was curious about a lot of different things. For some crazy reason, after that night I gave her my phone number and she started calling me.

My roommate was a bit entertained by this. She came to get me when I needed a study break, a couple of times in which I was out at the library, and he would tell me later, "Somebody came looking for you."

I would say, "Which one?"

And he would say, "The redhead." Not to be confused with a couple of the other hippie women that were around in my life that year, not like Liz who he called "The weird one," or Erin who he referred to as "The shy one."

And Leila cooked me dinner one night. When summer was nearing and I was preparing to go home and work on a landscape crew, she offered me a chicken dinner. So I took a break from studying and went to her mother's red house on Cherry Street Hill, and we sat around and talked a bit. I met her mother and her mother was going out.

"I'm a sophomore in college," I told her, as I still looked young. "Do you think it's normal for your daughter to spend time with college boys?"

She gave me a funny look, as if to imply that it seemed that I was judging her poorly, and said, "Sure. There is nowhere else that she will meet anyone who matches her intellectually."

Leila cooked me dinner and we talked for a while and eventually I returned to the library that night. A few nights later when I was done studying, I met her late in the evening for a walk. I guess you could say that was the night we encountered skunks.

We walked across town to the other side of the valley, to a park where I would later chase my roommate's escaped Siberian husky. We sat on a picnic table for a while and drew fairly close, with the type of closeness where you would eventually expect a kiss. I ended up being a friend, though. We talked, and that summer we exchanged letters, with her asking a bit about what I, Rob, could possibly be anxious about? And me asking where she would be in the fall.

It would later turn out that she left town two years early destined for a college designed for high school students. I saw her once more that fall in an awkward meeting with one of her local friends, but years later we are in touch again. She studied religion to the Master's level, as philosophy, at Harvard Divinity School and now does community organization in Baltimore.

Much better than living in Oneonta surrounded by college students.

That night, we walked to another park and sat on a bench. As we were sitting there, the Oneonta Police came through. It was last call at the bars and they were also chasing everyone out of the parks.

She and I started walking away. I said to her, "Walk a different direction until they leave please. I'll get in trouble if the stop us."

"I'm not stupid."

I was standing out in the gulf about a hundred or so yards from shore with water up past my belly enjoying the sunshine, enduring the chill of the water. The weather was warm, but not that warm, and the water to me seemed barely warm enough for a dip. Just then I noticed a brown object moving towards me under the surface of the water. I yelped a bit and jumped, splashing. A stingray. It turned away. Half a minute later, there was another, also coming straight in the same direction towards me. It, too, turned away when I swished my feet and hands a bit. I wanted to dip down to my shoulders but didn't stay long after that. I achieved my goal of spending some time at the beach and taking a dip in the water over this holiday.

Part of the purpose of this expedition is, indeed, to relax on the beach a bit, and to spend some time in the sun so I don't totally burn to a crisp after fifteen minutes on my next expedition after Christmas. But really, the purpose of coming to my sister's for Thanksgiving is to have an inexpensive holiday. Driving down and staying here doesn't cost a fortune. Although we have spent a bit of time shopping, and that isn't necessarily cheap.

Half of what we have done here has not exactly come off as intended. Wednesday's beach expedition was chilly and breezy, but the parrots were cool to watch as they swarmed around the palm trees at Sunset Beach. And that evening we went to a tiki bar at dinner, only to end up eating in the larger restaurant separate from the tiki bar, still enjoying good food but without the live music. Yesterday morning we ran a 5k race and I was stiff and sore, with my lungs protesting against an efficient run, but it helped earn our turkey - although, as the announcer said, "You all sound like a bunch of vegans!" We ended up having homemade calzones for Thanksgiving since none of us wanted to cook a full bird.

Then there was today with its resulting enjoyment and a small amount of bliss. An efficient day in the art of doing nothing. We drove down to Treasure Island and set up camp for the day, breaking the bases of two beach umbrellas in the process. We laid in the sun, walked, talked, read, and listened to music. And now I am slightly more brown.

Last time I was down here, we went to the same beach and then drove up the road a mile for lunch at a tiki bar complete with a one man band. That time, the one man band consisted of a man who roamed around the bar serenading people and beating a tambourine as he did karaoke-style singing along with a prerecorded soundtrack. This time when we went back the one man band was more of a country singer who played guitar while singing from a karaoke screen. He was good, and likely when prompted he could sing the phone book, but the drinks were better.

Tomorrow's project? Shopping of course. I skipped Black Friday to begin on Small Business Saturday instead. And then I will go with Cyber Monday.

Tonight around dinnertime I remembered I have a crock full of pickles. Normally, this would not be a big deal, but three weeks have passed since I put them in there, along with a mixture of brine and pickling spice and a couple of bundles of dill along with some garlic. It is time. So, on this Saturday evening, I was canning pickles. And next week I will not be home.

I am always a stressful ball of nerves when I am planning to be away. This time, though, I made time out to spend with family. It ended up in a shopping expedition.

Tomorrow... Well, we will see. Tonight is my night to sleep.

“You really should start a blog,” she said, as she took a photo of my latte.


“Why? I don’t think so.” We had repeated this debate a few times before.

“Because you have such observations on life and the places you visit. You know the history of the place. And why it works.”

I leaned over and kissed her after putting on my gloves and taking my mocha. It was time to make our way through the ice and snow outside.

She trudged slowly to the metro, trying not to slip in her boots which to me seemed more fashionable than functional. My feet were dry. My lunch break had drawn to an end and it was time to hurry a bit.

Back at work I thought about it a bit more. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I have a blog. In fact, it was my second blog, my first having ended a tragic death in the aftermath of a relationship upheaval, deleted rather than being offered up as share from one of many friends who followed my life. But then again, more of the same has led me to believe it is time to move on from this online world. Facebook is not quite what it is anymore, and even Instagram seems poisoned. I have friends on there – on both networks really – scattered throughout the world. My whole life is there, but I am happiest in the present. It is ironic that I am considering writing more online.

My online life, or shall I say my secret life, has always been hidden and somewhat separate from my day to day life. In some way, it is like Paul Theroux in “My Secret History,” where he spills the beans to the reader a fictionalized version of his life – how he lived in between the travel writing and the novels that he had at that point spent 25 years accumulating.

Paul Theroux, however, projects an image of a stereotype. He becomes one who writes of people in a crude and blunt way. I hope not to become that person, nor do I hope to become, as the New York Times reviewed him, one who should really replace the word “secret” with “sexual.”

I would say that is what I am here to explore myself including my past, but in reality I am here to explore the present. I will not explicitly tell my story. Instead, I will give glimpses of my life and my experiences so people slowly understand how I think.

Perhaps at some point it will become a story. In the meantime, life’s observations.

“See you Monday,” I said. “A bit after eight in the morning.” We are heading south together.