If a pic paints all those words, why are there so many here?

If a picture paints a clichéd number of words, this oughtta be brief. Because folks of all ages and assortments may read this, let me just say that before noon, on Saturday October 3rd, at noon, about snorkeling… well, I’d DONE it before, but, you know, never really DONE it… By noon that had changed, and 24 hours later, I’m a pro. After a speed boat trip that’s shorter than the drive from DC to the Shenandoahs, by 10:00 I’d seated myself in a deckchair to shoot a pic of my beachside bungalow

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from which I had this view:

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If you’re really clever you can figure out from which of the chairs in the 2nd I took the 1st photo. Now, despite appearances, the bungalow ain’t no 4-star affair, despite the hot and cold ALL THE TIME running water, and the toilet didn’t need flushing either, and no extra charge for the salt in the water … the distinct aroma upon entering could not be bought in stores, but disappeared upon opening the windows and running the AC…, the tall ostrich-like bird in a pen behind, the picnic table just to the right in front occupied non-stop by curious resort employees who gregariously demanded conversation on a weekend during which I was really looking for peace (need I add that to my mind my cell-phone has the same characteristic, though is not as gregarious?)…

But who needs four stars? There was also no extra charge for guests, and I admit my eyebrows raised at the sight of a second bed in the room, after rechecking myself and finding only one person. Now, my first DC apartment came with it’s own occasional black, hard, immortal, and multi-legged free companion, but after mailing chapter 2 I learned from Ron that the wall-walking lizard things referred to in it are the mass-marketing geniuses already known as gekkos… (“D’oh” moment conceded). Well, those open windows mentioned above… my partner for the night probably didn’t have this long a tail

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but I did camera- capture this guy on the beach in the AM, and just like those cockroaches of yore, every time I turned on the light in the bungalow, there was a jolting scurry from my lizard friend along the wall…

G. didn’t bother me much, and I confess seemed pretty friendly. Besides, the real key to the weekend (not the ongoing amazing food adventure) was what the snorkel yielded… I had no idea. I just had no idea. Even without a snorkel, in knee-deep water encircling this Gilligan’s-sized space, was coral of countless varieties and colors all looking like the mushrooms Alice saw after she passed through the looking glass…

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and it’s not even knee-deep. At this depth, and throughout my hours of snorkeling this weekend, there were black sea anemones with bright blue eye-like spots and 18-inch long needles all over nestled wherever there was room; teeming fish, some as thin as tissue paper, translucent, phosphorescent, dozens and dozens of types, including not at all most interestingly, but kinda memorably, a toy swordfish, maybe 3 inches tall and a quarter inch wide… with a nine inch nose that for some reason I just wanted to steer clear of – didn’t look like Pinocchio to me…

So all across the shallow beach area was this gorgeous mushroomy stuff, along with some fields of things that John Hurt and Sigourney Weaver would recognize from Alien… but go a little further and learn where the designers of the original Star Trek series got the idea for all those boulders that bounced down alien hillsides… as a matter of fact, I thought I was swimming over and through several of the alien topographies I’d seen on the show… and then looking out past those chairs the water changes color… and suddenly beneath the surface at the shelf of Jakarta Bay, 20-foot tall multi-colored towers with all sorts of life-like frozen clouds jutting out of them, really long-legged, always-blue starfish wrapped lazily across the agreeable coral. These towers against the deep blue sea backdrop underwater reminded me of nothing so much as the “birth of stars” photos that hit the papers the same day Sharon was assassinated (what a great little “did you know”).

Then exhale and let yourself drop off the shelf to enter this world, rather than gaze at it from above. While down that low, my imagination and body remembered a similar sensation when arriving in old Verona for the first time 10 years ago. The beauty is overwhelming and exhausting… and just for the record there was the moment I spied something REALLY BIG AND BLUE below me in my peripheral vision, shot 15 feet away into a massive fish school, looked behind me… (and spied my bright blue flipper keeping pace…) but off that shelf, those Disney fish musicals don’t seem quite so original, and it’s clear why Aquaman chose to rule below rather than above the waterline… Claude, I’ll be diving next time.

And the food! Were it not for the way too loud generic cover band (yes, if that guy at Duangrats in DC had had a backing band, he would have sounded the same). Then again, we all know I am the only one among us who could have identified the obscure Bee Gees cover played that night: Don’t Forget To Remember Me (yes, from the soundtrack to Cucumber Castle which I don’t think anybody ever saw…). Still, I didn’t want to hear it on my porch even after the five course buffet-style supper.

Just to sign off with a funny: from the minute I got to the island I was hounded, in Gilligan’s Island fashion, by a one-eyed native muttering the local dialect which has yet to materialize in my consciousness. No sooner was I seated in that deckchair with my novel (Lethem: Gun, With Occasional Music 3.5 stars) than he arrives, hovering… I smile, I’m gracious, I’m wondering “why me?”… I apologize… he wanders off. I get my first of three snorkeling epiphanies, return to my deckchair for twenty minutes before lunch and one-eye returns to gesture with hand to mouth that it’s lunchtime. Does anyone else see this man? Skipper? SKIPPPPPERRRR!!!!

I eat. 2 plates full. Four teas. Still wondering when a meal here would disappoint in either variety, repetition, or quantity… Talked with a 65-year-old Saskatchewan who chucked away a bitter 35-year marriage, got an ESL certificate and came over here for the warmth (and maybe something else but I can’t be sure)… returned to my deckchair passed a couple dozen Indonesian guests in a mammoth tug-of-war amid the palms… and here he comes again… SKIPPERRRRR! More persistent this time. Had in mind another snorkel anyway, so I try to smile him off with warm apologies, and head to the woods in search of hiding and another sea-route. Somehow, he’s in front of me, then behind me… can’t shake the guy. He cuts to the right without looking back so I go straight… a moment later I find new, pristine beach, look over my shoulder once and collapse in the sand. No people, no Cyclops, just little ol’ me and my snorkeling kit on this secluded little stretch of whiteness…

Not 5 minutes pass… and the splashing of the waves grows louder. Am I drifting into a lunchtime napping reverie, or drifting out to see? I raise my head a bit, crack an eyelid… Cyclops has a slave rowing a junk around the bend of the island in pursuit of me! His boat is right there, 15 feet from MY feet, at the edge of the water! I feign sleep quickly, praying he’ll just go away!!! The familiar circuitous padding of his feet. It’s 2:00? I leave in 24 hours! Where’s my peace???? “Skipppperrrr!!!! They’re cooooooming!” “OK, little buddy, you go this way and I’ll go that-a-way!” But he passes me by and the footfalls recede. Less than a commercial break later I crack an eyelid and register the junk (and I DO mean “junk”, sadly) still hovering, blocking my access to the treasured CORAL… I raise my head and am immediately assaulted from behind!!! I quickly smile and say “not yet” and plop my head back down as Cylops licks his chops with an “oh…”, neither of us really understanding the other for the most part…

But our last encounter tells me (Gilligan wouldn’t have got it) this thing ain’t gonna be resolved without a full-blown throwing down, me and this Cyclops, who hasn’t aged well since 2000 BC or whenever Odysseus last had at him) but boy has he aged! So I rise. Slave is shyly perched on a tree branch away to my left; junk due straight ahead, Cyclops shuffling in for the kill from 1 o’clock… more monster growls and groans that make no sense to me (few teeth, smoked a lot, never drank much milk (no one here can), but lived a long time… not scary, just unintelligible, and persistent: he’d have had a lesser opponent than me on his knees by now, and he knows it…). Cy had learned one word of English (does he know it’s English?), which he couldn’t say but he could scratch out in the sand… “T…O…U…R” … (Gilligan (aka Tom Hanks) wrote “H…E…L…P” in stones once), points to his junk, his slave, and some other little islands well within view but just the other side of some very dark blue water…

and I admit I thought about it…

so that’s what all this has been about… BUT WHY ME??? But, geez, I was tempted. Then again, I can see the headlines, or lack thereof: “..” nope, can’t see ‘em… but still. Maybe next time. So I grab my stuff, and head further away, hoping he’ll just give up and go for a tastier human, or just his usual lambs….and from the reef a ways off, I look back at where I’d been, and see the junk slowly heading away around a bend… it’s three o’clock

3 hours later I’m looking west from another deckchair at this, all in for $100:



And Ben, I took this stogie 11,000 miles from Amanda and John's... I think I'm doing it justice right here, even if I still can't pose for a photo...