Wave jumper

Back in my late twenties, I made my first visit to warm ocean beaches, visiting my friend L in Kauai.  Previously I had never been enamored of the tropical climate, which I associated with cockroaches the size of your thumb and sunburn.  But on that visit I discovered the enchantment of warm plumeria-scented breezes and blood-warm salt waters.  L was tired: she had a 3-month old and a 3-year old, and her then-husband was working two jobs.  So, I explored the rim of the island on my own, visiting Salt Pond for the sunset and family atmosphere, Poipu for the waves, and Lumahai and Tunnel beaches for the snorkeling.  We went on some family hiking and driving excursions, too, but it was the beaches that called to me, and ever after I was hooked on the tropics.  (They still have cockroaches the size of your thumb, but....I can compromise.)

I'm thinking about that experience, because I recently visited my mother at her new home in Ormond Beach, Florida. The air is very, very damp, and the sun is a strong baking presence always, but when you are in the ocean or the pool you become absorbed by the submersion of self in water. I find myself thinking of the womb:  is this what it was like?  No, because, in addition to the weightlessness and the cradling, there is the hissing heartbeat of the waves, and the flickering reflection of light and sky.  Mom is a short elevator ride away. I spend a couple of hours each day enjoying the waters, and a couple more on her balcony, watching the pelicans soar past in their pointy/bulbous-billed squadrons, swift and silent.

The Florida beach is nowhere near as beautiful as the ones in Kauai:  the palm treesare lined up like soldiers along the roads, and the condos and hotels are high-rise ugly, with very little landscaping.  The lush vegetation of the tropics is lacking, and so are the sweet scents of flowering vines, which are unhappily replaced with the odor of sunscreen.  And, the lithe brown local children are supplanted by white vacationing blobs and hobbling retirees. But, it doesn't matter. I stand, thigh-high in the warm pea-green water, sideways to the ocean, watching the light scatter along the broken wavelets, watching the sea build up into larger and larger swells until the waves finally break and I leap with them.

.

Buoyed by the green waves,
I put feet down to jump high
For the seventh one

In Kauai the waves often broke over my head, sometimes taking my glasses with them, sometimes filling my nose and stopping my breath.  I didn't have the chutzpah to swim out beyond the breakers, nor did I usually have the boogie board. So, I was not body surfing properly, and I was feeling the immense power of the ocean.  In Florida, it was a calmer affair.  I could float in the shallow water, bobbing up and down and back and forth with the surge of the ocean, and there was little fear of undertows or big waves.  I lost time, thought, even joy.  I just was.