This is not the post I thought I’d be writing.

After spending a week in St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands, I thought I’d be writing to tell you about the amazing place we stayed, right along the coast,

and how prone to sloth I would most likely become were I to have a porch like this

with sunrise views like this

or curious views like this

from which to slowly sip my morning coffee.

I could become quite lazy, indeed.

I might have also told you about the treasures we found from the sea

or our makeshift Christmas “tree” and our fins-turned-stockings

and the Christmas morning rainbow that appeared, almost as if on cue.

And I could tell you about the wild donkeys and goats and chickens, and the hermit crabs, and the ridiculous amount of fish and lobster we dined on, and the snorkeling and all its wonders, including the 5-foot nurse shark….

and the sting rays who visited our lagoon every morning, and the amazing beaches…..

And even then, I would only have begun to scratch the surface of all the things we experienced on our trip to St. John.

That, is the post I thought I was going to write.  Perhaps with a little bit of time and perspective behind me, I still will. But Life, the Universe, had other plans, and sometimes, things happen that shift your focus, and you find that what you thought you’d be thinking about and writing about, recedes into the background, and something else, something more glaring and vivid, takes the place of those now slightly faded, slightly sun-bleached thoughts you once entertained.

No, this is not the post I thought I’d be writing. And yet, it’s the only one I can think to write. So here we go.

 ****

This year, for the first time ever ~ in my life, my husband’s life, and my kids’ lives ~ we decided to go away for Christmas. This year was the first year that Noel has ever had time off around the holidays, and, in our excitement over this fact, we decided that since he had time off, and the kids had time off, and the stars appeared to all be aligning, we should take advantage of it, and go somewhere. And by ‘somewhere,’ I mean: somewhere warm, because winter in Illinois….mostly kind of stinks.

So, after a lot of discussion and consideration, we ended up deciding on St. John, the smallest of the three U.S. Virgin Islands….the one that, according to all the travel literature out there, puts the “virgin” back in the Virgin Islands.

With it being the smallest and the least visited of all the Virgin Islands, and with its many remote beaches that are not very readily accessible, there is a pristine and unspoiled quality to St. John that holds a certain appeal.

For most of our stay on the island, we did what everybody does who goes to St. John: we explored the beaches. We did a bit of snorkeling, but mostly, the kids just wanted to play in the surf.

 

This was their first experience with ocean surf, and they couldn’t get enough of it. After spending an entire day at Cinnamon Bay, running in and out of the waves, for somewhere close to six hours, they decided this was their favorite beach by far.

We’d also heard from a local islander that the surf was expected to be even bigger the next day, and there was no question then, and (for once!) no dispute over where we should go the next day. 

So, the next morning, we packed up our red rental Jeep, and headed back to Cinnamon Bay. We figured the prediction about the surf must have been accurate, as we found ourselves walking to the beach along with several people carrying surf boards. When we finally got down to the beach area, and staked out a place along the shore, we saw even more surfers, bobbing along the horizon and waiting for a wave.

So yes, what we’d heard was accurate: the surf was, indeed, even bigger. Much bigger, and much stronger, than the day before. I went out in it with the kids, while Noel went to rent some boogie boards, and a little seed of worry was planted: these waves were strong. It was often hard for me to keep myself upright in them, especially if you got caught right where they were breaking ~ which is, naturally, exactly where my kids wanted to be.

They didn’t mind being tumbled about a bit by it; in fact, in their opinions, it only added to the fun. But I worried about them, Anna, especially, being so little. I worried about her being tumbled up on the shore, and then dragged back out by the force of the undertow, before she was able to right herself or catch her breath. But I should know better.

I should know, it’s not the jellyfish sting that I knew might have been possible (mental note: the vinegar is in the cupboard, next to the refrigerator), or the pierced foot from an unseen spiny sea urchin. No, those things, those very possible things, evaporated like the salt spray on our skin, almost as if their possibility of actually happening was in inverse proportion to the degree to which I worried about them. No, I should know by now that it’s generally not the things you expend an absurd amount of energy worrying about that end up biting you. Rather, it’s those things that happen unexpectedly, the things that come at you sideways, where you never see it coming, that do the most damage. It’s the things you didn’t even know to worry about, that will really knock you down, tumble you head over heels, and leave you gasping to catch your breath on the shore.

 ****

Maybe, in retrospect, my intuition was telling me something that day. Hindsight is always 20/20, though, isn’t it? And believe me, we’ve gone, pointlessly, down that road countless times since that day. In the moment, however, I brushed that little bit of anxiety aside, as I know this to be true about myself: I am a worrier. I can worry like it’s my job. If worrying were a sport, my walls would be lined with gold medals, the World Champion of Worry. But I know, at the same time, that my worry can sometimes be irrational, and that if I used it as a barometer of whether or not something is safe, my kids would spend their entire lives on the sidelines of life, watching, but never really experiencing, it. Noel’s Rational tends to be the yin to my Emotional yang, though, and as he seemed mostly comfortable with things, I let it go. Besides, he was right in the water with both of the kids, and he’s a strong swimmer. He’s not a risk taker, and he always errs on the side of caution, especially with the kids. What was there to worry about.

Wave after wave, and hour after hour, the kids played in the surf. They attempted boogie boarding a few times, but mostly, it was all about the waves, and getting tumbled around by them.  After 2, maybe 3, hours of mostly uneventful play, with me snapping photos of everyone from the shore, I started to relax a bit. And of course, that’s always when those kinds of sideways things happen, isn’t it? It’s in the thirty seconds that you look away from your kids at the park, to answer a phone call, check your email, blow your nose, or finish that paragraph that you’ve been trying to read for the last thirty minutes, that someone falls off the monkey bars. Naturally.

****

Had I not been looking through the camera lens, had I been looking at the ‘bigger picture,” well, who knows? Maybe things would have been different. Maybe I would have seen the giant wave, looming on the horizon. Maybe I would have yelled a cautionary “Look out!!!” Maybe, the disaster would have been avoided. But these kinds of things are always peppered with woulda, coulda, shoulda, aren’t they?

 ****

Crash……crash….snap, snap, snap…..laugh…..laugh.

Again. And again. And over and over.

It’s all good.

And then.

Another wave.

So big, that Noel scoops up Anna, and hoists her to his shoulders.

Snap. Stand. All is well.

A nanosecond.

Another wave, sudden, big.

This time, no laugh.

Carsten emerges from the water, crying. He is running over to me. It’s not until I process the whole scenario that I realize, much later: he is holding his left arm with his right hand.

 ****

Carsten is not, I confess, the most stoic of personalities. So I assume, at first, that he’s crying over nothing: a too-rough tumble from the waves…..a too-big swallow of salty ocean water….a scrape from a rock on the ocean bottom. But as he runs over to me on the beach, and I start toweling him off, with a pacifying “Shhh…..it’s ok, you’re ok” he holds up his arm to me, while he sinks to his knees in the sand. And as soon as I look at it, I know, immediately, it is not ok. His arm is misshapen, and I know…I just know, that something is broken.

And in a split-second, the world goes upside down.

****

In that instant, that instant of knowing, pierced with the crying and the screaming, I somehow process the reality of what is actually happening…..and suddenly everything – the ocean, the waves, the sand and the sky, and every single other person on that same beach at that same moment – fades to black. The sun is our in full force, but all I can see, with laser-sharp focus, is this tragedy that has suddenly unfolded before us: my son’s arm is broken. And while I feel myself deflating, like a leaky air mattress, and feeling as if I, too, might just sink to my own knees in the hot, soft sand, I meet Noel’s eyes, and without a word I also know: we have to do something.

 ****

Noel drops to his knees, and holds Carsten’s arm for him. There is a shop, of sorts, nearby us, and Noel tells me to run over there and get help — which is good that he told me to do so, because who knows how long my panicked paralysis would have lasted?

I run into the shop, breathless and shaking, and blurt out, to really no one in particular, “Can someone please call 911? I think my son just broke his arm.”  The girl behind the counter, waiting on customers in a line at least eight people deep, doesn’t even make eye contact with me, as if this broken bone business happens all the time, and it’s nothing to get rattled about. She does, however, reach for the phone, and with that, I turn, and walk back out. I can’t even tell you one single thing that was for sale in that shop

As I walk out of the shop, I come upon Noel and Carsten, and I realize that someone else has joined them: a doctor. A doctor!! A GP from California who just happened to be in the right place at the right time, has offered us his help. And before I know it, another man has appeared, holding two thick magazines, which the doctor uses to create a makeshift splint for Carsten’s arm. And then, from out of nowhere, someone supplies packing tape, wrapping it around the magazines, to hold them in place, and to keep Carsten’s floppy arm from flopping any more. It is the best we can do, on an island beach, and we feel grateful for it.

****

A park official appears on a golf cart, ready to transport us up the walkway to the beach entrance, where, we are told, an ambulance is coming to meet us. Somehow, I remember – or maybe, someone reminds me? – to go back to the beach before we leave, however, and grab our belongings. So I run back, and cram all manner of shoes, towels, books, cameras, food, and bottles of sunscreen and bug spray into bags. Two guys from New York, who’d been hanging out near us for much of the morning, body surfing and, at one point, borrowing from us the boogie boards our kids had readily abandoned, appeared next to me, offered their help. They helped me fold up our beach chairs, and shove whatever remnants of our beach experience were left into various bags, while asking what had happened. They returned our boogie boards to the rental office for us, and showered us with equal parts regrets and well-wishes, as Carsten and Noel were transported in the golf cart, up the long, sloping walk to the beach entrance, and Anna and I walked along behind.

 ****

We waited anxiously at the park entrance for the ambulance to get there. You’ve heard, I presume, of the curious phenomenon of ‘island time,’ the notion that life unfolds at a much slower, more leisurely pace on an island? As it turns out, this phenomenon is no myth. As we waited, and waited, and waited, for that ambulance to arrive, I was no longer sure if the new year we were about to ring in was 2012, 2013, or 2022. An entire lifetime seemed to pass, while I stood there watching Carsten cry, feeling idle and helpless, and trying to keep my wall of resolve from crumbling, like the thick layer of caked sand I occupied myself with scraping from my feet and ankles.

After somewhere just shy of eternity, the ambulance arrived, and in an eternity plus one decade, we found ourselves, finally, making our way out of the park.

****

(To be continued…..)

(Because I am exhausted, and I have bent your ear for far too long already….I should offer you to stay for dinner at this point.)

 

 

 

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