Ometepe, Nicaragua by Morning

    I never much liked the word “vacation.”  Sure… the implication is wonderful.  Vacant.  Devoid of the stress and worry of real life.  It can be that way.  When you’re lying on the right stretch of beach, doglegged just enough around a grove of exotic trees to obscure the other tourists and most of the locals.  When the breaking waves mask the squeals of nearby children.  When your only concerns are a dry towel and enough liquid refreshment.  Even the towel is optional given the right sand.

    But that’s just the implication.  The reality is an unfamiliar landscape of responsibility.  The plane.  The transportation.  The hostel.  The literal burden of a fully stuffed backpacking frame.  And your traveling companions.  Maybe the Europeans that prefer the word “Holiday” have it right.  Most vacations I’ve been on have felt more like Thanksgiving dinner than transcendental meditation.  I play mediator more than sightseer, and pick more fights than seashells.  It’s cabin fever, only the cabin follows you wherever you go.

    In Nicaragua.  In San Juan del Sur.  I was given two days of perfect mental vacancy.  After two days the others were ready to move on.  We were on a schedule.  Three weeks, that was the deadline.  A checklist to rival year’s worth of actual work blotted my vision.  See.  Photograph.  Move.  Repeat.  I couldn’t be bothered with the planning, so I sang.  We sang.

    Ometempe by morning…

    Up from South San Juan…

    Everything that I got…

    Is just what I got on…

 

    Hours of buses, ferries, and securing a bed for the night.  Each task accompanied by heat and the pressing weight of shoulder straps.  There are no real beaches on Isla Ometempe, only Volcanoes: the extinct Maderas and the immaculate Concepcion.   It was for the latter we had come.  To ascend the slumbering cone until just below its peak and bathe in the hundred foot waterfall that could be found there.  To disappear, if just for a day, inside the rarest of ecologies: the Cloud Forest.  It was a short hike, no more than two miles, but in one-hundred and ten degree weather, backpack getting heavier with each step, you could really feel climb.

    The others flitted up the trail.  Everything moving slower in heat distorted air.  Like a lagging computer, their images resolving farther in the distance with every second.  I adore a walk on level terrain, but here I faltered.  Too bashful to remain at the hostel, I was left behind nonetheless.  Grumbling.  Whining.  Wheezing.  The effort of my legs yielded glorious results.  The effort of my mind only bitterness.

    I remember scrolling through the images on the camera’s display, disappointed by my camera’s inability to capture the breadth of Concepcion’s waterfall.  It was a vision—a presence—that refused to be comprehended by any unwilling to make the climb.  Except me.  I had been unwilling.  I made the climb anyway.

    After Nicaragua.  On the plane to Seattle.  In the car ride across the flatlands of Eastern Washington. The others continued to drift away.  Like family members pushing away from the table, bellies full of turkey and gravy; we knew each other well… and hated each other all the more.  I did.  I fled.  Righteous in my contentment to be free.  To stop following.

    I’ve never much liked pictures either.  They never turn out the way you want them to.  I only took the shots I did out of boredom.  No.  Out of fear.  Fear that my unease would spoil another’s joy.  So why should these imperfect images affect me so much?

I barely remember the idyllic lagoon.  Shaded beneath plantain trees emitting the kind of comforting immensity a small child feels from their parents.  It was hardly a hidden location.  The bartender was absent, so too were the rest of the tourists.   The bird refuge is a similar blur.  And the children missing school to hunt turtles for dinner.  I only remember the climb.  Resolving in my mind identical to the digital image before me.  A handful of backs, fading into the distance.

    Because they drifted away.  Because I let them.  Asked them to.  They vanished into the shimmering heat.  Into the future.  Only now, seven years later.  Now, when I am no longer vacant.  The memories of Ometempe make me courageous.  Enough to reach out.  To call out.  To catch up.

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