At 5 in the afternoon above Dubai, the sun hovers at twenty-three degrees— a pale apricot smudge in a post-storm sandy haze, draping Bluewaters in a light that flatters ruin.
I’m reclined—gently, necessarily— on a chaise longue angled for recovery. My neck, still nursing its grievance from a tumble in the waves, reminds me that a middle-aged man pays a price for youth’s joys.
Hugo is out there again, eleven and indomitable, bobbing bright in the surf like a buoy come unmoored, his yellow vest riding up with each slap of the Gulf. The water’s been like this for days— ever since the storm skirted the region and churned something loose in the sea. The wind, too, has memory.
A stopover—back from Andermatt, season’s end, slopes slick with ice— on the way home to Philadelphia has found them caught in the same element: water, not snow, yielding, not frozen, but no less perilous.
Lankan lifeguards— skin dark as soaked teak, in white rash guards and red trunks— pace the margins like shepherds. Their presence is dictated by corporate policy, and their practice overwrought. They corral the children within arbitrary borders, whistle sharp, gestures wide. No one here drowns. No one here is allowed the risk. The sea is permitted, but not trusted.
And yet— Hugo throws himself into the spray. He doesn’t test it, he trusts it. He lets the swells spin him, tilts back his head, arms out like he’s falling into the deep.
I watch. And remember.
Kian, years ago, in Uluwatu— both of us on bodyboards, chasing the clean arcs of surf that thundered just right. Before that, Tsitsikamma— waves that hit like old grudges, no lifeguards, no colors, no rules. Only bare naked nature, and us taunting its edges.
Now, I sit here— Hoyo de Monterrey between my teeth, its smoke mingling with silica and wind— serene with the sounds and sights, the hush between waves, the way salt dries in wind-blown hair, the shimmer of light on an unsettling sea.
There is something holy in giving up your body to the wild that shaped it over millennia, before the mind separated the foam from the sea.
Hugo doesn’t make the distinction He just surrenders to the feeling
And I feel it— as I watch him now, sun hovering at azimuth 268°, altitude fading, wind whispering everyone’s secrets— and the sea still reaches for me, up across the beach, as if it remembers we will be the same again.
SEÑOR - The Blog 