At Sea

I live by the sea now. And mostly, I travel along one — up and down coastlines, both here in the US and abroad. It's a strange thing for someone who grew up entirely landlocked, in the flat, fertile northwest corner of Mississippi called the Delta.

It was there at Lee Academy in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in a creative writing class taught by Mary Thompson, that I first found Ernest Hemingway. I fell for his clean, short, direct sentences — the way he could say so much by saying so little — and through him, for his adventures in the Caribbean and its waters. I didn't know it yet, but that class planted something. By the time I graduated from Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi, also landlocked, I was already drawn toward the coast.

I spent my adult life chasing it. San Francisco. Manhattan. Washington, D.C. And then, for a long stretch, Charleston, South Carolina, where I finally settled and planted roots. Each of those cities was transient in its own way — people coming and going, and with them, ideas coming and going too. There was a visual expansiveness to city life along the water that no landlocked small town could offer. The Atlantic gave me something like respite, even in the middle of a busy life. It still does.

But in 2017, I was at sea in a different sense — adrift, far removed from myself and my own body.

Upon turning forty my body was struggling to stay well. My business was demanding, stressful and difficult, demanding long hours and travel. Charleston itself was growing fast, and growing with it came a kind of internal politics and strife that wears on a person over time. I was tired in a way that went deeper than sleep could fix.

That was the year I went back to Havana, and struggled the entire August trip just to hold myself together and some days, put one foot in front of the other. The heat was more intense than I'd anticipated. Decent food and clean water were hard to come by, and the lack of both was taking an even bigger toll on a body that was already struggling. I ended up at a local hospital, where the doctor sent me back out the door with nothing more than a recycled bottle of salt water and a splash of lemon. That was the extent of the care available. (Socialized medicine, I supposed.)

My sister, back home in Mississippi, had intuitively grown worried about me. I hadn't looked like myself in the photos I'd posted online — puffier, with a rash spreading across my arms and one side of my face, all of it inflammation my body could no longer keep quiet. And I was less communicative than usual.

While I was in Havana, a hurricane was building offshore. We were getting our news filtered through the lens of a communist government and its dictator, so the local reports insisted it was nothing — just a gentle storm, nothing worth panicking over. But the sky told a different story. It had shifted into great black bellows of cloud that didn't match the calm coming out of state media. And the streets suddenly became empty, boarded windows ubiquitous.

A local merchant, also a friend, named Ricardo told me the truth as he saw it: only quail eggs and a little liquor were left on the shelves. Everything else — every scrap of food — had already been bought, rationed, or delivered to the hotels for foreign guests who were staying through the storm, whether they wanted to or not. Clean bottled water, always scarce in Havana, had run out completely.

I left on one of the last flights out. A stewardess asked why I seemed so calm, and I told her I'd flown that route many times before. I assumed she was asking because so many Americans get nervous flying straight through U.S. customs instead of routing through the Bahamas. But that wasn't it. She told me a hurricane was barreling toward the coast and that Miami itself - including the airport - was shutting down.

I had only a few hours to change my flight. Cars were still availble to rent, but gas was running out fast. By the time I landed in Miami, my sister was already calling. My brother-in-law worked some kind of miracle and got me on one of the last flights leaving the city — Memphis was the only option left. I got, as far as I remember, the last seat on the plane. As I boarded, I heard an announcement over the intercom that all ATM cash was depleted and most bottled water gone. It seemed like an apocalypse.

I arrived in Memphis and drove to Clarksdale. Back home there in the familiar landscape of the Mississippi Delta, I finally had a place to stop and regroup — something like ground zero, a place where I could fall apart and start over at the same time. I slept in the room that had been mine as a child, and memories came flooding back: a woodpecker hammering away outside the window, an old oak tree standing rooted and strong outside it, and the humming of cicadas in perfect rhythm.

I rested there — really rested — for the first time in longer than I could remember.

Over the following weeks, my sister guided me back toward health. She found me the right doctors, and helped me build a path that included a deeper, more committed yoga practice, cutting out alcohol entirely, eating food that actually nourished me, cutting out travel for a while, and simply becoming more centered in myself. I took long runs through the Delta while I was home, and somewhere in those miles it hit me: Rachael had been my buoy in the sea I'd been lost in. I had come home — not just to Clarksdale, but to myself.

A few weeks later, I flew back to Charleston, eager to return to the life I'd built there — its cobblestone streets, my many friends, the rhythm of the place I loved. But this time I came back different. I had stepped back into my own body and reconnected with my deepest self, and for the first time in a long while, I no longer felt at sea.

Some evenings now, I run the coastline and watch the sun go down over the water, and I think about how much we are like it ourselves — how we can be calm on the surface and churning underneath, how storms build in us before anyone else can see the sky change color, and how, if we're lucky, we find our way back to something like stillness. We are, in the end, mostly water. It only makes sense that we'd move like it too.