La Mer: Jacmel (Day 17)

I felt it before I saw it.

The sea.

Crystalline blue and azure with a mosquito sized breeze constantly whispering over your head, battling the noonday heat and making daylight just a little more bearable. And beautiful.

The sea. With all of its depth and flatness, emptiness, and salty boredom, mountains rise up at any moment. A ship’s emergence from the fog startles. How wonderful to sleep in the sun, hammock enfolding, or weather the winter darkness. It eases the feeling of home around me, a tired blanket in the sun, with Brendan calling from the painterly torch-lit waves.

Walking by the sea I feel peace and apprehension, the undulating waves mimic and mock my breath, in and out, in and out, impressions, oppressions, trying to take control. The salt air enlivens the skin but stifles with its weighty energy.

I could try and continue my struggle with the sea and its power, but, being flat, it is what each person makes of it. The horizon: the end of the world; God’s footstool; the meeting of man and sky.

I must move to the sea, be it Blue Rocks, Iona, Inishmor, or Jacmel.

Jacmel, unlike the other three, is not an island, at least by definition. City by the sea, province of colonial edifice, Jacmel stands a remnant of time over the Caribbean. The church on top of the hill faces the famous iron market. Two story buildings from another century rust, lose color, and collapse into themselves, a small Havana waiting for repair. Coves dotted with volcanic rock are eaten away slowly over time as palm trees droop and lose footing to the constant erosion of the waves, teetering, unsure. Brightly colored cafes house art work, Haiti’s Bohemia, while the elite build magnificent concrete houses that dominate estates full of palm and mango trees. Hotels stand quiet, awaiting the guests.

The best way to view this city, I have learned, is standing in the cab of a pickup truck facing the oncoming wind that blows like an overbearing motor and blinds you with dust,
sensing the landlocked island calmly waiting to be untethered and let to sea, unfettered to drift away from its native port. It stands in stillness, wishing to carry its green and fertile oasis away from the dust in order to rest under-sea like Brigadoon, waiting to rise again from the slowly decaying dock.

Is Haiti dying? Does it, like a man who is about to be killed, sense its life flashing before its eyes, repeatedly, playing itself out in a charade of repetitive history, of coups and governments rising and falling, of despair and suffering, of resistance and reminiscing?
Or is it simply breathing?

The sea. Always reborn while dying small and constant deaths. In it we have hope to understand the horizon of potential things-to-come while facing the oncoming winds.

In and out. In and out.
Feeling it before we see it.