Travel is adventure, meeting new people, experiencing and eating (at least in my case) a new culture...
You get to run away from the tedium of your own life.
But it's also about sucking it up and being reminded about the ease with which I live my day to day. I can bitch and moan about the traumas of being an urban school teacher, the secondary PTSD, and the terrors of confronting a stack of incontinent essays...
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but careening at 90 kilometers per hour around hairpin turns on unmarked, single-lane mountain passes, flinging past roadside vendors who raise plastic bags of over-ripe fruit, I'm reminded of my (relative) ease.
If they’re lucky, the vendors’ll see a couple of cars every ten minutes, and once an hour, maybe one of those cars’ll stop to make a purchase. Maybe tedium is tedium, but I’ll warrant that they’d switch places with me if they could. And I know the reverse is not the case.
And I’m reminded of my privilege again, sitting here on my Apple laptop, listening to the surf in the distance, and the slapping plop of waves against the villa's dock, the steps down to the shallow waters of the Blue Lagoon that sits within spitting distance of my room.
***
By the time I sat down in 7C of my layover flight from JFK to Kingston Norman Manley International, I'd gotten over my co-dependent guilt about leaving my cats (which stem from my mom's assertions of "I'll die if you go to South Africa/California/anywhere."). I'm here with T, V, Y, and T's little sister "t." T and t are here to rectify the housing situation of their Rastafarian father, who, from what I can gather, is living out of doors. S is T and t’s cousin, a personal trainer, ex-US resident, and our current man about town, our suicidal chauffeur, personal haggler, High Priest of the Jamaican Way, asserting, among other things, that Bob Marley’s death by cancer (which metastasized from his toe) was not cancer, but rather, an American assassination.
After t and I get out of customs and baggage claim, greet T, V, and S, who’ve come to get us, we wait impatiently for the arrival of C, t’s childhood best friend, Cornell grad and PhD, working in the HIV/AIDS field here in Jamaica. In the meantime, I, to my delight, get to gnaw on my first of unfamiliar gustatory delights, a fruit called “guinep,” pronounced with a hard “g,” and no “u.” It has a stiff shell reminiscent of longan--I suppose it’s not too helpful using one tropical, relatively uncommon fruit to describe another…tropical, relatively uncommon fruit--anyway, a stiff, slightly leathery shell that you can crack open with your front teeth or the edge of your thumbnail to reveal a pinkish, peachy colored, ovoid fruit that’s frankly more pit than flesh, but satisfying in its sour, sweet flavor. I think I’ve had it once before in Jamaica Plain, Boston.
C finally arrives, the two besties engage in a friendly back and forth recriminations (“supposed to meet at the Marley Museum!”), and she’s to caravan us to the museum. We wind up making a detour to C’s house in the Kingston hills—“Beverly” and “Mimosa” are a couple of the street names we encounter—and the area certainly conforms to the rule of real estate, the higher the ground, the higher the income, though I think the residences themselves would be probably middle-income, maybe even lower-middle.
I meet C’s adorable little boy, an almost two-year old, all eyes and lips named Jayce, who responds, when I say, “Is that your bicycle?” with “Is that your bicycle?” and “He’s so kyuuuuuute!” with “He’s so kyuuuuuute!”
Then finally we’re onwards to the Marley Museum, we pass boxite mining facilities, and S points out the van-like public transportation vehicles painted with a purple stripe. According to him, Dudus Coke, the kingpin recently extradited to the U.S., owns a fleet of more than a hundred.
I think I had an innate distrust of the Marley phenomenon, vanguarded as it is by dreadlocked, white Trustafarians (at least nowadays), but I get it a little more now. The bullet holes that pocked the walls of his house after a politically motivated assassination attempt, the music (even though the docent totally made us stand in a room and sing "One Love"--um...no.), the spot under the mango tree where he used to play his drums, smoke, and sing--to the annoyance of his neighbors (and inspired "Bad Card," "I want to disturb my neighbour, 'Cause I'm feelin' so right.").
There was a dude in a white T strolling around the grounds, and glancing at him, I had the fleeting thought, "looks kinda like Bob," then chided myself, "not all light-skinned, attractive black men with dreads look like Bob."
But later, glancing out the window, the docent identified the dude as one of his grandsons. So I took care to graze his back when I passed him entering the gift shop.
There was like an electric current that ran through my body--I think it was sexual. [grin]
I've been in the presence of greatness--two generations removed!
I left the ladies still browsing in the shop--I dunno if Marley ever intended for his face to be sold on pink t-shirts and for his legacy to help sell E-Z Wider fruit-flavored rolling papers--and immediately got called over by an ancient old man lounging in the corner of the yard, "Japanesey!"
I walk tentatively over, and he tells me he was Bob's cook when he still lived in Trench Town, then tells me I can take a picture of his painting if I want. He's the Georgie mentioned in "No Woman No Cry"--"And then Georgie would make the fire light / Log wood burnin' through the night / Then we would cook corn meal porridge."
Okay, well, don't mind if I do.
Now, if I'd been really cool, I woulda sat down and talked to him about what Bob was really like and smoked a fattie, but I am not, so I politely said thanks, then wandered away to take photos of the rest of the grounds, as well as some unauthorized ones, like the following:
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