The Silver Point Beach in Barbados has an endless summer kind of feeling. It’s a Kite Surfing Mecca, and arriving there I was struck by just how displaced I was from the culture that surrounded me. The surfers there weren’t really on vacation, it was more like they’d been summoned to perform a task, and they were attentive to that and not the idle socializing of tourists like myself.
(Photo by Lynda Hall)
Waiting on the beach was an array of kites billowing in the wind like an assembly of tents pitched at an outdoor concert. The surfers preparing to take them out to the water were all so beautiful, unselfconscious and sincerely indifferent to the world watching them, that they seemed holier, of a different order than the rest of us. Fully alive in their bodies, they had been seized by a passion around which their entire lives were organized. Working jobs where they could, they migrated the world seeking out the best combination of wind and waves. Mostly European, they were a tangle of different languages, their communication physical rather than verbal.
(Photo by Rob Hyndman)
Kite Surfing looks insanely challenging, and the surfer’s bodies, driven by their craft, were lithe, hard and practical. Even their children had a preternatural purity to them. Confident, little water bugs, they were free of tan lines and all shared these seraphic mops of hair, as if creatures from another planet. I don’t want to turn it on too much, but it was striking, even mesmerizing.
By the pool at the resort was an expensive looking black woman with the body of a Playmate. We made eye contact and I nodded toward her, but she gave me a dismissive and imperious look, immediately snapping her sunglasses down and scrolling through her iPhone. Later, when a man with an NFL build came by, she became animated and solicitous, eventually striking cheesecake poses for his camera.
Lying in a beach chair was a woman in her late 40s. She was wearing an intensely white bikini that offset her deeply penetrated, lurid tan, had immense fake breasts and hair that was dyed the kind of blonde that can only be synthesized in a lab. All day she lay alone, inert but for occasionally turning over. Every once in awhile her boyfriend, a man in his 50s who oozed vanity, would come by. Top-heavy like a body builder, he had meticulously attended sideburns that were the star of his face, and he walked about in a way that called for attention, which once gathered, he would lead back to his bronzed trophy who just lay there, waiting for him to need her.
The surfers didn’t seem to care if you saw them. Having fully committed themselves to something that they loved, they became beautiful. It was an accident, a byproduct of a physical and supernal devotion that contrasted sharply with those few there who saw beauty as a destination, something that lived on the surface, could be acquired and then spent like money.
And just a little further off, in the pool a woman was delicately immersing herself in the water. Her mother leaned over, speaking softly, “ We had a very tough Christmas, Jane was the nanny of one of the children killed at Sandy Hook and we’re just trying to put it all back together and find some light, you know?”