The Rewrite: A Gentle Handshake with Jamaica & Secrets Wild Orchid

Months of preparation intending to provide a special gift for those that have always provided for me. It was supposed to be a surprise for them, but turned out to surprise me - before this story began, we had to rewrite the planned future and how the story will end. A man who provided for me my whole life; enabled me to have the childhood, youth and young adulthood that has built me into the man I am today, refused his compensence. I plead for him to join us on this necessary trip away. The destination didn't matter, but just to get away from the oppression of responsibilities and practice our right to freedom. Being named "Shaver", I rebel and grow a beard. I guess since there's a "Fred" in Freedom, he must too rebel. And the story revises itself.
Mom's eyes widen like those of a child meeting her intangible hero - she's
already on her mind's beach. She chooses her sister Val to accompany her on this once-in-a-lifetime journey to transcendence. Transcendence? Yes! This is what a vacation means to me; to get away from the responsibilities and situations and things that define you at home. Wipe the window between oneself and our outside world free of these definitions and become able to see and be seen as we truly are; based on what we choose to do, what we choose to speak of, and everything we don't do when responsibilities vanish and they become impertinent.
I write this laying in a recliner, the sun nourishing my skin, my mind, while beads of sweat who have been begging to exit from behind my tight dermis, now finally breach the last wall of pale, Ohio flesh as my skin becomes expanded and relaxed with the warm sun tropical breeze - the beads of sweat sigh with reverie as they descend down my brow. I know I am more than this - but in this moment I write, and this is me - for now.
24 hours prior we were running on sheer determination as we leave the Pittsburgh airport, land in orlando, board another plane, land in Montego Bay and hop on our transportation. A whirlwind with only tight focus - the destination.
We arrive.
"Johnny-be-good" is our driver and he finds deep conversation with a Chicagoian enjoying his retirement at a small hotel called Toby's. They agree that, when traveling, its best to assimilate; to leave all lessons from home, all assumptions relevant to another place wherever they were derived and become chameleonistic. The best time to be had is by becoming the most enjoyed and enjoyable person at that destination. They agreed that when you use the same perception as you do at home, you rob yourself of when then becomes the unseen. Because not everything is visible in Jamaica through Ohio eyes - just like having a conversation while your favorite show is on, details get lost in translation as you choose to listen and see what is most apparent.
Of course this is my account of the discourse - it may be true that these words were never said - at least I absorbed the concept, and now I attempt to put it into practice. Johnny drives and speaks into a microphone pointing out the dangers of Americans driving in Jamaica, he says, "the left side is the right side, the right side is the wrong side; the suicide side". He points out the shopping plaza consisting of old, weather-worn shops in the "city". School children skip down the street in small and large cliques, heading home for a siesta. There's a digital billboard in the city center; the only one of its kind I've seen. There is no message shown in the center of the sign due to a large crack in it, as if someone torques their arm back in rebellion and launched a rock into it. Only
those with cataracts can look upon that sign and understand the messages
flipping from one to another with a clear understanding.
About 20 minutes from the bus departing the airport and we're at the resort; Secrets Wild Orchid, Montego Bay. We tip Johnny as he unloads our luggage and are greeted by Damien, who takes our luggage, looks upon our itinerary and smiles as he shows us to the semi-private Preferred Club check-in. Super friendly he talks our way to the short distance to Peta, the woman who will be checking us in. She goes over the brief orientation and hand us back over to Damien to escort us to our room. Miss and I in room 1216, on the 2nd floor with an almost intense ocean view; from our balcony we see the crest of the earth with clear skies over the ocean, slightly to the left we see only mountains with sparse signs in inhabitation in the little rooftops peppering the hillsides. Our mini bar is stocked with Red Stripe, sodas and water with a vodka and a some
jamaican rum. All complimentary along with access to other excess - 10+ 5 star restaurants, snorkeling (which I look forward to taking advantage of daily), a slew of bars, room service, and more than I could ever take advantage of in 5 nights.
We unload our necessities along with everything else we've brought and head down to da beach. We lay out for a while in the warm sun and try to absorb the enormity of having my spirit, mind and body in the center of such gorgeousness - overwhelming! Especially being accompanied by my love, my mom and aunt. Its a first to have family on a trip like this, usually its just Missy and I. We take a short stroll to a small al fresco lunchtime place and fill our bellies. I distended my gut with an Orchid burger and some muscles in a cream sauce. My hand affixed to a cup at all times - even in the water. We try the "bob marley" drink, we try the "hummingbird", the ice cold beer, the virgin pineapple fizz, a
cuban cigar, and do tiny victory dances in our own private minds as we celebrate the decadence.
Really we're celebrating much, much more than that - even things we can't even conceive.
We go up to our rooms discussing dinner options. We shower off the natural salty goodness we pulled from world's pool and just try to sit in wonder at every corner. I walk out of our room - having slept two hours since the day before, and my mind wants me to yawn, but my spirit proves more enamored and it comes out as a sigh of joy as the sweet wind hits my face, making me shut my eyes to better focus on the thick, velvety breeze cacooning my body.
We choose Hamitsu, a japanese place a few yards from our room takes reservations for Hibachi dinners, we just walk in and sit at a table. I get stuffed shrimp, and a rice bowl very similar to gumbo. Our server, Nikesha, who likes to be called nikki (although I believe she prefers her given name and recommends the familiar nikki to us pasty american's - assuming our tongues incapable of bending around the syllables of Nikesha). She recommends a drink named after her - a super sweet mix of grenadine and rum and probably some other mystery ingredients. Too sweet for me, I ask for a beer. It begins to rain, a tropical rain and we walk through it checking out the open air shops, and soon its time to retire to our king size bed, soft as the coastal gusts billowing out window shades. I smile reflecting on the triumphs of our day. Hours later I awake with
the same "oh-God-this-is-too-good" grin.
Day 2 of 5 begins.
I'm greeted with the most incredible view it yields a cuss word, "holy shit". I roll back over, almost overwhelmed by it and wishing to dream it way. I don't. And every time I open my eyes in bed I see the coastline, feel the breeze, and cuss myself back to reality with a soul-wrenching, uncontrollable "holy shit". I'm here.
We head down to the World Cafe, an expansive buffet, for breakfast. I engulf two pancakes and a veritable buffet of fruits, grapefruit juice - not just because I love grapefruit juice, but because I feel it helps extend my gratefulness as grateful juice, as in my request for it. We lay on the beach following breakfast for hours and hours. Literally from 10 am to 5pm with newly acquired swim goggles and a few adult beverages under our belts.
We're here.
We go in, I meet a painter - this is all I need to cue this great memory of friendship, family, and love.
We're here.
We have dinner at the same buffet, and its exquisite despite our errors in
judgment. Entering the building without being sat, pushing and sitting and then enjoying the best rare steak and snapper fish I've ever had. Simply amazing. We stroll. My stomach matches my moms as we both request a bathroom break. She retires to her room and here we are; in an incredible arena with leather seats and a tone of reggae inescapable to my american ear - even as the caucasians around me look baffled as they play Sublime, an american reggae band.
The three of us, sitting as birds upon the doorstep of eternal happiness, sit and watch. Soon to be more than observers, but participaters in life once again - and it will be then when we share this love, this moment, this band, these lyrics. Evening Two promises adventure, secluded, decadent adventure.
We disappear and reappear in my memories from night 2. We're walking to our room, I'm on the balcony, I'm down by the pool and Miss is yelling at me to get my ass back up to bed. I'm waking up and its officially day 3. Up early at that, around 5am.
My stomach clearly remembers our escapades from the previous night. I'm not going to repeat night 2, but if we were going to "hit it hard" one night, this is the night to do so. Saturday is our free day, we've tossed away our freedoms on sunday and monday, and tuesday will be our day of departure.
Sunday is a trip to dolphin cove, which I'm sure will be just amazing. Monday is a shopping trip (meh) of which we paid 16 bucks apiece, to make reservations to go shop.
I'm laying on the beach, morning day 3. I've done some swimming, not to check out the sea life but to exert my poor body. I'm laying with my feet facing the west, which is just a vast ocean and the jamaican mountains. Whenever I can see to infinity; i.e. an unimpeded ocean, a clear cerulean sky, it never ceases to grab me and pull me in - every component of me is gathered from their individual distractions and are pulled together in the vastness. Like hitting a reset button, or clearing the cache, I'm atoned.
We've been seeing storm clouds a little south of us everyday. Some sort of
meteorological magic has given us sunshine everyday. The clouds always seem to burn off as they approach us, and the only rain we've seen has been at night.
We're not just counting our blessings, but we're reveling in them, as we notice them one by one.
2:30 Jamaica time, Saturday the 21st. Mom and Aunt Valerie are currently
enjoying a massage, or a variation thereof. Miss and I are laying under the now halo-less, albeit intense sun. Earlier today we were giving ourselves a more thorough tour of the grounds, miss having a bloody mary and me a grapefruit juice. We look up, as we seem to do more often here than home, and see an unmistakable halo around the sun. Clear as day and with a faint rainbow of colours within the sun's new belt. Amazing.
While we were on our little jaunt we picked up some goggles, not a swim mask but old fashioned swimming goggles. We look at some pictures of ourselves wearing silly, dollar store grass skirts (the more you get the cheaper it is" he says from behind the counter - the cash register's final figure finds him always wrong) we didn't get any pictures, yet. We go to the room and upload some free photos to the computer, relaxing in the air conditioning. We open the door to our balcony and the a/c shuts off. The heat from outside collide with the cool air in the room and the marble floor becomes blanketed by condensation and the mirrors fog up. We head down to da beach and I have a fantastic time with the new goggles, I feel as though I can swim for hours and emerge from the water with a full tank of air - never breathless. We lay in the sun, its now 2:52 on Saturday and we're basting in the sun right now. If I get burnt this vacation, its happening now even with a generous coat of SPF30. We're basting and to the
left we see, what looks like something that would yield a thunderstorm warning at home, maybe even a tornado warning. Bus as soon as the clouds get between us and the sun they quickly dissolve. Reveling in a blessing number two-hundred and sixty-one. . .
We meet everyone out and go to Bordeaux, the french restaurant for dinner - by far the best dinner! Split pea soup, some spring rolls, a tiny shrimp salad - everything tiny, but brimming with flavour. The main course? Some incredible rare beef and veggies. We walk and digest, sucking on some unlit exquisite cigars from the smoke shop.
Sunday and Monday were whirlwinds. I'm now sitting in the airport waiting for our final departure from orlando to Pittsburgh. I plan on reflection time while we sit and wait; gathering these good memories by the arm fulls.
Sunday we have an excursion planned. Dolphin Cove in Negril, about a half an hour from the resort. At a hundred and ten bucks a head we were given the opportunity of a lifetime. The bus pulls out with only the 4 of us on board and make our way through the nearly cloudless skies around the winding roads (of which you have to stay on the left side of the road, with people on scooters passing on the right onto oncoming traffic, and older men with boys carrying buckets of water and lines of fish - it can be a scary experience!) We make it to the newly built Dolphin Cove with perfect weather and a small group. We meet a guy, already in the water, wrestling with a pretty big stingray. We get in the water and pet the stingray - the guy shows us his stinger and we pet the stingray more tentatively. We talk for a bit and after asking a few questions he tells us he's from central mexico, and gives us the name of the city. We must've
looked confused so he adds, "you know, where all the peyote comes from." I guess everyone looked confused but me as he smiles a huge grin and points at me saying, "ahhhh he knows peyote!" I know peyote from watching the movie The Doors, where Jim Morrison brings his girlfriend Pam and band mates to the desert to eat peyote, they all vomit and become miserable while Jim finds his spirit guide. Nevertheless, our time with the stingray was short and sweet. We shuffle over to the pavilion area quickly pulling our toasty tootsies off the hot wood-planked decking. I only brought tennis shoes, so I went barefoot all day.
The dolphin trainer gave us an introduction and asked some questions. He pointed out mom and Missy as secret marine biologists when mom guesses the average mortality of a dolphin is 40 years old, while in captivity with veterinarians and a good food supply on hand Missy guesses 60 years old. They're both right and making friends off the bat! Peppered with dirty jokes and with a thick jamaican accent, we begin to half-listen to the orientation - especially when we notice the dolphins beginning to play in the water just ahead of us. We head down to the beach with a group of about 20 and are suited up with these thin, kinda-bouyant life jackets labeled, "this is not a life jacket". Its saltwater, and with the fat I've packed on over the winter, plus the non-life jacket life jacket, I didn't even have to kick or tread water to keep my head above the water. We jump in off the dock. They break us into groups. First group heads out and gets in a straight line, the trainer introduces the two dolphins to us and they swim under our outstretched arms to be petted. Its amazing. We get in the other line, this time back-to-front, and take turns holding on to the fins of the dolphins. Mine takes off like a rocket and I decided to kick and help its propulsion. Missy's decides to take it easy on her and putz along getting clear, smiling pictures with no saltwater splashing her in the eyes or mouth. Again, amazing! The dolphins fetch a ring and jump, soaring high above the water, just for us. This place is brand new, with hopes of adding a jamaican wilderness tour, a zip line, a restaurant, and much more, but for now the dolphins were all we needed. We rinse and dry off and head to the gift shop for our pictures. We mull over them, picking some to be printed, for a very long time, and then we just choose to purchase all of them on a disc. Good choice! Mom and I head out to see the camel's. 3 of them with two trainers. We learn that all the animals
are trained using operant conditioning "like when your phone buzzes and you just have to look at it - we train them like that". We also learn that the camel's are trained NOT to spit, which I
thought was strange, and correlated that to teaching a man not to cry - a
natural response.
We board the bus, hungry and completely satisfied. Unbothered by our itchy
behinds from the wet, salty bathing suits we're still wearing. We go back to the beach, which has some terrifying cloud cover moving toward us from the mountains southwest of us. It rains. We go back to the room. Shower off and lay down.
Smiling, relaxed, we're on vacation!
For dinner we go to Blue Mountain, the jamaican restaurant named after the
highest mountain peak in Jamaica - which also happens to be where they're famous Blue Mountain coffee is made. The food was good, nothing like Bordeaux, but good.  Only one more day left ...
Day 4, Monday the 23rd of May, 2011. We made plans to go to the Market. 16 bucks a person to have a tour guide bring us to the hip strip, an older strip in Montego Bay, then to an "upscale" set of shops, and then to the market which consists of tin roof'd huts lined up with all the same "handmade, local" crafts while the ladies (mostly ladies) physically pull us into their shops, too small for more than one person. They want to haggle, just like the other stores we've been to, but they're serious! They drag mom to the first hut and start braiding her hair. It costs her 50 bucks, but as she begged them to stop, pleading she didn't want her hair braided she was able to work them down to 15 dollars, which is about 1100 in jamaican dollars. Miss is under the same fire and I give her a
little money to buy something. I put our money in all of my pockets so when they're putting jewelry on me telling me it looks so good, I pull out my wallet with 5 bucks in it a tell them that's all I have. I just got a necklace and bracelet set for 5 bucks. At the same "market" a guy pulls me into his mom's hut, for lack of a better word, showing me the same trinket-y garbage as in the high-end stores and then pulls out a sack of weed from his pocket. I've done my research and I know its illegal to possess, sell, buy and use marijuana in Jamaica, but its overlooked a lot of times not only for the rastafarians and their religous use of it, but because they have bigger issues at hand, like gang violence to name one. I started talking to this guy, named Joseph, and I find out he is a grandpa at 42 years old - I never wouldve guessed. Despite a few grey hairs, he was super fit. The kind of guy you would see scale a palm tree, shoe less, and with a machete in his mouth, cutting down coconuts. He says he's here to help his mom sell her stuff, he said he is able to support his gigantic family by selling weed more easily than selling the garbage out of the huts. I give him 10 bucks and said, this is for you and your mom, I don't need anything from you. In hindsight this probably wasn't the best decision. I go back down to the shops out front where mom is still being violated by unrequited hair stylists, aunt valerie is perusing the goods and striking conversations and Missy is surrounded by vendors trying to take our money (she dressed too well for this endeavor - I wore an OLD t-shirt and older, wrinkled shorts). A guy who makes cups out of bamboo, which is basically a hollowed out piece of bamboo, decorated the outside of the bamboo with Missy's name and some palm trees. He wanted 20 bucks, then he wanted 12 then we got him down to 10 by telling him to understand that we're broke! This piece of merchandise didn't hold the same 20 dollar value to us as it did to him. All we had was that $5 bill - he ended up
giving it up for that 5 - and I still don't know if we got a deal. We get back on the bus, mom's head pounding from the tight french braids as she anxiously sat trying to comprehend what just happened. She'll never do that again! It was a beautiful morning, and now the clouds begin to return. We head back to da beach and do some snorkeling, without a snorkel, but a pair of swimming goggles.
There's so much on the ocean floor just outside our room, always changing, that I could stay in that water for hours. And I do. I see schools of fish swimming synchronously and its gorgeous. I learn to hold my breath longer and longer and I go deeper and see these tubes coming up from in between rocks, I get closer and a whole bunch of tentacles come out from the top like a time-elapsed flower opening in fast motion. I see 6 black balls with huge spikes coming from them sticking to some rocks on the sea floor - they're sea urchins, and the last thing I want to do is step on one of them - I keep swimming. Oh, and the starfish, the starfish are everywhere. We can dive down and pick one up, we hand it to each other feeling the velcro-like grab of its tiny clingers holding on to our hands, like an alien "hello, my name is starfish" and a firm handshake.
For dinner we head to El Patio for some mexican fare. Its a buffet, and although we've become used to they're buffet's, it still outshines any buffet's at home.
We're full now. We head over to the piano bar for a beverage and to soak up any remaining drops of "good times, mon" on our last night of paradise. We grab a drink and cheers ourselves while some rowdy young scottsman orders a round of shots for everyone. Everyone knows drinks are included with the resort, so he goes around passing out way-too-strong shots to folks who didn't even want them. We watch, kind of in awe. The ladies go off to a steel drum show, I didn't want to spend my last night assessing the differences of this resort band, who change their music assuming the eastern ear of an american prefers covers of over-played pop numbers, and I head to the room. I set up the outdoor soaking tub and put my ipod on with some cool, easy Paul Simon - his new album called "so beautiful, so what" - I lay in the tub watching the waves slowly pull themselves to their most excruciating distance into the bay, and retract quickly
with a deep sigh of relief, as if that attempt to reach my doorstep will be attempted again and again (I hope these waves can reach to Ohio). The warm water is deep and covers me up to my neck. I bob up with each inhalation and my chest is filled with that sweet jamaican air, and I sink with each exhale. Over and over again, all while Paul Simon sings about a rewrite, about how he's going to rip out the bad pages and start again. Almost in a meditative state now as all I can focus on are my own thoughts - my body in the ocean somewhere, motionless, floating and bobbing with the waves - our buzzer rings. I'm shocked back into myself and with the slightest movement I can feel the water now on my skin, I hope out of the tub and toss my robe around me as uncouth as I can hurrying to the door. Its Missy back from her time with the steel drummers. I go back out and float in the tub for a bit longer -  but the moment has passed and now its time to pack.
Packing for us is a one woman job. And Miss is the queen packer. Everything has to be done just so, otherwise our big suitcase would be well over 50lbs, the summit where any further weight would yield a hefty fee, and our smaller suitcase would be underpacked, and no one would know where anything is. We're up until 1am packing and enjoying some Red Stripe Light. Its the end of day 4.
Tuesday - the day we say farewell kind Jamaica. The day we try to breathe in the kindness and gentle friendliness of the people we've met so we can take it home and share it with anyone who comes across our presence, and what this experience has done for us, and to us. Miss relishes the moment with a much-too-early walk and swim. I sleep in knowing the long day we have ahead of us, thanking myself for these notes of memory - knowing I can now take a shortcut to these moments, because I've taken a moment to soak it in, write it down, with no further plans of any rewrite.