Under the Sea
To celebrate our 24th wedding anniversary, Crystal and I jetted down to Curaçao, the former Dutch colony on a desert island 40 miles off the coast of Venezuela.
We chose Curaçao, in part because we’d never been there and in part because we’d get to swim with sea turtles. International law prohibits tourists from touching them, but they didn’t mind touching us. Our guide was offering them raw fish treats, and these hungry creatures bumped into me while trying to get to a satiated stomach. (That’s me with the orange underwater iPhone rig.)
If you had told me as a kid that I’d get this close to sea turtles in their habitat, I probably would’ve asked if that means I grew up to be a marine biologist. I wonder what middle school me would think of 46-year-old me’s answer: “Nope: you actually advertise tractors, old houses, and dead people’s stuff.” It’s wild that now I work in auctions seeing as the first auction I ever attended was a bankruptcy auction with all of my dad’s contractor equipment in our front yard.
“I’m ready for my closeup, Mr. Demile.” Some of these dudes or dudettes were really curious about my iPhone housing, even though I had no food to entice them toward me. Their investigations made for some great shots.
This fella or lady seemed a bit skeptical or maybe annoyed. Look at that mug! I guess not paying it with food but taking its picture is a bit rude.
This little guy or girl was hoping I had something other than a camera in my hand.
The Colors of Curaçao
We were told that tourism is relatively new to Curaçao, which was predominantly an oil-refinery island off Venezuela until U.S. sanctions shut that down. When thousands of jobs left the island, the country leaned into building infrastructure, refurbishing old buildings, and developing tourist options. Many of the massive murals were dated within the last two years.
When the birthday girl posed for this picture, we didn’t know this scene would later prove a foreshadowing. (You’ll see why in the last section of this post.)
Crystal and I didn’t know to bring a lock from home, but our hearts were virtually locked together on this trip. We came to Curaçao to celebrate Crystal’s birthday and our 24th wedding anniversary. We’ve visited 13 foreign countries together (and dozens more separately), yet we’re finding our hearts more and more home here in LynchVegas. When those barefoot kids said, “I do” on a riverside beach, they never thought they’d travel the world, adopt a teenager, build award-winning businesses, or repel waterfalls together. We didn’t dream big enough. And now our challenge is to keep dreaming, to keep finding new ways to love each other well.
Crystal loves a street market. Anybody who has traveled with her knows this is a requirement on almost every trip. She raved about the value of fresh food, while I admired just how far Michael Jordan’s brand has infiltrated the world. We both luxuriated in fresh mango smoothies to offset the hot, humid air that hung over the cobblestones.
As America is torn between a former prosecutor and a felon, between a former attorney general and someone calling for the jailing of journalists & political foes, between the child of immigrants and someone who has promised internment camps & serial numbers for millions of immigrants of color, and between a defender of Ukraine and someone who raves about dictators like Putin, I felt this sign in my bones.
We have the strongest economy in the world, the biggest & fastest economic recovery from Covid of any industrialized nation, and unemployment at multi-generational lows. But all of that pales in comparison to the liberty inherent in the ground-breaking version of democracy built into our constitutional republic that is threatened by an insecure, spiteful authoritarian empowered by a Supreme Court to bend centuries-old guardrails to appease his narcissism. May proclamations like this live on in America as a celebration of what we continue to be rather than a pining for the way it used to be!
These cacti are painted, but this island was full of cacti. We learned that Curaçao is a desert that has only 15 days of rain per year. Despite sitting on the outer edge of the Caribbean, this tiny country hasn’t experienced a hurricane since 1877! Neither Crystal nor I expected that, especially not with all of the accurate pictures we’d seen online of tree-lined beaches and colorful fruit platters. But almost all of the fruit we ate was grown in another country.
This row of rainbow-colored buildings is practically the logo for Curaçao. To give you a sense of scale, these letters are taller than me.
I screen captured my GPS because it captured our daily journeys to snorkeling beaches. We’d drive for half an hour through scrub brush, cacti, and gnarly little trees and then pop out into a panorama of white sand and a range of vibrant blues.
I’ve never heard of an indoor food truck. Maybe something was lost in translation to English?
A New Place (to Us) for an Old Love
I try not to take for granted that I mostly fly for free. I get to see so much of the world because I can jump countries and continents for less than what the airport parking will charge me when I return. Instead of complacency, that gift fills me with wonder that I can do what any caesar or pharaoh couldn’t—what titans like Carnegie and Rockefeller never experienced. I can start one day on one side of the ocean and start the next in another. I can hold my wife’s hand on two different continents on the same day and take pictures of creatures below the waves. I can leave the anvil on which I beat out a living and glide above the clouds.
Our beachside hotel offered tons of quiet alone time until sunset, when people came back from other parts of the island for (loud) beach partying at an adjacent resort. Crystal and I got to catch up on a lot of conversation time. We’re both married to a reader, a contemplator, and a shepherd. My favorite conversations were the ones as she rode piggyback in the ocean or pool with her arms around my shoulders. Low volume, low key, high connection.
I think it’d be rad to had this setup for my men’s Bible study and prayer group—with one change. I’d switch out the sandy ground for a fire ring in the middle.
The shoreline along our hotel was lined with big, jagged rocks. So, we mostly drove to beaches. Thankfully, we had beautiful pools from which to watch the sunset. The one evening we spent around this pool, we had the whole place to ourselves. Offseason has its benefits.
Finding God in the Fauna
I look for lessons when I travel—reminders of wisdom I’ve replaced, inspiration from people living unique lives, whispers to my soul. Normally, before I leave I ask God to reveal his affection for me and/or the reason I was meant to travel to wherever I’m headed. Curaçao taught me to look for beauty beyond the dry places of my heart and culture—or even in them. It showed me that life teems under the surface of even the beautiful things I can see. And, per usual, it gave me a sense of scale for the challenges and frustrations of my lived experience in contrast to a HUGE, diverse world that isn’t concerned about what concerns me.
This summer, I’ve been listening to An Immense World, a huge book about the physical senses that animals have but humans don’t. I’ve learned there’s so much going on around us humans than we realize—or can even hope to realize. Highly recommend the audiobook! As we swam with these fish, I wondered how their experience in the water differed from mine. What could they see, smell, feel, and hear that I couldn’t? What do they inherently know about these environs that humans still don’t?
I had never seen flamingos in the wild until this trip. We stopped three times next to this inland saltwater lake to watch them fish for shrimp. I had so many questions. How does a saltwater lake happen? How did the shrimp get there? How do the flamingos not eat all of the shrimp—or how do the shrimp reproduce enough to avoid local extinction? What would it be like to walk if my knees bent the opposite direction like a flamingo’s knees do?
I don’t speak the language of iguanas, but I think I heard this one ask, “Draw me like one of your French girls.”
We encountered so many beautiful fish while we snorkeled, but this one was my favorite. This image doesn’t do justice to its iridescent scales that shimmered between hues like one of those color-changing exotic car wraps. Other than the turtles, these were probably the biggest creatures we saw under the surface—with the biggest specimens stretching almost as long as my forearm. Crystal and I followed them, as they nosed along the bottom together from east to west.
Our favorite beach was in the Williwood section of Curaçao. Locals wore shirts with this name across their chests. We passed dilapidated buildings and a lot of cacti to get to the beach, but we learned why the locals were so proud of their sliver of the island nation.
I usually spend Monday dawns alone in the office catching up on Biplane Productions‘ Facebook invoices or on a solo hike on local trails. On my Monday morning in Curaçao, I let Crystal sleep in while I walked laps alone in this pool. I say “alone,” but this silent companion was probably lost in his thoughts too.
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