Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [82]
We kissed for a long time in the open field, until goats encircled us, nudging greedily at the backs of our knees and gnawing on his sneaker laces. The moon rose. Then, in the distance, we heard faint chanting. Moving toward the voices, we saw a whitewashed building—a Pentecostal church. It was the night before Palm Sunday. We listened outside as people spoke in tongues, sang, and testified, their voices rising into the midnight sky. The enchantment of Treasure Beach began to show itself as more potent and primal, more mysterious and subtle, than the magic of the mushroom tea, the cave spring, the manroot drink, or the Rasta’s cane.
The next morning, we set out in the two-man Klepper with three sandwiches, a mango, and a liter of water. A Klepper is a folding kayak, an elegant version of the Plexiglas kind, with a frame of blond wood and a hull of heavy canvas. They have circled Cape Horn, crossed the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean, and served on expeditions to the North and South Poles. You can also pack one in two duffel bags and travel with it. John had fallen in love with them, so much so that he and Michael Berman, the friend with whom he would later start George magazine, founded Random Ventures to invest in similar handmade boats.
In the daylight, Pedro Bluff was transformed, no longer ominous or shadowy, but a thing alive with seabirds, brush, and cactus flowers. We paddled hard and made it through the heady current at the end of the bluff around to back seaside. It was beautiful and wild and seemed to go on forever—miles of high cliffs, jungle, and deserted beach.
“You see, nothing to be afraid of.” He leaned in, nuzzling my neck. “Good job, Sport.” He was right. We were together, the water was turquoise, the sun was shining, and we were far enough out so that the swells beneath us were only a murmur of what they would become. We stopped, ate our sandwiches, and watched the dolphins nearby. A good omen, we said.
Then he wanted to go a little farther. And once we did that, he wanted to land. I refused. I had agreed only to come past the point. We had no spray skirts, I argued, and we hadn’t seen another boat since we’d left Great Pedro Bay more than an hour before. But he was seductive—the water was calm, we didn’t need spray skirts—and he wanted what he wanted. He also knew more than I did about the sea, about anything outdoors. He had opened these worlds to me. But more to the point, in Negril I had glanced at the book John had brought, and the idea of landing on one of those beaches and enacting our very own desert island Tantric sex fantasy was alluring.
We moved in for reconnaissance, staying behind the break, but the same swells that had seemed so gentle farther out were now larger. They were also breaking on something well before land. We drew closer, and I saw it—darkness in the water. Danger between paradise and us.
“It’s a reef—turn back, King,” I heard myself saying in a voice much higher-pitched than my own. We paddled back out and conferred.
“You’re first mate and I’m captain, but we’re a team and I need you behind me,” he said. “If we pull in and you say no for any reason—any reason at all—I’ll turn back.” He kept his eyes on me and waited. There were the bits of dried salt on his large brown shoulders.
I wanted that desert island fantasy, sand and all. I also wanted to feel powerful, as afraid as I was. And somewhere in the mix, I wanted to please him.
“Okay. But you promise?”
“Don’t worry, I promise.”
We advanced again. A reef. We went back out, paddled farther down the coast, and pushed in once more. Another reef. By now I was tired and ready to give up, but he pleaded. As we got closer, he spotted a break