Unabashed

Damn I want to go to the beach, take a vacation. I want to sweat in that good way, sunburned just enough to feel it, to look a little red, so my skin feels stretched and tingles. I want to hear the waves lapping the shore, to read Monsoon by Wilbur Smith by Wilbur Smith again–ships and pirates and bounty. I want to experience the ease of life that comes with knowing I don’t have anything to do that day but drink beer, smoke a cigar, listen to the ocean and read my book. Yeah. Just me and my cooler full of iced Coronas and sliced limes. I need it.

The picture below is of Dead Man’s Beach, Peter Island, BVI, 2004, the day I married Suzy. I know it’s not a good picture, but I was about as happy as I’ve ever been at that moment. That’s her on the beach. The island in to the right is Dead Man’s Chest, where Blackbeard abandoned fifteen men with nothing between them but a bottle of rum. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the shanty “Fifteen men on a Dead Man’s Chest, yo ho ho and a bottle of rum” for Treasure Island, but no one knows if he made it up or if that was a real story. The beach, Dead Man’s Beach, is supposedly named thus because the bones of those fifteen men washed up on it.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: beach, blackbear, bvi, Caribbean, peter island, treasure island, vacation