Growing up, I didn’t have comedian, writer, and human extraordinaire Lane Moore around to tell me how to be alone, so, when it came to what would be, for other people, major life events, I learned to wing it.
My birthday presented a special problem. You see, it falls on Christmas, an irrational mega-holiday the populace of our country celebrates beginning in October. My solution, since I’ve had the privilege to do so, has been to duck out via travel—whether for work or pleasure or simply isolation.
I’m not talking about major splurges. Granted, all the negative spending for the bio-family I don’t have boosts the budget. I’ve been hosted by friends and their families across the pond, and, lately, I’ve been adopted into a Washington, D.C., family. NB: Chosen family’s the best. I’ve even started a mini holiday tradition of my own, a Queersmas Eve of sorts. Since I wrote about it last year, the group from which it took shape has doubled: There are 800 of us now.
Travel is the panacea. I can leave familiar aches, angsts, and triggers behind and just be.
The best holiday-birthday trip I ever took—one of the best trips I’ve ever taken—was a three-day jaunt (courtesy of the federal judiciary’s ridiculously stringent leave policy) via an uber-brief, pretty cheap plane ride from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Culebra, Vieques’s smaller cousin island. No horses, but much, much better diving.
Culebra’s where I saw my first octopus, snorkeled casually with some remarkably chill tortoises, and fed tarpon my leftovers. Yes, consider this a huge, glaring endorsement. Go to Puerto Rico, but most of all go to Culebra. Be sure to hit both Dinghy Dock and Zaco’s Tacos when you come up from your dives.
SCUBA is the best escapism. It occupies the brain: After all, a mistake could do anything from detracting from your experience to killing you. Not that we divers like to dwell on that sort of thing. But I do, since I have a fascination with super-deep dives, cave dives, and everything in between.
Eugenie Clark’s Shark Lady came out in 1978. When I was a child, it was my Bible. With a child’s ignorance, and, to be fairer, lack of context, I didn’t understand why Durham didn’t, like New York City, have a museum or an aquarium where I could observe marine denizens while my mother worked each day.
Eugenie Clark was my hero. She’s the kind of woman who got stung by a poisonous fish at depth and kept diving based on her estimation of how long she had to deal with the sting. And, no, it wasn’t that sting that killed her. She died three years ago, at 92. Clark dived pretty much right up until the end.
The sea was to me what space is to other children. Or maybe it’s like what space would be to other children if they could take off and orbit to their hearts’ content; if they could be sure of encountering aliens on every mission. More than 80 percent of the ocean is effectively unexplored.
Yes, 80 percent. Even in the United States, we’ve only used modern mapping methods on about 35 percent of relevant marine terrain. Hell, we may be more likely to find aliens underwater than in space.
I’d begun begging to get certified, dreaming of diving, from the moment I’d gotten hold of Shark Lady. Lucky me, I got certified by 14, and I haven’t stopped diving since. It’s like being in a different world, and it’s amazing.
Here's how I spent the rest of Christmas Day: on Flamenco Beach, enjoying the hell out of some shark pinchos with mayo-ketchup, like a good Puerto Rican, and Medalla.
Finally, because I’ve openly admitted my ambition to convince people to go to Culebra, I’ll finish with one of the best meals I’ve ever had: my Birthmas lobster extravaganza at Susie’s.
Somehow on a tiny island off an island the salad was perfect, the wine was everything I could have hoped for. Oh, and the lobster was even better than anything else I had that year I lived in the Caribbean. They don’t have claws, you know.
Culebra is rebounding, and your tourism dollars will be well spent. Go!