The old man and the sea
the beach walker -- Feb 2012
For my whole life, I have been coming to the same crook in the top of the curve of Seven Mile Beach on the largest of the Cayman Islands. For a brief, wondrous four years in the late nineties, I called this place home. It is the same stretch of beach where I met my husband in 1987, akward adolescents bearing serious resemblances to Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing and Daniel La Russo (Ralph Macchio) in the Karate Kid respectively. It is the beach where we bumped into each other again at twenty on New Years Eve and fell in love and started our lives together.
This is the sloped ribbon of white sand and craggy tidepools where I used to walk with J's mother in the early mornings. As long as I have been walking its length, so has the man captured in the photo above. Cherry and I passed him in the early years as we traveled the same route, the stretch from the ironshore just past the cemetery to the hotels closer to George Town. I nodded gravely to him as he passed the morning I surveyed the lingering storm surge and the damage after the island's near miss with Hurricane Mitch in '98. My first Newf Dakota (shaved to the skin and sunscreened) frisked past the walking man with a coconut clutched in his jaws on our daily trips to the West Bay Post Office to pick up correspondence from the States and loose breadfruits that fell from the tree in the cracked corner of the parking lot.
Later, I left the island, moving around the world to have adventures and babies, but he was here every morning whenever I visited. He stepped nimbly around me as I knelt in the sand to build drip castles with my little ones, nodding sometimes as my sons and daughter learned to swim in the turquoise shallows and collected hermit crabs in the tidepools.
He hasn't aged much in these twenty years--has always looked like the 'most interesting man in the world' from the Dos Equis commercials. I have created a story about him: he must be rich and quietly famous. There are houses just up the beach on the coveted Boggy Sand Road that belong to celebrities--Larry Flynt lives there, and it is rumored that the inventor of the Barbie is tucked away there as well. I wondered aloud to my husband that this might be him, but we did the math as we paddled the kayak this morning and figured the inventor of the Barbie must be in his nineties by now. Perhaps he's a writer who uses his treks to clear his mind before sitting down to a day at the desk.The views and the sounds of the sea are the perfect backdrop for a writer's life. Dick Francis lived here for years; he once stopped by a fledgling writing group I had started at Dickens Café in 1996.
"Hedge fund manager," J said. "Works from home."
"Or eccentric trust funder," I mused. "Maybe there is a history of tragedy in his life."
The frustrated journalist in me can't stop puzzling over this man. Who is he? What is his story? What does he think about as he walks the long miles of this beach every morning? His face is not particularly friendly; he often seems deep in thought. Sometimes he'll nod hello, but I've rarely seen him smile.
"Just ask him!" my family laughs at my curiosity. "I'm sure he recognizes you after twenty years. Introduce yourself."
Stay tuned to see if I get up the nerve in the coming weeks.