It is New Year’s Day. Trujillo, Honduras, Central America.

At around 1PM or so, you and your wife, along with a few 1st and 2nd cousins are on this rather small boat owned by a cousin named Gallo. One motor; it’s a fishing boat to be sure. After a quick jaunt around a nearby lagoon with Pelicans flying above you, you speed along the coastline to meet up with other family members for barbecuing and general celebration at your once grandfather’s and now family’s Ranch called “Rio Grande” (It’s actually where the Rio Grande pours out into the Caribbean).

After eating, drinking and general happiness, you get back in the boat with an uncle, some cousins, and head straight out about 2 miles off shore. Stop the motor and just started fishing by hand (line, a stone, a hook, and bait). Everyone catches but a few. (You? Maybe three). It’s nearing sundown and—as it turns out—a storm is quickly approaching.

A perfect picture:
Imagine speeding directly toward the shore as the the starboard sun sets over the mountains. Then look over your left shoulder behind you; see the blackest and most singular, wide cloud with dark hues of copper-colored rain, strafing the water below. It’s coming fast: both the shore…and the storm.

You’re close enough now. Jump out of the boat and into the water; it’s beautifully warm. Walk to the shore and family as the air gets this deep cinnamon color; the people, frantic, throw their things into the two cars available to take about 15.

Yea, do the math. Not enough room. So, look at these two young 2nd cousins, standing near you (the photo here taken an hour or so before this), and then look at the others running toward the car: your Mom, your wife, your step Dad, your Aunts and Uncles, your many cousins.

Say this:

“Go ahead, I’ll ride back in the boat.”

At this point, the beginning of the storm is reaching you. It’s maybe 5:15 PM.
Random pelting of warm rain begins; warning shots.

A Problem. You have to go. No seriously: YOU HAVE TO GO….to the bathroom.

Numero dos.

With only your bathing trunks adorning you—and the sky now almost entirely maroon and charcoal grey— the last vestige of the setting sun guides you toward only one conclusion: You. have. very. little. time.

Run!

Find a discrete place on the shore next to and under a palm tree, just a few yards from the water. Dig. Accept your fate much like all with whom you had descended from, and accomplish what your body tells you that you must do.

Cover the um…results…with sand, gigle and think, “There; that was easy!”

Run out from your hiding place, naked as a wildebeest, with rumpled bathing trunks in your right hand, and jump into the water….

….You will come out…clean.

The warm waves are shaking and busy. Your cousin, Gallo is already in the boat, anchored maybe 30 or 40 feet off shore (you can wade to it), and the storm is now throwing its first full punches. Your young cartwheeling cousins jump into the boat with you. All of a sudden, it’s so cold! Gallo fires up the boat and heads along the shore, back toward Trujillo.

The sky is nearly black. The sun is gone. The rain pelts you like never before experienced. You giggle like wild parrots, and faces can barely be made out in all these grey sheets.

Your body convulses, shivers with a combination of frigid reaction to the temperature change, childhood giddiness and absolute present tense experience. There is zero understanding of future or past. You simply are.

Undaunted, the boat plows, skips, pops, and smashes against the waves. It is just the four of you. Emerging above, to the left: stars. Emerging deep and beyond, to the right: Trujillo, just off the cliffs. At the top, the old Spanish fort and its long-unused cannons are in silhouette against the backdrop of your Mother’s hometown, its streetlights a yellow-fluorescent. “Blackened forest, set ablaze.”

The rain is relentless. SMACK! SMACK! continues the boat against the waves. Then, just as quickly as it began, it stops. Like some poorly written movie in need of a re-write, the rain simply stops just as your pull up to where your boat docks.

How long did this take? Don’t know. Maybe just a few, maybe ten(?) minutes. It wasn’t far. Know that it felt both like a lifetime, as but a moment. You get off the boat, having never felt so waterlogged. Never. ever. ever. You are soaked to the bone.

You find your wife. You feel changed. No. You ARE changed. You look at her, and say, “Babe, I just experienced one of the most beautiful experiences I can possibly convey or understand.”

No pictures. No video. Just your memory. From the Water to the Sand.