Salt

“You know what it is?” I said to Scott, “It’s like I’m waiting for something to happen. I need something to happen.”

The sun has long set by the time all sixteen of us are positioned starboard and port, rolling the long skiff to the water’s edge by way of logs continuously being reset beneath it. Boat meets water as waves meet pale shins and cuffed jeans. Our “captains” were meant to arrive before 6 but it is after 8 by the time our belongings and ourselves are all aboard. The skiff is white, maybe twenty feet in length; a fishing boat. Our gear and backpacks at our feet (thinking time was of the essence, we had come straight from class), the waves playfully buffet the craft, spraying us with brackish water. The two Omani boys in charge of the boat speak to each other in hurried phrases as the outboard sputters and tsssss… sputter and tssss… finally catching, the taller of the two maneuvers the boat another 50 meters out before the engine dies.

Click. Click.

With greater urgency, the two begin another intense exchange. It is so hurried that Kleaver, conveniently positioned behind everyone else, only manages to decipher a single phrase:

“ma-fee petrol”.

Nervous laughter circles around the ranks of American students. The young boys say nothing, but one manages to work his way to the bow in order to throw anchor. We watch, giddy with the novelty and risk of our adventure. The second boy jumps into the waves, after a few minutes we can see the silhouette of his ankles outlined in the slightly reflecting sand as he walks off.

We look at each other. We lean or recline where space permits. He has anchored us precisely in the coiling breakers and every wave adds inches to the saltwater working its way up our calves and stretching out our clothing. Thirty minutes go. Someone recognizes the detriment to our belongings of long-term submersion and we struggle to find our backpacks and hoist them, dripping, onto our saturated laps. Sometimes the waves just graze the skiff’s side, sending up spray, but other times they roll with perfection directly into the hollow of the craft. An hour. We talk over the waves, laugh quietly. We say over and over again “ma-fee petrol”. I rearrange the contents of my bag: camera and cell in the center, clothing and school books on the sides. The moon is high, ¾ full, so when our gasoline and its carrier return, I can see him again, moving more slowly across the shiny sand. When he reaches the tumbling craft, Wes jumps off to help him lug the tank onto the stern and beneath the panels.

Rumble rumble tssss…

Click. Click.

The boys remove the lid to the battery, employing Scott’s moderately dry turban to toggle the two connections, willing it into electric action. Water continues to flood the craft, sixteen people on a boat with a capacity of seven. The battery becomes increasingly submerged, sharing the water that mingles with our long-pruned feet. Twenty minutes later and they make a call, the taller of the two is still ringing his hands painfully from receiving current when their father arrives. “Very nice, huh? Having good time?” He laughs and adjusts his frameless glasses. He takes a look at the battery, lit from Wes’ donned headlamp, and tells everyone to get out.

Say again?

Thinking back on it now, I don’t think there was a moment of hesitation for any one of us. I mean it’s the middle of the night and you’re trying to hitch a ride on a sinking skiff to a deserted island off the coast of Oman. Of course you’re gunna jump when the man says jump.

We were all still able to touch, so we stood, pulled back and forth constantly by the relentless breakers. Wet and salty. We tripped over ourselves and our neighbors and the boat knocked us, steered us, our feet in the sand.

“Dad” pulled the battery box up from the boat’s floor, pouring out the foot of water. He too tried to maneuver the cells, but the cloth was soaked through by now and he sent one of his sons ashore to look for a rock. Scott and Rachel started bailing at this point, using a hat and empty water bottle in an attempt to decrease our chances of future capsizing. The rock was found and, once returned to the boat, taken up by the father in order to smash both rusty clips further onto their assigned cells. He would hit one side and nod to his son who would attempt to turn over the engine.

Click.

Sputter…

Click. Click. Click.

Sputter… Click. Click. Click. Click. Click…

“We are happy?” laughs the Dad.

What a sight. For thirty minutes, 14 sodden Americans clinging pathetically to the sides of their tiny broken boat, a weathered Omani man pounding pleasantly away on the craft’s battery with a frickin rock.

The engine catches.

We shout, sloshing our salty bodies back on board. The anchor is hoisted and we are wet and relieved. Back in position, with their father in tow, the boys steer us out toward the blackness of the Gulf. Scott and Kleaver are on my left, Indiana is behind me and Wes is on my right. I forget the rest. We creep through the tossing waves, even past the breakers there is no relief from the swells and our boat is heavy. Slowly slowly.

Tssss…

Click.

The line of light from Muscat is behind us, a strip of orange horizon. In front of us is nothing. Pitch-black. Water. “Dad” once again takes up his rock and returns to battery battery. Ten minutes pass and the outboard catches. I, designated holder of all things electronic for our guides, am asked to produce “the Magellan”.

Hungry, I lug the bag of communal dates from the soggy floor and pass them among the ranks. They are juicier, swollen with salt water, but we eat them anyway. An hour passes and things quiet. I try to doze, bending my neck over the backpack on my lap, wedged between the boat’s central bar and a floor panel. When we do spot land it seems all-of-a-sudden.

It wasn’t there and then it was.

The skiff slows, tiptoeing prissily around rocks that loom black even with the bright moon, evading the mass of reefs below. There are lights on the island, groups of fisherman lounge beside small fires, waiting for the early morning hours to return to the water. We unload ourselves and our supplies, cutting our soft, flat arches on a beach of dead coral fragments.
Away from the glowing lights of the fisherman, we lay out our two straw mats and set down the red cooler. My khakis are so sloppy that they are sliding off, my cardigan stretched down to my knees, thus I change, peeing in the soft white sand among the bushes that cap the island.

“Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.” I hear Rachel and step solidly into the wet sand beneath me in my hurry to get to her.

“Oh my God.” I echo. “This is it. This is the one moment.”

Between the tripod made by Rachel, Hugh and I, she is stoic, adjusting her giant body in slow turns. There is sand on her gradually sloped shell and she gracefully moves her head and front flippers. From tip to tip, her shell pushes four feet. “She looks like a dinosaur,” Rachel whispers.
Sensing her awareness we backed away. Brains buzzing.

Our “captains” make sure we are settled, “hand us a cell phone”, and ask us what time we would like to be returned to civilization the following day. Chris offers up 4pm, but, making room for “Omani time”, I suggest 1. The proposed time is set between 2 and 3, or as “Dad” decides – “sometime in the afternoon”.

Wes, Kyle and Chris work to ignite damp briquettes, the rest of us huddling in a semi-circle of growling stomachs and clothing deemed “har-ram”. The shrimp and vegetable kabobs are finished in shifts and passed throughout the group, while burgers served on white bread, that Scott has managed to dry over the coals, taste like manna from heaven. It is past midnight and no dinner has ever been so deserved or so enjoyed. People walk off, come back. The heat of Muscat doesn’t reach this island and we put on more layers as the moon reaches optimum height. The haze and humidity of the city are too dissipated and we can see long lines of blinking constellations.

Some stay near the fires, roasting marshmallows. Scott takes out and focuses his binoculars, showing me the terminator’s ragged edge on the moon, bright planets and swatches of stars. Graham joins us and we lie on the splintering mat, beneath a sign posted to warn against landing, camping, or diving on the island without a permit by order of royal decree, sand on our calves and the sticky palms of our hands. One by one everyone gravitates toward us, wading up hijab for pillows or and towels for blankets. Kleaver puts the speaker on low. Bon Iver. The Lemon of Pink. We turn on the sand. Scott has volunteered himself as night watchmen and stands, hands on hips, facing the waves. I tell him I can sleep when I’m dead and we walk back to sit by the glowing coals.

Eventually the moon falls beneath the horizon. The sky is at its darkest and the stars are relentlessly innumerous. Looking at the brightest only illuminates the paler millions that act as backdrop.

Dawn breaks temperately. First there is the knowing glow, the spectrum of grey differing from west to east. The clouds look like rain, but they always look like rain in the morning. We can see shapes; see everything going from monochrome to Technicolor in lens-like layers. We walk to the eastern most beach, the clouds hanging in both orange and bruised purple. Here again the shore is veined with coral shards; white, grey, salmon. Pucca shells and smooth smooth stones.

Graham joins us, then Caitlin.

Once the sun has unquestionably risen, Scott and I try to sleep, taking our neglected places on the mat while the rest stir and sit up. I attempt it for an hour, dozing to and from sleep but never settling. When I wake up I make my way to the cooler and pull out an orange. Sitting with the water lapping my feet, I try to peel it in slow circles.

Next, I swim. My skin almost a stranger to light exposure. Free in wearing so little. The water here is cool and the waves raise you and return you to the sand. I explore the island, taking pictures of countless dead birds along the beachfront and the rich cerulean water between the rocks. It is difficult to walk in the soft sand, sore feet sinking into its white allowances, trying to avoid wide cavities carved by lady sea turtles. The island is nakedly beautiful. Raw and natural is rises from the shallow blue without discernable shape.

Time was relative, but by mid-morning the heat has reached a significant point and we decide to move camp to the far side of the island in hopes of holding on to any shade we can collect. The more innovative of the group fashion a lean-to with our straw mats and some rip-rap 2x4s against the side of a tattered ledge, beneath which we put our remaining food and our languid, saline bodies. We swim, snorkel, walk the beach. We are afraid to look at the clock, but by noon (?) the majority has established themselves beneath the overhang. We sit and talk, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches go around for takers. Before us, spread and splayed over low black crags are our notebooks, Al Kitaabs, articles of clothing. Every once and awhile someone gets up to turn a waterlogged page and flip their soggy shirt. We bat at flies, slowly but surely moving back closer and closer to the rock wall as the sun gains height. Eventually the combined square feet of shade are no longer adequate for so many bodies, and many retire to covered enclaves in the water.

It is one. And then it is two.

I listen to Andrew Bird and drink liter after liter of water mixed with pineapple Tang. The flies crawl into creases in the turban I have twisted and tucked over my hair. They land on our arms, our lips. We sweat through our eyebrows, from the folds behind our knees.

Caitlin and Hugh scoop out the molten chocolate chips with left over marshmallows.

Kleaver passes around his remaining Marie Bisquits before teaching Indiana how to tread water.
Chris and I slant the 2x4s in order to slope the mats to a greater degree, increasing the shade by at least two feet.

Katricia sits on the cooler. Hugh wears her sunglasses. I flip my khakis, readjust a notebook, kill a fly on my foot.

John turns the now-soft pages of his Jack London collection, upset as its salty spoil. Rachel and Chris return to the reefs.

It is three.

Kyle, Wes and Jacob toss a football in the shallows between the rocks. Scott moves from shore to land, eats an energy bar, returns to the water. Noses, cheekbones and shoulders are inflamed, geometric piles of salt are cupped in the crevices of our cliff, and the cooler when opened releases a smell like rum, produced by the fermentation of our warmed and water-logged date remains.

Once again, the lean-to no longer adequately shades us, and being so encompassing prevents all manner of fresh breeze from cooling the interior. We divide and convene in small batches in the shade of outcroppings along the shore, sitting delicately on the moist sand, not saying much.

Indiana manages to light a soggy cigarette.

Graham begins to search for “the cell phone” given to us the previous night, in order to call to make sure that the boat is coming, but to no avail. Slightly panicked, I and others remove ourselves from the shade to locate it. We look beneath our bags. Inside them. We check our beach from the previous night and rummage through the trash. Scott takes out his binoculars and positions himself to face the proposed direction of Muscat. No cell phone. We all have our school-phones, but these, if they aren’t out of battery, have service, and still function after total submersion, do not contain the number of our “captain”.

It is four. Most resign themselves again to the enclaves. Graham and Scott stand look-out. We are tired, hungry, hot and dirty. There is less talking and more sighing.

A boat is sighted. They encircle the island once before making port in the blue cove. Glad to not be stranded, we quickly load up the skiff, while our guides take a load off. They smoke and sit, skip stones and remove themselves to the other side of the island to pray. All the while, the 14 of us stand around the ship, everyone holding on with both hands. We let the water wet our pants again, let it soak its way up to our thighs. It doesn’t faze us, we do not let go. Eventually they work their way back to the skiff, ask us if we are ready. We scramble on with an embarrassing urgency, cradling our backpacks and stepping on the small fish caught and stowed on the floor of the boat.

Sputter tssss… Sputter tssss…

Click. Click.

You’ve got to be kidding me.

The craft floats lethargically throughout the cove, turning as the men again knock at the battery. We are too exhausted to be the least bit surprised. The outboard starts. And then stops. Again it starts and the taller boy maneuvers us away from the island, out into the Gulf.

We near shore in time to hear the call to prayer, stopping only a few times throughout the return trip when the engine gives out or the men decide to go fishing…

Last night we ate lunch at Aunt "Janice's", both families being gathered into the sitting room to listen to "Tony's" lecture, which he brokenly translated to me as being entitled “I Know My Husband Why I Am a Bad Woman” (???).

I am tired again. The house is on lock-down as far as I can tell, family members coming and going, screaming and crying and slamming doors. It’s 9pm and I haven’t eaten since lunch.

Three days later and I’m still picking sand out of my hair and salt off my zippers.