The Invitation
A friend (?) invited me to this:
Eager to have my penis appraised and planning to walk in with it in my hand, I got there fifteen minutes late hoping to interrupt a prayer (still how many insist on officialising meetings in Bim). The building was locked down as tight as a clam’s asshole.
Having already turned the corner towards my car, a guy who’d heard me knock was calling after me, running to let me know he’d only just himself been the victim of the general lack of concern on this island for other people’s time. What he said though was that he’d “just been told the meeting was postponed”.
Plan B
The car hood was warm against my buttocks. There were two wood doves pecking in the gravel. They look like they never miss a meal, I thought. And, How close they come as if they don’t take me seriously as a human being!
I call a friend who is always up for an adventure, hoping he would be in the city. It went to voicemail. I call another friend I hadn’t spoken to face-to-face since I took my clothes off in front of him so he knew I wasn’t wearing a wire. A recording said he was unavailable. I wondered if his phone was just jealous of our friendship.
Plan C
What to do? I imagined myself feeling awkward walking into a bar alone and decided the solution was to sit at the bar and chat up the barman. In the carpark opposite the chosen bar on Hastings main road, I listened to ministers on the car radio talk about how well we’d (island we) responded to hurricane Elsa which barely brushed us yet caused more than a thousand reports of damages, the roads to be lined in chainsawed limbs of fallen trees, flooding, electricity outages and the water to be off for the next five days (where I live).
Sitting Facing Eternity
Walking past the bar, I saw no barstools in front of the barman…perhaps a COVID protocol. So I kept walking and sat facing the sea on the Richard Haynes Boardwalk.
Sargassum saying yes to climate change?
There is so much sargassum. I should use it in my garden. I wonder if it will dry up my plants because I didn’t wash out all the salt. The Airbnb residence needs it more. I could dump heaps there when it’s unoccupied so it has time to finish stinking up the place. A sampling of thoughts.
How difficult it is to focus on any one thing: the waves are never the same wave nor the noises they make as they trip and fall…never the same. It is too much. I become hypertensive from the immensity of my inability to be in nature, to move along with it, be carried in it, at ease. Do not bring those children over here to upset my soulcase!
The Turtle Encounter
Just as I ponder that my bottom must be wearing down because it gets more sensitive to sitting on concrete and wood as I age, I see what I think is a log being pushed ashore by a wave. It is not a log!
I Don’t even Need an Excuse to Talk to Strangers
I am so excited, I tell strangers who pass to “Look!” Of course, they’re tourists and none are wearing masks, so I put mine on slowly while looking them directly in their eyes, but they ask me how many eggs a turtle lays and I run away to call the emergency turtle hotline (2300142) and ask them to bring tasers if they have them so I can help control people who use flash photography.
A Family Knows Things
Before the turtle lays, she does an inspection -“pitting” it’s called – to make sure the sand is right – easy to dig in, won’t collapse while she’s laying, isn’t full of buried treasures (like diamonds or dog shit) etc.. I learned this from a family who talked to me like they were from the turtle rescue place, but I left unsure whether they just knew the people or had themselves volunteered before.
The mother, who was cheerful and unassuming, said she saw me from the time she, her husband and giraffe-son turned the corner. They know what to look for – (I had my phone out already thinking about documenting this for my three-people fan base).
I liked that she liked that I kept my distance (from the turtle, not her…which I also did).
I only thought if I were going to lay eggs, I would definitely not do it in front of no human. They love to eat eggs so much they’ve designed a multitude of ways to cook them.
Other Bajans Question my Citizenship
Figure it out! Or kiss my…
Some other Bajans seemed surprised I’d never seen a turtle come up to nest before and I thought, I don’t park out to foop* down Drill Hall**.
Turtle Rescue to the Rescue
A fast-moving, petite woman with toned thighs and a high bottom shows up with a fluorescent orange bag, wearing a t-shirt with the words ‘turtle’ and ‘volunteer’ on it. Once the hawksbill starts to lay, another volunteer who happened to be passing by with his family, holds her clipboard while she scrapes off barnacles to get accurate measurements. Then, to my surprise and delight, she gathers the crowd that had formed, guiding them to the turtle’s productive end to answer questions.
Egg-laying Trance
Apparently, once the female starts to lay she goes into a trance, kinda like she’s imagining herself living on a farm with Tom Hardy and/or Omari Hardwick (or any other substantially tattooed man for whom she would tell any amount of lies). So she’s unlikely to abort, plus, if we stand still, we resemble trees and that’s why, although this may have seemed intrusive, it wasn’t.
The Human Sexual Drive to Create False Moons & it’s Impact on Turtle Hatchlings
Mid-August is when the hatchlings emerge – two months after the eggs are laid. The challenge has been that there are no lighting regulations in Barbados and it’s at the discretion of the bars lining the beaches to consider that the human animal is a part of nature. There are other options to replacing bright lights for security reasons, some as simple as angling them away from the beach. As she said this I felt sick of human beings and how we are, how it’s such a stuggle to get us to care about anything other than sex…you know, making money…which is ultimately about impressing somebody into having sex so maybe they’ll stay, validating who we like to think we are.
Snot crying for hatchlings crushed by cars
The hatchlings head towards the bars and beyond…to the roads.
How to Save Nestlings who have my Sense of Direction
The woman volunteer suggested vigilance and that we should only intervene if we see them heading in the wrong direction. In such a case, you put them in a bucket with a little sand. A woman wanted to know if you can put them on top of each other. The volunteer looked for a picture on her phone meant to surprise the woman, and I was glad a huge dick didn’t appear to surprise us instead as she scrolled through the photo gallery.
There should be as little contact as possible – use two fingers, one on either side of the shell – and you call the turtle rescue people. Maybe then I’d ask how much sand to put in the bucket since it feels like the white people are getting more attention than me. Is this really true? How can I accurately measure? I like that she doesn’t change the way she speaks to talk to people who look different, even although you would use the word “short” to describe her to others. Another sampling of thoughts.
(For more information about the Barbados Sea Turtle Project click here).
The Videos
“Mercy! I need to get a Segway.”
“First, plastic bags all through my living room and now a red light up my cloaca?!”
“I would like to blind you with some sand! That is what I would like to do!”
“You humans are a mess! I hope you fare well when aliens come to watch onna give birth!”
The Photos
“I’m invisible”
“I am invisibuuuuul”
It was night time and you can’t use a flash…so imagine this turtle looks like one in a Nat Geo documentary please. Thanks.
*Barbadian dialect for the other F-word you guessed. **Drill Hall is a popupar lovers lane beach because it doesn’t have much (if any) artificial lighting.
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