I’m not good company on vacations, at least for a couple of days. Trying to relax somewhere else other than home feels a lot like trying to bite my own elbow – it’s uncomfortable and I look like an idiot. After a couple of days on vacation getting into the flow of no plans, no goals, and no chores, I start making plans, setting goals and doing chores. Pretty soon, I’m doing the same things I did at home with an extra hour thrown in for a new time zone.
One thing I’ve found that does relax me is watching others relax, especially around a pool. It’s kind of like watching tater tots come to a slow crisp in a toaster oven, and who doesn’t like tater tots?
On my second day of vacation, having situated myself by the pool, I heard an unfamiliar, but loud word bounce off the pool deck and looked up to see a middle-aged lady who had just spilt her beach bag full of ablutionary items. I imagined her name to be Gisela and by the sound of her foreign deleted expletives, probably German. Most of her forty-two items that spilled out on the tiled deck were uncomfortably near me, namely a European fashion magazine and a tube of sunscreen, SPF 326, that made me question Germany’s numerical system and whether they get a tan from the same sun we do.
Scanning the pool, I then turned my attention to a middle-aged man named Mr. Holder, who had ordered a tangerine-infused protein shake at the bar. After picking it up he made two complete laps around the pool, as if the drink had boosted his self-confidence, then plopped down to cool his little feet at the edge of the pool. This had all the makings of the perfect tourist picture – except that Mr. Holder also took periodic slurps from a tube coming out an apparatus he carried on his back. From a conversation I overheard, his backpack manufactured water from the air using energy generated by tiny amounts of electricity we humans produce in the “molecular exchange of our positive and negative ions.”
As he rose to his swollen little sunbaked feet, I felt compelled to help Mr. Holder balance his mechanized pack and he again began a circuitous route around the pool, selling his invention to mostly attractive females, describing his “Ionic Blast” as “a liquid landmark,” and handing out pamphlets that were made from the pulp of sweet potatoes. His sales tactics were only partially successful since the tube going into his mouth slurred his speech, making his sales pitch less than believable, and setting him up as a person who had just come from the orthodontist’s office. At one point, he stopped to lean against a wall for support, and appeared sweaty, bloated, and in need of a quick hit off the ionic blaster himself. This gave me an opportunity to move to another recliner, passing through some light green vapor rising out of Mr. Holder’s patented pack.
A pool length away, an exhausted pink-haired mother, Bernadette, tried to catnap while simultaneously moving her baby’s stroller back and forth, a motion that was slowly putting her to sleep but was doing nothing for her baby, who had most of a bowl of oatmeal in her hair. To give the appearance of being awake while rocking her baby to sleep, Bernadette had tightly wedged her arm into her reclining chair for support. However, as she began to slowly relax and drift off to sleep, her fingers slid deeper into her own unkept and oatmeal filled hair, pulling it just enough to cause her to stir slightly, not much, but just enough to hinder her from any deeper slumber. This cycle repeated itself again and again, and I watched Bernadette’s face become increasingly agitated each time she nodded off again and tugged her hair. In fact, she fell asleep some twenty-seven times, each time a little deeper, each time contorting her face in utter agony and self-torture, before she woke again.
I then realized that lack of sleep with moms is probably a national crisis, whether on vacation or not, and I took a contemplative moment to pray for mothers everywhere, after which I moved again to another pool spot. I thought I had found a nicer area that required less empathy on my part, but a lifeguard turned on the Fantasia Fountain, an assemblage of colorful water tubes and sprays, one of which misfired and arched across four lanes of the pool to hit Gisela directly in the small of her back.
I cannot describe the noise that came out of her accented German mouth except to say that it reminded me of one of those sirens on a foreign police car, the ones that sound like your dryer time has expired at the laundry mat. I could only lower my sunglasses and stare at Gisela who had succeeded once again in stringing together a flock of guttural expletives, as if the very same dryer I mentioned earlier was slowing spinning down to complete its cycle.
By this time, Bernadette’s baby awakened with such a start that Bernadette, who had finally fallen asleep herself, lurched forward and tore a vast chunk of her pink hair out of her head, and stopped for the first time in hours from rocking her baby. The next day, parenthetically, I saw her on the beach with a cast on her arm. She had shaved the other side of her head to match the portion she had retched out the day before and was now rocking her baby with the other arm.
While this all sounds like beach heaven, there were other more natural forces at work nearby that seem to balance out the tourist action. As is common in Florida, every part of something manmade is also surrounded by a lush array of flora and fauna. Water capillaries flow in and out of the inland waterway that are lined with fruit trees, and the thick undergrowth is teaming with lizards, snakes, and waterfowl of all sorts. As it happens, our resort is just a stone’s throw from such a wooded area where a pair of ospreys have nested for years. These white and black striped harriers are not hawks or eagles, but are in a class all by themselves, and have the remarkable ability to hover over the ocean until they spy a meal, then dive straight down to grab it with their razor-sharp talons. We watch them in fascination as they make dozens of trips every day, fish still squirming in their claws, back to their nests to feed their young.
What happened next depicts the miserable efforts we humans have made in environmental conservation, as when a splash pad at a pool would be capable of frightening an osprey flying over, but that is what exactly what happened. With its breakfast catch in tow, our osprey, distracted by the arching water coming out of the pool gun and by Bernadette’s ear-piercing scream, dropped its fish like a missile from seventy-five feet, straight down. The mullet’s nosedive was a surreal thing to watch, I must admit, and as the fish flew unimpeded, and I was reminded of Rene’ Magritte’s painting of men floating through the sky with umbrellas. However, my trance was broken by a sudden gust of wind that caused the mullet to flatten out and hit the water with a sickening belly smack, becoming the first fish of its kind to do so in a salt-water pool in resort history.
As I watched, the osprey dove instantly down after its catch and Mr. Holder ran for cover. With his awkward Ionic Blaster on his back, he ran like we all do when we have waited too long to go to the restroom and must improvise in ridiculous ways just to make it. As a result, Mr. Holder tripped and fell into the pool and because his backpack was now fully charged with human ions, he received quite the electric shock, much the same as one would get in the winter from shuffling around on shag carpeting. In any case, he seemed from my vantage point to go through an embarrassing set of jerks and face contortions. The lifeguard on duty dove in to save him from his own ionic exchange, but made the mistake of grabbing Mr. Holder and lost control of his bladder as the electricity transferred to him and passed out his weakest link.
By the time I had reached my room, “Buoys and Gulls,” the resort’s newsletter, had been printed and was being delivered under every door. A footnote at the bottom read:
“Our pool is closed for the rest of the day for hygienic reasons. Our regularly scheduled coin-diving contest for today has also been postponed indefinitely while an officer from Fish and Wildlife Management monitors the rescue of a mullet from a hovering osprey. Parents are advised to keep children under ten pounds out of the area. We are sorry for the inconvenience. In lieu of the coin contest, we are offering at no cost to you, spa facials from a visiting German cosmetic specialist, and free samples of positive ionic water with an oatmeal cookie at the front desk. Have a nice day.”
The newsletter didn’t seem to bother me at all. I sat down on the couch and for the first time all day felt relaxed just sitting in my room, and I turned on the TV to watch a couple of hours of Shark Week like I do at home. Room service was on their way up with a bowl of piping hot tater tots, and after all, who doesn’t like tater tots?