{SPRING GE T A W A Y }
grown and nearly gone, it’s hard to remember what any- thing was like before you happened.” I spent the next week trying, though. At least when I wasn’t too busy lying on the beach.
The unreal world
Lying on St. John’s beaches was the agreed purpose
of our Caribbean expedition — along with avoiding various aspects of the real world. The trip was Mona’s idea originally. A high school senior who had dealt impressively with college application stress all year, she wanted nothing to do with be- ing home the week the fat and thin letters trickled in. “I want to be at the beach,” she’d said. It seemed like a fine
idea to the rest of us, including Lizzie, who’d survived her own bout with admissions madness a year before. On our first full St. John day, we packed books and a lunch
and headed north to Francis Bay Beach. In the afternoon, I walked up a short, dusty trail east of the bay. It was my hope, later in the week, to get in a longer hike: Virgin Islands Na- tional Park occupies more than 60 percent of St. John, and I remembered an immensely satisfying day Deborah and I spent walking to the far corner of the island. What would it be like to retrace those steps? And to return to Mona’s question: What had it been like
to see the world as childless 30-somethings in 1988? Deborah was 38; I was 37. We’d been together for three years, and we knew we were going to get married sometime.
conclusions would be wrong, I think, because there’s so much else about that 1988 trip that one or both of us can’t remember. Why did we choose Maho Bay in the first place?
Someone must have recommended it, but we can’t say who or when. Where was the tent cabin we stayed in? All we know is that, unlike A-18, it lacked an ocean view; had an isolated, jungly feel; and was surrounded by tiny, yellow-breasted birds called bananaquits. Did we rent a car? My memory said no. Then Deborah
reminded me about the hitchhiker we picked up who told us that her parents had moved to St. John with a group of other people traumatized by the Cuban missile crisis. And where, exactly, did we go on that wonderful
hike? I thought I knew.
‘Okay, it’s less warm’
The next day we got up early, hoping to go snorkeling
at Trunk Bay. No such luck — the swells were too big, and by the time we arrived, park rangers had closed Trunk’s famous snorkeling trails — but we didn’t care. We were at the beach! Mona and her mother built a multi-turreted sand castle
while Lizzie and I read and dozed. “We would love to invite you to come see it before it gets destroyed by forces natural or otherwise,” Mona said, mimicking a talk on coral reef ecology we’d attended at the camp the night before. We roused ourselves to do so. Eventually, we tested the water. A ranger had
advised that broken bones, not drowning, were the worst-case scenario under the day’s conditions. We managed to stay whole, perhaps because we didn’t really try to swim. Floating was satisfying enough. A day later we found a more sheltered beach, on
Leinster Bay, and put our rented snorkel gear to use. Snorkeling is one of the great joys of St. John,
a tent cabin at Maho Bay Camps, where a walkway leads to the beach.
We also knew that if we wanted kids, we’d need to get going. We didn’t know when the wedding would happen. (I was
divorced and shy of a repeat ceremony.) We didn’t know if the kid-having plan was going to work, much less what it would mean if it didn’t. And we didn’t know how long Debo- rah’s mother, who had cancer, was likely to be around. At some point, we called home and got news about that.
It wasn’t good. The wedding question became more urgent: Were we going to have it while she could still come? Somehow — I can’t recall the details of the conversations
— we decided to get married in a matter of weeks. It was a tense moment for me, and it would be easy to leap to conclusions about why my memory of it fails. But those
20 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | MAY 16, 2010
as I’d learned in 1988. I’d forgotten the simple technique involved, but it soon came back, and we stalked brilliantly colored fish along the rocky shoreline. With the girls immersed in books again, Deborah and I ventured farther out, where we marveled at the sea turtle that our likable beach neighbors — another two-daughter family, from
Oregon — had told us we’d find. The hiking map I’d purchased promised ruins atop a
nearby hill, and I couldn’t resist checking them out. Soon I was standing alone at one of those astonishing viewpoints — look- ing northwest toward Tortola and the other British Virgins — that make tourists think: Wouldn’t it be fabulous to live here? We’d thought this before. In 1988, we briefly discussed
buying St. John land. We had no children and good jobs, so I guess it could have been more than fantasy, but we never got as far as pricing anything. Why not, the girls asked? Transportation costs, we told them. Plus the fact that a few months later, we did something almost as impractical:
PAGES 18-19: PHOTOGRAPH BY MONA THOMPSON; PAGE 20: PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE THOMPSON FAMILY; PAGES 20-21: ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN BURGOYNE
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