The One with all the Boat Camping

I have this green mason jar in my kitchen that is called the Happy Jar. One of my girlfriends in college had one; a jar in which you write down your most happy or favorite memories on post-it notes, fold them up, and place them in a jar. On New Year’s Eve you open the notes and read through your various memories of the past year. I began to make a happy jar in the Florida Keys when my boyfriend, Kevin, and I started living together. And today, a crisp day in early September, just feels like a good day to choose a memory from the jar. It is the night of our housewarming party in Michigan. It feels appropriate to pick a memory from our last house, to understand it is time to create more memories in a new one. I pull out a folded piece of paper, open and smooth out its crinkled edges on the kitchen counter. The date in the top right corner reads, April 8th, 2017. The note reads,

Being out on the skiff with Matt, finding $100, and going to Kiki’s for dinner with my boys.

Of all the memories to choose, I choose the one that hits home the most. That takes me right back to that place, to the islands that became my home. Tonight, was the night that a majority of them would be destroyed, devastated, and ruined.
The night Hurricane Irma would hit their shores.
We would be toasting and ringing in a new house, as our old one would be filled with five feet of water.
All the more reason to celebrate. I wish it was easier to feel that way.

It all starts with Matt Finn.  Matt, the man I mention in my happy note and the name that fills up my happy jar with so many beautiful memories.
If it was not for Matt I wouldn’t have met Kevin. I wouldn’t have learned how to snorkel, semi-Scuba dive, and balance my beer bottle on the roof of a house boat while speeding through the Atlantic Ocean. I wouldn’t have learned what freedom was in a new and foreign landscape. And I don’t think I would have stayed around long enough to realize it if it wasn’t for Matt.
He showed me a different side to Island life. Up until meeting him, I was constrained to merely the islands and the bridges connecting them. “The whole point of living on an island is to get out on the water around it,” I remember him telling me. To get off the coral rock, to have a boat, to sail or skiff away, to find a spot of ocean where no land or man is visible as far as the eye can see.
The whole point is to find freedom. How it tastes salty and feels like leather skin dried out from the sun, crunchy hair, and beer stained breath. Jelly fish stings and barracuda bites. Tan lines and sand between your toes.
The Keys aren’t about the Keys at all. They are about everything that lies around and under them.

I meet Matt out to dinner one night. Savannah, the girlfriend I ran away to Florida with, and I drive down to the lower Keys to try out a new restaurant I hear about on the radio, Kiki’s Sandbar. We eat and sip our drinks at a high-top table next to the bar. Two men sit at the high-top table to the left of us. I can’t help but stare at the younger man with long, past his shoulder’s, sun streaked brown hair. I’m a sucker for men with long hair and this one has it. Matt, the older handsome man, notices my wandering eye, and as he passes our table, he whispers in my ear, “Come have a drink with us out on the dock”. Done. We do.
The rest plays out just the way Matt planned. “I saw two beautiful people and thought why shouldn’t they meet? Or better yet be together?” Defends Matt in the reason why he introduces Kevin to me that night.
I start dating Kevin a few weeks later. A few weeks after that the three of us begin taking sunset cruises, speeding out one of Matt’s three boats to catch the last glimpse of sunlight, have a few strong beers, and take warm salty dips after the sun dips down beneath the aqua horizon.
Two months after that Matt invites us out boat camping.

Before living in the Keys, I could count on my fingers the number of times I had been on a boat. After living there, I would have hundreds of hands full. For one, I worked part time as a first mate on a 36-foot-long sail boat, allowing me to get out on the water every night. But when Matt was in town, especially when work for him was slow (he owns his own mangrove cutting company), Kevin and I would get a call or a text saying, let’s get off this rock. The night before we are first invited to go boat camping with Matt feels like Christmas eve. We have our bags packed, the boos stashed, and a set of warm clothes for a cool night out on the breezy water. I have a new disposable camera devoted to the trip and Kevin insists we take playing cards. We go to bed early. Matt always likes to leave on time, and being the young and carefree kids we are, Kevin and I are usually late and Matt doesn’t like that. But this time we are going to be on time. Because we are going boat camping tomorrow and neither of us have been boat camping before.
The excitement of the unknown sings us to sleep.

It feels like you are standing in the middle of heaven. Whatever that iconic vision of heaven looks like; the one painted on ancient palace ceilings or cut out in cathedral stained glass windows.
Like wherever you look, you can’t look far enough back to see where you started from.
You are in this sphere of water, air, and white whimsical clouds. There are no people. No land. No sounds, except for the motion of waves.
I have been back country camping before and experienced a similar feeling of solitude and seclusion, only this time it is different. This time there is no rock to catch you when you fall or ground to set up your tent and sleep upon.
All you have is water and the light reflecting off it. All you have is the blue of the ocean. The place of this blue feels like a dream you once had as a little girl napping at your grandmother’s house after playing dolls one afternoon. This blue feels like the 1950’s. As you sit on top of the house boat roof your mind begins to slip away and you think about all the shades of blue you have ever seen.

Underwater blue, morning blue, sunset blue, horizon blue, nearing an island blue.
Full moon blue, no moon blue, cold blue, windy blue, frozen blue.
Humid blue, hot blue, hazy blue, storm blue, drunken blue, buzzed blue, blue blue.
Every day it is changing.
Every day it feels a different way. Like today it is saying “Welcome Home,” this is something better than you could have ever imagined.
This just may be heaven, or paradise, or simply a sky of blue.
You don’t know yet.
You haven’t lived long enough, but you are getting there.
As you look away, out onto the ageless waves, there is a blue that smiles back saying,
“You will travel here some day” and learn the color of blue is forever.

Our boat camping weekend is full of sipping beers between snorkeling dips, Kevin catching a fairly large Nurse Shark, and playing games of rummy on the boat’s roof while Matt fries up slices of zucchini and filets of whatever fish he spear gunned that day. We attempt to camp on a small island, where we make a fire and I pitch my tent. Within an hour we are forced to pack up and sleep out on the water because of the infestation of mosquitos and their unrelenting bites. I am sad to take my tent down, folding up the stakes and unsure of the next time I’ll be able to use it. Camping is such a Northern activity. You have your campground sites, RV hookups and bathroom stations within walking distance, nearby lakes, playgrounds, and hiking trails for your leisure. But what we were doing was not typical camping. I’m not sure how many people can say they have boat camped before. Where you have stayed on a boat for over 24 hours and when you walk on land again you have the opposite effect of sea sickness; you have land sickness, where your body feels queasy by the level ground beneath you and not the waves of the ocean. 
Boat camping: where you go to bed in the middle of the ocean, just as the crescent moon is rising up over the Eastern Horizon and it is one of the most beautiful images you have ever seen. Your favorite shape of the moon is a crescent. You have one tattooed by your heart.
Boat camping: when you wake up on top of a boat, the light and heat of the sun forcing you to roll over and see if your boyfriend is still by your side. Your hand moves away his blonde streaked hair and as you gaze down at his still sleeping face, Matt pops his head up over the front rim of the boat and captures a disposable picture of you two. It is one of your favorite pictures. It makes you remember the feeling of waking up that morning to pure oceanic freedom. No other boats are around and all land is so very far away. That picture reminds you of falling in love; with Kevin, with Matt, with the beauty underneath it all. Underneath the ocean, the water, the level of earth you have always lived upon. This time you went deeper; you grew a little more into the great unknown of below. Extending yourself and your view of this beautiful world making you love it more.
Every time you look at this picture, you wish to be on that roof top again. With a fresh day of snorkeling ahead of you, an open ocean calling out jump on in.
Sometimes I can still smell the salt on my skin.
I still have some of my bikini tan lines to remind me that this was not all a dream.

On the night before Hurricane Irma hits the Keys, I call Matt. I’m folding laundry and have been on edge all day. A piece of me feels like it is there; in my old apartment, packing franticly, driving out of the Keys with a herd of cars, praying this place will still be here after the ungodlike storm hits. Matt drives all three boats out of the Keys, transporting them to his other house along the west coast of Florida. He drives the houseboat there and I am thankful it will be safe. I ask Matt if he’s scared and he says no. “It’s just another hurricane that I’ll bunker down through and it’s gonna be one hell of a mess to clean up,” he yawns just thinking about it.
In a television interview with the Miami Herald weeks later, Matt says, “at least now I have a better view with some of my palm trees down.” He is always looking at the positive and that is what I love most about him. No matter what the situation, whether it is a hurricane tearing through his house or mosquitos tearing him up. There is always a second option, maybe even a better one than the first. He keeps smiling with his native prayer beads hanging low around his neck.

When I think of the Keys I don’t think about the roads connecting each one, or my favorite bars, or palm trees, or beachy shores, or the 7-mile bridge. I think of water and the feeling of being out on it or in it. Of swimming through its warm waves and down under its surface to a whole new world I would have never know about unless Matt took me there.
Unless he unlocked the secret to the Keys.
The secret of how they survive no matter what high scale hurricane hits them. It’s not what your tourist eye can see that gives the Keys their magic; it’s the opposite.
It’s what you can’t see. Unless you’re out in the middle of the ocean, sitting on top of a boat, questioning why you should ever head back to shore. Because out here, this is where you belong.
Lost in the clouds and the blueness of sky.
Where you can’t escape the sun and you learn how love has a new degree.
Something you could never feel before.

Swim deep enough and you will find it.