Beach Tar on My Feet

For Joni Mitchell the issue was her filthy fingernails and her beach tarred feet. I have a few other issues. The sunscreen I purchased (SPF50) lays white on my skin like a thin sheet of stiff armor. I suppose there is a soap created specifically to manage layers of such sunscreen (SPF50 and above) but no one as yet has recommended such a brand to me. I am sufficiently white without the sunscreen layer that I apply daily diligently to control the coloring of my pale skin to what I consider a healthy shade of brown. I’ve always appreciated Melville’s chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale,” and have long associated whiteness with illness, with a sort of nothingness, like the arctic white into which Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym sails. The applied sunscreen dries and seems glued onto my body though I stick to no one.

            Mostly, I walk about in dirty clothes which is not my usual attire. We are in Costa Rica for nine weeks and despite overpacking I maintain a limited wardrobe here: a blue and black pair of bathing trunks; slate blue and gray pairs of ‘dress’ shorts (when we decide to eat at a clean well-lighted place); three pair of underwear to wear under the dress shorts; eight or ten tee shirts, colors varied; and two pair of old running shorts I purchased in past younger years when I was a distance runner; and two pair of pajamas, of course. (As I list the clothes I have brought with me, I am surprised at the seeming quantity of them, but everything gets sweaty and dirty quickly: the beach is sandy, and the water though warm is still quite salty and rolls in with dirt from afar. The temperature is high here—92 degrees during the day and the sky is clear and sun filled: we go twice daily to the beach wearing mostly in the afternoon the clothes from the morning. Sitting in the sun slathered in sunscreen, sweating in the sun and heat, wearing the same tee shirt several days consecutively and switching out yesterday’s tee shirt (now dried) for bedtime, I am not the model of cleanliness and odorlessness. Much of what I have brought with me requires regular laundering. I suppose if I were more of a true hippie and less of a bourgeois I would tolerate my dirty clothes for longer periods of time; though I have in my life inclined toward hippie-dom, I am also now seventy-six years old and quite set in my cleanish ways. There is available for us a laundry service and we schedule pick-up and delivery weekly. Our laundry bag at the end of the week is always full. 

And yet I am dirty everywhere. I feel dirty everywhere. Yes, I shower every day, sometimes even twice a day, and I try to scrub the sunscreen, sand and salt from my body, but I am only ever partly successful. I suspect that when I get home I will have to shower for a week before I begin to feel clean again. Sometimes I smell from sunscreen, sometimes from sand and salt, and sometimes from just plain body odor.

I am out of my comfort zone, as the cliché these days says. 

I have not for some time felt comfortable with travel. I apparently do still travel but for a number of years traveling has been an aversive activity. I am geographically fixed, situated geographically as an ocnophile, in Michael Balint’s terms. The ocnophile, recovering from the trauma of birth and separation from the source of all sustenance, makes the painful discovery of the independent existence of important objects. Ocnophile wants to hold object close but then can't give up object because subject inhabits them; introjected objects means the object is inside and cannot leave. The strategic life stance of the ocnophile to deal with that original trauma is by clinging to objects, holding them close, and magically imagining that there has been no separation. The ocnophile feels confident that his 'object' will 'click in' with him and protect him against the empty, unfamiliar, and even dangerous world. I hold my coffee mug close. I have drunk my morning coffees out of the same crafted one for almost two decades now. I will not travel with it for fear it would crack but the mugs here are an unsatisfactory substitute.

So, traveling challenges me because I have to leave behind my objects, though I still pack heavy even for weekend excursions. This practice is in an effort to carry with me the significant objects and recreate as best as possible my environment away from home. It is a hopeless attempt; my fingernails get filthy and there is beach tar on my feet. What I need to learn to do is plant my flags in the new location earlier.