If the Shoe Fits

 

Photo credit: Robsalot (that's me!)

I had arrived in the bay in the dark, which I loved, because when I woke up in the morning and saw the landscape for the first time as dawn broke it would be like arriving all over again. A light wind pushed my boat through the glassy water and safely into the anchorage, where I dropped the hook and settled down for the night.

The island was even more beautiful in the pink light of the morning than I could imagine. Velvet green mountains sprung out of the clear blue bay and reached for the cotton candy clouds that lazed about the sky. As I watched the sun start to peak out from behind the tallest mountain, I noticed a perfect white sand beach, dotted with coconut palms gently swaying in the morning breeze. That was my goal for the day.

I didn’t make it to the beach until after lunch. The morning had been spent putting the boat back together after the 23-day ocean voyage. Once I polished off the last of the peanut butter and jelly, I decided I deserved a break, and jumped in my dingy to row to shore.

As I dragged my little rowboat out of the surf and woman ran across the sand, asking if she could help. With her blonde hair and American accent, she did not appear to be one of the local Marquesans. While she helped me drag the boat up the beach, she told me about how she had just arrived the day before, by plane not boat, for a much-needed two-week vacation. Her name was Meredith, and she was from Chicago.

We spent the next two weeks exploring the island together. The time flew by, and before I knew it, we were walking down the beach together enjoying coffee and watching the world wake up on our island paradise on the last day before she would have to return to reality.

“What made you realize you wanted to live this life?” she asked.

I stared down at my feet for a moment, the sand squished up between my toes.

“Well,” I replied looking out toward the horizon, “when I was a kid, I rode horses. I used to spend summers working as a groom at this barn to earn enough money for riding lessons. One day I was holding this beautiful red roan mare for the farrier while he fit her for new shoes. He was trying to use horseshoeing as a metaphor for life, going on and on about ‘if the shoe fits’, and I realized, farriers don’t look for a shoe that fits the horse's hoof, they make the shoes fit. Wild horses, on the other hand, don’t wear shoes at all.”

I look down at my bare feet again, as the tongue of a warm ocean wave washed over them, “And that’s when I decided that’s what I needed to be.”

“Wild?” she asked.

“Yeah, wild,” I replied, “now, do you want to go for a sail?”