Story 26 | Summer Getaways | Turks & Caicos: Summer Squall
Inclement weather has interrupted your vacation to Turks & Caicos, both in the delay of this post and in today's story. Take cover now.
Plot twist: your eagerly anticipated vacation to Turks & Caicos has been delayed due to inclement weather. In this case, the inclement weather being single motherhood, house-hunting in a frustratingly competitive market, childcare challenges and lack of momentum. It’s the first time my weekly post has come out late, including when I welcomed my daughter, but I’m showing myself grace. Kinda.
Whoever* ordered the Summer Getaways destinations is really testing me because I have story concepts for three of the next four destinations, so my brain keeps wandering into those stories, instead of conjuring a plot for this one. I suppose I could change the location – would you notice? – but I did publicly declare we were going to Turks & Caicos next, so that’s where we’re going, come hell or high water. Which gives me an idea…
Speaking of vacations, next week is the Fourth of July, so you will not receive a Plot Twists story on Thursday (on purpose this time). We’ll be back July 10 with our next installment of From The Library Of – I have a cool and wise (tough combo to pull off) author lined up!
*it was me
Turks & Caicos: Summer Squall
There are a few manners of being woken up that are universally regarded as undesirable. Being pelted with raindrops that feel more reminiscent of frozen needles would be one of them.
One moment I’m napping poolside at the beach (true luxury), cozy, warm and blissfully unaware of my surroundings due to being socked deep in a REM cycle, and the next, I’m drenched and gasping for breath as an icy shock of water sharply slaps my skin like a violent beauty treatment. I’m disoriented (my father would use this opportunity to use the phrase lost in the sauce), searching for context clues as to my own identity and location, sputtering and preparing to fend off whatever attacker has chosen water as their weapon.
I start to regain grasp of myself, though I’d better hurry if I’m going to survive whatever elemental hell has broken loose: that’s right, I’m Shelby, and I’m at this resort in the Turks & Caicos. I’m used to a summer afternoon storm, but I’ve never seen anything like this.
It’s as if someone switched off the sun, the clouds have so profoundly blotted out the sky. And this isn’t a sprinkle of rain. It’s not pouring, it’s dumping rain, making it hard to see much further ahead of me, the wind shifting the direction of the rainfall, smudging the view as rain gets thrown in my face and whipped away again.
An aggressive gust almost smacks me out of my lounger, and I start to take in the chaos around me. From my vantage, I can see across the pool and down to the beach, where the once turquoise waters met a bright blue sky dotted with fluffy white clouds. Now, I don’t know where to look: to the pool that is now bizarrely overflowing or to the resort’s catamaran recklessly hurtling toward shore.
Nature wants all my attention it seems and throws a simultaneous shocking bolt of lightning and deafening clap of thunder across the sky, illuminating and further animating a squealing bachelorette party thrown into chaos by the storm. Let’s face it, they weren’t peaceful to start; it’s a wonder I even fell asleep, but now they are abandoning their rum punches in the pool and fighting the wind and ducking flying palm fronds to find the pool’s infinity edge, now obscured by the excess deluge that has turned the pool deck into a pool itself. I don’t know much about a pool’s plumbing – never stopped to think about it, really – but even I know something’s gone very wrong when you’re ankle-deep poolside.
The bachelorette is wrestling her sash that the wind has deemed its personal plaything, while her minions are mostly just screaming and trying to figure out if they should gather their affairs, shelter under the cabana or simply run for cover. It’s when the adjacent umbrella is plucked from its base with the ease of a tiki accoutrement cast aside from a cocktail and then lifted into the sky to our collective horror that the girls gain clarity and then channel the volleyball-team-or-whatever-athletic-pursuits-that-earned-them-those-bodies energy and RUN toward the hotel, sunglasses and sarongs be damned. One has the wherewithal to keep a video going on her phone, which, given the footage, absolutely has the potential to create an internationally viral TikTok, particularly if she slips on the way inside.
A flash of white steals my attention back to the ocean where the catamaran is struggling to lower its sail. The sea is churning, the waves less nature’s sound machine and veering straight past threatening into the outright danger mother nature can instantly reveal herself to be.
As darkened waves pound the beach ferociously, the boat is more or less headed straight, but for the pitching from side to side, in time with the shrieks of the passengers. And she’s moving too fast, particularly when there’s a finite distance ahead to shore. The crew must be struggling mightily, shifting from distributing light bites and prosecco to life jackets and puke bags. The latter of which don’t seem to have fully made the rounds as I can see an adult male hurling over the side.
Against the odds, the captain pulls the catamaran into shore relatively gracefully. I’m assuming he decided to run aground on purpose, since hovering offshore wasn’t going to be a strong option. Boarding a catamaran isn’t easy as is, and disembarking and clambering to shore in an instant monsoon is mostly funny so long as everyone survives. I hear one woman, clutching a useless straw hat to head and her life jacket askew, screech: “this is not what I paid for!” We know. Another lightning bolt splits the sky, and she shuts up and focuses on scurrying to the hotel.
“Shelby!” My colleague Elena’s voice was nearly drowned out by the wind, but I turned to find her heading my direction, occasionally sideswept by these insane gusts. “Are you okay?” she shouts. “I knew you were out here taking a nap. We gotta get inside and help the guests!”
At the start of the summer, Elena and I were responsible for setting up the pool loungers. The resort has entirely too many of these loungers, so it was a wild game of Tetris for a minute there. I got tired and sat down for a minute as we debated strategy, which led us to discover that if you stacked the loungers just so, you could shelter one chair from view, creating the perfect spot for a quick snooze on break or after shift and giving us a taste of enjoying the resort-guest life we curate for others.
So yeah, back to work.
Next Stop
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