“We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.” —Carson Mccullers
This week we’re trotting off to places nearer the equator. Spring is beginning to eke into the air, and the extra hour of sunshine has me dreaming of tropical light, booming storms sweeping along the horizon, choppy rides in low-slung pangas, and tarpon cruising like missiles beneath turquoise waters.
When Orvis sent me down to Belize this past November for a photo shoot, several members of the travel team shot me knowing grins, teamed with a warning to “watch out for the Belikins.” The Belizian beer apparently has a legend all its own among several of my work compatriots, and I smiled and nodded easily, knowing I didn’t usually drink on the job anyway. If the camera is out, the rule is one drink, and one drink only. There’s just too much money wrapped up in that equipment for me to do something stupid.
However, when my one window to get on a boat for some fishing photography before the fashion shoot began was cancelled due to heavy rain, we decided a conciliatory beer was in order. And so, two days into the trip, beer-thirty began sometime before 8AM.
I quickly switched to coffee soon thereafter.
It was a working week—one of those where bedtime was never before midnight (late night edits / shot list checking) and the alarm went off before 4:30 most mornings. There is such a thing as good light, and it knows nothing of sleep requirements. It’s a glorious thing… eventually the exhaustion wears in, you relax, and the work happens. It helped I was working with a fantastic team of professionals who just made shit happen. We finished each day with a round of Belikins, too tired to really get into the spirit of drinking but feeling too celebratory to utterly forego any “local beverages.” The bar at El Pescador, our base of operations, was fittingly named in the fishing spirit—the Grand Slam Bar. It became a gathering place, a planning place, and (for me) a photo-editing place.
Each day was another survived. More adventures, more boats, more vehicles, more outfits, more rain. More images.
Barman extraordinaire Mariano did whip up something filled with rum, coconut, pineapple, and chocolate when I came down with the cold from hell, however, and saved the day with the icy beverage. Sounds weird, tastes most excellent. Maybe Jack Sparrow had it right—rum does wonders.
And, at the end of the shoot, the photo crew gathered in one of the villas, too exhausted to party as we should have, many of battling colds from the rain-plagued shoot. We sat in the dark on couches, sipping wine, and watched some low-budget film that one of the photo techs had been in. It was a companionable quiet—the simple sense of being that results from having adventured with one another; from having seen each other work and hard-earned mutual respect. It was cheap wine and sand flea bites and pure exhaustion.
And it was pretty damn fine.
So, in honor of the simple moments I’d suggest we keep this week’s recipe basic:
1) Buy beer of your choice. Something local.
2) Find friends. Adventure with friends.
3) Sit around, bone tired and happy. Drink beer.
Enjoy.
