Summit Up

Good morning and welcome to Summit Up, the world’s only daily column dreaming of a tropical vacation because yesterday morning we woke up to frost on our front porch.

The cobalt-colored water, calmly rolling into shore, meets the clear, cloudless sky on the horizon. The connection of the two is seamless, like mirrored azure planes. A fair-haired, smiling girl points with one long finger to the heavens as she and a shaggy, bearded man bring their goggled heads up from the water’s surface.

They rest calmly, flippers sculling slowly, as they admire the tranquil expanse of ocean. The boy brushes his companion’s cheek softly with his fingers, than leans over for a quick peck. Scuba goggles pressed firmly into their foreheads, cheeks pink from the sun, they are two specks alone in a remote water wilderness, the shore a distant spread of browns and greens.

As they float flippers up in the calm Caribbean water, the man notices a large shadow about ten feet away to his right. Cold fear seeps into his fingers and toes. He freezes his body into a dead-man’s float, placing his head in the water for a better look. The girl, startled by his abrupt movement, nimbly pulls down her own goggles and dunks her head under the water in the same direction.

Instead of the large fish lurking in their imagination, the couple looks at the graying, barnacled exterior of a ghost ship. The old wood groans in the current as tiny, unidentified, foam-colored fish flit in and around the wreckage. Suddenly, a great white shark raises out of the water, sideways, its mouth gaping.

White. Black. Wake up.

So, now we’re sitting with eyes open and we’re wondering what to make of our world.

Built by men and women seeking independence and anonymity, free from persecution by a controlling monarchy, American ghosts brawled, battled, hauled, hawed, drank, spit chaw and made love to the New World, determined to hack it into pieces of the world they knew in Europe and elsewhere. I am American with my cowboy boots and my desire for self-sufficiency.

So we want to open our eyes and remember this obscure moment because it’s all we really have. Red, orange, maroon and almost violet bricks mortared together like the people in our life line the streets of our memory. This is it. There’s nothing protecting us except air. With every thought and move we make, we decide who we will become: A head secretary, a soldier, a protester, an oracle dispensing pearls of wisdom, a novelist, a fearful little girl, an artist, a priestess, a nun or a mother. ... We can’t let fear cripple our imagination. Mystified and hopelessly hopeful, we bask in our unanswered questions and revel in having no answer.

We’re out on this fine Saturday, planning to follow our dreams