Barely Surfacing

Week 1

We melt on the polluted beach on the way to the Internet café. Soviet factories sour this beach that is not far from Baku, the capital. Much like the system that maintained these buildings, the structures have dissolved. Now the buildings are just the skin, and are often crumbling concrete walls that have slipped into the ocean.
We pass burning trash and the smell of rotten eggs, which stretch every bus route in Azerbaijan. Today it is intensified by the heat, made less tolerable by the humidity.
A mile or so down, we expect to make a left: we’re beat, we need water without bubbles, which can be found at few stores in this country. Most Azeris do not understand the bottled-water phenomenon. To make it worth the purchase they carbonate it.
David insists we move on. Apparently in this dead heat we’ll find something with walking for.
We pass one man, and I wonder if he wonders what the hell we’re doing in this country, on his beach. I feel like we need to move quickly—forgo the rocks and skate on smoothness, away from struggle and weird men.
These walls act as piers, so several men fish from the tip of them. From Soviet-era waste to oil dumping and leaking, these fish are not made for eating. But then again I eat the cows that eat the trash my neighbors burn to the ground.
We skip rocks, then climb a wall that is barely surfacing. The boys pretend to push each other onto jagged pieces. Between rubbish, David grabs a seashell, and Eric does the same. All the shells are rubbed with a peachy color. “I have something to say that’s really lame.” Sweating, land illuminated by the cans that fill it, David says the three of us should trade these shells, as a promise to stay the whole two years.
We do, and jump up to the Soviet train track covered in weeds. I realize then, that there are whole seashells on this beach. Unlike the grinded rocks that form the beaches of California, the sand here is made up of infinite crushed seashells.
Past the teenage troublemakers in Speedos, we make it from the shore to the convenient shop where we grab dondurma (ice cream) and the world-renowned Fanta. We relish in sun we cannot avoid.