Stories

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A week in Germany (and Switzerland...)

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After a car ride to the Tiranë airport, flight to Munich, bus to Nuremberg, then car ride to Hubmersberg, I finally arrived at Hotel Lindenhof. It’s a 150 year old hotel that was built seemingly in the middle of nowhere, that has been added on to throughout the last century and a half. Because of the restaurant and bar at the hotel, many of the farmers from the surrounding area would come to have a drink or to eat with their families eventually resulting in the village of Hubmersberg being built surrounding the hotel.

Because this hotel is a partner of the organization I work for in Albania, I was asked to go and take photos in order to update their website, and have social media content. I spent a couple days at the hotel, before traveling to Switzerland and another part of Germany to take event photos for other partners of my work.

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The Worst Trip I've Ever Taken

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It started as any other trip does, finding cheap tickets. I used to spend way too much time scouring the web for the cheapest plane tickets I could find so that I was able to afford traveling as much as possible. These particular tickets were from Nashville, Tennessee to Oranjestad, Aruba with an overnight layover in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

For those that are unfamiliar with Aruba - as I was at the time, having only heard of it in the Beach Boys song - it is a small desert island off the coast of Venezuela. Not part of Venezuela, mind you, but surprisingly part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. While it has its share of beautiful beaches and clear waters, most of Aruba is actually pretty desolate and barren with a good number of abandoned buildings scattered around its 180 square kilometers (69 square miles). And it was one of these abandoned structures that lead me to having the worst trip of my entire life…

I stayed with my friend, Eliot, during the stopover in Fort Lauderdale and he hopped on the plane with me the next morning to go experience this place that neither of us had ever been. We spent the first few days driving up and down the length of the entire island - which was only about 32 kilometers (20 miles) - and scoping out places we wanted to return to and explore in more depth. We found a number of cool places, including a cool abandoned tunnel, but there was another spot that caught our interest…

Eliot inside the tunnel we found.

From the road all we could see was a slight ramp over the guardrail next to the road, and a building that was falling apart on the other side, and then a large patch of trees.

The view from the road, Google Streetview 2021.

Through the trees was an abandoned, partially destroyed boardwalk surrounded by a mosquito infested mangrove forest that led to a pier that at this point was mostly just pieces of wood and concrete protruding out of the water. At the end of what was left of the pier there stood a concrete structure shaped a bit like a boat. In a past life it was probably a bar or restaurant of some sort, but now was far different. There was no glass in the windows, and the whole thing was slowly decaying, soon to become only a memory of what once stood there. After wandering around the structure for a bit, and watching the sunset, it was time to head back to the car.

The view from the bar back along the destroyed pier and mangroves.

As we approached the mangroves, the blood sucking hordes came out with a vengeance. In my haste to get back onto the boardwalk and to the car without being eaten alive I stepped on something in the water that punctured a hole in the bottom of my foot. I ran limping along the broken boardwalk slapping mosquitoes and trying to avoid stepping through giant holes in the structure. When I got back to the car I looked back and saw a trail of bloody footprints along the path that we had taken out. I wrapped my foot in my shirt, put pressure on it to stop the bleeding, and drove back to the Airbnb.

I slept that night with my foot propped up on a cardboard box. I woke up to a scabbed over wound, and lots of pain. When I got out of bed to take a shower I put the slightest bit of pressure of my foot and realized it could not support my weight. Hopping toward the bathroom, I felt blood rushing down my leg to my foot and within seconds my wound opened again and started gushing blood all over the floor. Quickly scrambling into the shower, I was able to get the bleeding to stop again, but just when I thought everything was under control I blacked out. I don’t think I was out very long, but I woke up in a heap on the floor of the shower and Eliot calling to me from outside the door. Rinsing off, I picked myself back up and pulled on some clothes. I opened the door to see Eliot putting on his shoes.

“Get in the car,” he said. “I’m driving you to an urgent care.”

An hour of intense and painful wound cleaning later, I hobbled back into the Airbnb only to collapse on my bed. I was unable to walk for the next few days and all of my plans for adventuring around Aruba came to a screeching halt. What was supposed to be a 10 day trip quickly turned into a 5 days of being bedridden and binge watching Breaking Bad. Thankfully, by the end of the trip I was able to manage the pain and get around a bit more, enough to get some wonderful drone photos of this island that I would not soon forget.

I don't regret going to Aruba, I don't regret going to that pier. If this injury taught me anything it was to fully appreciate every single day when I travel to a new place, because you never know when you're gonna have to spend half of your trip stuck in an apartment.

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Love = Sacrifice

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When I was growing up, my dad was a pastor. One thing we did consistently, almost every single night, was have a family worship night. Most often after dinner, all of the children that were home that evening would gather in the living room and sit around on the floor or the couch singing from a hymnal, listening to my dad give a lesson, and then do a prayer circle of whatever prayer requests we could remember from our family and community.

The format my dad used for his lessons changed and adapted a few times over the years meeting in the living room. My early memories are of him just discussing some Bible story, or biblical topic. A bit later - as most of us got older, probably - he started reading specific passages from the Bible and discussing them in more depth. But on a rare occasion, he would have something he wanted to talk about that wasn’t directly from the text. That is where this story starts.

I still remember this day clearly. He gathered us all together and didn’t open his Bible. He wanted to discuss something else. As it turned out, he was reprimanding us. I don’t know if he was speaking to one of his children specifically, but the message was clear to all of us and is still stuck in my head some 10+ years later. His message: we were selfish.

Despite not remembering the exact year this happened, it stuck with me. So much so that I thought about it constantly in college. No one ever wants to be thought of as selfish, so I decided to make a conscious effort to not be that way. I knew that when I went to college I could redefine myself. No one there knew me, so I could become whatever kind of person I wanted. I decided that I would try to base my life on one particular Bible verse:

“Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.”

- John 15:13 -

I was going to do anything I could to make sure no one could describe me as selfish anymore. Obviously I wasn’t going to be literally laying down my life but there were other ways to live that out. It became little things like valuing relationships with other people over whatever was at the top of my to-do list. Staying up all night with a friend so that they would stay awake to study - even though I didn’t have to study. Loaning a textbook to a classmate the night before a due date when I also hadn’t done the assignment, but knowing I could do it the next day before class. Simple things, but doing what I could to be selfless.

The tattoo wasn’t a reality for awhile after that, though. 

You see, I went to school about 2500 miles away from where my family lived. So this inspired self-development was happening far away from them. It happens anytime you no longer live around certain people, but those college years are even more impactful - especially when you’re surrounded by people that are vastly different than those you grew up with. Despite the progress I thought I had made, the people that knew before from before college didn’t seem to notice. It didn’t matter to me that they didn’t notice, but what began to sting was that most people just assumed I was the same person I had been as a teenager.

I specifically remember the day I got the tattoo done. It was in early 2017 and I was coming home from a rough day. I had been feeling the itch to get a new tattoo and knew exactly what I wanted done, but just wasn’t feeling like driving to a studio to actually do it. I walked into my house to find a couple of my siblings hanging out and within ten minutes of being inside, a comment was made about me and about what kind of person I was. Except, the comment wasn’t true. It may have been true seven years prior, but not anymore. The sibling that made it didn’t think much of it, but it stung knowing that for years I had been trying to shape myself into a new and better person and my family couldn’t see it. They saw me as the 17 year old James.

It didn’t matter that I knew I wasn’t that person anymore. Someone - that is supposed to know me well - still thought it and it threw me into a spiral of downward thinking that maybe I hadn’t changed at all. Maybe it was just in my mind. But I knew that wasn’t the case, and I wanted to have a constant reminder of that.

I almost immediately walked out of the house and drove to a shop. The artist didn’t have anyone else there so we jumped right into my piece. As he repeatedly scratched a needle of ink over my skin, our conversation wandered. He was interested in this story and as we spoke, I could see his mood shifting. He was kind and welcoming when I arrived, and over the hours sitting in the chair I noticed a new emotion coming over him. Still kind, but now pensive. Pondering.

After finishing the tattoo, he looked at me and thanked me. I was taken slightly aback due to the fact that all I had done was sit there and take pain. If anything, I should be thanking him for his artwork. But then he proceeded to open up and explain that he had stopped going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings a few months prior. He wasn’t on good terms with his family, especially his son. He told me that after our conversation, and hearing the story behind my tattoo, he felt inspired to return to AA. Not only that, he was planning on reaching out to his son who he had not spoken to in almost a year.

Love equals sacrifice. And what better representation of self-sacrificial love than to give up one’s own life, as Christ did. So, in an effort to represent Jesus’ sacrifice I chose to make this tattoo a tree - a dead tree - placed right over my heart.

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Ujëvara e Shëngjergjit

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When I first moved to Albania I was very unaware of the waterfalls. After living in Hawaii back in 2014, I had grown accustomed to exploring streams and admiring the waterfalls at the end. I didn't realize how many there were in Albania, mostly because I just didn't do enough research. 

I was in Tirana this past weekend and had plans to go visit a town a little further north. When the time came, I looked at how long the drive would take and upon realizing that I didn't feel like driving a four hour round trip just to visit a small village, I decided to look for something a bit closer. That's when I stumbled upon the Shen Gjergj waterfall on Google Maps.

It was only an hour away, and through a mountain road that looked super interesting and exciting. So I made the short drive, went on a small hike, and made a video about it:

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Tafelberg

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Life is never easy. This is not a revolutionary thought. But as young children we often forget that things don’t get easier as we age. Maybe it was just me, but when I was younger I just assumed that once I got to the point where I was accomplishing goals and living dreams that my life would become easy. This couldn’t have been further from the truth.

The truth is that I found myself actively living out one of my dreams and yet I was in one of the darkest mental states I had ever been. The reason is not the point of this particular story so I won’t get into it, but what is important is the bigger story. How I got out of that state, and what helped pull me from those depths.

I had just finished up a five week trip to one of my favorite places on earth, Hawaii, and was set to have yet another epic adventure roadtripping through New Zealand for the next month. For a variety of reasons I was not feeling myself, I was in a dark place and going through some of the most severe depression I’ve felt in my life to this point. Luckily for me, one of my favorite artists, Jeremy Loops, released a new album in the middle of my road trip. Jeremy Loops is a South African musician from Cape Town that I had discovered during my many hours spent watching YouTube videos and he didn’t have much music released at the time. This album, Critical as Water, was only his second album.

For whatever reason, Jeremy Loops’ music was always able to be a mood booster for me. Every time I listened to his first album I couldn’t help but to sing along with all the words that I knew. So when I was driving the backroads of New Zealand I would take every chance I could to put on Critical as Water. It pulled my mind out of the dark corners I would so often find myself in, and help lift me up.

In some small effort to pay tribute for what Jeremy and his music has done for me, I had the outline of Cape Town’s most iconic landmark put onto my wrist.

“A semicolon is used when an author could’ve chosen to end their sentence, but chose not to. The author is you, and the sentence is your life.”

Project Semicolon

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August 9, 2016

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August 9, 2016.

I still remember that day vividly. It was one of my first days back from Indonesia. A trip I had taken to create a video for a local business that was being funded from the US. I spend 10 days there, making YouTube videos as well as filming for the bigger project. Now I was back, in Birmingham, going back to the same office I had been going to for almost a year. Same job, same place, same people. Every day.

I knew I couldn’t handle it. The job was interesting and fun. The people were fantastic and I loved working with them. I had a comfortable office to myself with a big floor to ceiling window, and a salary higher than I knew what to do with. But I couldn’t handle it. I didn’t want the daily 9-5. The work was right along the lines of what I’d spent so much of my life doing, but it wasn’t rewarding for me anymore. I needed to find something new. I needed to find something else to work towards. I was getting too comfortable, so it was time to get uncomfortable.

That day, August 9, 2016, was the day that I was sitting in a team meeting and announced suddenly (to the others as well as to myself) that I would be leaving that job. I offered to stay on for a bit part time to help them transition to someone else, but by the end of the month I would no longer come to the office every day.

I remember the feeling I had when I walked out of the office that day and got into my Subaru for the short drive home. Sure, it wasn’t my last full time day, but that’s the moment that marked my next leap into the discomfort of the unknown.

I decided then, on the drive home, that I would never take another full-time job again unless I knew it was exactly what I wanted to be doing. I was no longer going to have a comfortable office job just because that’s what society told me I should be doing after graduating college. I knew things wouldn’t be easy, I knew it would be stressful at times, but I felt at peace. I knew I was going in the right direction.

So, I got it permanently marked on me. No turning back, only go forward. A short, simple, minimalistic reminder that I chose this life no matter what came at me. I could only move forward.

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Opacarophile

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I guess it really started when I was in college in Georgia. Living at one of the highest points around, I consistently saw some of the most dramatic and awe-inspiring sunsets. On a regular basis the sky would complete clear and I would watch the orange orb as it sun behind the horizon. It often coincided with when I was finishing dinner so I typically didn’t have to plan to see the sun setting, it just happened that way.

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Sunset chasing became part of my college life. Even to the point that after those four years I would still do it. Any time I’m back on that mountain in north Georgia I make a conscious effort to find a spot before the sun goes down so I can enjoy those moments. It often results in randomly running in to other people doing the same thing, and when I frequented those overlooks more often the people I ran in to were frequently people that I already knew.

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Unbeknownst to my college self, I would leave those mountain-side sunsets for the same experience, in a very different environment. And it was that new environment that really solidified the opacarophile in me. Not to say the sunsets from Lookout Mountain weren’t special, but watching the sun sink into the ocean while sitting on the warm Hawaiian sand just took it to another level. The sunsets I experienced in Maui have probably spoiled sunsets for me for the rest of my life, but honestly, it’s not that surprising. The sun would sink behind the waves and just when you think it was over, the clouds would explode in a grande finale that would put every 4th of July firework show I’ve ever experienced to shame.

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While the clouds really help to enhance most sunsets (assuming they’re in the right position), it’s the cloudless sunsets that really stick with me. Watching the sun drop out of the sky and disappear sliver by sliver is something that I will always love, whether it is over an ocean or the mountains of Georgia. The moment the final ray of light disappears is one that I have difficulty describing.

For about two seconds, no matter what is happening around me, the entire world falls silent. Everything stops. Every sunset comes flooding back to memory. Every person I’ve ever watched the sunset with is suddenly back watching with me again. For about two seconds, nothing matters, and the world is at peace.

It’s this feeling that I wanted to immortalize. It’s the memories of all the places I’ve watched the sun set, all the people I’ve watched it with. It’s the sense of peace I feel every time. And while it’s obviously not plausible to watch the sunset every night, I can see a representation of it on my arm. A constant reminder that despite whatever is going on, there’s a way to feel at peace.

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・・・・・ ○ ・・・・

Moving back to the contiguous 48 states after living in Hawaii for a year was odd for a number of reasons. It was strange not having the beach 5 minutes down the road, it was odd to not be swimming in the ocean at sunset every evening. While the warms nights were still present in Alabama when I first got there, by the time October or November rolled around I missed being able to sit outside after dark in a tank-top and board shorts. One thing that I didn’t expect to seem odd was the lack of tattoos.

Tattoos are everywhere in Hawaii, and it’s completely normal. You see big-time business men with their tattoo sleeves sticking out of their aloha shirts, and 70 year old uncles with chest pieces. Tattoos are a huge part of the Hawaiian culture, and don’t have the same negative stigma as they do in many places in the world. It goes back centuries and is much more deeply engrained than I would be able to explain. It is a big part of many of the island cultures in the Pacific. In those cultures, the tattoos tell stories. They show the celebrations, they show the low points. They are worn to honor children, parents, families. They represent more than just the skill of a talented artist, they show the life and history of the one that wears it.

It was with this in mind that I started getting tattoos. I wanted constant reminders of the highs and lows of my life. I wanted to be able to look at my body and remember everything that I’ve been through. I wanted stories to be told. The stories that make me who I am, the stories that have gotten me to this point: 28 and loving the life that I’m living despite whatever things have torn me down or gotten in the way.

With all of this in mind, I decided to start telling those stories through a small series of written posts. A series that will likely grow as my life goes on and I find more stories worth immortalizing on my skin.

The first I want to mention is my most recent. It is also one of the most basic, minimal, and obscure tattoos that I have if you don’t know anything about my family. I saw the idea somewhere on the internet and liked it.

If you don’t know this already, I am the sixth of ten children in my family. If I had one or two siblings I’m sure I could figure out something significant enough to get a very detailed tattoo representing both of them. But my parents made it much more difficult (because I’m sure they were thinking about my tattoos when they decided to have a big family). So I went for dots.

This tattoo is a line of dots, and one open circle. Five dots (representing my five older siblings), and then the open circle (me), followed by the other four dots (younger siblings, in case you didn’t already pick up on that theme). Something simple, and easy to explain, that could potentially be copied by my siblings, if that’s something they wanted.

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