Globetrotter Baptism

Bellies full and heads sluicing with liquor, our six white bodies lay in lethargical majesty on the deck of an abandoned shack on the coast of Uruguay’s isolated Cabo Polonio. We’d been looking for the hostel keeper for hours, but word around town was that he’d been held up in the city, so we took to the beach to wait it out and hope for the best. The sun beat down on us and we could feel the burn and the drum of blood in our ears despite the canopy of clouds overhead.
We were startled out of our slumber by a loud thwack on the deck, and a small gang of young boys yelled at us from a distance: “Quieren jugar?”
Hearing our lunchtime wine on the lilt of our answer, the boys snickered as they caught the football we threw back. “Vamos,” they said.
Half our size and twice as quick, the bright-eyed boys were winning before we’d even risen from our half-drunken teeter, still scratching at the jigger of sand gnats nipping at our feet. A crescendoing sense of defeat overcame the six of us — a bell curve of hopelessness the axes of which correlated with the setting of the sun. In an act of mercy, the boys ended the game, just as another came running over the rippled sand dune yelling to us in hastily-practiced English: “The hostel is here! The hostel is here!”
Our bodies chapped and sweaty, we sauntered into the water for a rinse, emerging with the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths. We hoisted our backpacks onto our shoulders, and as the stars freckled the sky we found ourselves newly baptized in the sudden spooky clarity of being sobered by the quiet Atlantic Ocean.