FEBRUARY 2, 2022 – Having lived much of life at 45-degrees latitude, I noticed that at 17-degrees our sun is a different star. Its zenith is nearly overhead and motivates an early start before one’s energy becomes non-renewable. By 8:00 I was in queue with other “pilgrims” where tour boats lined up to catch and carry us out over the Great Barrier Reef.
The primary destinations: Green Island, 27 km from shore, and Michaelmas Cay, 40 km out. Both are sand-covered coral, but the latter hosts only low-lying vegetation. Easily circumnavigable on foot, it’s home to as many as 20,000 pairs of seabirds during summer breeding season.
I’d never snorkeled before. After rudimentary instruction, I plunged into the sea and followed my group from the boat to Michaelmas. The record would be incomplete, however, without mention of my troubles.
During earlier coconut-tree-climbing escapades in Cairns, I’d lacerated my foot, and among lessons learned was that in the tropics, even minor scrapes don’t heal as they do at . . . 45-degrees latitude. Halfway from boat to cay, my right fin caused such pain over the wound, I had to swim without the flipper. I floundered, fell well behind the group, then slipped toward inexplicable panic.
I rescued myself by recalling the time when the Sunfish I was skippering in a high school regatta capsized—disappointingly, if harmlessly. My crewman panicked, however, and clutched me vise-like. Without thinking, I shouted to distract him: “Quick, help me right the boat! We can still win the race, I promise!” (We lost by a league but “won” our way to safety.)
With boat and Michaelmas each half-a-kilometer distant, the “instant recall” of my solution to the Sunfish “incident” calmed my fears. I was soon confidently underway, left fin doing double-duty and right fin now a hand-flapper.
With my eardrums just below the surface, each breath through the snorkel tube sounded like an exaggerated gasp of wonder at the extraordinary beauty below. Intricate coral reefs in the shallows hosted schools of brilliant fish swimming on field trips. The groups maintained perfect obedience over sudden chasms of the deepest blue. The underwater scenery was beyond the reference points of any prior experience: it exceeded, I thought, Walt Disney’s imagination on LSD.
Having survived The Birds on Michaelmas—and the swim back to the boat—I took aim at Green Island, this time, with sandals, not snorkeling gear (stubbornly, my foot eventually healed). The 37-acre cay was dominated not by birds but by date and coconut palms, flowering hibiscus, broad-leafed banana trees, and the purest sand of the South Pacific. I walked away from the other “pilgrims” and lay on an abandoned section of beach in the shade of palm fronds. With head resting on folded arm, I dreamed of paradise . . . in paradise.
At tropical day’s end, the sun’s too exhausted to slip gracefully below the horizon. Instead, it plummets behind silhouetted palms—which, in Cairns, anyway, is when the Brobdingnagian but harmless fruit bats dropped from the trees to parody the Hitchcock classic.
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
