Townsville, Queensland. Imps has disappeared to cool down. Half the family have gone to play with sleepy koalas. Susan, Nun and I chose the aquarium.
The aquarium housed a live reef and underwater passages, where hammerhead sharks whisk by with careless disregard for the visceral thrill they evoke in me. I sat next to a fish enthusiast, who has spent the last few days staring into a glass tank. His shirt was sprinkled lavishly with breadcrumbs, and on his lap nestled books on fish, which he perused periodically as he spotted a fish he couldn't name. "I have identified every single fish in this tank,'' he revealed. A deep-sea fishing veteran, grizzled and sporting phantom fingers, exemplified the gradual change in attitudes toward fishing. In youth he prided himself in spearing big fish; today he is preaching conservation. I learned from him that there were two kinds of sharks. One kind spend their waking and sleeping lives in perpetual forward motion, to bathe their gills with oxygen-rich water. Sedentary sharks also exist, and they benefit from pumps. He showed me a shark skull, replete with multiple rows of jagged teeth - the innermost rows gradually advance to the fore, as the outer teeth become damaged with use. I was disappointed that there weren't tanks of jellyfish, as there were in Monterey Bay Aquarium, still the best aquarium I've ever seen. I consoled myself with videos of jellyfish, from which I learned that corals are upside-down jellyfish which prefer never to take flight. Finally, I toured a turtle hospital, and visited its two turtle patients. Here they nurse giant turtles which have swallowed fishing hooks, lines, plastic bags, and all manner of human debris. Theirs is a slow, painful, oftentime deadly process of excretion.
I left the aquarium with the suspicion that I would never see a better view of a reef. Watching the drama of ocean-life unfold behind protective glass walls, in the tamest of conditions. I felt safe. Out there in the sea: turmoil, varying currents, poor visibility, undependable sunlight, sand-strewn water. Not to mention the fear of losing air and drowning ignobly. The trauma of a failed diving expedition, my first, weighs heavily on me. I have a keen sense of life, fragile life, unravelling. I have been fighting against inevitability. Somehow I must embrace transience.
The waters beckon invitingly, brightly turquoise. Atop the boat, I can see the reef-tops, heads of massive limestone structures that grow over the seabed. The reefs rise over human height, forming underwater mazes for divers and fish alike. Maps are needed for navigation. I struggled into my diving suit, nursing a tight ball of tension. Cecile, our French divemaster, spent few words on instruction, and I must rely on Moon, our family's reigning dive queen. I have not forgotten how to breathe underwater - my license says I am a certified diver. Cecile gave the thumbs-down - time to lose elevation. My body-suit deflated with a sigh, and I went under. There was plenty of refracted sunlight. My first encounter was Wally, a humphead wrasse, which swam to us in greeting. Or in anticipation. Bright blue, very large and very friendly. His favourite thing in the world is having his lips tickled by human fingers. Though conscious of losing my fingers, I couldn't resist. I wriggled my fingers in the slimy, fleshy folds of his lips. Wally didn't seem to mind, my favourite Queenslander.
The descent was complete as my knees touched sand. The aquarium did not prepare me for this. A sweeping cornucopia of corals, a profusion of colors and tentacles and colored tentacles. Fish made darting swims to nibble on corals. They have reason to be nervous. Pump-breathing sharks lay deceptively still on the seabed. The comparatively smaller triggerfish are even more vicious, and are known to empty holes in diver flesh; an attack occurred just yesterday. Lae encountered a triggerfish and panicked, nearly surfacing in her haste to escape; Moon sensibly grabbed Lae's leg and maintained elevation; I was oblivious to the drama. Cecile cupped a swimming flatworm in her hands. Black, streaked with orange and white, it swum by undulating its flat body against the water - a transverse wave packet. A bright red cuttlefish propelled itself by undulating a fin that ran around its mantle, reminiscent of a dancer swirling her skirts.
By the end of the second dive, I began to understand buoyancy. I must fine-tune the air in my suit, such that I stand on the precipice between sinking and rising. While breathing, the periodic inflation and deflation of my lungs affect an oscillation between rising and sinking. Such niceties I had never worried about in a dive, as my mind was otherwise preoccupied with breathing.
There was another rising and sinking on the ride back to land, of the contents in my stomach. The boat collided into choppy waves with intent, sending up two-storey-tall sprays of water. Rainbows formed, meters before my eyes. Alas. To stand on land-lubber legs was impossible, so I curled into a ball and practised the fine art of not being present.
