The story I’m about to tell takes me back a year in the Bahamas one extremely hot June day. Let me go ahead and say that I consider myself to already have somewhat of an adventurous spirit; but not enough to risk anything. I am the first one across the tightrope at the ropes course with my harness on, but when the harness comes off, I back away. Maybe it is fear, maybe its practicality, or too much love for life in general to risk it; but on this particular day, I was feeling a bit antsy and no one was around. I was on a secluded island with my family and another family including another girl my. It seemed as if the beach was empty and my only companion was an old red and rather beat-up kayak that I had been ignoring all week. I stared at it and as the sun reflected on the sides of the metal, giving it a semi-unnatural glow. Fine, I will take you out for a ride. I’m not sure what propelled me to proceed to climb in and begin to paddle away, but the fact that I hadn’t even told anyone I was journeying on the deep blue unpredictable sea was pure stupidity on my part. The heat must have really been messing with my head.
About a mile out, a HUGE mossy rock stood tall like a lone tree in a barren field. The rock seemed to be the center of life, with a plentiful of bright coral, a variation of unknown fish and a slight whirlpool gravitationally pulling anything that came to close into the side of the rock. “It’s a lot of work to kayak around the big rock. You should probably go in a group,” the island tour guide had said the first day we arrived. I kept paddling.
On the land, humans feel big and important, walking around and being able to see everything around them. In the ocean, especially alone, any hint of self-righteousness deflates. Being out in a mass of unpredictable blue with no one to talk to forced me to really spend time thinking to myself. My arms began to hurt and I passed the halfway mark to the rock. I could see my family out on the shore now. I tried waving, but wasn’t sure if they noticed me, and again they retreated farther up the beach so I could barely see them. The closer I got to the rock, the bigger it seemed. I had been out in the kayak for at least a half an hour and this trip starting to seem endless. That’s when the sky began to change.
Thick dark clouds came from the horizon rapidly and lined the sky, shielding the beach from the sun. If I didn’t make it around the rock before this nasty storm hit, I would get sucked in the rock and then who knows if I would have the strength to make it back. I considered turning back because at this point I was scaredto death and my arms were already sore. I was already out so far with no one to save me, and no one to even see me get sucked away in the sea. There weren’t sharks under me weren’t there? Panick. I should go back. I stopped paddling and looked back. I only had about twenty or so feet until I started my turn around the back of the rock. I wanted to be able to say I had made it, or this whole trip out would be a huge embarrassment. I looked for any possible ounce of courage I could summon from within me. I didn’t look strong, and I really wasn’t, but I wanted to be. As I got closer to the rock, I felt like I was in a movie discovering some antique structure no one else had seen in a long time. It looked so different up close with a million different marks and ridges, although I was still scared to death. I had the uneasy butterfly feeling and the jitters. I didn’t have complete control over my movement anymore, the whirlpool was pulling me around the rock, but slightly inward, and I paddled as hard as I could to stay a reasonable distance from danger.
Once as a child, I had cried at the top of the Acrophobia ride at Six Flags because I had been terrified of the ride down. I remembered that I had put this on myself and that I had come so far anyway, and I began to feel braver. Faster around the rock, I reached the other side and saw that I was going to make it. The dark clouds were directly overhead, but the paddle back seemed so much less scary that the ride there. Now that I was more familiar with the path, and it wasn’t so foreign to me, I could handle it. People fear the unknown and take comfort in familiarity. The dark sky released a shower of fresh rain, just as I had released my fear. I reached the beach in another twenty minutes, climbed out of the kayak and laid sprawled out on the sand, ignorant of how long it would take to get it all out of my hair later on. Maybe this was a sign that I had the strength to conquer any journey, maybe I had more courage than I thought, and maybe I am up for any adventure presented to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment