I am not an adventurous person by nature (though it happens to be a quality that I long for).
I like to imagine that if I didn't have children I would be climbing a mountain in Argentina or backpacking through Ireland, but the sad reality is that I would probably still be sitting here merely blogging about it.
With that being said, I would like to relate a story about our last trip to Florida which illustrates my non-adventurous personality.
It was about 10 years ago.
Matt enjoys swimming and particularly snorkeling and has tried to seduce me into joining him on our few trips to the ocean.
I refuse every time because I'm a chicken (aka non-adventurous).
I just don't like the idea of my body dangling precariously above ocean life...possibly hungry ocean life...that can see me without the benefit of my being able to see or avoid them.
I think it's a common feeling shared by many.
Don't judge me.
So on this particular vacation I must have been feeling extra brave, because when Matt yelled up to me from the water he was snorkeling in to the beach I was standing on, "Come in here! You've got to see this!", I conceded.
I handed off the baby (London) and lowered myself into the chest deep water (we were in a jetty).
I was feeling okay because there were four or five other friends in the water with us and I figured that if a monster came up from the deep, ready for a snack, the odds would be against them, not me, because I was in the middle of the group.
Then the moment of truth...
Matt hands me his mask and snorkel and instructs me to put them on.
He then tells me to look into the ridges in the bank that I had just climbed down to get into the water.
I didn't want to do it, but I did it.
And there were things under there looking back at me.
Things that did not look friendly.
Things that I had to climb back over to get out of the swarming-with-life-jetty-of-death.
Things that might try to grab at me while I was doing so.
I decided I'd had enough, popped my head out of the water, handed the snorkeling gear to Matt and said something like, "Ew. Gah! Ick, ew. I want out here now", when someone from the beach overhead said, "Look out guys! Jellyfish!"
I start looking around spastically, like in the movies when someone is drowning and the person in the water with them is treading water and splashing around while trying to look through the water to find them even though it's useless because you can't see through water like that.
But this was even more so useless in my circumstance because jellyfish happen to be the color of water.
People around us start yelling, "Ouch" and I was out of the water and up the side of the life-filled bank much like a very clumsy and somewhat dizzy mountain goat.
Minus the grace but with the addition of a bikini (I was younger and much thinner).
I cut my leg all up in the process but I wasn't really noticing because I was enthralled by the site of hundreds of jellyfish swarming toward Matt and the others in the water.
Yes, hundreds.
Hundreds.
They managed to escape with just a few stings and continued to investigate the ocean floor as if nothing had happened.
I, on the other hand, ended up with a gash on my leg and also my fair share of stings (no one peed on them, though I had many offers) but also the insatiable desire to find out why the jellyfish seemed to be attacking us.
I researched it immediately by typing in something like, "when jellyfish attack" in the Google search engine.
I discovered that jellyfish don't attack because jellyfish don't have brains.
They eat things they bump into and sometimes form smacks (groups of jellyfish) or blooms (huge numbers of jellyfish that form suddenly) because they aren't strong swimmers and get caught up in drifts or currents.
So the reality is that I wasn't attacked by a jellyfish, but rather a jellyfish accidentally bumped into me and he may have even apologized for it except for the fact that he didn't have a brain.
And I'm not adventurous, but rather a moron that has no knowledge of ocean life which is even more reason to avoid it and instead plan a hike through the Amazon.
B
You can see the rest of this session here under "Edwards Family".
2 comments:
I'm with you... even though I live right by the ocean, it's rare to see me in it. If I were meant to hang with the fishies, I'd have gills.
Manda
I would consider myself adventurous, but snorkeling in deep water still creeped me out a little. The combination of the muffled sound of your breath through the snorkel and lack of peripheral makes it feel sort of like you're all alone out there.
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