Swimming with Crocodiles & Bioluminescent Crocodile Repellent (or, “Right Where I Should Be”)
You don’t always know why you are where you are. Maybe there are no reasons, maybe the world is water and the grave is gravity and all you are is a minnow. Or maybe there’s more, maybe the world is wonder and the grave tastes like grace and not gravel. Maybe you’re miraculous. Maybe you’re dreaming. Maybe this is all so much like a dream that all it can be is real.
I am in a little boat. Savannah sits beside me, nineteen and bursting with possibility. My daughter and I are riders, puttering away from a little dock beside a little Mexican village and into a big, brackish lagoon. The sun is falling all burnt and buttery in the sea a quarter mile south. Everything is lit like love, lavender, easy on the edges, loose lines like a lucid dream.
El Zapoltalito, Mexico; June 2022
A man from the village fingers the outboard motor. We taxi through dark, tight nests of mangroves that send their serpentine selves sideways and skyward before sinking into the warm water, water so motionless it’s a mirror. The smooth, scarlet sky inverted. We’re walking on wine.
An hour later it’s dark. We give darkness its own word, as if the world goes monochrome at night. But the sky is still a color wheel spinning slowly up there. Navy, indigo, cobalt, azure, admiral blue, denim, they’re all slow dancing above us. The water beneath the boat is inky black, it ripples roundly away. I think of ravens. The motor mumbles. We glide to a stop in a far corner of the vast, sea salt lagoon.
The boatman cuts the engine, reaches down, overboard, his four fingers stir the surface of the water. The water lights up.
Puerto Escondido, Mexico; June 2022
We were told this would happen, that billions of tiny, bioluminescent creatures would turn into tiny sparks when the midnight water is disturbed. We paid the boatman to bring us here for this. We believed this would happen. But now that I see it I don’t believe it. Faith becomes knowledge becomes incredulity. If I sit here long enough watching the water glow, maybe I’ll circle back to faith again.
We plunge into the warm lagoon, me, my daughter, our friends. The boatman says the crocodiles won’t bother us. I can’t remember what a crocodile is right now. My brain seems to lack the capacity to process anything beyond this: we are swimming in a sea of winking stars, and this is impossible. We are laughing involuntarily, splashing impulsively, disbelieving spontaneously.
There are a lot of moments in this waking dream we call life, aren’t there? But we ignore most of them, caught up in the yearning for the big picture. That’s fine, but I’m not sure the big picture is ever as beautiful as the little ones. It’s the little ones that matter most.
There is a moment there in the black lagoon. We’re treading warm, obsidian water in this liquid meadow in a tangled mangrove forest. Savannah’s wet face is lined with rivulets of seawater, each one afire with millions of the tiniest flames there could ever be. She’s smiling and my heart is smiling and she says, “Isn’t this amazing?” She has so much to learn, but if all she knows is that single sentence, maybe that’s enough.
I look up and the sky overhead is smeared with planets and suns and nebulae. You can see their different colors, vivid ghost light. The cosmos tonight is strewn like dust across the infinite face of the universe. To the north a nighttime thunderstorm is gnashing its teeth above the mountains, lightning throbbing, distant thunder rolling rocks around inside its ionized throat.
In this smallest of moments, I can’t decide whether I’m awake or asleep. Neither can I think of why it matters. I don’t think I’ve ever been more sure that I’m right where I should be.
