were not enough, flying fish (“malolo”) began to skitter around me. They kicked the huge bottom lobes of their tails as they pressed off the water, extending modified pectoral fins as sails. They skimmed busily just above the water twenty, forty, eighty feet before subtly ducking back into it. The malolo buzzed around me and spinner dolphins continued their acrobatics in small groups passed by me moving out of the golden-red bay as evening settled on the gentle coast of the Big Island.
~~~
My time there was a tranquil dream, an ebbing flow of encounters and emotion. Elizabeth and I found a seemingly endless stream of peaks, valleys, lava rock, reefs, and bays with bright sun and verdant mountainsides around every corner. Warm water and Tonka’s rumbling masked painful memories of our past trouble and an equivocal future that she was pushing me hard on. In many ways, our time in Hawai’I was a fundamental turning point. Typical of youth, I made life-changing choices without fully realizing their scope or consequence. The most difficult was to simply avoid choosing about our future, which was a tacit selection of an inevitable eventuality. In a bitter irony, we were never closer than our times in Hawai’i yet we began to diverge – largely because of the ocean.
A clear outcome of those early tropical Pacific journeys was the course on which my career became set. There were certainly future events that would steer my path. But I arrived in Hawai’i with a love of the water, a general interest in biology, and a desire to work in some aspect of conservation; I left a marine biologist.
A constant I have found is that really major challenges are rarely met with utter resolution, but somewhat paradoxically with many more questions. A whole new world opened up to me in the ocean and its study. My scientific umwelt had been sculpted by the plains and mountains, by conservation issues related to agriculture, mining, logging, and the ecology of rivers and streams. Things are more easily controlled and studied in terrestrial and freshwater systems than in the ocean. It felt a daunting and somewhat intractable realm to attack, but marine life had infected my passion and curiosity. I soaked in every ounce of the warm sea and found answers to life-altering events transpiring around me, but more questions than guidance emerged. What parts of this massive field should I pursue? How would I find my way into this nebulous and ultra-competitive area of study that so many professionals and friends were advising me to avoid? How would I separate myself from the countless others who felt similarly compelled? Would this choice lead me away from Elizabeth? And perhaps most pragmatically – how in the hell was I going to progress in marine biology as an undergraduate student in Missoula, Montana?
Many experiences in the islands faded to warm memories upon my return to the snow-capped peaks, but captivating journeys had altered me forever. The connection between river, lake, ice, and ocean had been fused. One frigid day, high in the Bitterroot, I found this:
Water rushes around a stone a thousand chance ways,
Each white-cold in February’s ice-mingled fingers.
Filling tiny dimples on its face, Earth’s blood pushes hard
For change…for action, until rigid grip slips into motion.
Each dynamic bed lies down a maze of possibilities,
Moss-slippery steps, pouring aquatic cries to the sea.
Landlocked and snow-bound, I continued my studies with a radically different perspective now that my life’s path had been steered to the ocean. I became intensely determined to prove wrong all those advising me I would never make it in this field. My choices, goals, and experiences were now bent through a marine lens. The journey began in earnest.
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