Jun 18 2008
Delusions of Grandeur by the King of The Hill
I’ve got my fingers crossed. In roughly ten days (if the meteorological forecast is accurate) I may be able to go snorkeling at my favorite spot in Florida. Sure, I can always push my glass-covered face beneath the surface at the many inland springs. But for fish variety and size, nothing beats the salty sea. My favorite spot consists of a jetty the juts almost half a mile into the ocean, the boulders of the jetty falling away into deep water. The deeper da water, the bigger da fishes.
Why must I wait ten days? In surfer lingo, it’s got to be “summer doldrums” for snorkeling to be good. Wind and waves are forecast to die down to next to nothing, and when that happens the sediment falls from the normally cloudy water.
The post photo is of two beautifully spotted barracudas taken in the Bahamas last summer. The other fish are bar jacks.
During one of my snorkeling adventures at the jetty, the conditions were so-so: maybe ten feet of visibility. Which made it quite exciting. Fish and sea turtles and even underwater hunks of rock will appear suddenly, causing your heart rate to jump a notch. On this particular day I came upon a huge barracuda. Nearing five long, I would guess. While virtually all aquatic life tends to bolt when they spy me coming, this guy went nowhere. “He” just looked at me. And that’s a primary reason why snorkelers often decide that they don’t like barracudas. The damn things aren’t afraid of us. And that raises our own fear.
That insight got me thinking. I wonder how much human worldviews & mythologies & cosmologies would differ if, through time and even to this day, there were a gigantic species of predator that would regularly swoop into our neighborhoods to devour a loved one, and, try as we might, we couldn’t eradicate it. Would we still view ourselves as the pinnacle of creation? Would we be crazy enough to insist that “Gawd has a plan for me,” even if that plan included becoming lunch for a lurking monster?
I wonder.
