Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia

In every place there are people who live their environment. There are urban cyclists in NYC, mountaineers in Switzerland, and barflies in Boston. I’m always excited to meet and make friends with these people where ever I go. People who have a deep connection with the land and an intimate knowledge of its workings. In Australia 85 percent of the population lives within 50 kilometers of the coastline. The ocean is their environment.
Growing up in the woods of the deep south I know virtually nothing of the ocean. I can tell you the names of common birds and which plants are which in my native Georgian forest, but standing here on the edge of choppy waters with this snorkel strapped to my head, I can’t tell you shit. Not about the potential dangers that lurk beneath or how to spot rip currents by looking at the water’s surface. Of these things I am an ignorant child, luckily though, this is my buddy Dickson’s playground, and he’s agreed to show me the water’s way.
Dickson, or Dicko as he’s affectionately referred to by friends, is a tall lanky character, an internet dating phenomenon, and at times (particularly when I’m not in the room) the hardest drinker around. On New Years, Dicko, two his best friends (a couple of lifelong surfers), and I sat on their front porch drinking beers, and waiting for the rumored stampede of hot chicks to come drunkenly sloshing by. We had been discussing exercise when Dicko decided to mention his daily snorkeling routine.

“Snorkeling isn’t exercise. You don’t even use fins Dicko,” chimed one of the surfers. Seems to me like it might be more work without fins than with them, but what do I know? I’m from Stone Mountain, Georgia.

“Do you know how to snorkel? Have you ever done this before?” Dicko asked.
“Yeah,” I replied. “My old man took me snorkeling when I was a kid………..once.”

Off into the drink we went. Dicko takes to the water as if born to it. While I, at least for the first 10 minutes am a complete catastrophe. The water’s getting in my goggles. When I try to adjust them my snorkel fills with water. Forgetting that I can just blow the water out, I’m thrashing about swallowing mouthful after mouthful of saltwater. At some point I look up and Dicko is so far away that I can’t even see him. Then I realize that I’m really alone out here and how deep the water is. Panic begins to set in not only because I don’t want to die out here, but because safe footing really isn’t that far away. As the only black guy in probably all of Australia(at least it feels like it sometimes), I hoped that people weren’t looking at me saying to themselves, “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.”
Eventually, I too grew gills and the psychological threat of dying was placed at bay. Turns out the water really wasn’t that deep at all. *cough* When you look at the surface of the water all you see is water, but underneath lies a whole new world. Strange, thinking of this as wilderness. To me trees and forest and spiders and snakes is the wilderness, and the ocean is really just another word for the beach. Well, that’s I thought before anyway.

It’s wild down there.

They say that the ocean is the last unexplored frontier on Earth and now I understand why. Beneath the glistening oscillations of the water’s smooth surface is an environment in which we are foreigners. Perhaps it was that I had expected there to be only sand, that I was surprised to find such dramaticism and diversity of terrain. Ginormous boulders jutted from the sea floor proudly overlooking the vast expansiveness which conceals two-thirds of our amazing planet. Aquatic plants cling to anything they can get a hold of like wind swept trees on the side of a mountain. Vegetation is everywhere, and if this was above sea level, this would definitely be the back country.

Potentially awkward on land, you could tell that Dicko was champion of this environment. He dove amazingly deep, propelling himself further from the surface by hurling himself from big boulders. Seriously, the guy was like Johnny Fucking Quest out there, tapping rocks together to call large swarms of fish, flipping over flat rocks to feed this 5 feet iridecent blue one. It’s just cool when you get a chance to see people excercise massive stores of knowledge of something you know nothing about. Hopefully I get to learn a thing or two about the ocean while I’m here.