Born to the Land

Under the hot sun we meander slowly along the road, past shaded cottages and small farms with lush gardens. At Mile Marker 20 rather than street addresses the areas outside of town use mile markers as reference points we stop for a wade in the water.

Jonathan heads out first, slowly sliding into the warm waters of the Pacific. Sitting down in the shallows he leans back on extended arms and closes his eyes as he soaks up the Hawaiian sun. The waves gently breaking on the shore behind us is all we can hear.

“Are there any sharks around here?” he asks. “Probably white tip reef sharks and hammerheads beyond the barrier reef. You can see the reef about a kilometre off shore. See where the waves are breaking? That’s where you’ll find them.”

Preparing his skin diving gear, Jonathan looks for reassurance. “Are you sure that nothing will come through the reef?” “Fairly sure. But there are no guarantees in the ocean.”

He spits into his dive mask and rubs the saliva onto the glass. “Okay,” he says. He submerges the mask to wash it clean before fitting the rubber frame snugly over his face.

Slipping below the ocean’s surface at the same time, we dive into a school of brightly coloured tropical fish, possibly butterfly fish. They dart around rocks and coral-head trying to avoid us.

In the shallows, waves toss us about over a field of sea urchins, with their long black, sharp quills coming within inches of our exposed skin as the ocean surges rock us back and forth. Jonathan, leery of being pricked, swims out to deeper water and pursues a couple of trumpet fish and a school of squirrelfish. I pick up a grey sea urchin with short, stubby quills and motion for Jonathan to extend his hand. As the urchin sits in his flattened palm, he feels alight, prickly sensation and laughs through his snorkel, oblivious to some of the larger fish swimming around us.

Swimming out to the reef, Jonathan was mesmerized by the brightly coloured coral. Throughout the afternoon Jonathan proves to be a natural diver. Heading into deeper water he swims toward the bottom, and upon reaching it, somersaults. He pushes off from the sandy bottom and races upwards to the surface against a slight current. The feeling of weightlessness and the sensation of flight grab his imagination.

At the surface he says, “This is what it must feel like to be an astronaut.”

He was being a boy.

At mile marker 16 we turn onto a non-descript driveway and make our way around a copse of palm trees and tall shrubbery. Just beyond lies the beach house where we’ll stay for the next three days, all shaded by coconut palm trees.

With a mountain at our back, Jonathan and I take a leisurely stroll to the beach, basking in warm sunlight under a blue sky with small, high clouds. We soak it all in, savouring the moment. Before us stretches a crescent-shaped beach, about a mile in length, bordered by palms and large green hibiscus shrubs with fragrant red blooms. The beach’s fine bone-white sand is pockmarked with crab burrows just above the high tide line. A mile out, the waves are breaking over the barrier reef that runs along the entire length of Molokai’s southern shore. Its waters, running the gamut of blues, form light shades in the shallows to dark blues out by the reef. The previous day’s humidity has been broken by the cooling Trade Winds blowing in off the Pacific.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 20th, 2005 at 9:48 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.