Essay 10

A Complex Simple Adventure

Guam is a beautiful place, seven hours West of Hawaii by air. I had the pleasure of traveling there recently; it was the staging point for a series of South Pacific scuba sojourns. We dove wild atolls. We snorkeled with sharks and bizarre sea creatures. But the Guamanian adventure I remember most is swimming in a regular old pool, outside a regular old apartment building...in the rain.

It was pouring hard. I stood alone in the pool. I watched through my goggles as long drops flew through the air, pelting my body. It hurt. I submerged my head halfway up my eyeballs. There, I surveyed craters caused by tiny meteorites of water, which, upon impact, rolled into the larger body of liquid Olympic pool.

I lay submerged on my back on the bottom, just four feet from the surface. I observed the drops from below, imagining what it feels like to be a fish, going to work on a rainy day. It took me and my heavy bag of scuba equipment 30 hours of airline travel to reach this place. But only the simplest swim trunks and goggles were required for this exploration.

I swam the back stroke and side stroke, and compared the different perspectives of the raindrop/swim goggle collision. Like snowflakes, no two drops were the same. I tried to crawl between the ripples of the drops that had fallen in front of me. I stood with my tongue skyward, wondering if equatorial rainwater tastes different. It doesn't. And the sound of the rain was a symphony.

Had I not worked so hard to travel so far from home, I might have missed this wonderful experience. I traveled ten thousand miles to find my next adventure. I found it in the simplicity of the rain.

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