The greatness of the sea

The innocent ripples of the edge of the ocean. From here, it just gets deeper off into the horizon.

I have spent a lot of time by the ocean in the past year. Sometimes I am on a beach and often on a beach on an island, but as I sit here now, I am on a breach looking at an island. And I ponder: what is it that makes us like islands so much? I mean, although I am contentedly sitting here with all my camping gear and my four-wheel drive on a lovely beach, why do I feel the almost overwhelming urge to swim over? Am I trying to get away from being away? To be on an island is to be self-sufficient and also it is to escape from the world.

It is to have an existence where your world is very small. As if by some magic alchemy, the water creates a barrier over which the problems, stresses and distractions of the rest of the world cannot pass.

I stared at the sea yesterday when the tide was out. Here, the slope is so gradual that at low tide, the water is nearly half a kilometer out from high tide. Out nearly at the farthest boundary of my world was a lone pair of tire tracks that seemed to disappear into the calm waters. It gave me a crazy thought: what if I drove down into the water and kept driving until my car got stuck and then watched the waves come in and take it, washing the sand from under it as it slowly sank into unrecoverability. The thought made me shudder.

Driving the Camel on the beach on Fraser Island. We must use a tide chart to avoid the high water taking our car!

The sea draws me and terrifies me. I have floated on it with a snorkel in my mouth and a mask on my face and look at the pretty fish and coral. I have strapped tanks of precious air to my back and gone down a tiny fraction of the sea’s depth. I have waited for it to recede to collect worn pieces of glass and I have driven on the beach soon to be reclaimed by the water.
But I am not under any false illusions: if I were put out into the sea without any of my life-giving pieces of technology, I would not last very long. None of us would.

So maybe there is a connection between the sea’s ability to mute problems by passing over it. Maybe the petty fears of the day-to-day can not begin to compete with the total power of the deep water for humans. And over it we pass, cleansed by it’s magic.

And the sea will reclaim all. This wreck on the beach at Fraser Island, Australia was once a luxury steamer.