I recall a conversation I had many years ago with a young man,
seventeen at the time, not that I can remember much of what
I might have said.
He was describing an encounter with a large hammerhead shark
while he and his girlfriend were snorkeling off the coast of Cozumel,
two months earlier. It had apparently come up on them obliquely
from behind and their right. Their first awareness of it was as it
passed diagonally to their left, perhaps twenty feet away,
heading away to their left and front.
What remains indelible in my mind were these words of his in retrospect,
“I got the feeling that we were totally of no significance to that shark,
almost as if we didn’t exist.”
Thoughtful words indeed, impressive for a seventeen year-old I thought
then, and still do.
Islander.