by Hero Jenkins
Ever watch a movie where
there was a hideous monster on the rampage devouring or killing everyone it
encountered. Ever watch the reaction of the movie people to the monster? For
the sake of this post I am going to divide these people into two groups: the
ones who get eaten and the ones who do not.
When the monster showed up
most people would run away. The people who managed to get themselves eaten all
had one thing in common. They would watch all of the freaked out people run by
and then go in the opposite direction to see what all of the excitement was
about.
In the neighborhood where I
grew up we had a different kind of monster.
Gang members with guns. As a result in my neighborhood if someone
started running, you would run too. You didn’t stop to find out why, you can
find out why later, once the danger had passed.
I told you all of that to
tell you this. My wife and I were snorkeling in Maui when a colorful fish
darting amongst the rocks below caught my eye. I decided to point this fish out
to my wife but she was nowhere to be found. I looked everywhere for her, I didn’t
see her. Then I looked on the shore and I saw her standing there pointing past
me, out to sea.
What the…
She was saying something,
what was it?
“SHARK!” I finally heard.
“Shark?”
I looked around and sure
enough there was a dorsal fin, not more than ten feet away.
Now I have seen a bunch of
survival shows and everybody knows that most shark attacks happen because the
victims are splashing around and get themselves mistaken for seals or some
other water creature. I knew exactly what to do; yet I didn’t do any of it. I
freaked out and started swimming as fast as I could to shore.
By the time I dragged my
tired body out of the water I was mad. How could she leave me out there with
that shark?
“When you saw me take off,
you should have taken off too,” she said defiantly. She was right, we had both
grown up in the same neighborhood and yes that was the way things were done. But,
here’s my point. She had to swim by me, all she had to do was tap me on the
shoulder on her way by… that’s all! She could have warned me, but she didn’t.
And to make matters worse, she was unapologetic. Neighborhood rules. Her job
was to see the danger and take off… my job was to recognize it and follow.
So that was the time when I
almost got eaten by a shark while swimming in Maui… well, actually it turned
out to be a turtle, but it could have been a shark.
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