An expert snorkeler I am not, but I know enough to show the kids how to spit in their masks to keep them from fogging, to violently puff when water splashes into their snorkels, and to walk backward in the water so as not to trip on their fins. I check that their life vests are tightly secured, and that the younger two have pool noodles to keep them floating on the surface. Our platform has a floating fence around the permissible snorkeling area, and there are lifeguards at every corner. Still, it feels daunting to release my four-and six-year-olds out into the Great Barrier Reef. This is the constant parental challenge, to push our fledglings out the tree, into the liminal void, a maturing exercise that’s exacerbated during travel, when everything is new and nothing is predictable.
I ease into the water with Tate, while Kyle swims in with Reed and Finn. It amazes me that no matter how exotic the location, how one-of-a-kind the experience, the act of swimming always remains the same. During my childhood summers, I woke at the crack of dawn and met my friend who lived on my block for a sunrise bike ride to the neighborhood pool; that early-morning dip involved the same stroke, stroke, stroke as it does now, on the largest reef on the planet. The percussive pulse from submerging my ears into water echoes back the same muffled sounds as my childhood trips to lakes and rivers in Texas. The earth’s surface is over 70 percent covered in water, and sometimes I wonder about a drop of water resting on my shoulder, whether it’s been to Antarctica or the South China Sea, or perhaps, miraculously, even out my childhood kitchen sink.
This water is cold and clear as glass, and the current allows for simple breaststrokes as I dip my head into another planet. Above the water’s surface, it is sun’s reflection and waves. Two inches underneath, and I am floating above a kingdom of coral, some four hundred different types in shades of orange, yellow, green, purple. There are staghorn coral, resembling a deer’s antlers, clustered in bouquets and offering protection from prey to the smaller fishes. Brain coral, with its folded ridges and grooves. Thousands of minuscule fish swim in a thousand different directions, an aquatic rush hour of scurried dancing. An eggplant-purple giant clam, four feet in diameter, has taken his place on the shallow sea floor, resting vertically, his upward-facing mouth opening and closing with the current. He is the old man of this particular reef, sitting in his favorite recliner, retelling a slow story. I find Nemo scampering through sea lettuce algae.
I resurface every couple of minutes, a mother hen counting her chicks. Tate sometimes comes up to clean out her mask at the same time, grin wide and eyes gaping. She looks at me knowingly, as if we share the secret to the unseen world below us.
“Mom, did you see Nemo? I saw Dory too,” she says.
“Did you see the brain coral?” I ask.
“Yeah, that was weird. It looks like a dozen brains were emptied out here from a science lab.”
The five of us reconvene for lunch on the platform, plastic plates piled high with shrimp and fish. We are exhausted and exhilarated, cheeks pink and hair matted to our foreheads.
“Mom, did you see the purple and blue and yellow fish?” Finn asks in his high-pitched preschool voice.
“Yes! What did you think?”
Finn shrugs. “Cool.”
“This is the best day ever!” Reed says.
“Oh yeah? Why is that?” Kyle asks.
“Because I’ve never, never, never seen this before. Well, except on TV,” he answers.
I think of my childhood: hardly leaving central Texas, content to swim in my neighborhood pool and cruise suburban lanes on my bike. I’m grateful and in awe my children have now seen the Great Barrier Reef. I whisper a prayer that they will still be gleeful over Slip’N Slides and sno-cones.
Hours later, on the boat ride back to land, Finn sleeps on the seat next to me, wiped out from happy exertion. Reed scrolls through the day’s photos on Kyle’s phone, and Tate reads on her Kindle. I stare out the window. This water holds magic, gives birth to creation where most days nary a human eye is witness. Water is familiar; it is front-yard sprinklers and nearby creeks. And it is exotic, unknown, bearing secrets to worlds beneath worlds.
Our remaining days in Queensland are this: we board a plodding train from World War II upward to an arts village, high in the ancient rain forest; we watch locals hang out laundry and take children to school under the Daintree fan-palm leaves; we examine tiny, chalky Anglican churches nestled in a canopy of rain forest vines next to ice cream stands.
We camp in the countryside near the small town of Port Douglas and swim under stars in a rock-encrusted pool. We hold koalas, pet kangaroos, touch dingoes through fences, ogle wombats, cassowaries, crocodiles. We cross a street, and the tree in the crosswalk’s center screeches with rainbow lorikeets, and we watch them darken the sky as they leave in a synchronized dance, a flurry of green, blue, and red feathers. They are Australia’s pigeon, and they are breathtaking.
We drive for hours along the Queensland coastline, and the kids call out their holiday wish lists from the back seat. Bing Crosby joins us through speakers. We pull over to a roadside stand for mangoes and a picnic at a beachside rest stop, and Kyle and the kids scurry on boulders along the rocky beach, mindful of the deadly box jellyfish. Tate chats with a young girl about the pet rainbow lorikeet on her shoulder, a nonchalant redhead who might as well have been walking a mutt on a leash. We float on a military-issue duck boat through crocodile-ridden swamps.
Quite surprisingly, we find a Target, and buy new flip-flops for the boys, a new swimsuit for Tate, a few chocolates for St. Nicholas Day. I spot artwork from an Oregon friend splayed on a book’s cover in a bookshop in the middle of nowhere. We eat more ice cream and sip flat whites, Australia’s contribution to coffee. On the evening before St. Nicholas Day, we toss Kinder Eggs into the kids’ sweaty flip-flops at our rustic campsite.
One final afternoon, I unfold a cheap plastic chair under the awning of the campsite’s general store, tap into their spotty Wi-Fi, and cross my fingers that a Skype call to our American travel agent won’t disconnect halfway through a major credit card transaction. A chorus of kookaburras laugh in the nearby trees, serenading as my hold music. I book our second chunk of flights, to Casablanca, Nairobi, Nice. I recall those vaguely familiar place-names, but they feel a lifetime away.
As I power down my laptop, Kyle pulls up with the rental car, kids in the back seat. “Are you done? We want to drive into town and walk around.”
7
NEW ZEALAND
After Queensland, we knew we wanted to visit friends in Melbourne and Sydney, and also make a little jaunt to New Zealand—but the holidays mean outrageous holiday airfare. When frugality is one of your chief traveling considerations, you sometimes have to leave the country, then come back again.