Get Back in the Water

You know when that shark bites with his teeth, babe/ Scarlet billows start to spread – Mac the Knife, by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil, as sung by Bobby Darin

Off a Yucatan beach, not far from where this story takes place, but many years later. (BD photo)

(Sharks are much in the news these days, so I thought I’d weigh in.)

A long time ago, I had an encounter with a shark off a beach on Mexico’s Yucatan coast.

How long ago?  Well, someone I met at the time said, “There’s going to be a big development project up the coast at a place called Cancun.”

To be precise, it was 1973, and construction began the following year on what is now a city of more than a million people.

What got me to the beach was an American with a Volkswagen beetle who I met in Tikal, the Mayan ruins in northern Guatemala. He had just finished a Peace Corps stint in Colombia, and he was circuitously making his way home.

He was sun-beaten and scruffy (so was I) and he had snorkeling equipment – masks, flippers, for two, and a spear gun. He planned to stay on a beach somewhere on the Mexican coast, he said. There was a reef, the second longest in the world after the Great Barrier Reef off Australia, and you could swim to it from shore in certain places.

Would I like to join him?

Of course.

The place we found where the reef was close, about 200 metres out, was empty of people. We strung our hammocks under the palms. It was the dry season, so it was all the shelter we needed, our blankets at night keeping the bugs at bay. The nearest village, where we could buy tortillas, onions, tomatoes, beer and water, was a few kilometres away. These supplemented the fish we caught on the reef.

A little farther up the coast was Tulum, the Mayan seashore site, still devoid of tourists. We spent an afternoon at Tulum to break up our timeless days. This was about as idyllic as my life would get, a “be-here-now” moment with not much to look back on and no notion or care about what lay ahead.

We spent a lot of time at the reef. Myriad fish swam among canyons of bright coral. We saw groupers, angel fish, snappers, barracudas and more. And a single shark swimming lazily, unthreatening.

 A couple of days in we were having a good luck at the reef. My travel companion had speared three or four fish. We would eat well that night.

“Take these,” he said, handing me a spear-gun line with the fish attached. “I’m going to hang out here a bit longer.”

I started back to shore. I had not gone far when the shark swam in fast and stopped in front of me. How big it was and how close, I could not tell. There was no reef to give depth perception. It didn’t matter. All I could see before me was shark. My reaction was instant terror. I was raised in northern latitudes where bears or wolves might equally have stoked primal fear, but a shark would do.

What I saw: a Caribbean reef shark. (Photo: Dennis Hipp, Zepto)

Several things happened almost at the same moment. My mother appeared before me in the kitchen of the home where I was raised. That vision lasted only a second as I popped my head out of the water to see how far I was from the beach. Too far. At least a hundred metres. I froze, paralyzed with fear.

I dropped the fish I was carrying, though I don’t remember doing so. Without thinking, I had done exactly the right thing. When I put my head below the surface, the shark had disappeared. Was it below me or behind me? I dared not look. After a minute or so, I began to swim slowly towards shore, my speed increasing the closer I got, until I was moving like one of those water-strider bugs you see on the surface of a pond.

In retrospect, I realized a few things. The shark had been attracted by the blood coming from the speared fish. It was unlikely to have attacked me. It was probably not that kind of shark. But retrospect does not serve in the moment.

I paced the sand until my fishing partner got back. I explained what happened.

“A shark took the fish,” I said.

He looked mildly annoyed. Not only was our dinner gone, but I had lost his fish line. But he understood my trauma.

 “Well, you’ll have to get back in the water,” he said. “If you don’t do it now, you won’t be able to.”

I understood what he was saying. Reluctantly, we returned to the sea. It was late in the afternoon and we didn’t go all the way to reef. It was enough to gather some conch, abundant on the sandy ocean floor. Now, conch, grilled over an open fire, are good eating, if a bit chewy, but they can’t compare with fresh-caught grouper.

We hung around for another day or so, but for me, maybe for both of us, the reef had lost some of its allure. We moved on up the coast and inland to Merida where we parted ways.

But I got back in the water, and I was glad I did.