The sky was blue. The day was warm. Sunlight glinted off aquamarine water. We sat on the salt-and-pepper beach gazing up the slopes at rain clouds hugging the forest on the mountainside.
It was low tide. The water was far from the sandy shore, and we had to clamber over sharp, black rocks in our flippers to get to the edge.
We swam along the contours. The swells lifted us up until it felt like flying. And they pushed us down to where darting fish and neon anemones hid in crevices and nooks and crannies. After swimming along this way for a while, we would get disoriented and poke our begoggled faces above the water to see where we were.
And as we swam there, a sea turtle passed us by.
Trudy looked back at me, her eyes wide, her finger pointing. I nodded, and we swam a while alongside as the turtle in great sweeps of its fins glided along the counters and rose and fell in the swells on its way to someplace that it seemed to have in mind. We swam alongside, keeping our distance, until the water got shallower and the swells threatened to push us down onto the rocks.
The sea turtle, it kept going.
