Quoting Jacques Cousteau

Story ID:	634
Written by:	Carol J Garriott
Organization:	home/retired
Story type:	Musings, Essays and Such
Location:	San Juan Puerto Rico USA
Year:	1965
Person:	Carol Garriott

“Sometimes we are lucky enough to know that our lives have been changed, to discard the old, embrace the new, and run headlong down an immutable course. It happened to me . . . on that summer’s day, when my eyes were opened to the sea.”—Jacques Yves Cousteau

I like to quote Jacques Cousteau . . . he must have felt somewhat like I do about the sea. One would think that my feeling for “big water” came about gradually, through frequent experiences on the shore across the years. But I remember vividly, like it was yesterday, my first close-up, stick-my-toes-in-it view of the ocean.

July 1965. San Juan, Puerto Rico. I was the delegate from the First Christian Church, Emporia, Kansas, to the World Convention of Churches. Standing there on the balcony of my room, this small-town Kansas girl watched and listened to the surf pounding in on a rocky shore below me. And I was never, ever, the same.

This trip, totally paid for by my church, where I worked full-time as church secretary, was the first trip, first excursion of any kind, out of my home state, much less out of the country, by myself (at the age of 30) without the husband making the decisions. I had made it all by myself from Kansas, to the Miami, Florida, International Airport, probably one of the largest airports in the world, and my first flight on a commercial jet.

A lot was happening during that time, to me as well as around me, in the world of the 60s, with all that entailed. I guess I was growing up, confronting a world that did not match my idealistic views. My childhood, teens, and twenties in rural Kansas in the 40s and 50s had not prepared me nor my peers for the explosive events of the 60s. Also, I was working through the turmoil of realizing that my marriage was falling apart; actually had not really been a marriage for a long time.

So I was at a point in my life quite open to impressions and influences. Often, we aren’t totally aware at the time of such that are shaping us and our direction. Events may seem random, coincidental. I have come to believe that things happen for a reason, to provide us with the opportunities for decision-making and growth.

That mesmerizing introduction to the sea in Puerto Rico was no coincidence. Heretofore unknown to me, there was a “water spirit” within me—I loved the lakes and streams of Kansas, but something else called me—and those turquoise Caribbean breakers made it clear that by that kind of shore was where I must be.

Through later trips and vacations to the shore, I came to an acknowledged love of and overwhelming respect for the sea. Whether it’s a cove, bay, gulf, or ocean, the sea is always changing, like a living thing, caressing, soothing, or, in storms, hurling itself violently against the shore.

Now that I’ve been “livin’ on the bay” for seven years, I have come to know the sea even more intimately, experiencing it mysteriously silent in the fog or brilliantly dramatic at sunset, never again to appear exactly the same. Its’ aura and persona is formed by combinations of weather, atmosphere, time of day, season, never exactly the same. I almost feel it responds to me, adjusts to my mood and emotions at a particular time. I can sit by the seawall in my tiny village on the coast of Texas and feel comforted, all stresses draining away, as if being consoled by an old and dear friend. In times of grief, I can go to the Bay, and somehow be reassured that our world goes on, that life beyond this one awaits.

I see now that I was ready “to discard the old, embrace the new, and run headlong down an immutable course.” My strength, resolve, and direction were building, and I literally never looked back. The whole world was out there before me, all I had to do was embrace it. Though it was eight years before I was able to file for divorce and chart my new adventure, that was the beginning, “on that summer’s day, when my eyes were opened to the sea.”