Fish Food

When I was 8 years old, my family took a trip to Hawaii for spring break. Any destination other than our North Carolina beach house would have been a Big Deal, but to be going somewhere tropical—to be fleeing the chilly mud pit that is upstate New York in spring—this trip had epic potential. In my little 8 year old brain, I had two main concerns. The first: I really wanted to go on a whale watch* and meet some humpback whales and possibly jump off the boat and swim away with them forever. The second desire was born when my parents told me that our first hotel of the trip, on the Big Island, had an outdoor pool that was open until—wait for it—like 10pm!—and that it would be so warm that I could go swimming in it that first night we arrived at the hotel. I fixated on this point. After waking up at 4am and traveling for most of the day, when we finally spilled off the plane at our destination, a glorious swim in a tropical pool would be my reward.

That first hotel we stayed at was pretty amazing. It was located right on the beach and had a wide open lobby with a skylight and a pool filled with orange and yellow and red tropical fish that were longer than my arms. They swam lazily back and forth, day and night, and were so desensitized that they didn’t even flinch when little fingers poked them from above. In addition to the regular swimming pool it also had an outdoor pool that was separated from the ocean by barnacle-encrusted rock. Every time a wave rolled to shore it spilled over that rock wall, depositing fish, crabs, shells, and every other kind of tropical life form you could want—except for dolphins, to my disappointment.

Needless to say, it was a really cool hotel. Once we checked into our rooms, I announced with gusto that I was ready to go swimming. My parents looked at me, I’m sure, with a weary sort of amazement. We’d been traveling all day, awake since well before dawn, and hadn’t had a scrap of food except what the airline supplied during the flight. They wanted dinner and bed, in that order. There was no time for swimming in their plan. No amount of wheedling, begging, cajoling, and but you promised had any effect. The plan was dinner and bed.

I resorted to hardcore pouting. Lower lip jutting, head down, arms crossed, I trailed behind my parents, sister, and both grandmothers as we explored the local shops and stores. I was a prodigious pouter in my day, and I put everything I had into it. So much so that I was completely unaware of my surroundings: the palm trees, the soothing, balmy tropical air, or the raised curbs that were rather different from what I was used to in New York. I walked right into one of those curbs, went flying, and skinned my elbow on the black asphalt.

They say head wounds are the worst bleeders, but I would argue for elbows. My stupid left elbow (I still have the scar, ask and I’ll show you sometime) bled and bled and then bled some more. We ended up eating at some barbecue place in town mostly because it was the closest place we could steal a billion napkins from and stick them on my arm. At least my bloody trail of napkins might have been mistaken for barbecue sauce at a distance. My elbow continued to bleed all night, leaving stains on the crisp hotel sheets. And there was no night swimming.

The first part of this story doesn’t have much to do with the prompt except for the part where it was the rest of my family’s irrational desire for food that kept me from night swimming and very nearly delivered a fatal blow to my left elbow.

Preparing for the snorkel adventure.

A few days later, the big adventure was snorkeling. We rented all the right gear: mask, snorkel, flippers. We bought an underwater disposable camera to document the adventure. And we bought fish food. Each of us got a full bag of brownish reddish pellets that, when used judiciously, could lure the biggest and brightest fish for their close-ups. It was a beautiful day, with bright blue skies and warm temperatures.

We sat through our lesson on how to use the snorkels and flippers, received pointers on where to find the best fish and coolest things to see, and then we were on our way. The water was exceptionally clear—so different from the murky Atlantic water that I was accustomed to. We could see for what felt like miles. For a little while I was preoccupied with figuring out the flipper and mask and snorkel, but I quickly came to the realization that there were no fish. I mean, there were fish, but clearly I wanted to see something more in the size category of my friends from the lobby. I didn’t want minnows, I wanted tropical sea monsters.

I don’t know if I was the first person in the snorkeling group to break out the fish food. Surely some other industrious person had opened their packet of food before descending into the water and was judiciously labeling out bits of food for the waiting fish. Maybe someone else, once they were out in the water, came up for a breather and opened the package above the surface. Neither of these options occurred to me. Still underwater, I fiddled with the plastic packaging, twisting and stretching it this way and that. It was a stubborn bugger and required a lot of work, but the seams finally reached the breaking point and snapped open, spilling fish pellets in the water around me.

My sister was in charge of the underwater camera. To this day she swears that she heard a scream through a snorkel and turned around to see a cloud of writhing, swarming tropical fish and a little pair of blue flippers kicking below. What did my sister do in this potentially dangerous situation? She snapped a picture.** We still have the photographic evidence of my shining Hawaiian moment in which I became the meal.*** At least I got to see some of the biggest, most brilliant fish Hawaii had to offer; in this situation, I’ll take that as a victory.

I don’t really remember much of what happened after the package exploded except for that first moment of panic when the fish swarmed. I’m sure my dad probably came over and pulled me out of the feeding frenzy. I do remember being really bitter for the rest of the afternoon that I’d wasted all my food in one burst and had nothing left to bribe the fish with. In retrospect, this was probably the best possible outcome. I also feel pretty lucky that I didn’t fall into a pit of magma when we visited the volcanoes, because it was really that kind of week for me.

*We spent about four hours on a boat and did not see one single whale. Not even a freaking dolphin. Talk about epic disappointment.

**I really wanted to include the actual photo, but according to my parents it was too blurry. They did, however, provide the pre-snorkel photo, which I thought was pretty good too.

***I almost wrote about the time I was in a petting zoo wearing a red and white cow-patterned bathing suit with a red ruffle and a goat brazenly walked up to me and took a bite of my ruffle. And then another. And another. And soon half my bathing suit was wadded up in its mouth and I was screaming and my dad had to yank me from its cruel jaws. But in retrospect, that was pretty much all there was to tell of that story.

This week’s synchroblog prompt was food. You can read the others here:

Food — m : The Meat of the Hunt — Word Shepherd : They don’t call it the big white dress for nothing — muddleddreamer : the bad bag of cuties — i write to be rid of things : Eat, Bake, Love — adventures of alisha : Feed Me, Seymour! — passionately pensive