Journal Entry
From the journal of Minnow Gray
It was hard to tell where I left off and the shark began. She was that close to me. Longer and broader than most I have seen.
Magnified by the water, her exquisite blue iris looked into me with a searching, ageless curiosity. She reminded me of my
shark on Catalina but smaller, maybe seventeen feet. I resisted the urge to hold my hand out to touch her because I didn’t
want to startle her. The feeling was sublime, as always, and I got choked up.
Once she faded away into the blue, I glanced back at the guys in the cage. Through their bubbles, I saw them all give an enthusiastic
thumbs-up. The rush hit me then, and I felt like I’d just been injected with an elephant’s dose of adrenaline. I didn’t want
to come up for air, but I had to; my lungs were screaming.
Am I afraid? People always ask me this, and I struggle to answer. The great white shark elicits a deeper kind of fear. One buried in the
dark parts of our psyche. I think maybe the fear is so huge and so old, it turns into a kind of acceptance, if that makes
any sense at all, and I tell them that I’d rather die swimming with a white shark than live in a world without them. There
are so many things more dangerous that we humans have become habituated to. When you realize that, everything changes.
Because the one thing I know for sure is this: We are not in control. Not one bit.