Everything, Nothing, and I'm a Middle Child

I wanted to write about this a while ago. I was cleaning out my desk, and I found a note reminding me to write about it. At first I thought it was too seasonal and would be too out of context, but in the end, well, you can see I decided to do it anyway.

Back in October we had the use of a car for a month. Every weekend we drove out to a better-than-Haifa beach. There's one in Atlit where you have to pay a few dollars to get in, but considering how much less filthy and obscenely overcrowded it is in comparison to Haifa's beaches, it's totally worth it. It is a rather shallow, protected beach, so you'd have to get pretty far out to worry about the current. One side of it is a huge sandbar so a person can go out rather far - and then there is actually a 'sub-beach' sandbar out a ways that you can go out to and laze around on, too.

One day, we wandered over to an area no one was exploring. We noticed that, if we weren't imagining things, we were getting nipped by some little critters. Mark put on his goggles and did a bit of exploring. If we didn't stand, but kept moving, the fish left us alone. Eventually, Mark discovered a bit of a coral reef (no, that's not what we were standing on - totally unrelated, I guess). Anyway, we all took turns putting on the goggles and hovering over the coral reef. The others would stand at the edge and pull the goggled person back if they were floating too far out.

It was pure magic. Once I put the goggles on, it was like I'd disappeared from the planet. I hate to sound obvious, but it was an other-worldly experience. I hung out over the reef, looked at the beautifully colored fish and then I went off and explored other areas, diving a bit deeper to look at the bottom of the sea. Of course, it was rather shallow, so I rose back to the top pretty quickly. It was such a reinvigorating experience.

I definitely need to get myself my own pair of goggles.