Floating at The Edge of The World

The island clutched its precious lagoon, saving it a while longer from the depths of oblivion with a fringe of black lava rock about a mile off the beach. Its sloping banks of sand and coral polyps were like cupped hands outstretched towards basalt fingers. Inside the lagoon, the water was safe, inviting — a nursery for marine life too innocent for the evil waters beyond. Outside, it was cold, cruel and wicked. It was this meeting of ocean and lagoon that I had yearned desperately to experience in that most visceral of ways, to float at the edge of the world where Pacific Ocean swells are tamed as they shatter over the endearing walls protecting the eden within. This they had done for at least a million years, a valiant battle nobly fought, but one that they will inevitably lose to the endless passage of time and the unrelenting spite of such a boundless deep.

Mo’orea: A paradisiacal island amidst extreme isolation in the remote South Pacific.

The Shove

It was six-o-clock, and I had come to select my kayak, haul it a short distance over cool-white sands to the water’s edge, and push-off towards Mo’orea’s outer reef where I would transcend to a higher plane of existence. I stood where the waters licked at the small commune of Ma’atea on the southeast coast, looking out across the expanse of impossible cerulean ahead of me. I resolved that it was now or never: That I was going to go for it. I chose the baby-blue craft to be my vessel, its colour a vain imitation at that of the turquoise pool beneath it, the latter’s own hues shimmering handsomely in the first light of the morning. For the little kayak, this made for an unfortunate yet unavoidable contrast, and only further attested the lagoon’s immeasurable beauty. Everywhere, corals bathing beneath the surface reached skyward as if to embrace the light’s warmth.

The Tub

For the first few hundred metres, the paddling was docile and easy, with only tiny corrections needed to glide my tub along the path before me, edged by the coral garden just inches below, and not far from where I had enjoyed a fleeting encounter with an eagle ray the previous evening. The water was calm and quiet, breaking only by the occasional slipping of paddles through its meniscus. Shortly beyond, the corals grew farther and farther beneath as I approached a small trench in the lagoon. I had studied the route the day before and knew to expect this gauntlet, and I knew also that I would soon have safe passage over it after just another hundred metres or so. This knowledge did little to console me in the moment, nor did it go any distance towards quashing the immediacy with which the fear then came over me. Here, I was vulnerable Dante in the Styx.

Mo’orea’s southeast lagoon, pierced by a deep channel stemming from the open ocean.

All around was dark, inky water — the same piercing azure that I could see off to the distance between my present island and mighty Tahiti on the horizon. The chop grew angry over a stretch of just a few strokes, the air turned cool and heavy and my fibreglass hull no longer felt like the ironclad it had until just moments before. I could feel adrenaline course through my veins and my heart rate surge; I tried desperately to focus on the level horizon and — above all — to not look down to where krakens, leviathans and untold demons surely waited for me.

I paddled deftly, my arms and neck aching for the first time now as I strained to keep my vessel true and my gaze steady. I closed my eyes and shuttered the chaos encircling me. Momentarily I became a Polynesian seafarer of old, navigating by way of the heavens and of feel rather than sight, negotiating perilous waves on my journey from Ra’iātea to Aotearoa, or from Tahiti to Rapa Nui, or perhaps most fatefully of all, from Nuku Hiva to Hawai’i.

The Garden

Finally, the chop subsided and the warmth was restored. Ink became pearlescence, and corals returned. I had done it — I had crossed the channel and overcome the great ocean’s only tendril of influence inside the lagoon, whereby it exerted its cruel power from the break in the reef off of Haumi to the East, one of several examples around Mo’orea where initial defeats in the island’s futile battle with the deep were evident. I had made it to the tranquility of the outer reef; a kilometre expanse of white sand and ornate bryozoans now stood before me and its basalt keep, where not half-an-hour beforehand some Tahitians had assured me one may stand in waist-high water, look over its crest and peer into the fathomless abyss falling away just a nose ahead of it. Now, the sun was slightly more overhead, having risen silently above the peak of Mount Orohena in the distance as I too had been drifting silently southward, a fact I had to accept in faith owing to a mixture of lenticular and stratocumulus clouds providing an effective cover for its proud cap. The lapping surface of the sea glinted and dazzled in all directions, its colour now an impossible shade of pectolite.

The slumbering behemoth Tahiti rises in the East amidst a vengeful ocean.

I stopped for a moment and submerged my camera beneath the water. Here, the lagoon was deeper than it was within that inner sanctum before the awful trench, perhaps five-to-ten metres. I had made it to this sandy ledge at a little before six-forty on an unremarkable springtime Tuesday. The atmosphere was completely calm and the air was silent, save for the raucous crashing of waves off to the distance. For thousands of miles they had travelled unobstructed, swelling, building, until fated to relinquish on such lovely shallows. Contemplating their fleeting ferocity, my temporal obligations faded from thought. I lolled peacefully in my tub with the motion of the undulating water’s throb at the rim of the world. I laid there in the frictionless water; I was weightless.

Suspended without weight or ego at the edge of the world.

I felt the oar meld with my body as I righted my craft to face the direction whence I had journeyed. It became an extension of my shoulder and with a forceful right the bow turned suddenly anticlockwise. I thrust the left paddle deep into the water at my left and readied my weight against it so to prevent us from overturning. I was once more deified as a Polynesian demigod of antiquity, commanding the hull to skid under me such that I was now confronting the majesty of Mo’orea directly. Vermillion rays presently fell upon her lush volcanic hills, washing towering spires of verdant basalt in crimson light as they ascended towards heavenly Hawaiki along the foothills of pristine Tohivea.

Mo’orea dispels her foggy cloak to greet the morning’s light.

The contrasting throes of tempestuous waves less than a hundred metres behind with the serene nursery before me culminated in electrifying juxtaposition. My thoughts turned heavenward as I lay suspended on this carpet of such intense aquamarine between these perfect archetypes of ruin and paradise. I was alive, and I savoured the blessed moment. I shared it with the handful of carefree rays and sharks soaring peacefully around me. Now that I have seen such visions of wonder with which they are rewarded, the mystery as to why the graceful mobula leaps from the surface no longer eludes.

How long would it be until I am next in such wonderful circumstances, floating in a natural pool at the shores of a geological miracle in the middle of the single biggest vastness of our planet? I thanked my own saviour as much as I did the divine sculptor of these precious isles.

The Sibling

After several minutes of pause over the reflecting pool ahead, I turned to face the South once more, to look upon Mo’orea’s most impressive sister in this corridor of French Polynesia, with whom she is presently locked to do battle with the prevailing winds, deserted by their older siblings off to the leeward. The islands here had shed the rugged carapaces still worn by those to windward, as if mellowed by their prolonged assault from the deep; they were Maupiti, Bora Bora, Raʻiātea and Huahine.

I looked in awe at the serrated flanks of gargantuan Tahiti, whose fortitudinous shield looked down upon me now in judgment from across the deceitfully named Sea of The Moon. I was reminded then that while the span between these sisters measures just ten short miles, its bottom reaches a mile to the basin floor — for Tahiti and Mo’orea are not really sisters at all, but volcanic triumphs that have temporarily victoried over the great ocean in isolation to one another through tenacity and anguish, the latter first and then the former — initially as seamounts and then as islands — and thus they are but ten treacherous miles indeed, and there is no tranquility to be found within that awful bathymetry. While they were birthed by the same infernal hotspot in the heat of Earth’s mantle, they were each abandoned to gestate alone over hundreds of millennia in the belly of the deep, the magma which spewed violently forth adding to their size and hissing phreatically at every agonising ejection.

Tahiti and Mo’orea: Two siblings which defied the mighty Pacific in isolation to one another.

The Tempest

At this, my attention was wrenched back once more to the thundering waves at my periphery, whose tidal intimations now drew me slowly yet unequivocally towards the reef’s wall in its manifest heaving. I decided at this moment that I did not need to paddle any closer to the brink to appreciate fierce Ta’aroa’s raw power, that the rude surf’s heavy spray now raining upon me was proof enough that I was sufficiently close from my refuge twenty metres back. Another pause, and the scale of the incomprehensible emptiness that loomed beyond the lagoon dawned on me. Hardly a spit of land now separated me from the Antarctic. Aside from an impossibly small chance of foundering upon some speck of land in the Australs, had I set a course due South I would have travelled unhindered on the cusp of infinity for four-thousand miles into those frigid latitudes. There we opposed, and contemplated, and placated in ethereal stillness, separated by almost sixty degrees in arc and celsius. I submerged the camera once more beneath the placid surface, and as I did so discovered an underwater world in perfect equilibrium, a crystalline solitude washed in celestial silence.

The tranquil waters of the outer lagoon existed in blissful harmony beneath the cataclysm and chaos above.

I righted myself one last time in the direction of safe Mo’orea. The irresistible hue of her waters and the secret garden refracting within now looked magnificent as she beckoned my return, for even Polynesian wayfinders must return to familiar shores eventually, to enshrine their tales of triumph and bravery in legend. I rounded my gaze once more to marvel at the warring spectacle unfolding at the reef’s break, to acknowledge the primordial ocean’s power and thank merciful Tane for his land and the sanctity it promised me. Frantic swells struck the basalt cliffs with renewed fury as if defeated in their endeavour to swallow me in their gyre. I chartered my course towards the benevolent island and slipped away, seizing my opportunity to retreat from the frustrated surf.

The Return

I paddled slowly landward. Just ahead of me I could see the dreadful trench watching my approach, convulsing and plotting as it did so. My thoughts became transfixed on this spectre in wait. Despite its persistent hatred, its power was reduced, its hue now seemed a familiar indigo rather than a vengeful black, for the mighty ocean at the lagoon’s edge had tempered its intensity and steeled my nerve. This time, I was Virgil traversing purgatory, no longer Dante in hell. The crescendo of waves behind me quiesced as the rising chop grew all around once more, signalling that my inevitable rendezvous with this past adversary, rising immediately upon me now, had begun.

Pitch-dark waves separate me from Mo’orea’s safe shore as my canoe crosses into the trench.

My tub rocked as the once caressing surface now lashed at her sides. My paddling was steadfast, my mind concentrated on the fertile hills rising precipitously behind the shore’s brush, knowing it would not be long before I would tread on such delicious sands once more. I looked over the edge of my protecting craft to confront the channel’s black heart and refused the terror it tried to conjure within me. I leaned carefully so as to not upset our balance, lest I enter such dreadful waters and allow the malevolent deep to claim me yet. I redoubled my efforts to paddle, my body contorting side-to-side in opposition with the rolling water as I plunged the oar deep below the surface and resisted its attempts to capsize.

Finally, the chasm made one last wretch at my demise in its own dying throe, sending foam skating over the bow of my kayak. The hull snapped violently as we crossed out of the cold, windward currents and into the tempting warmth of the inner lagoon, as would a colossal whale mortally struck by a well-aimed harpoon. The kayak darted into the calm water, whereupon it slowed gracefully at my temporary retiring of the oar. I leaned backwards and strained my neck toward the sky, now awash with scarlet beams. I had earned my respite as did brave Ishmael returning to harbour having survived leviathan.

As the water’s gentle resistance returned, so too did the other aspects of physical reality. I had descended from my celestial plane and was soon admonished with all prior terrestrial limitations, it was as if I had been permitted a glimpse behind the curtain of divine creation only to be banished some place East of Eden. I had traded my seat at the temple of Ta’aroa for this earthly heaven, a paradise on Earth that now underwhelmed, and at this I knew my capacity for wonder had been impossibly heightened in some cruel atonement for my audacious voyage. The mighty ocean had bestowed an ephemeral courage upon me when I challenged its power, but exacted my innocence in its bargain.

The Sanctuary

I navigated the increasing forest of coral heads and purifying clams with the masterful ease of Tupaia presiding between South sea archipelagos. The sweet sound of aqua foam gently washing the gilded beach filled the unmoving air, which was now thick with the tropical heat of day. The breaking waves at the lagoon’s perimeter perished to distant memory, their existence marked only by a stifled hiss beneath the lapping at the shore. Schools of iridescent chromis flitted around the maze of vegetation in this teeming microcosm, and elegant rays skirted militantly about them as they gave their playful chase, unaware of the myriad horrors beyond the reef which threatened their precarious harmony.

A pink whipray patrolling the shallow banks of Mo’orea’s inner lagoon.

A final, laboured thrust of my faithful oar brought me leaping out of the impeccable water and careening on to aureate sand. I sat within the tub for a few, precious moments and felt the water’s adulating laps encourage its stern further landward. The prospect of lush, virile peaks that previously called out to me from across the lagoon had now been taken in a cruel trick of parallax, the punishing waves beyond the extremes of Mo’orea’s reach now pierced the horizon like a sliver of obsidian. I considered the nearby cerulean and the far-off indigo, the fragility of the divide between them, the separation between order and turbulence.

Feeling the encouraging nudge of lapping waves in my beached kayak following a final heave.

I clambered arduously to my feet and over the side of the diminutive kayak, which I observed now to be little more than five indomitable feet of resin and fibre. I clenched at the fraying rope which threaded the tip of its bow and pulled upwards to judge its weight, its mass insignificant but its might immeasurable. I allowed my grip to weaken and watched the rope fall to the beguiling water, where it drifted whimsically between ebb and flow. I stood beside the tiny craft, anchored by my feet which had succumbed to the pliable sand. The tide hugged my ankles; my legs bolstered a leaden body just as volcanic columns affixed this precious island to the Pacific basin. While we stood defiant in our respective waters, we would both surely perish by the same relentless ocean’s pull one day, returning us to our maternal pool.

The Requiem

The time was now seven-thirty, my voyage had lasted ninety eternal minutes yet seemed to have concluded no sooner than it had begun — an azimuthal sun flashed emerald and sank — its fleeting passage now condemning that indelible journey safely to my memory forever.

I still think of Mo’orea’s delicate lagoon and her fortifying walls, and of the fierce ocean patiently awaiting their demise — trying, testing — while the little island persists in vain futility. I yearn for the island’s beauty, and contemplate her reef’s present garden and its inevitable doom; I despair at the cold necessity of this cruel duality, of the decaying atoll that her cipher will inhibit. I try to reconcile such a paradise with oblivion. I think of eons from now, and lament Mo’orea’s inexorable fate in this abyssal pit.