The author, John Marek, is executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
I’m not sure when the idea of wanting to be a marine biologist became a pop culture punchline, but it was certainly not so in the 1970s. For a period of two or three years during high school I thought that was what I wanted to be when I grew up. Although I had been weaned on a steady diet of Flipper episodes, Jacques Cousteau specials and Nova episodes, I had only touched saltwater once in my life, on a family vacation to Florida when I was 8. But I was a ravenous reader and checked out every book in my small town’s library on the ocean and sea life. It was not an exhaustive collection and tended toward pretty pictures and simplistic explanations, but I was hooked. I also had two home aquariums which I maintained rigorously, although neither contained anything beyond the selection of guppies, neon tetras and angel fish one could purchase at the local discount store.
My underwater career aspirations, fanciful and unrealistic on the best of days, came to a merciful demise because I was never quite able to finish in the top three of my high school’s standard biology test, which would have allowed me to compete in the state competition at Bowling Green State University. (Despite being a completely landlocked campus in the middle of pancake-flat soybean fields, BGSU had a reasonably good marine biology program.) Instead, I consistently finished first or second in English and even placed 16th overall in the state my senior year, opening up scholarship and admissions opportunities in that area instead. I wasn’t particularly interested in pursuing a career in English education or – ahem – writing, so I settled on a distant cousin, radio-television communication. That would eventually morph into business management and finally marketing, and here we are.
I thought about my aborted undersea career today as I snorkeled over Grand Bahamas Reef. It wasn’t the first time I’d been snorkeling, but it was the first time I’d snorkeled in the open ocean, and one thing became abundantly clear to me: I would have sucked as a marine biologist. It’s not that I am afraid of the water, it’s just that I don’t particularly love being in it. On it, sure. I love boating and kayaking, but actually getting in the water and swimming or diving? Eh, I can take it or leave it.
Having said that, there were moments on the reef when my surroundings looked just like those Jaques Cousteau specials as I glided stealthily among the colorful fishes and the sea fans and the coral. At any moment, I almost expected the bow of a long-sunken pirate ship to jut out from the monochrome gray bottom as they so often did on Nova. But after 40 minutes or so, the first flighty tendrils of vertigo started slithering from the back of my brain to the pit of my stomach and a I knew it was time to head back to the boat. I am not particularly prone to seasickness, but staring straight down with no horizon while you bob around in the waves is clearly something that takes a little getting used to. I am sure that with a little more experience I would be fine and might even come to enjoy sport diving, but the truth is, there is only so much time and there are things I much prefer doing: casting a fly to a trout on a cold mountain stream, hiking a mountain pass, kayaking a misty lake at dawn.
For a period of about 15 years from the early ’90s to the mid-2000s, I golfed on pretty much a weekly basis. I was never very good and I never really enjoyed it (the two go together, I suppose), but I did it because it was expected of me for career reasons. I stopped golfing on a regular basis right around 2005, but still played an occasional round at charity tournaments and the like up though 2015. Then I had a sort of epiphany: Why am I doing this if I don’t enjoy it?
Maybe if I had pursued a career in marine biology I would have come to like regularly donning a wetsuit and gliding around under water. And maybe not. Maybe it would have been more like my golf game, something I made the best of because it was expected of me.
Looking back on it, I suppose I am glad I didn’t do so well on those biology tests.