And the pageant even has a villain (besides humanity and its predictable depredations): the spectacularly sinister Crown of Thorns starfish. This is not your garden variety seaside charmer -- believe me, no one will ever manufacture darling little pastel guest soaps in the shape of these beasts. The army-green Crown of Thorns has up to 21 legs, each one bristling with venomous reddish spines. It looks like it just arrived from a planet near Alpha Centauri with an extensive array of bad intentions. It has repulsive eating habits, ejecting its stomach out of its mouth to envelop a likely patch of coral, releasing enzymes and absorbing the digested microscopic animals, plants and all, leaving behind nothing but the bleached skeleton. The voracious Crown of Thorns has reached plague proportions in the Great Barrier Reef, laying waste to vast areas of coral.

Reef Teach has a somewhat uneasy, semi-official relationship with most of the area's dive-boat operators, a situation that Colwell attributes to the fact that he zips blindingly from 0 to 60 on the ol' exasperometer whenever he hears dive guides "leave out very important facts" about the reef's flora and fauna. But every boat I boarded had at least one snorkler or diver who'd seen Colwell's show and couldn't stop praising it, how it had made the baffling, alien undersea world not just more comprehensible, but even more beautiful.

I was one of them. I learned to stop rushing through the towers of coral. I saw the crumbly trail of sand emitted from the back end of a shimmering turquoise parrot fish and knew it for the remains of his coral dinner. I got close to a long strand of gorgonian coral and spotted a dainty, bugged-eyed gobi fish racing up and down its length, the only traveling the little guy will ever do; he reminded me of a Samuel Beckett character. I swam through a meadow of violet staghorn coral and, when I spotted a Crown of Thorns munching on one corner of it, knew that in perhaps a week or two it would be a wasteland of white. That giant clam with a shell-span of nearly 3 feet didn't faze me a bit.

Hovering over the undulating tentacles of a stinging anenome, I saw a piebald clownfish (a notorious sex-changer and immune to the anenome's venom) luxuriating in perfect safety within them like a starlet among her bodyguards. I drifted slowly past a massive boulder coral and watched it blossom with dozens of purple spiral frills: Christmas-tree tube worms, looking like the world's most festive cocktail umbrellas. I noticed that every fish I encountered stared at me with an expression that I can only describe as aghast, and remembered what Colwell had said: "These fish are at home." How would I react if they suddenly appeared in my living room, scrutinizing me as I munched my morning bagel? I suspect they'd find me with much the same demeanor.

I even saw fish and coral change color, though I never saw anyone swimming upside down -- except that is for Trevor, a diver from Yorkshire, England, who first spotted the clownfish and graciously pointed them out to me. Trevor is one of those stupendously modest guys who professed to be a beginning diver just like me. Turns out, though, that while he hadn't strapped on an air tank in quite a few years, he once traveled the globe, diving in some of the world's most legendary reefs -- including the Red Sea -- and in some kind of professional capacity. (I imagined him dropping from a helicopter for an undersea reconnaissance mission.)

Trevor revealed himself to be an old hand by following Colwell's recommendations to a T. Every time I turned around, I saw him drifting motionless and serene, his arms folded to keep his gauges from banging against the fragile coral. He knew how to take it slow and look carefully, all right. Not only did he spot the pretty little clownfish, but once we got back to the boat he told me he'd spotted a couple of turkey fish -- highly venomous, visually stunning porcupine-like fish with permanent scowls who look (in photos at least) like traditional Japanese warriors -- lurking in a little cave on another dive.

I didn't come back from the reef brimming with outrageous tales of spotting hammerhead sharks, frolicking with dolphins, hand-feeding a giant potato cod or hitching a ride on a manta ray. Those kinds of stories are like trophies that veteran divers haul out at the end of the day as the boat chugs slowly back to the dock, and my rapturous descriptions of tube worms aren't likely to impress anyone. But thanks to Colwell (and Trevor) I came back to New York with a philosophy rather than a fistful of yarns: Slow down and look closely. And who knows, it might prove as fruitful in Gotham as it did on the Great Barrier Reef.
salon.com | March 4, 2000

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