a confession: I've always been afraid of deep water. Like most phobias, mine isn't entirely rational. It's not about drowning, exactly, or being eaten by a sharp-toothed creature, although that wouldn't be ideal. It's more about not knowing what's below me, about darkness and emptiness and my own insignificance.
And yet there I was, floating in the open ocean, peering down through a snorkel mask into water hundreds of feet deep. Above the surface there was wind and swell, blowing spray, gray sky. In the distance were the limestone cliffs and tousled coconut palms of Vava'u, an archipelago of 61 islands within the Kingdom of Tonga, itself a collection of 176 islands scattered across approximately 260,000 square miles of the South Pacific. Beneath the surface, there was stillness, vastness, silence.…
