The Day I was Rescued by Dolphins

After fantasizing about it for years, I decided it was time to fulfill my dream: to take a year off and live on an island. Had I gone bananas? No. Thoreau's Walden profoundly inspired me and I always wanted to do what he did: leave the distractions of the daily grind to find out the meaning of life. He wrote his philosophical book while living in the woods in a house that he had built himself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts.

I chose the tropical beach version. I was living in New York City and was insecure, confused about my career path, and on a quest to find my identity separate from my parents. I had many excuses about why I couldn't do it, but when I was 19, I cashed in my investments and decided to invest in myself. I traded in my sequins for seashells and purchased a one-way ticket to the Caribbean. It was the single best thing I ever did for myself. What happened next was the last thing I could have expected: a miracle.

I was bold, stubborn, foolish and lucky. I had been living in a campground on Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands, for 3 weeks. I was eager to leave the small campground that had become, in my mind, as crowded as New York City, and find a secluded beach where I could live forever (or a year). I bought a small inflatable boat with a motor, loaded it with all of my belongings, and went in search of a secluded beach to live out my Walden. I felt like one of the original explorers, ready to find uncharted territory.

I was on an island known for great sailing, and I ignored all sound boating advice that had been given to me. I didn't check the weather, either, or I would have noticed a squall just outside the calm safety of Brewer's Bay. I also neglected to tie down my camping equipment, and when my boat hit some large waves, my tent went overboard. I jumped in after it and became separated from the boat.

I always felt comfortable in water; my first spoken word was in fact "water." I learned to swim before I could walk. The ocean was always the place I went to when I needed to soothe my pain. I never worried about sharks when I was in the open ocean. Yet, here I was in a dire situation; I couldn't believe I was going to drown. I was being tossed brutally in the waves and it was difficult to distinguish the surface of the ocean. I have to be calm, I thought. I relaxed my body while it was contorted into pretzel-like positions. There seemed to be a break in the violence of the waves and I swam up to what I thought was the surface and I took lung-full of water. I think I passed out for a few minutes, though I'm not sure how long I was out.

Things were extremely distorted when I regained consciousness. I felt like I was body surfing a wave toward shore. There was a moment of relief that my ordeal was over. I couldn't recognize the bay I was in. My next moments were panicked. I couldn't tell what was pulling me; I flailed my body around, terrified, only to become more frightened by feeling something slippery beneath me. My mind couldn't comprehend what was happening. I was in shock. I had gone to the edge of desperation about survival and had surrendered to death.

There was three dolphins swimming briskly, lifting me to the surface. I was near the shore, but they were swimming parallel to the shore. People had gathered at the beach, down the bay, the equivalent of a New York City block. When I came within speaking distance, I told them of my boating accident. A man asked, "Where is your boat now?" I told him I didn't know. He called out to a fisherman in a boat getting ready to bring in his nets for the day, "You better go look for the dolphin-girl's boat." The locals began calling me dolphin-girl, which eventually evolved into Dolphina over the course of the year I lived there.

As do other people who have experienced a near-death incident, I was shaken to the core and forever altered. All the masks that I wore and presented to the world to protect myself were stripped away. I saw clearly my identity, who I am at the core. When I returned to New York City a year after living on the island, I officially assumed the name Dolphina to represent the new me, the true me.