Whenever we snorkel, we collect trash from the reef. Usually it consists of fish hooks, weights, or broken fishing line that is wrapped tightly around coral heads, but anything that should not be in the ocean is fair game. I intentionally wear a pair of swim trunks with a large pocket in which I place everything.
One perfect day when we had just left the water after a morning snorkel at Makua Beach in Waianae, I was warming in the sun when something suddenly leaped from my pocket and plopped onto the sand. When I bent down, I found myself gazing at a tiny octopus, perhaps an inch or two in length. That was bizarre. It was certainly the first time in my life I have had an octopus in my pocket. One time in Bangkok, I found a bar girl in my pocket, but an octopus . . . never.
We decided to take it to one of the shallow tide pools found at the far end of Makua, but when my wife picked it up, it latched onto her finger, and it was surprisingly difficult to peel it off her. We named him Cuomo.
Cuomo seemed really upset. He was a very sourpuss octopus. After spending only three minutes above the high-tide mark, he had already determined that people are imbeciles - and he hadn't even shopped at WalMart yet! He was clearly tired of his grand adventure; he was irritated; and he was ready to return to the ocean.
After a brief and extremely uncooperative photo session in the tide pool, I picked him up, told him he was going home, and walked back to the water. That's when he bit me. An octopus has a strong beak that it uses to break shells, and although this fellow was only an inch in length, his beak broke through the skin of my palm, drawing a trickle of blood. Fortunately, we were in Hawaii and not Australia because Australia is the home of the tiny blue-ringed octopus, which, according to Wikipedia, "carries enough venom to kill 26 adult humans within minutes."
Sometimes it seems to me that everything in Australia can kill you . . . and usually wants to kill you, too. The only exceptions are my cousins. Half the people in Bowen, Queensland, are my cousins, and they are the nicest people in the world. But their country's blue-ringed octopus is not. Same with the salt-water crocs. And eastern brown snakes. Great whites. Sea wasps. Death adders. Box jellyfish. (Right now, there are some misguided people in America muttering, "Yeah, yeah, they got all that, but they don't have Fauci." For the record, I don't know any of those people.)
I held on to Cuomo as I waded out through the shallows, and then I opened my palm and released him; he immediately darted into the blue depths, evading the snapping jaws of more than one hungry fish. I like to think that at this very moment, he is, in Ringo’s words, back “Under the sea, in his octopus’ garden, in the shade.“
Octopuses are fascinating creatures. More than 95% of all animals on Earth are invertebrates, and the octopus is the smartest of them all. Some people I know want to be an octopus, but that’s not because of their intelligence. It’s because they want to be able to slap eight people at once. OK . . . I can understand that.
A well-known actress - I won't reveal her name but you can easily find it online - has a quote that belongs in the Miss America pageant: "I love hugging. I wish I was an octopus, so I could hug ten people at a time!"
One last quote. I wish this were mine, but it's not, and I don't know who first said it. You'll understand it only if you've had kids:
"Sleeping with a toddler is like sharing your bed with a drunk octopus looking for its car keys."
You can go to Amazon and find a coffee cup with that inscription.
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