7. Swim with Dolphins

I'm guessing this desire started way back when I was a kid, watching the tv show 'Flipper', a show about an intelligent bottlenose dolphin who interacted with a park ranger and his two young sons. There are two scenes that I remember most vividly: one of Flipper 'laughing', with his head out of water and making squeaky 'ack-ack' dolphin sounds, and another of someone holding on to Flipper's dorsal fin and going for a ride. Flipper seemed so smart, a cross between a horse and a mermaid, and I wanted to meet a Flipper friend for myself.

Later, in my early adult years, as we learned more about dolphin intelligence, their use of echolocation, and their assistance of humans in distress, the question was raised: are humans the only sentient life on the planet? Was novelist Douglas Adams right when he wrote in 'So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish' that the dolphins were actually here to save us humans? Could it be that dolphin consciousness is equivalent to our own, with equivalent forms of communication, family and friend relationships and a sense of community? What would it be like to meet fin-to-face with one of these intelligent mammals? Would I experience a 'mystical meeting of souls' as one of my more metaphysically inclined friends had experienced? Or would I be transported back to my childhood frame of mind, playfully excited to just be in the water with my friend Flipper? I decided to do my best to leave pre-conceived notions behind, and just stay open to what happened.