The Intrepid Reporter

This would be the interview of Alika Zale’s lifetime.

She knocked over several textbooks and kicked aside some stray cardboard boxes as she dug through what seemed like hundreds of colorful portfolios, flipping through the pages until she found and yanked out the right documents. She pinned them onto her clipboard and tucked it under her elbow, slipping her ballpoint pen out from behind her ear and pulling out a loose strand of smooth, dark hair from her ponytail. She chugged down the last of her tea and slam-dunked it into her trash can. She dusted off her suit pants and her ink-black blazer and tugged at the crisp collar of her dress shirt. Then she snatched her camera off her desk, stuffed it into her satchel, and slung the leather bag over her shoulder, throwing the door to her office closed.

She marched through the rows of her fellow news writers, hunched over their computers, the clicking of the keys a cacophony as they hammered out their latest scoop. A few of them shot her an envious glare, but even that couldn’t wipe the smile off her face. They could talk behind her back all they wanted, but they couldn’t change the fact that her article would sit on the front page.

The elevator chimed pleasantly as it reached ground level, its steel walls parting down the middle and sweeping open like a downgraded version of the pearly gates. The sun beamed down on her, the voice of her uncle himself seeming to spur her on. Her shoes tapped against the cracked, grainy concrete as she skipped across the sidewalk. She flung herself onto the warm leather seats of the taxi, the fiery chariot that would deliver her through the bustling traffic and pothole-patched streets. The foul-mouthed driver, the guardian angel that would guide her to the light.

In her senior year of high school, she submitted her first article to a nationwide writing contest, detailing the poor living conditions that resulted in many physical and psychological health issues that marine mammals experienced in captivity, dissecting the case of the orca Tilikum as her prime piece of evidence. She received first place. She also received many complaints from the local aquarium after they lost a lot of profit and thousands of customers due to the ugly truth.

But the truth, however ugly, had to be shared with the people so that in the future, society could prevent what beautiful falsehood concealed. The truth satiated her thirst in a way that tea, or really any earthly drink, never could. It pulled on her, as the moon pulled on the tides. It was her calling, her one true love, her religion.

It all started with the ring of the doorbell of her old childhood home.

“Oh god, Brendan,” her mother said as soon as she opened the door, “what did you get yourself into this time?”

The lanky middle-aged man simply shrugged as he strolled in, grinning nonchalantly through his unkempt beard, his leather satchel slung across his shoulder. He tossed his brown hat and elegant black topcoat onto the shoe rack, his mussed dark blonde hair standing on end from the static.

“What can I say, Mary? It’s not every day you get the opportunity to scrape yourself on some coral from none other than the Great Barrier Reef itself.”

“Uncle Brendan! Uncle Brendan!” Alika sprang up from her chair at the kitchen table and flung herself into the lanky, middle-aged man’s tightly bandaged arms, nearly knocking off his tiny, circular glasses.

“Slow down there, my little detective, I don’t want you to hurt yourself.” Her mother placed her hands on her hips and raised an eyebrow at him.

“If only you followed your own advice.”

“Uncle Brendan, Uncle Brendan, can you show me the pictures you took?” Alika begged, jumping up and down as her excitement coiled and uncoiled like a spring.

“The floor is yours, kiddo!” Alika tugged him over to the living room and they plopped down on the carpet together. Uncle Bernard set down his satchel with a thump, shoving aside a giant portfolio stuffed with colorful tags and a bulky camera until he excavated a shiny black binder that Alika was all too familiar with. His one and only photo book. Then with the flourish of a magician yanking a rabbit out of his hat, he flung back the cover and turned to the first page. A sprawling swirl of white-gold land, vibrant green splotches of vegetation, cradled in the deep sapphire blue of the sea. A Dugong mucking around in soft clouds of sand with four bright, dandelion yellow, boldly striped creatures swimming alongside its graceful grey figure. A swirling spiral of shining steel streaked through with silvery fins and shimmering tails. A clownfish peeking out of the plump tendrils of a peach-pink anemone.

Every snapshot was only a fragment of the mysterious, enthralling, restless kaleidoscope of the world that he had the privilege of peering into. What about the mighty, gelid mountains of the Himalayas, the solemn, silent emerald forests of Japan, the vast amber sky and blood-scarlet horizon of the Sahara, or the great stone serpent of a wall that snaked across the east and west of Northern China? So many places, and so few years, but Uncle Brendan's focus never wavered. His camera may as well have been a crossbow, always trained on one bullseye in particular. Arctic, Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Baltic, Red, or Dead, he and his lens always found a way back to the sea.

“Why do you choose it?” Alika whispered. Her uncle’s bushy brows furrowed.

“Choose what?”

“The sea.” Her uncle hummed to himself, his hooked nose turned up, scratching his stubble in thought.

"Hmm, why did I choose the sea?" he mumbled to himself.

"Why not somewhere safer?" Alika added.

"Why do I choose again and again a place so untameable and unpredictable?" Uncle Brendan continued to muse. His body stayed completely still, but his eyes darted back and forth in a frenzy as he paced through the winding corridors of the labyrinth of his mind. Each new question that he posed to himself sharpened his words, his sentences a sword that cut through the air. "Why risk drowning in its tumultuous wrath, all for a glimpse of the glimmer of the treasures that lie in its calm?"

He stiffened and his breath hitched as if the answer hit him with the force of an actual blow, then he broke out into a sudden, hearty laugh so loud that a startled Alika almost tumbled backward onto the carpet. He picked up his photobook, fanning through the pages until his finger, the needle of his internal compass, landed on a certain iridescent page. A picture of a leatherback sea turtle swimming through the crystal blue waters.

“Tell me, Alika, do you know how turtles cross several hundreds of kilometers of the ocean with no visual landmarks and still return to the exact spot where they were born to lay their own eggs?” She shook her head. He stuck up his index finger and spun it around in a circle. “They use the currents as a guide; the currents of the sky. Also known as the Earth’s magnetic fields.” He smiled at her, his teeth sparkling with a ferocity and vitality to match that of the depths themselves, and his ember ignited her soul in turn. “And that’s the key, kiddo. I don’t choose. I just go with the current.”

For that fateful afternoon, he said the words that Alika would live by as a disciple lived by the verses of their teacher.

“Sometimes the waves of change lead us in our true direction.”

“It’s beautiful,” she murmured, running her fingers over the precious images.

“Take a good look at it, Ally,” her uncle said softly. “Usually sights this beautiful don’t last for long.”

And surely enough, ten years later, like a sea turtle finds its way back home, the ugly truth found its way to the front page. The first headline was written by none other than Brendan Zale.

Climate change is the biggest threat facing the reef.

Alika clutched her clipboard close to her heart. The tires screeched against the tar as they sped down the highway, the towering skyscrapers and iridescent billboards of the megalopolis flashing by her window. She went through the questions, again and again, quickly mouthing out the sentences her eyes scanned. She rehearsed the motions, her professionalism carefully practiced and choreographed. Chin up. Back straight. Perfect posture. She could not - no - she would not mess this up.

The articles she had read over the past eight months swarmed through her skull.

In five years, marine heatwaves triggered four mass coral bleaching events, reducing shallow-water coral reefs by as much as eighty percent.

Twenty cyclones of category four or more have caused irreversible damage to coastal cities.

Her uncle knew this would happen as soon as he came back from the Barrier Reef; a decade earlier than everyone else. At first, when Kiribati drowned under the rising sea levels, people denied it, but after the hurricanes reduced Rehoboth Beach to ruins and Sanya sank, there were no more doubts. The tides were turning. The global flood that ancient cultures from all over the world tried to warn them about was on the cusp of arrival.

And this, the interview of Alika Zale's lifetime, could unveil the ark that would save everyone from extinction.