The Storyteller, the Dreamer, and the Discovery of the Biggest Shark on Earth

Every summer Rosa Bond and Kevin McKnight would meet up at the one place that had bonded them since childhood: Camp Cross in Jupiter, Florida. Rosa was a born and raised Floridian but Kevin came all the way from North Carolina. He was the only out of towner because his dad used to be a marine biologist. Now he was fighting in Vietnam and just trying to keep his dead down. Kevin and his mom still lived in North Carolina to be close to her family.

Rosa knew someone in her family was from somewhere else that led to her living in Florida, but no one talked about it anymore. Everyone who came there seemed to live in her house. Twice a week there was a new cousin who her grandmother was ushering in and making a bowl of food for. There wasn’t a lot of room, indoors or out. Their house was one of many on the block where property lines overlapped. Just because they didn’t live in the Bond house didn’t mean they weren’t treated like family. Rosa was able to go to camp because her parents worked.

Rosa and Kevin’s friends faded into the background during the eight weeks of staying at Camp Cross. Every year after they met she would go with her parents at four in the morning to get things ready and see Kevin as quick as possible. The cabins for the boys and girls were on opposite sides of the canteen, but one stayed out after curfew with the other to keep an eye on the coastline. Every day of the eight weeks, no matter what was scheduled, Rosa and Kevin would be on guard duty looking for what Kevin swore he’d seen on a fishing trip with his dad.

The story was a big one to hear Kevin tell it.

It was the last day of the summer and his dad had decided to take him out on the boat for an entire day. The breeze was crisp as ice in the early morning as soon as they sailed out. Kevin had a life jacket on over a sweater his mom made him put on. There was speculation that his dad had gotten a kid-size thermal diving suit so Kevin could swim as close to the bottom of the ocean as he could possibly get. His dad was a ‘World League Professional’, according to Kevin, with forty confirmed dives in about a thousand countries each. He did it all of the time to look for sunken treasure no one else had ever seen before and tell the other scientists about what it meant. His dad was the real life Aquaman.

The sunlight was beaming down by noon caused Kevin to be able to take off the sweater without getting in trouble with his mom later. They hadn’t been able to catch anything, but Kevin was more focused on when he was going to be able to make the dive downward. He kept asking his dad who only wanted to talk about them moving to Florida for good. He was going to have to ship out soon and it might be more fun to be there than stay back home at North Carolina. Although Kevin’s dad wasn’t enlisted in the army, there were a lot of his friends’ dads who were leaving more and more lately. He didn’t think anything of it until then.

Instead of answering or talking about needing to be the man of the house when it was just him and his mom, Kevin jumped into the water. He didn’t have any suit and his lifejacket was still off from when he wanted to remove his sweater. He started fighting the water to stay up and was only under for a second (though he would say he nearly died) when his dad jumped in and saved him. Right at that moment, the biggest shark in the entire world swam passed them. If they had been in the water they would have both been eaten alive.

No one believed it other than Rosa. Her family told similar stories of when they came to Florida from wherever they were before. The biggest difference was that they didn’t have safe boats or lifejackets to stay alive: only the clothes on their back and a dream. Those were very important in Rosa’s family. They never disparaged her from what she wanted to do, but her grandmother especially. If Rosa wanted to be a horse one day, she could do it. If she wanted to be a cook for a lot of kids like how her parents did, that was a wonderful idea. If she wanted to see the biggest shark in the world then she just needed to learn how to swim faster.

Summer after summer Rosa and Kevin made it a point to find this gigantic shark in the Atlantic Ocean. It wasn’t impossible. Animals in Florida always went where they weren’t supposed to. As he got older and when his dad came home Kevin didn’t tell the origin story anymore. He turned colder towards his dad that when his parents divorced and Kevin still had to come to Florida, it wasn’t completely surprising. He and Rosa just found other motivation. Anytime a dorsal fin came up the hopelessness subsided. As big of a let down it was when it wasn’t the shark they were looking for, it still meant that it might be out there.

On the last year they were able to attend Camp Cross before having to attend as counselors if they wanted to go, Kevin and Rosa stayed out a lot more often. Their own counselors had amped up watching over them now that they were thirteen and refused to let them go anywhere alone together without a chaperon. They would oftentimes get bored watching them stare over the fencing all day without the guarantee they’d even see a ripple from something different than the day before.

Rosa cried the entire last day. When she did manage to get to the bus stop to say goodbye to Kevin, she hugged him until the bus driver was honking. He gave her a scrap piece of paper with a North Carolina address. She ran after the bus all the way to the end of the large and continually expanding parking lot. She looked up to the skies and sent a thanks to her grandmother in heaven. Rosa had wanted so much for an opportunity to talk to Kevin more. She believed her grandmother had passed away to become her guardian angel and to lead her through this.

Letters went back and forth for the rest of the year until they slowed in winter. Rosa’s version of events were greatly exaggerated at the time.

She would send him letters day after day in those weeks where nothing was happening on his end. She met the mailman at the post office often enough to receive birthday cards and invitation to dinners. She became so angry about that she thought she was going to explode. Kevin was supposed to be her summer best friend turned year-round best friend. Even her own ones from school weren’t as fun to be around anymore when she knew that she couldn’t look forward to getting back to Camp Cross. No one else wanted to see what she was looking for the way that he did. They wouldn’t get that the best days of her life were all at a fence staring at the ocean for any sign of the biggest shark in the world. Kevin abandoning her without resolving this issue was the rudest thing she ever heard of in her entire life.

Rosa’s parents continued working at Camp Cross while she stayed home over the next few years. She was in high school now and found other interests. She was the best photographer in her class, she absorbed science classes easier than before, and she looked forward to maybe getting work at a newspaper after school. She wanted to be a reporter first and get to writing about wildlife later when she had the option to do anything. She applied to anywhere in Florida she could easily get to and from by bus at least. If she hadn’t grown up never being told to keep her dreams realistic, Rosa might not have had the thick-skin when the door was slammed in her face. No one needed women writers. They did want someone to get their coffee.

When getting a job after graduation didn’t come as easily as she thought it would with her grades, Rosa took the unpaid coffee jobs. She had to at least be close to a starting point. Meanwhile she took whatever odd jobs she could. Cleaning, waitressing, part-time receptionist, all of it sometimes in one day after being a gopher at the local newspaper. She found her reprieve by writing the articles she wanted to in notebooks. There was never enough paper. There was an even rarer moment when her thoughts didn’t drift to Kevin McKnight and Camp Cross Shark.

The second summer after graduation, Rosa’s mother wasn’t able to take the chef job at the camp. She and her father had already made promises that they would continue returning as long as the pay was good. The camp accepted Rosa as an alternative option before she could even be asked. She begrudgingly took down her signs around the neighborhood auctioning off her many services, left the unpaid gopher work, and hitched the bus ride with her father to Camp Cross.

Once again Rosa Bond was in the canteen helping get things together before the campers showed up. She worked around the kitchen micromanaging and doing ten things at once as she was used to in order to get it all done. Within the hour, her feet were already hurting and she was sweating. Her father stepped in front of her, guided her through a deep breath in and a deep breath out. He reminded her that the reason she was here was because her mother had stressed herself out to the point it was doctor’s orders to take it easy. Rosa’s grandmother had claimed until her last breath that not taking life so hard was the privilege they had living in America. Even if they arrived at such a dark point in history.

Rosa tried keeping her heartrate below 122 beats per minute but it was hard the second the kids came screaming off the bus. They were already lined up at the camp store banging on the service window demanding to buy drinks and snacks. Rosa took the spot, where her assets and quick thinking would be better used than cutting crusts off bread, and dealt with them one by one. She did it mindlessly without thinking about who she was talking to. By lunchtime she was running on auto-pilot with every price for everything implanted in her brain down to the nickel.

Her father assured her to go take a break. The lunch hour was taken care of and he could manage dishes until she got back to begin working on dinner. Rosa had learned to take her breaks when offered. In the position she crafted for herself, it was unknown when the next one would come along. She grabbed a bottle of water and headed to the one place she knew it was going to be quiet.

The fencing was falling apart, but the property line had been expanded outward anyhow. She sat on the grass and watched the horizon for any new ripple, finding the old ones as if the knowledge never left her. She could hear her grandmother’s voice reminding her to write it down when she got back to the cabin. She still didn’t find anything and wondered if Kevin actually was making it all up through hindsight. She got up to leave only to have something else find her.

“Rosa!”