Higgins - Maeve in America: essays by a girl from somewhere else

S LIPPING INTO SHOCK, using all my strength just to keep my head above the choppy waters of the Pacific Ocean, I couldnt muster up the energy to climb back onboard the boat. I just clung on to the ladder, making a sound quite similar to a shouting goat. The tour guide leaned over the side and called out, Up you get! Come on, nearly there, youll be fine! in a chirpy but anxious tone, the one youd use to coax an aging relative back into the nursing home. I couldnt move. She climbed down the ladder and hauled me up on deck herself, tiny and all as she was. I lay there for a minute, curled up like a fern. A vomiting fern. Are you pregnant? she asked, and I shook my head. Its just that dolphins are the midwives of the sea and it seemed like they were trying to help you. No, they werent, I said, coughing up seawater and my lunch. They were trying to kill me.

You see, I once swam with wild dolphins off the coast of New Zealand. If I told you that, and nothing else, how would that statement make me sound? Am I a chill girl, a surfer, not just on the waves but on life itself, someone who just goes with the flow, happy wherever, a lithe beauty laughing in the flickering light of a campfire, ankle bracelets glinting, sun-bleached head of hair thrown back? Do I love nature, treasure all the creatures of the sea, and commune with Mother Earth as seamlessly as a sunflower, as fluently as a fish? I would love for that to be the case, but that is absolutely not the case. Its dead wrong. Its purely aspirational, and does not match the truth even a little bit.

Here on dry land, I blunder around the place making mistakes all day long, misunderstanding others, managing to over- and underestimate my own motivations and capabilities as I go about the endlessly tricky business of being a regular human being. So why should I be any different under the sea? Particularly when Im surrounded by dolphinsthe most malevolent creatures known to man.

At that time, I was coming to the end of a three-month stint of comedy festivals throughout Australia and New Zealand. I ask you again, how does that statement make me sound? Like a world traveler, a touring artist, shuttling between airplanes and hotels and theaters with a host of funny and charming friends, taking things global? There is truth to that, of courseI was getting opportunities to work and travel that I had never dreamed of. I mean that. It was never my dream to stay in a hotel in Bundaberg with an older English comic who closed the show every night with a routine, that never failed to bring the house down, comparing his childs birth and wifes body during said birth, as akin to watching his favorite pub burn down. Id just kind of followed along a string of various successes and failures and found myself here; I was on the road, a job coveted by many, but one I never quite chose. And this was the realitylots of checking in, to flights and hotels and venues, lots of time spent with people Id never voluntarily choose to spend time with, and plenty of bewildered, if not hostile, audience members waiting for the big loud boys they preferred.