They feel everything

Poetics from a crocodile cruise guide

It was sweltering and sticky and the water was the color and opacity of milked tea. The river was swollen—an unusually high tide—and there were warnings from the staff at the Daintree River Cruises office that crocodiles would be hard to spot. As we waited to board the tour boat, the children complained, the mosquitos feasted and, in the distance a storm threatened. No one was in a good mood.

We were one week into a long-awaited trip to Australia—our first as a family of four, and the first since my father-in-law died, the second since my mother-in-law died. It had been six years since I last set foot in Australia, eight years since we packed up our apartment and moved back to the United States and started on the trajectory that landed us in rural New York.

I’ve written about how places can serve as time capsules before, and Sydney was no exception. It is a city like no other, and we lived there during such an intense time (the last years of my mother-in-law’s terminal cancer) that the whole place is preserved in a kind of amber for me. To be there, just two days after the death of our beloved family dog, was to be constantly moving through memories and emotions. The more our kids enjoyed themselves—playing with the cousins they’d never met, splashing in rock pools, eating Bubble O’Bills and mango hedgehogs, the more surreal the experience became. Here was our alternate life, the path we could’ve taken, laid out before us. Here was the field we were married in, the restaurant we ate at with San, the flat rock in Gordon’s Bay where I spent many hours thinking, thinking, thinking. Here was home. It was too much. I tamped it all down—my layers of grief, my regret, my guilt for being the one that brought us back to the US. I willed my mind blank.

It worked, until the crocodile cruise. We moved down the Daintree River at a painfully slow pace, everyone’s eyes scanning the banks, mistaking every log in the water for a crocodile. My sweaty, red-faced children lolled in my lap. At places the mangrove was thick and impenetrable. In others, it had been wiped bare—felled trees piled like matchsticks, standing trees bare except for their very top leaves—by record-breaking flooding in December 2023. All the while, the guide talked into a microphone fluidly, the sound of his broad accent obviously part of the admission price. He was a puzzling mix of crass and tender (not the first Australian to be described this way, I’m sure), telling off-color jokes about a female crocodile named Bruce Jenner and quipping three too many times about using my children as bait to lure the crocodiles to the boat. But he also described the ecological damage done to the mangroves with feeling, and told loving stories about the crocodile residents of the river by name.

And then, as we observed a large male crocodile (who might’ve been Bill or Gary or Bum-Eye, but it was hard to tell) drift through the water, he pointed to the partially submerged creature and told us that the small bumps on his skin were full of nerve endings that are more sensitive than human fingertips and that they covered every inch of his body. “They feel everything,” he said.

I immediately thought about this phrase from my childhood, “suck it up.” We were constantly telling each other to suck it up, or being told, or telling ourselves. Something is hard, or difficult, or painful? Suck it up. For a long time, this was my way through, the only way I knew how. But sitting on a small boat on an ancient river looking at this prehistoric being who appears armored but is, instead, sensitive beyond comprehension, I am saturated. My pain and my joy and my melancholy can’t be contained, tamped down, reduced by my sheer willpower any longer.

I promise myself to let the feelings come, but not right now. Right now I have to take a deep breath and fan my children with my hat and play I-Spy in a landscape of brown and green until we make it home.