Adventure Aquarium

I’m with my daughter petting cownose stingrays by dipping my hand into a large warm water touch pool inside the bright and airy Stingray Beach Club room at the Adventure Aquarium in Camden, New Jersey. The rays feel squishy and slimy and act like puppies. I have to keep reminding my daughter to use the required two-finger touch method instead of her whole hand, not because I really care, but because I don’t want to get any more annoying looks from the exhibit staff.

I get a call from an Aquarium manager saying that my wallet was found near Penguin Park. I guess my wallet’s “if found” note served at least part of its purpose. My daughter looks at me and asks with mild disbelief, “Again?” I imagine all the things that might have been stolen as we make our way to pick it up: $30 bucks, coupons, pics of my daughter as a baby, old fly fishing receipts, and who knows what else an aquarium thief may want from that old tattered brown piece-of-myself.

I try and remain calm, but I’m panicking. What if a thief maxes out my cards? Steals my identity? What if I can’t afford my daughter’s college? We head over to the front ticketing area to pick it up and after a few interactions to prove it’s my wallet, I discover both my credit cards and all my cash have been taken. How can one aquarium dad do this to another? I quickly call my wife and tell her what happened, and she begins the process of canceling cards. She’s good at that kind of stuff.

The Aquarium, where the overall cleanliness is ambiguous, can be so crowded on Saturdays that we literally dodge other parents and kids walking in and out of rooms usually in the wrong direction because no one seems to ever pay attention to the arrow-signs, but since it takes two damn hours to get out here I figure we should stay and try to enjoy these animals anyway. Credit cards or not.

It’s the Spring my daughter turns 10. She is already reading books I didn’t read until late high school. We recently purchased her first writing desk from Pottery Barn where she now reads and draws and does her homework and it seems to have centered something within her. I imagine her ten years from now traveling the world, camping among the towering mountains of the French Alps like her mother once did, or fly fishing off one of the Seychelles Islands in the heart of the Indian Ocean. I want that for her. I do. That, and more.

When I was twenty, I drag-raced in a Vegas mall parking lot. I swam with a friend fifty yards off the shore of Laguna Beach in the dead of night, panicking with each strange movement below my feet. I traveled to Nicaragua and worked with a local nonprofit to rebuild a village that had been destroyed by a mudslide, where we had to be guarded at night by men with machetes. These days I can barely stand for twenty minutes before my back starts to ache. The hair on my head is disappearing and what’s left is turning gray. Maybe looks don’t matter at my age anyway or maybe I’ll just wear more Omega watches or Allen Edmonds to embrace whatever that is supposed to embrace.

My daughter glides in front of me like a winged pixie and we make our way passed the Snapping Crab Beer Garden, not as worried as she used to be about me being close behind. She passes the Sea Turtle Cove and makes her way to the Shark Tunnel like she already knows exactly what she wants. When she was four, I used to have to carry her quickly passed the Megalodon jaw since just the sight of it made her cry. Now she stands inside the jaw below the rows of six-inch teeth and laughs. She points at the hammerheads with her red, nail-polished fingers and explains that the head is shaped like that for enhanced vision and improved electroreception.

“I can’t wait to learn to scuba dive,” she tells me. The thought of being deep under water for hours scares me and I realize she’s actually the real adventurer I always thought I would be.

The Aquarium is starting to get less dense with people and it’s nearing closing time. I wonder if the thief used the $30 bucks to buy ice cream for their own kids or one of those dolphin stuffed animals from the gift shop or maybe they saw my daughter’s baby photos and got inspired to take their own pictures at the Polaroid Instant Booth. On the fridge at home, I still have the set we took together in the booth on our first visit.

We come to the Piranha Falls again and there is something about the mixture of smells with the simulated rain and the plants and the fake thunder and lightning that makes it feel more real than real life. Everything feels perfect and safe and beautiful, like the way things were before the realities of life crept in. As we make our way passed the bird enclosures, I tell her that it’s probably time to go, that it’s getting late and we’ve already seen and done everything we can, including the VR whale experience and the hurricane simulation machine.

She stops to buckle her black low-heel shoes and we sit for a minute inside the Oceanic Light Zone where different marine life are projected onto the walls. The figures created by the lights seem to wrap their shadowy fins around us holding us close together. She tells me which fish are her favorite and why as they go by on the wall. I cherish each of explanation.

I look down at my phone and see a text, “Cards cancelled.” Before I can look up, she is already running into the next room, waving her hand at me to keep up. She nibbles on the cotton candy we bought earlier in the day that’s been sitting precariously in my backpack and makes her way up to the second floor because she wants to touch the horseshoe crabs.

“Can we please stay just a little longer, Dad?” she asks.

We laugh at ourselves.

“Yes, let’s do it,” I say to her.

“Let’s stay.”