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The winds had picked up again, whipping the ocean into a frothy mess making our visibility difficult. A cyclone slammed against the coast a week before, pulling up coral from its reef bed, breaking trees like twigs and littering the coast with debris. A cyclone is an inward spiraling wind. The word itself, auspicious enough, means the coil of a snake; a force of nature often referred to as a ‘meteorological phenomenon’. Set like an emerald stone in a delicate strand of seventeen other islands along the tropical Capricorn coast, this dollop of land was once home to the Whoppaburra people. The sands are painted with its histories, reds to brown, deep and dusty, orange and pink, near purple. The hills teach traditions offering secrets of lost cultures. You can see the ocean wrestle with color fading from deep blue to exquisite turquoise. These islands freckle the Great Barrier Reef and make up a protected marine park that teems with wild noises and vibrant life. Butterflies swarm this time of year filling the sky over head with spotted black and blue clouds of wing and shadow. I had come to help clean up the aftermath. The heat slides in on the morning so intense it sets bone marrow to a boil. This island with no cars, magazine quality beaches and the eerie midnight bird song of the curlew had become my temporary home. This particular day we had taken the kayaks out to spice up a lazy afternoon. Our adventure was proving to be a naive attempt at flinging caution into a very angry breeze. The waves came sideways in quick choppy bits splashing over the front tip of the kayak blinding me with salty spray. Gusts of wind booted the kayak forward into a nose dive rocking us through the dips and valleys of the waves with whiplash intensity. The current forced the nose of our boat in the opposite direction we paddled in. My shoulders burned. We were out in open ocean. I felt way out of my element which had become a norm on this trip so far. Mountainous rock jutted out sharply blocking our view of the beach. Without the destination in sight, I felt a quiver of panic light up the crest of my belly. It was this outcropping, a ninety degree angle, that we were attempting to avoid while simultaneously turning 360 degrees and laboring for shore. Further out in the sloshing waves, a mate’s boat tipped losing all paddles and picnic paraphernalia. I decided to jump in and leverage my desperation to propel us back to shore. Thankfully, I shared aloud my half-baked plan with my boat mate; a fiery haired Brit with a proper accent. She promised to kill me herself if I didn’t get eaten by the salties first! Australia has a strange magic and Great Keppel island a particular pull. It hides a woop woop (Australian for really small) village of twenty or so tents set on platforms with tin roofs, twin beds, a fan, a lamp and a chair on the front ‘porch’ that makes the tent feel like a palace. The shared kitchen brings a gathering every morning and most evenings when the village air fills with boisterous Australian lingo. Crows dot the trees like giant black berries and bats the size of hawks hang upside down, watching. Exhausted and from the safety of my tent, I watched the sun slip into the ocean. I had traced my curiosity up the Eastern coast of Australia seeking answers to questions I didn’t know I had. With swirling notions of purpose, strangely, the cyclone offered me direction. It seemed fitting for my life just then; a graduate student set on the precipice of a career with an unknown future. The swirling winds of chaos had become a homeopathic to my own. I was not aware of the salties. Later, I would recall the boat ride that brought me to this island. It was night and the moon had shone brightly on calm waters providing a path for the nose of the ferry; a pale yellow like the gold road that led Dorothy to the wizard.