Once upon a time, in the ocean, there was a young grouper.
He was big for his age, but that doesn’t count for much in the ocean, and he had to be constantly fearful of other creatures. Still, he managed not to get eaten for quite some time, and was getting large.
Near the area where the grouper swam, up on the shore, there was a town of humans. People lived there mostly for the beach, but there is more than beach to human lives, so they built things nearby as suited them. There was a road along the beach built up on an embankment to keep even high tides and surf from flooding it, and just on the other side of that road, inland, the people made a very flat area where they built baseball fields, basketball fields, volleyball fields, even tennis courts and a running track. This was very convenient for the people, having these recreational areas so close to the recreational area of the beach, and it worked well for some time.
One night, though, a huge storm came up the coast, bigger than any storm that anyone could remember, and the sea rose up and surged inland. It swept right over the people’s road up on its high embankment, and flooded their whole athletic area and all the fields several feet deep, sweeping the young grouper and many, many other sea creatures along with it, and when the storm subsided and the ocean went down all that water and all those creatures were trapped in the people’s athletic area.
Well, the storm had damaged many of the people’s buildings and homes, they had limited resources, and the new salt lake that had formed in the athletic area wasn’t the most important thing they had to deal with by far, so the water sat there for quite some time, month in and month out. A few of the people even fished in the new, strange lake.
It didn’t take the grouper long to get used to his new universe, small as it was compared to the ocean, and after some time it dawned on him that he was now the biggest of all the fish and sea creatures that he’d seen. He quickly got used to the idea, and he found that he could bully or eat any of the other fish just as he pleased.
Groupers, as a whole, aren’t known for having much memory, and of course young folks are not much inclined to listen to those who do have memories, so it wasn’t long before he’d forgotten all about the ocean and his former fearfulness in it, and he had no way to know that all that still existed anyway. He got quite used to being the biggest fish in the world, not having to fear anything and doing exactly as he pleased.
All was not well, though. Many of smaller fish had been eaten, there were fewer left to eat every day, and things seemed to be getting less healthy in general. Their world had shrunk vertically, and even though it had always been shallow since it was formed, it was not as deep as it had been. It was also getting darker all day long, nobody was feeling very good anymore, and even though their world was not deep, if they went down toward the bottom they felt sicker still.
Still, that just meant that the young grouper’s prey couldn’t hide nearly as well, and being the biggest fish in the world, he still had enough to eat. The situation was getting worse, but it was better for him than for anyone else there.
In the town of people the repairs to their homes and buildings had gone well, and they finally turned their attention to the new salt lake that had been their athletic fields. Some of the people were beginning to complain about not having the fields anymore, and that the new lake was starting to stink, look bad, and besides, the fishing there wasn’t very good anymore.
Those in charge of such things looked at the situation and realized that the more slowly they drained the new lake the more sea life would remain, and that certainly wasn’t going to help the stink, so they came up with a plan to temporarily open a large channel to the sea through the road all at once, so the lake would drain quickly, taking as much of the sea life with it as possible.
So, one day when there had been a lot of noise all of a sudden the grouper’s entire wold was MOVING in one direction, and he, and almost everyoen living in the little world of shallow water were swept back out to sea, to the ocean that the young grouper had forgotten all about.
It didn’t take him long to realize how much had changed, though, and after exploring just a little he thought to himself. “This is GREAT! The water is much better now, so much deeper, and we all feel better in it. There is an infinite space to explore, much more to eat than I ever thought there could be, and I AM THE BIGGEST FISH IN THE WORL…”.
– Robert the Wombat