MILOS, Greece—Hunter, age 10, had awaited this moment for months—leaping from a moonscape, into the endless, deepest blue, since the second he saw it on brochure back home. Shipping out from Piraeus a few days before, standing on the top deck, the hillside lights of Athens fading in the background, I had asked my niece and nephew what they most anticipated on the voyage. Brooke, 13, gave an answer that was almost poetic. “The beautiful white buildings, and the beaches, and a new something to see, every day,” she told me. Hunter, 10, was much more straightforward. “Jumping off the rocks,” he said, without hesitation.
But now, standing on the precipice of the lunar landscape at Sarakiniko Beach on the quiet island of Milos, Hunter is having second thoughts. After a morning of gleefully flipping off the forward decks of a wooden sailboat, the long—much-longer—drop down a small cliff is giving him pause. Striding to the edge to look off the precipitous edge, he retreats back to get a pep talk from his mom. And then, a minute later, having crouched and flexed and otherwise drummed up his courage, Hunter ran, and leapt, the cheers of other swimmers rising up as he dropped, safely and with a splash, into the cold Aegean waters below.
