Here’s the history of life as we know it. First came single-cell organisms around 4.1 billion years ago in hydrothermal vents, many scientists say, deep in the ocean. About 600 million years later came multi-cellular organisms. Hundreds of millions of years after came the earliest animals. Hundreds of millions of years after that came the ancestors of modern humans. Perhaps there’s a fragment somewhere in my DNA that remembers my unicellular origin, remembers when my ancient relatives propelled through the sea engulfing nutrients. Is that why I am hypnotized by the ocean?

To Australians, kangaroos are ordinary. To me, kangaroos are exotic. I am a tourist from the United States and like most tourists, I hope to see kangaroos. Watch them bound 25 feet in a single hop, jump six-feet high, zoom by at 40 miles per hour powered by their muscular hind legs and propelled by their powerful tails which provide both balance and force. And since my partner Arnie and I are spending three months in the country where kangaroos are native, where they travel in groups called mobs, I expect to see a lot of them.