Luckily for Aleki Taumoepeau, a New Zealand man, love might be bottomless but the ocean is not. Over a year ago, Aleki, a newly-wed ecologist, was conducting an environmental sweep of the Wellington harbor when he accidentally dropped his wedding ring into the water. His wife Rachel remembers:
“It flew off into the air and everyone on the boat was looking at it and said it was like a scene from Lord of the Rings in slow motion.”
Many people would probably have heaved a sigh and given it up for lost, but Aleki was determined to find the ring. He tossed an old anchor overboard to mark the spot, noted the GPS coordinates of the catastrophe, and hoped for the best. His first opportunity to look came three months later, when he returned to Wellington for a conference.
Borrowing some equipment, he attempted a dive but the conditions were poor, and his coordinates, it turned out, were faulty. But did he give up hope? He sure didn’t. Over a year later, with his wife and baby watching on the shore, he made the trek out one more time. This time, aided with some new coordinates from Google Earth and Niwa, he actually managed to find the anchor, with (surprisingly enough) the ring shining next to it. What are the odds that he would find that exact spot? And the chances of the ring not having shifted position, gotten covered by sand, been eaten by a fish, and so on and so forth?
Perhaps what’s most noteworthy is that this man was so determined to find this specific ring that his wife gave him on their wedding day. The article in The Dominion Post mentioned that Aleki’s wife had offered to buy him a brand new one. Things are just, you know, things. So what might explain his fixation on finding this exact object?
I wonder if they used some variation on the wedding vows one often sees in movies and TV shows, where the officiator pronounces, “May this/these ring(s) be blessed as the symbol of this affectionate unity,” and the bride and groom declare, “I give you this ring as the pledge of my love and as the symbol of our unity and with this ring, I thee wed.”
It’s possible to underestimate the power of these kinds of symbols; obviously, Aleki’s love for his wife is not only bound up in the ring. But it was, apparently, important for Aleki to have that specific ring imbued with those specific emotions present in his life; important enough to have him brave the Wellington harbor waters a full sixteen months after he lost the thing.
Or maybe he just felt foolish and/or superstitious losing his ring just three months after getting married. Either way, his dogged quest for the One True Ring should bode well for his marriage.
