My Underwater Self
I never sought out the wide open spaces. I longed for the peace of the deep.
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I don’t mean to say that that first descent into the pool wearing my leaky drugstore mask was a religious experience. But I was intrigued and unsettled in a way we can only be during those few childhood years when it is still possible to glimpse a new world without having guessed at its existence beforehand. It was a new world, and simply knowing that it was there, that I could enter it, filled me with a vague contentment. I had found the wormhole— the rent in the fabric of normal exist- ence—through which it was possible to enter some deeply satisfying other universe.
I thought of that knowledge as my secret, though of course millions of others were just as entranced, just as eager to pass through this mysterious portal. In the late fifties, “skin diving,” as it was then called, was only beginning to be perceived in the light of mainstream sanity. Until Jacques Cousteau and Emile Gagnan invented the demand regulator in 1943, recreational diving had been a cultish activity practiced mostly on the Mediterranean coast by men who referred to themselves as “gogglers” or “underwater hunters” and who banded together in associations that had wonderful names like Club Alpin Sous-Marin (Underwater Mountain-Climbers Club). Using only lung power, wearing motorcycle goggles, and carrying tridents and spears fashioned from umbrella ribs, they plunged into unexplored coral gardens that were still rich with primeval splendor, where the sluggish mérous and other prey fish had not yet been imprinted with the fear of man. The introduction of “scuba”—not yet a word but an acro- nym for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus—made diving a more intrusive sport. All at once the hu- man association with the underwater environment was no longer so exquisitely tentative.
SCUBA DIVING, FROM THE BEGINNING, had an air of dangerous allure. Every landlocked schoolboy knew of its intriguing hazards: The bends, which caused a diver’s veins to fizz with nitrogenated blood until he died a ghastly, percolating death; or rapture of the deep, which took away his reason, filled his heart with false contentment, and drew him down into the ocean gloom. Like millions of my contemporaries, I was transfixed by Sea Hunt, the TV series that featured Lloyd Bridges as a former Navy diver named Mike Nelson. In episode after episode, Mike Nelson would be found locked in deadly underwater combat with some evil agent or saboteur. Knives drawn, the two antagonists would cartwheel slowly through the water, each trying to sever his opponent’s air hose and send him gasping to the surface.
Nowadays scuba diving is a rather contemplative leisure-time activity, but back in the Sea Hunt days it was just another test of manly worth. I learned to dive when I was fourteen, in a YMCA pool in Corpus Christi, and like everyone else in the class, I imagined myself upon graduation patrolling the blue waters of the Gulf, a spear gun in my hand and an underwater Bowie knife in a plastic sheath strapped to my calf. The class itself, appropriately enough for these martial fantasies, was run like a boot camp. Our first task was to tread water for thirty minutes without using our hands, while the instructors made sarcastic comments from the side of the pool. The tanks we used were bare gray cylinders held onto our shoulders with canvas webbing that left deep impressions in the skin. The air in the tanks was delivered to our mouths by means of old-fashioned double-hosed regulators—the kind used by Mike Nelson himself—and their long accordion-pleated hoses fanned out from our faces like the gills of a salamander. In the classroom lectures, as terse as football skull sessions, we struggled to solve incomprehensible decompression problems and watched as the blackboard filled up with physical theorems and crude sketches of ruptured lungs.
I felt as if we were training to be not merely recreational divers but members of some elite underwater commando unit. I gloried in that illusion. My diving knife, for instance, was not just a mundane tool to free myself from fishing line and other underwater entanglements, it was the weapon with which I would one day rip open the hide of an attacking shark. But beyond all the warlike daydreaming and posturing was a deeper thrill. In the first few sessions, I had trouble getting to the bottom of the pool, since none of the techniques for equalizing pressure in my eustachian tubes seemed to work for me, and I was beset with a constant pain in my ears. Added to that was the simple problem of strangeness—the ungainly equipment, the dulled sensory awareness, the panicky sound of my own breathing as I drew and expelled the dry bottled air. Once I had passed through all these barriers, however, I detected in myself a kind of serenity. Hanging limply on the bottom with my fins barely grazing the concrete, looking out through the glass of my face mask, whose reversed letters assured me I was protected by a “tempered lens,” I felt a disembodied contentment—the contentment a soul is said to feel when it rises from the chrysalis of a cast-off body. At the age of fourteen, my body was practically new, but I was already a little weary of its predictable sensations and its burgeoning adult demands. Underwater, it had new properties; it had, for the first time, a grace of movement. With a portable air supply these sustained jaunts beneath the surface were a violation of the laws of nature, yet I felt more in conformance with the natural world than I ever had before.
Nowadays all scuba classes end with a check-out dive in open water, but in 1962 there was no such requirement. By the time I was through with my instruction, I had a joyless familiarity with the U.S. Navy decompression tables and a reasonable confidence that I could handle any diving emergency that might arise in a swimming pool. Answering an ad in the paper, I bought a used tank and regulator for $25. I took the equipment home and gazed at it wistfully, but something kept me from gathering it together and heading out into the Gulf with the fish hunters who had taught me to dive. Looking back, I realize I was simply afraid. The Gulf was vast and often rough, and the offshore oil platforms where all the diving was done were patrolled by hammerhead sharks and thousand-pound groupers that, according to legend, had actually gulped divers into their mouths. The Gulf of Mexico was not the point of entry I had imagined for myself—not the quiet little brook of The Water Babies but a roiling dark blue mass that could absorb an intruder like a vicious storm.
My secondhand equipment went unused and was passed on to another eager buyer when I went to college in Austin. In a landlocked university town during the late sixties, when almost every aspect of existence was caught up in urgent historical rumbling, my preoccupation with diving was merely a quaint relic. The reality around me was phantasmagorical enough. The ordered, limited world I had grown up with was suddenly capable of shape-shifting revelations. I remember the hysterical joy I experienced the first and only time I took LSD—joy because I felt confirmed in my belief that there was more, that human awareness did not necessarily need to end inside the cold gray walls that marked the boundaries of our conventional perceptions.
But strangeness has a short shelf life. Before long it turns into just another stale component of reality. As I passed through my twenties, as one daydream after another lost its conviction, I still craved the otherworldly sensations of diving.
FINALLY I WAS DRAWN BACK INTO IT. I had long since forgotten how to work the decompression tables and my certification card had expired, but I brushed up with a private instructor in the pool of an apartment complex and was soon reaccredited. I signed up for a three-day diving trip. The boat left from the coastal town of Freeport and ran all night to a deep, isolated reef—the northernmost coral reef in the western hemisphere—known as the Flower Gardens.
At dawn I looked out over the Gulf to see a big sea turtle surfacing twenty yards away. The turtle’s head was blunt, and its features conveyed an impression of morose curiosity. All around the creature was the infinite blankness of the ocean. It was eerie and exhilarating to imagine the sort of life that turtle led, as solitary as a comet wandering through space.
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