My Underwater Self
I never sought out the wide open spaces. I longed for the peace of the deep.
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The sensation of jumping into the open sea that first time was as startling and absolute as I’d always imagined the sensation of skydiving would be. All at once, I was alone in the firmament, and though I was not hurtling downward, the feeling of suspension was just as intense.
It took me three or four calculated breaths to calm myself and look down past the blunt swaying tips of my fins. The water was a deep blue, and against this backdrop the expanding bubbles that arose from the diver below me were a brilliant silver, so sharply defined they looked like solid metal discs hurtling toward the surface. I grabbed hold of the descent line and lowered myself hand over hand. I had not gone five feet when my ears began to hurt. The trapped air in my eustachian tubes felt as dense as mercury, and there was no way I could relieve the pressure. I moved my jaws up and down, I pressed the mask against my face and exhaled, I swallowed and rocked my head from side to side, but the pain just grew more concentrated. I must have stayed there for ten minutes, humiliated, until finally, bit by bit, the pain lessened and I was able to sink slowly to the coral bank.
The divemaster took my hand as if I were a girl and led me around, pointing out the fan worms and Christmas tree worms that would pop back into their burrows as we approached them, the mustardy growths of stinging fire coral, a crevice from which a small spotted moray eel protruded, its flat body swaying in the current like a banner. The divemaster let go of my hand and gestured with a wide sweep of his arm at the seascape before me—the bulbous mounds of brain coral, the fissures and shallow canyons floored with blinding white sand. It was a theatrical, half-joking gesture, but I chose to read it seriously. Here is the place, the divemaster’s outstretched arm seemed to indicate, that you have been seeking.
I had only a glimpse on that dive, since I had depleted most of the air in my tank during my slow and stressful descent. I did not understand the radiant and unsettling forms of life that stretched out before me—the corals and fishes and anemones and the specks of plankton that swept over the reef like particles swirling in a beam of light. There was no way to focus on any one piece of the reef, to find some crucial illuminating detail that would help me perceive its purpose. The waving tentacles, the darting fish, the ceaseless secret business of the reef filled me less with wonder than with anxiety. My desire to comprehend this place was a kind of panic.
As I gained altitude, rising toward the surface and the shadow of the boat seventy feet overhead, the separate components of the Flower Gardens became a compacted, colorless mass. Barracuda hovered along the descent line, their teeth exposed in a carnivore’s rictus, their eyes ticking off my passage. Behind them was the ocean backdrop—it had the deep blue tincture of an approaching thunderhead. I wafted to the surface like a figure in a dream, and when I climbed back onto the boat, the memory of that first brief visit to the reef taunted me until it was time to go down again.
THAT WAS YEARS AGO. the dive is recorded in my first logbook, a pale blue vinyl notebook whose waterproof pages, bound with a plastic spiral, provide space for indicating visibility, bottom time, maximum depth, and temperature. I soberly entered this data, and on the lines reserved for “Comments,” I merely made a few guarded observations—“shallow coral heads; thermocline at 80'; barracuda; strong surface current.” There was no room to say more, and anyway I loved my terse declarative observations with their authoritative semicolons. At the time, those words seemed as well chosen and concentrated with meaning as the words of a haiku.
Eventually that first logbook was filled up, and then another. Brusque as they are, they seem to me now like dream journals, like diaries kept in a fever. Reading back through them fills me with nervous energy and with a kind of resentment that they do not constitute, as I had once hoped they would, the autobiography of an underwater pilgrim. The entries are too spotty for that, though the memories they evoke are vivid. On one page I am groping around blindly along the mud bottom of Matagorda Bay, searching with a group of Texas archaeologists for any nails or buckles or harquebus parts that might indicate the wreckage of the flagship of the Sieur de La Salle. Overhead, the engine of the research boat is running, its propwash deflected downward by means of an elbow-shaped aluminum housing that blasts away the oozy overburden, bathing us in turbulence and total darkness.
On another page I’m diving among giant clams off an island on the northwest coast of Madagascar. The island’s main village is called Hell-Ville. Its forests are populated with bug-eyed lemurs, its beach patrolled by a giant Aldabra tortoise named Caroline, who presents her neck, as thick as a python, to be stroked. Underwater, I pick up an empty cowrie shell from the sand bed and run my fingernail along its serrated aperture, producing a sound like that of a finger raking the teeth of a comb. Staring at the blurry brown spot on the back of the shell, I suddenly flinch, contracting the muscles at the back of my neck with the involuntary wisdom of a prey animal alert to its most vulnerable points of attack. The gleaming hide of a large shark passes from above into my field of vision, and I watch it sailing ominously over the reef—which, with its giant clams and undercut mushroom growths of coral, looks as defenseless as a hobbit village. The shark’s teeth are exposed in its lipless mouth, its nose is tapered to an artful wedge. The creature’s form is beautiful, but there is the terror of utter blankness in its eyes.
Or, I am diving off the coast of Southern California, at a place called Begg Rock, a barren islet that barely breaks the surface of the Pacific chop. I’m wearing a full wetsuit. The only place the water touches my skin is in the gap between the top of my mask and the rim of my neoprene hood, so that I feel as if I’m swimming with an ice cube on my forehead. Underwater, the rock is covered with scallops and anemones, their tendrils and tentacles—bright orange or red or yellow—vivid against the grim asteroid shading of the rock itself. Into view comes a face, a face so familiar and unthreatening that for an instant I almost raise my hand to wave. It is a sea lion, soaring toward me with languid winglike strokes of its front flippers. The sea lion comes within three feet of me, studies me frankly with its moist doglike eyes, and then veers way, its body spinning like a bullet. I watch it go, watch the dark blue water enfold it, and am left with an odd thought: a realization that the sea lion is now swimming through the Pacific with my image lodged somewhere in the circuitry of its brain.
THE LOGBOOKS FILLED UP, but the gaps between dives became longer and longer. I had three children; I had spiraling responsibilities of the sort that forced me to regard diving as an expensive recreational activity rather than as a life’s mission. I looked at those logbooks, at the paltry entries in the “total bottom time” column and felt almost shameful, as if the few underwater hours totaled there were, after all, the pitiful record of an abandoned spiritual quest. I read through the diving magazines—the ads for resorts and live-aboards in Aruba and Bonaire; the models posed in hot-pink wetsuits, lasciviously displaying some new gauge or contour-fitting buoyancy compensator—and grew self-righteous and edgy. I could not tolerate the notion that diving could be merely a hobby, but at the same time I envied the people in those magazine layouts—envied them their seemingly eternal leisure time, their perfect bodies, their gorgeous equipment, their casual, uncomplicated appreciation of a world that I had hungered for all my life but that continually eluded me, like some ungraspable goal in a homesick dream.
I sat on the edge of the bathtub as my youngest daughter discovered she could put her face underwater and open her eyes without coming to harm. Six inches of water, and nothing to see except the white curving shape of the tub—and yet night after night she plunged below the surface for as long as she could hold her breath, and I would watch her arms and legs thrashing as she tried to surge down into the depths she imagined were there. I knew what she wanted. She wanted to be at large in this sudden new territory, to pursue the illusion that she was fit to inhabit it, that its strangeness would embrace her.
From the book Water and Light: A Diver’s Journey to a Coral Reef, by Stephen Harrigan, to be published in May by Houghton Mifflin Company. Copyright 1992 by Stephen Harrigan. Reprinted with permission.
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