MosesWrites

Underwater

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Twenty-five meters (82 feet) below Coron Bay, Busuanga, in the Philippines, the dive master did a quick check to ensure we all had our lights ready before entering the hull of the Ekkai Maru (越海丸), a cargo ship built in Scotland, captured by the Imperial Japanese military, and sunk in an air attack by the United States Navy on 24 September 1944. 

I hadn’t been under the water in over thirteen years, and even that only involved a couple of easy reef dives in Bali. I’ve not spent any serious time diving in nearly thirty, since my mid-to-late teens.

I could grasp the strap attached to my flashlight but I struggled to undo the Velcro pocket where it had been secured. In seconds, the dive master scooted over and helped me and then, illumination in hand, we proceeded for a spectacular forty minute tour of the wreck.

I learned about SCUBA at the behest of my mother’s second husband, Peter Lawson Kennedy. I took courses with the East Bay (Rhode Island) Dive Center in the fall of 1996 and had my certification dives just shy of my sixteenth birthday which, I believe, just met the minimum age requirement for the Open Water course.

I can still feel the cold of Narragansett Bay, even with a thick wetsuit, booties, a hood, and gloves. One time when we surfaced, snowflakes fell upon the ocean.

My lips matched the cobalt color of the sea.

I’ve never liked getting my face wet and I’m not keen on dark places that lack spatial orientation.

Why then approach an entirely pitch-black space with life dependent on a regulator attached to a rubber hose attached to a tank on my back?

Breathe. Breathe, slowly, deliberately, breathe.

I need to harness my rational mind to temper chest-tightening anxiety. I need to process overwhelming anxiety, to understand it, to tackle its origins, to let it bubble out of my lungs and ever so beautifully travel meter by meter to the surface. 

Why had Peter insisted that I dive? What happened during that tenth grade year of high school, when he married my mother, when we moved into his home, when we became enveloped in his world of wealth and power? What did that warm vodka taste like, stashed in a filing cabinet in the back of the attic? How did I manage to pass a single class? Where did that rage linger in my body? Why do I work in secondary education, and what does it mean that I’ve voluntarily given up gainful employment with no securely confirmed plans for the future?

Under water you only have your own mind and your own body. There’s no conversation beyond a handful of hand signals. No phones, no WiFi, no grounding experience of gravity, just the buoyancy and balance between mass and air, breathe in, breathe out.

I had forgotten how dry your mouth can get after forty or fifty minutes: under water, so sips to quench your thirst. No nibbles. No looking over your shoulder.

There’s so much to see, the wonder and mystery of a world below, the fish, the coral, the abundance and diversity of life, so colorful and delicate and bold, undulating in currents, swirling to distract prey, interdependence and survival and the accruing consequences of our planetary climate catastrophe.

But I had to think, I had to clear my mind as much as I needed to clear my ears and equalize the pressure in my sinuses. I had to breathe each breath as if it were my first and last.

Under water, you’re entirely alone, but also entirely dependent on those with whom you’ve dove. If you don’t know how to help, if you can’t ask for and receive help, you may die, or watch someone else die.

I’ve always wanted, more than anything, to teach that sensibility, that capacity, that ability to ask for help, for my students and in my management of institutions. Doctors, lawyers, therapists, masseuses, hair stylists, teachers, plumbers, dentists, handy people of all sorts—people with skills, with training, with intuition and empathy and discretion (really everything AI lacks so profoundly) can help us do so much more. Not simply because we need or lack or can’t, but rather because we can, because we can do so much better even simply knowing that we have this astounding abundance of resources.

More simply: to know your dive buddy has a second regulator if yours malfunctions, or if you run out of air, so that you can continue to breathe, that you don’t have to make an emergency ascent and risk catastrophic decompression injury. It’s all so amazing and generally quite safe, until you’re in a hyperbaric chamber.

 That’s a metaphor, too.

Without help we’ll never thrive under pressure, we’ll never manage the pressure that can allow us to realize our fullest potential.

I’m glad to have gone back to something I hadn’t done in so long, with all the rush of memory and perspective it brings. I’m amazed how quickly the skills and movements came back to me, how by my third dive I felt quite comfortable, how I could fully enjoy the wonder of the immediate present.

How much has changed!

I learned with dive tables and algebra, now everyone can have a cheap computer strapped to their wrists, which does all the calculations moment by moment. You’ve got more time to enjoy, to maximize your experience, I’m told.

I still worked out the nitrogen load in my head. I’m glad to have had an analogue depth gauge, and to have an analogue watch.

Plus cameras, now everyone can easily, cheaply have a camera if they like. I remember in the 90s being amazed by the complex housing and extraordinarily expensive equipment needed for decent underwater videography. Now it costs hardly anything.

The divemaster at the second shop laughed at my original PADI card, which I’ve somehow managed to hold onto.

I’ve never seen one like this before, she said. You got this before I was born.

I’m not that old, I joked.

She smiled, and said you’re lucky to have learned at such a young age.

In some ways, though, I did dive back to my adolescence, and had that time-traveling experience of body and mind sent to a world not occupied for almost three decades, hyper pubescent, depressed, angry, captured in photographic memory, cynical, isolated, pitiful physical coordination, lost, shattered.

During the first dive, I had felt such relief as the pressure cleared my sinuses, finally, after a cold I had had the week before. I blew my nose again and again.

When I surfaced and took off my mask, the boat crew laughed. You might want to rinse your face off. I can only imagine the circle of thick snot the mask had ringed around my eyes and nose, the snot that hadn’t been blown into the sea.

Back to sixteen, yes, but I also journeyed through the amazing experiences between then and now, the personal and intellectual and emotional transformations of adulthood, the truly amazing contentment and security of middle age.

Underwater has a euphemistic meaning, too, of being bankrupt or financially insolvent, of a person or institution facing irresolvable challenges.

Underwater, also, the past has been preserved, and been re-discovered: I remember so clearly writing the commentary on a scholar’s essay for the History of Science Seminar at Princeton, a paper about the sub-marine, a real honor that now brings my brain back to the heights of its playful intellectual and analytical abilities. James Delbourgo’s “Diver Things: Collecting the World Under Water,” a great paper, and I got to enfold Newton’s Optiks and Virgil’s Aeneid and the Biondo Flavio I had read in Tony Grafton’s class, his account of the two great Roman ships in Lake Nemi in his Italy Illuminated.

In 1447, forty-five years before the discovery of the new world, “some workers—piscibus quam hominibus similiores—more like fish than men—were hired from the seagoing city of Genoa.  It was their job to swim down into the deeper parts of the lake to find out how much remained of the ship and in what state of preservation…” 

Amidst “a great throng,” Flavio recounted, “it was a fine and wonderful sight to see the great eighteen-inch-long bronze nails used in the construction of the ship, so well-preserved and shiny that they seem to have just come from the blacksmith’s anvil” (ed. and trans. by Jeffrey A. White, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005, Bk. 2, §§ 47, 50). 

Underwater, time bends forwards and backwards, from antiquity to the Renaissance to a modern war of horrific violence and destruction, from Atlantic to Pacific, from West to East.

Still you need to count your minutes, you must know the present, you must gauge your air and your breath.

I ended that Princeton commentary with verses from Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott’s incredible Omeros, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990, Bk VIII, § II, p. 46):

“…but for Achille,

treading the mulch floor of the Caribbean Sea,
no coins were enough to repay its deep evil.
The ransom of centuries shone through the mossy doors

that the moon-blind Cyclops counted, every tendril
raked in the guineas it tested with its soft jaws.
Light paved the ceiling with silver with every swell.

Then he saw the galleon…

…
And though he lost faith in any fictional ship,
an anchor still forked his brow whenever he frowned,
for [Helen] was a spectre now, in her ribbed shape,

he did not know where she was.  She’d never be found.” 

Today, to my surprise, I’m more hopeful.

Dive what may, I’m still going to look. I’m still going to dive, into the future, for one more wonderful than Helen, under the water or wherever she may be.