Beginning, middle and end
Many years back I began a scuba certification course I never finished. Although every year we usually go to Cebu for the holidays without fail, something (ie laziness) would stop me from completing the course. So long ago was this that if I resumed the training, I would have to start the lessons from step one all over again. However the thought of scuba has always remained niggling in the back of my mind. Over the years I have come to indelibly associate certain places with specific kinds of physical presence. I love Canada and the north for its mountains and glaciers (walking on the Athabasca Glacier is perhaps the closest I’ve come to an epiphany experience) just as I will always remember Paris for the play of color which is the Chapel of St. Chapelle. They are beautiful for forms which are uniquely their own. In a similar way, I’ve always suspected that our country is remarkable not for the scraggly dots of land we all crowd on, fuss over, and generally manage to make a mess of, but for what happens beneath the islands. So over Christmas break my brother and I finally took the scuba course and now we are both certified to (physically but not figuratively) swim with the fishes.
Learning to dive is learning how to short circuit millions of years of evolution. Our ancestors evolved from the water and thus we are born for the land, a calling we disavow every time we jump into a pool or the sea. Thus scuba (as is implicit in the etymology of the word itself, an acronym) is an acknowledgment of physical limitation, a distortion of acts we consider second nature, such as breathing.
The first of the physical transformations is a reverse molting, fleshy human integument simply will not do. As someone never fully comfortable in my own skin, the addition of a new layer in the form of a wetsuit compounded my already gawky awkwardness. Slithering/sliding into the suit was not a problem. It’s when one gets into the water that the suit grafts on and one can feel the neoprene layer tightening up on your body. While this leaves one snug and warm, there is but a hint of added resistant from this skin which is not human but artificial, from the land but for the water. Next come the weights, tank and regulator. The latter allows access to air which is cold and dry, a subtle counterpoint to the warmth of the water and the life around you when you dive. (The first words out of my mouth, with a regulator in my mouth, were, ‘I am your father’, points if you get the allusion!) Rounding out the ensemble are fins, which really completes the metamorphosis as walking becomes nearly impossible in the darn things and the ubiquitous mask. From the streamlined human shape, a person grows more skin, a hump (in the form of the tank) bumps around the waist (the weight belt) and various other tubes and gauges which make it appear as if a squid has hitched a ride on your back.
Compounding the distortion of the familiar is the heightening and diminishing of senses in equal measure. Sound is greatly amplified and carries with it a greater resonance, as if it can both run further but not faster underwater. On our very first open water (out in the sea) dive, we were headed back when we heard a large explosion, startling enough in itself when you have been hearing nothing but the hiss of air and bubbles for almost an hour. So violent and immediate was the sound that Rocky thought an oxygen tank had exploded and he had been abruptly promoted to the rank of eldest (and only) brother. Later, the instructor told us that it had most likely been dynamite fishing, off an island 20-30 minutes away by boat! Another time we waited and watched a small fishing boat pass overhead, its propeller murmuring to the water in a distinct shnick-shnick voice, as if coaxing the sea to allow it passage.
If the ears perk up, it is the eyes that become constricted underwater. Vision becomes telescoped on the view seen directly in front of the mask. While above water you have two eyes, under water you become a cyclops, the mask your only window into, and protection from, the world you have taken such pains to see. Peripheral vision is nonexistent and even simple tasks such as looking down and tightening your gear, or looking to the side to check on your buddy, become cumbersome and difficult. I never appreciated the utility of the sidelong glance until it became impossible with a mask around my face.
As other as being underwater is, the training in itself is relatively simple, focusing on equipment familiarization and practical skills. However it is in the training that one fully appreciates the risk in getting one’s feet wet. One portion of the course involved using a snorkel, deliberately flooding it with water and then exhaling hard to clear it so it’s safe to breath again. Commonly all the water is not expelled on the first go so one must first ‘sip’ enough oxygen to be able to exhale violently a second time. For the life of me (and I use the phrase in its literal sense), I could not sufficiently clear the bloody snorkel and instead of oxygen, I kept breathing in water. Salt water tastes like panic and fear and death. Practice stills the nerves and allows competence; but it will never erase the memory of rational thought being replaced by the overriding urge to claw your way back up to the surface of land, sun and oxygen. My family is not unfamiliar with the thought of the deep claiming foolhardy or reckless visitors. The half-brother of my grandmother was a master scuba diver who dove one day alone and was never seen again. Neither body nor equipment were ever found. Hubris dooms us all.
While over and under water are two different planes, the former has increasingly begun to encroach on the latter. Sometimes the advances are benign, once I found an old bottle which had settled on a reef and become encrusted over. From the sand (perhaps of the sea) the glass was made and now that glass has once again returned to the sand and the surf. However, there are objects that even the sea and salt cannot make their own. On the first dive I saw a white plastic bag making its way along the sea floor, an animal from land which has no match underwater. (See here a report on continents of trash out in the ocean. Note though that the authenticity of this news had been questioned.)
Vlad Nabokov had it that, “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” In that brief crack of light we are sandwiched between the blues of the sky and of the sea. For both, beyond the blue lies darkness, of space or of depths where even the sun cannot reach. It is a wonder that we can travel to the edges of the blue, look upon the face of the abyss and the dark, and with a blessing return to the land where there is warmth for the brief moment of our life.
Pictures of me trying to be a fish can soon be seen on my multiply, antconejos.multiply.com, just as soon as I learn how to work the thing.
Learning to dive is learning how to short circuit millions of years of evolution. Our ancestors evolved from the water and thus we are born for the land, a calling we disavow every time we jump into a pool or the sea. Thus scuba (as is implicit in the etymology of the word itself, an acronym) is an acknowledgment of physical limitation, a distortion of acts we consider second nature, such as breathing.
The first of the physical transformations is a reverse molting, fleshy human integument simply will not do. As someone never fully comfortable in my own skin, the addition of a new layer in the form of a wetsuit compounded my already gawky awkwardness. Slithering/sliding into the suit was not a problem. It’s when one gets into the water that the suit grafts on and one can feel the neoprene layer tightening up on your body. While this leaves one snug and warm, there is but a hint of added resistant from this skin which is not human but artificial, from the land but for the water. Next come the weights, tank and regulator. The latter allows access to air which is cold and dry, a subtle counterpoint to the warmth of the water and the life around you when you dive. (The first words out of my mouth, with a regulator in my mouth, were, ‘I am your father’, points if you get the allusion!) Rounding out the ensemble are fins, which really completes the metamorphosis as walking becomes nearly impossible in the darn things and the ubiquitous mask. From the streamlined human shape, a person grows more skin, a hump (in the form of the tank) bumps around the waist (the weight belt) and various other tubes and gauges which make it appear as if a squid has hitched a ride on your back.
Compounding the distortion of the familiar is the heightening and diminishing of senses in equal measure. Sound is greatly amplified and carries with it a greater resonance, as if it can both run further but not faster underwater. On our very first open water (out in the sea) dive, we were headed back when we heard a large explosion, startling enough in itself when you have been hearing nothing but the hiss of air and bubbles for almost an hour. So violent and immediate was the sound that Rocky thought an oxygen tank had exploded and he had been abruptly promoted to the rank of eldest (and only) brother. Later, the instructor told us that it had most likely been dynamite fishing, off an island 20-30 minutes away by boat! Another time we waited and watched a small fishing boat pass overhead, its propeller murmuring to the water in a distinct shnick-shnick voice, as if coaxing the sea to allow it passage.
If the ears perk up, it is the eyes that become constricted underwater. Vision becomes telescoped on the view seen directly in front of the mask. While above water you have two eyes, under water you become a cyclops, the mask your only window into, and protection from, the world you have taken such pains to see. Peripheral vision is nonexistent and even simple tasks such as looking down and tightening your gear, or looking to the side to check on your buddy, become cumbersome and difficult. I never appreciated the utility of the sidelong glance until it became impossible with a mask around my face.
As other as being underwater is, the training in itself is relatively simple, focusing on equipment familiarization and practical skills. However it is in the training that one fully appreciates the risk in getting one’s feet wet. One portion of the course involved using a snorkel, deliberately flooding it with water and then exhaling hard to clear it so it’s safe to breath again. Commonly all the water is not expelled on the first go so one must first ‘sip’ enough oxygen to be able to exhale violently a second time. For the life of me (and I use the phrase in its literal sense), I could not sufficiently clear the bloody snorkel and instead of oxygen, I kept breathing in water. Salt water tastes like panic and fear and death. Practice stills the nerves and allows competence; but it will never erase the memory of rational thought being replaced by the overriding urge to claw your way back up to the surface of land, sun and oxygen. My family is not unfamiliar with the thought of the deep claiming foolhardy or reckless visitors. The half-brother of my grandmother was a master scuba diver who dove one day alone and was never seen again. Neither body nor equipment were ever found. Hubris dooms us all.
While over and under water are two different planes, the former has increasingly begun to encroach on the latter. Sometimes the advances are benign, once I found an old bottle which had settled on a reef and become encrusted over. From the sand (perhaps of the sea) the glass was made and now that glass has once again returned to the sand and the surf. However, there are objects that even the sea and salt cannot make their own. On the first dive I saw a white plastic bag making its way along the sea floor, an animal from land which has no match underwater. (See here a report on continents of trash out in the ocean. Note though that the authenticity of this news had been questioned.)
Vlad Nabokov had it that, “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” In that brief crack of light we are sandwiched between the blues of the sky and of the sea. For both, beyond the blue lies darkness, of space or of depths where even the sun cannot reach. It is a wonder that we can travel to the edges of the blue, look upon the face of the abyss and the dark, and with a blessing return to the land where there is warmth for the brief moment of our life.
Pictures of me trying to be a fish can soon be seen on my multiply, antconejos.multiply.com, just as soon as I learn how to work the thing.