Wilson had become a legend precisely for his avoidance of these sites, which furthermore attracted so much scuba and snorkeling traffic that it was hard to believe that a findable diver in distress would not already have turned up. It wasn’t until our boat was in the water that I began to feel preposterous. Ollie and I looked like Dumb and Dumber in our yellow flippers and matching short-sleeved O’Neill neoprene shirts.
I said, “So what’s the plan, exactly?”
He made a grimace. “Let’s get on with it.”
We toppled ass backward into the Gulf of Oman.
Everything beyond ten meters was lemonade murk. I was tense; I had forgotten about the unlimited expectancy that is a feeling of being in the sea.
Ollie went along a shallow trough. I followed. We had dived this site before, and soon I recognized a grove of lavendercoral. On we went, through enigmatic marine vales. The blue-and-white striped fish were out and about, as were the small black triangular dawdlers, as were, in a disorderly shoal, the innumerable now-glossy, now-dull colorless guys that are the pen pushers of the reefs. My Fish Identification Course did not cover these little fellows, and in fact the whole enterprise of human discernment, of passing what is sensed through the sieve of what is known, is more or less annulled underwater. Perhaps for this reason, I’ve never been able to dive without loneliness—and never could have gone into the water like Ted Wilson, without human corroboration. Always I would need to sense, close by, friendly foot fins idling in the deep. And yet while looking for Ted Wilson’s body, if that’s what we were doing, I hardly felt companioned by my intermittently effervescent old buddy. We were present as searchers, not sightseers, and I felt a terrific pressure of intentionality. The sunbeams in vertical schools, the alien phyla, one’s unnatural litheness—I was used to submitting without thought to these marvels and their incalculable
Welt
. Very few human ideas survive in this implacably sovereign element; one finds oneself in a realm devoid not only of air but of symbols, which are of course a kind of air. There are moments when even the sunniest diver has forced on him or her certain dark items of knowledge, among them, if I may extrapolate from my own diver’s experience of being simultaneously a vessel and a passenger, that one is a biological room in which one is the detainee. None other than Cousteau, as I learned from watching his
Odyssey
, understood that a corollary of his oceanographic adventures was the contemplation, inevitably gloomy, of the processes of decomposition and disappearance that finally govern organic life and, for that matter, the lives of civilizations, ancient traces of which are apparently to be found everywhere in the depths of the Mediterranean Sea in the form of coins and urns and ruins. None of this is to propose a special category of submergedtruth; but there is no point in denying that diving changes things.
We came to a drop-off and went down.
Right away we saw a leopard shark, at rest on the white sand. On another day, I would have been overjoyed. Convulsively, I kicked away from this animal, from the abominable sound of my breathing, from the inertness of everything. I have to think this was provoked by the fraudulence of my situation; but in any case, panic displaced all notions except that of surfacing. I signaled to Ollie. We went up without delay.
“I can’t do it,” I said, gasping. “I’m not breathing right.”
Ollie said, “OK. Let’s get on the boat.”
I haven’t fully recovered from this freak-out, which one might more precisely describe as a traumatic episode of extra- or supramural apprehension. A few months ago, I had reason to spend a discounted but still very expensive night in the Neptune Suite of the Atlantis Palm. The special feature of the Neptune Suite (aside from the two complimentary Dolphin Encounters, with dolphins supposedly flown in
I said, “So what’s the plan, exactly?”
He made a grimace. “Let’s get on with it.”
We toppled ass backward into the Gulf of Oman.
Everything beyond ten meters was lemonade murk. I was tense; I had forgotten about the unlimited expectancy that is a feeling of being in the sea.
Ollie went along a shallow trough. I followed. We had dived this site before, and soon I recognized a grove of lavendercoral. On we went, through enigmatic marine vales. The blue-and-white striped fish were out and about, as were the small black triangular dawdlers, as were, in a disorderly shoal, the innumerable now-glossy, now-dull colorless guys that are the pen pushers of the reefs. My Fish Identification Course did not cover these little fellows, and in fact the whole enterprise of human discernment, of passing what is sensed through the sieve of what is known, is more or less annulled underwater. Perhaps for this reason, I’ve never been able to dive without loneliness—and never could have gone into the water like Ted Wilson, without human corroboration. Always I would need to sense, close by, friendly foot fins idling in the deep. And yet while looking for Ted Wilson’s body, if that’s what we were doing, I hardly felt companioned by my intermittently effervescent old buddy. We were present as searchers, not sightseers, and I felt a terrific pressure of intentionality. The sunbeams in vertical schools, the alien phyla, one’s unnatural litheness—I was used to submitting without thought to these marvels and their incalculable
Welt
. Very few human ideas survive in this implacably sovereign element; one finds oneself in a realm devoid not only of air but of symbols, which are of course a kind of air. There are moments when even the sunniest diver has forced on him or her certain dark items of knowledge, among them, if I may extrapolate from my own diver’s experience of being simultaneously a vessel and a passenger, that one is a biological room in which one is the detainee. None other than Cousteau, as I learned from watching his
Odyssey
, understood that a corollary of his oceanographic adventures was the contemplation, inevitably gloomy, of the processes of decomposition and disappearance that finally govern organic life and, for that matter, the lives of civilizations, ancient traces of which are apparently to be found everywhere in the depths of the Mediterranean Sea in the form of coins and urns and ruins. None of this is to propose a special category of submergedtruth; but there is no point in denying that diving changes things.
We came to a drop-off and went down.
Right away we saw a leopard shark, at rest on the white sand. On another day, I would have been overjoyed. Convulsively, I kicked away from this animal, from the abominable sound of my breathing, from the inertness of everything. I have to think this was provoked by the fraudulence of my situation; but in any case, panic displaced all notions except that of surfacing. I signaled to Ollie. We went up without delay.
“I can’t do it,” I said, gasping. “I’m not breathing right.”
Ollie said, “OK. Let’s get on the boat.”
I haven’t fully recovered from this freak-out, which one might more precisely describe as a traumatic episode of extra- or supramural apprehension. A few months ago, I had reason to spend a discounted but still very expensive night in the Neptune Suite of the Atlantis Palm. The special feature of the Neptune Suite (aside from the two complimentary Dolphin Encounters, with dolphins supposedly flown in
Similar Books
