Today is the culmination of the month that I have been on this island. I was meant to leave a week ago, I had planned to finish my dive course and then head back to the mainland to visit Copan for a couple of days before flying back to New York, but my dive course took longer than expected, and a few folks advised me that Copan was definitely missable if I’d already seen Tikal, which I have, and it is easy to stay here on this relaxed tropical island paradise microcosm. That was a few days ago, and then I was going to leave yesterday, I had sorted out all the ferry and bus schedules and determined that I would absolutely have to leave no later than yesterday on the afternoon ferry in order to catch the bus in La Ceiba to San Pedro Sula and then find some hostel to spend the night at before my flight leaves the day after, it is cutting it too close otherwise and I know Central American buses aren’t that reliable.
But then there are two dives scheduled tomorrow for the North Side and I’ve been wanting to dive the North Side since I arrived, if I’d managed to finish my class earlier then I would have gone last week but I didn’t, so we pull out the ferry schedules again and determine that if everything goes perfectly and the boat gets back on time that I can catch the afternoon ferry today but it will be one hell of a hustle but I should get to San Pedro Sula in time. So that is the plan, and I will have my last day of diving and then begin the re-entry with public bus transit across the chaotic mainland to a dangerous major city where I will arrive at night, that is the new plan I have bought myself a few more hours on the island but then when I add up all the costs of ferry, taxi, bus, taxi, hostel, taxi to airport it is only a few dollars shy of the plane fare if I take the morning plane tomorrow at six, but sometimes the flight gets cancelled and if it is I am really stuck and there is no way I’d make my flight but the weather is clear, and the island is idyllic and I don’t want to leave. I book my seat on the morning plane for tomorrow and voila I have bought myself a whole day longer here.
The boat is leaving early, at 7am. I pack up my backpack and leave the key to my apartment on the table, I won’t be coming back here tonight, and walk down the main street to my dive shop, I’ll leave the bag there and then move over to the dorm this afternoon. There’s no one here, I’m the early bird and I sit down on the porch swing to wait, I want this day to be perfect, it has to be perfect it is the last day of paradise for me and I have made a lot of possibly stupid choices to gain this experience for myself and today is the payload. The divemaster, Etienne, arrives, he is shaking sleep out as he unlocks the shop and a little concerned, too, because nobody is back by the dock, and most of the staff of Utila Water Sports signed up for this so if they are not here what does that say about the dive?
We can only go to the North Side if the weather is clear and there was an intense rain shower at around 6am, I am worried that maybe Kate rolled over in bed, opened an eye to the weather and made the call to cancel the boat. More divers show up but no staff, and Etienne can’t reach anyone so we are all waiting at the dock, we assemble our gear in optimism and all agree that the weather is definitely clear enough now and the captain will come, the captain will come, the captain has to come I need today.
Kerry, our captain for today, putt putts into the lagoon dock on a dinghy, ties up and steps onto the dock. We are on, we are going, we are not going to settle for some lesser dive today and maybe we will even see a whale shark, a dive boat saw one two days ago even though it’s not the season and maybe we will too, after all it is my last day here and the cosmos should definitely be aware of that and reward me with a whale shark.
Etienne has finally heard from the staff, they are all viciously hung over, they just stopped drinking an hour or two ago so the boat has a little more room on it than we expected although still a respectable group, enough to make it worthwhile to burn the gas necessary to get around the island. There are a couple of middle-aged guys I haven’t met before, Barry who seems to be pretty obnoxious actually and the others are making quiet snide remarks about him behind his back, apparently he burns his air really quickly and tends to shove his mask up on his forehead, the hallmark of a snorkeler which is to say the hallmark of a non-diver which is to say the hallmark of someone who doesn’t belong on this boat. I try not to be uncomfortable with the quiet snideness, even though he is kind of grating, because I know that I am equally vulnerable to such mockery, I am the girl who tried to quit her Open Water class three different times, I have been having a lot of trouble with this and am a rank beginner to boot.
Another guy who’s name I forget, he’s much more pleasant to speak with and we chat a bit, about where we’re from and where we’re going and where we’ve been and what we did there, this is the conversation I have over and over and over it is the baseline conversation amongst backpackers and travelers. Kim has joined us, whose name is not actually Kim but she is using it as her travel name since people have trouble pronouncing her given name, Maayan. I am lucky that way, there are versions of my name in almost every language so sometimes I am Kate and sometimes I am Katerina and on occasion Katya.
So me, and Kim, and Etienne and Barry and the guy who’s name I can’t remember, and then Elly and her husband whose name I also can’t remember, they are an older British couple and both of their kids are divemasters here on Utila so they come down to visit, and dive, they are both divemasters too, and party of course, both of them are at least 30 years older than I am and they party harder than I do by a long shot. And Kerry, of course, the captain, also middle-aged and a local, he’s from here and has the lush accented English to show it. It was a welcome surprise to me, that English is the dominant language on this island rather than Spanish, and one of the reasons I was so reluctant to head for the mainland and travel alone with my crappy Spanish.
The boat is loaded, all of our equipment and air tanks and wetsuits and fins and masks and weights are in and we motor out of the lagoon, under the bridge and around to the north. The clouds have cleared almost entirely and I am leaning around the side of the boat to get the wind in my face and smell the salt spray, the air is the temperature of warm bathwater which is to say perfectly perfect, and look! Kim has spotted a rainbow, Kim is fantastic at spotting things, she is the one who saw the turtle the other day and the moray eel, too. This is going to be a perfect day.
At our first dive site and we suit up, Etienne is going to dive with Kim and I since we are only rated to 60 feet, the others will go in a separate group. I’ve assembled all my equipment on the tank already, I did that at the dock, buckling the vest onto the tank and then attaching the regulator and testing the air and making sure I have 3000 psi in the tank. I sit down in front of my tank, strap on the vest and then slowly stand up, have to go straight and lift all the weight of the tank and gear with thighs and knees and this is a little dicey because I banged the crap out of my knee a couple of days ago but it is fine now. I am moving very carefully on the boat now, because I’m top heavy and not that there are lots of waves or anything but I’m really good at falling down and with all the weight settled oddly on my back it will be even easier, I should almost just throw myself down on the deck of the boat and get it over with. I sit down on the center bench, my tank slamming down behind me, so that I can put on my fins and mask. It is poor etiquette to do so, which I know, and would certainly be worthy of a snide remark or two. Proper dive boat etiquette is that I should sit on the edge of the boat, with the tank hanging over into the air, and put on my fins and mask there just before rolling off backwards, but I just know that if I do that I will go flailing into the water before I’m ready, pulled over by the tank, and I’d rather knowingly breach boat etiquette. Yes, I am a rank beginner and I barely made it through my dive class and everyone on this boat knows it so I really don’t see the point in pretending otherwise.
Fins are on, mask is on, and I hate this part when my mask is on but I’m not yet in the water, I automatically try to breathe through my nose and it sucks all the air out of the mask and I feel like I’m suffocating, it comes naturally when I’m in the water but not out here in the air and I really want to just shove the mask up on my forehead but snorkelers do that not divers. I put the regulator in my mouth and begin the Vader-esque breathing, deep deep breaths and I use my air really fast because of it but this is such a strange thing to me that it’s more important that I take these deep, calming breaths, reassuring myself with every blast of oxygen that I am breathing, that’s more important than a longer dive. I cross my legs below the knees, make sure my vest is inflated, left hand on my weight belt, right hand pressed against my mask and reg to make sure I don’t lose them as a I tumble backwards into the water letting the weight of the tank carry me backwards.
I somersault completely in the water under the boat and then rise to the surface again, signal the captain that I’m ok with a fist touching the top of my head. Etienne is in the water already, and so is Kim, the other dive group is off and away in a different direction. We give the ok signal and then Etienne turns his thumb down, I hold up the air valve on the vest and slowly, very slowly release air. I’m wearing 12 pounds of weights on my belt to counter my buoyancy, Etienne wanted to weight me a little more because I descend slowly but that is on purpose, the first training dive that went so badly started off so badly because I dropped like a rock and I need to stay in control of this. The water is rising over my face, over the regulator and I’m officially breathing underwater now, rising up over my mask and inevitable that a little water leaks in before I get all the way under, once I’m in the pressure of the water around me keeps the seal intact but I will have a little saltwater sloshing around inside the whole time. Going down, slowly, and Etienne is watching me carefully to make sure I’m ok, I’m officially certified but he is aware that I have panicked underwater before. A few feet down and then hold my nose, blow air out to pop my ears and equalize the pressure. About twenty feet down and then he turns to lead us on our dive, and swims to the left. We follow, Kim and I, we are buddies which means we need to stay always in sight of each other which is more difficult than you might imagine with more than half of your peripheral vision cut off by the sides of the mask, she could be right next to me and I couldn’t see her and vice versa. They are a little ahead of me and suddenly it happens, I start choking my throat has seized up and I can’t breathe.
I grab Kim’s fin so that she knows I’m having a problem, she turns and sees and then grabs Etienne. I am pushing the purge button on my reg, this shoots air into my lungs with no cooperation on my part and this is the solution we found and the only reason I am diving now, that I can just dispense air when my body refuses to breathe. Etienne is worried, he is gesturing to make sure I don’t forget the purge button and shoot to the surface, I know and I’m fine, I stopped them just because in case I couldn’t solve the problem they should be there and they are. I’m breathing again, my airways are open, and I take a few more of those deep, calming breaths to make sure my body is no longer rejecting this air and we go on.
It’s dark, down here; we can see, but not very well, and we are swimming along a black coral wall dropping off endlessly, swimming along looking for interesting marine life there among the coral and I barrel roll to look the other way, that little bit of saltwater sloshes in my eyes and tries to go up my nose stinging a little, lazily looking up to the surface and seeing my air bubbles over me and then out into the darkening deepness where the reef falls off. That’s where we’d see a whale shark, if we saw one, and I wonder what it would be like to look into that endless water and see a fish the size of a building looming out of it. Anything could be out there, anything at all, and frankly if it were more than 20 feet away I wouldn’t be able to see it, wouldn’t know it was there but I am pretty sure it would know that I am here.
Deep breaths and we haven’t seen anything particularly amazing, some coral and parrot fish and a huge grouper and a school of snapper, and the wrasses which are incredibly common and so no one really cares about them but I love them, schools of bright blue fish the length of my hand swirling in the dappled underwater sunlight. I am not sure that I enjoy diving, the whole time I am kind of waiting for the dive to be over, for the moment I surface and breathe in the open air again, I am hoping we see something that makes it worthwhile and the north side is supposed to have much better marine life, it hasn’t been as fished out and damaged by divers and snorkellers as the more accessible areas around the south side of the island but we are not in luck today on this dive.
I am down to half a tank of air, it is time to turn back so we turn and swim back along the wall, I barrel roll again looking out at trackless, depthless ocean where things can come from any direction and the up/down orientation of gravity that reigns with an iron fist above the water is meaningless here. Water changes depth perception too, everything looks bigger and closer and I have to keep checking my peripherals that I don’t have anymore.
We ascend through a school of wrasses, break surface a few feet from the boat and swim back. I take my fins off and hand them to the captain so I can climb up the ladder, place my foot firmly, grip the rails with both hands and then that first step of the tank breaking free of the water and suddenly gravity is back, up is up and down is down and I step very carefully back into the boat, clinging to poles and railings and swaying my way back to the air tank holders to thunk my tank down. I shrug out of my equipment, and then move it all over to a new tank for the second dive, put my weight belt on the floor and shimmy out of my wetsuit, I’m shivering a little from our dive it’s much colder underwater too. We are still waiting on the other group to come back, Kim, Etienne and I sprawl out on the aft deck in the blazing sunshine. “Life is hard,” Etienne sighs. We solemnly agree.
(to be continued)
3 comments:
I would like to feel more of the lead convincing herself that her plans will work as she delays her departure in the first two paragraphs. I kinda get the sense but it is faint.
“they are an older British couple and both of their kids are divemasters here on Utila so they come down to visit, and dive, they are both divemasters too, and party of course,” may be overly complex. I had to stop and reread this part. While the structure of the sentence interrupted the flow, I like the “and party” as, in tandem with the nonchalance towards the hungover crew, it gives strong sense of island life.
You might think of omitting the bit about the banged knee impairing the ability to lift. As written it sounds strangely “wimpy” for the lead, but further explanation that explains to someone who doesn’t understand our level of clumsiness would detract from the main focus of the story.
Once the diving process starts the story is amazing. You manage to explain the basics of diving for those who are not in know so that they can understand and visualize without SOUNDING like you’re explaining diving. Hell of a trick. Most authors can’t pull that off at all. Heinlein’s greatest flaw in my book.
The physical description of the dive is amazing. While I can completely visualize the dive, I find that I have no clear sense of how the lead is feeling about the dive. It seems like it was a run of the mill dive. Did it meet her seemingly high hopes for a “perfect” day? Is she content? Is she disappointed? Perhaps she hasn’t gotten what she wants yet, but is confident in receiving it in dive 2?
I think your question about how she "feels" about the dive is interesting. Indeed, I haven't done enough diving to really rate any one experience on an objective scale in terms of a 'good' dive or a 'bad' dive, to me a 'good' dive is one in which I don't stop breathing and break for the surface, or alternately, ya know, die.
For me, the 'dive experience' was a gestalt that begins when you get to the boat, and includes the camaraderie of the diving group, the time in the water, and the emergence and relaxation after. I also am kind of interested in going down not to "see stuff" but just to play with the process of diving and the different things you can and can't do with your body while you're down there.
I see. The gestalt experience makes sense to me and puts the description of the day and my inability to pin down the emotion into a new context. When reread understanding what you take from the dive experience as a whole, the emotional subtext of the story becomes more clear. However, I think the majority of people consider the "seeing" part of the dive to be the big thing. So the trick here is going to be to take the reader out of their assumption to understand what matters to you and are able to get the gestalt of the story.
Post a Comment