Leaving Utila, pt. 2 (Dec 2008)

We are pleasantly tired from the first dive, it is more strenuous than one would think to fin slowly through deep, cold waters, and this warmth the perfect follow up, my muscles all more relaxed than I thought possible. Dozing, but not really asleep just slowed… all… the… way… down. Our captain points at a spot about 15 meters in front of the boat, he’s identified the second group’s location underwater by the bubbles breaking on the surface of the waves, I can’t even see what’s he’s pointing at but then again I usually can’t, the other day he pointed out tiny jellyfishes by the boat and I couldn’t see those either. A few minutes later the more experienced divers emerge and climb aboard. It’s only mid-morning but we discuss whether we’d like our lunch break now or after the second dive, I am firmly voting for now but only inside my head, I’m enough of a drag on this group as it is and if the majority wills a second dive right away then I will suit up and get back in the water. It’s strange, actually, because I learned all about pressure groups and surface intervals and I thought we had to do the break in between dives rather than after but I guess we’re not really going deep enough for it to matter.

They are wriggling out of their gear and switching tanks, and I exult inside we have decided to break for lunch now and who cares that its so early. Kerry unties the boat from the buoy and we motor off across the shining water heading for the Cayes, two of the many small islands in satellite around Utila and the only two that are populated. I have been hearing about “burgers on the Cayes” for weeks, and also am eagerly anticipating the absence of those pernicious sand flies that taint every beach experience on Utila, any relaxation spiced with the tension of looking for those tiny dots on skin harbinging welts that will stay for weeks. Also, this means I can stay lolled out on the deck for a bit longer.

Ellie comes around to each of us and asks what we’re having, the options it seems are burger vs. cheeseburger with optional fries. I’m not quite clear on why she is so concerned about this while we’re still underway, and ask her if she is going to be our waitress, or if we are anticipating service from a roller skated girl at the dock. No, she is radioing our order in so that it will be ready when we arrive, a clever circumvention of island time, manana time when everyone is slowed… all… the… way… down.

We dock the boat and climb off, Kim and I following Ellie and Etienne they know where they’re going on a narrow concrete footpath between shoulder to shoulder clapboard houses which are adorned with the most garish of Christmas ornaments possible, cheap shiny garlands draped over tropical bushes as we pass by in our bikinis and swim trunks. We turn into a shack on the right, just before the bright yellow bridge that connects the two Cayes, this is the home of the famed burgers. We get our drinks, water or soda, and sit down as a long picnic table to await our pre-ordered burgers or cheeseburgers with optional fries. The table is a little too high, I could easily rest my head on the forearms without bending my back, and we make awkward small talk, Barry is holding forth on something or other, about some travel experience he had in Mexico, he is doing that traveler thing of one-upmanship although no one else is competing.

Our burgers arrive and they are not the juicy grilled piles of beef I have been anticipating, there are burgers everywhere on this island but not any good ones, at least it’s not charred and the fries aren’t drowning in grease, I will definitely not miss the food on the island I want to get back to New York where I can eat something other than bad hamburgers, greasy fries, and the occasional taco. Paying for our food takes another interminable interlude and I am newly glad that I decided to take the plane tomorrow morning rather than trying to rush back for the afternoon ferry, otherwise I would be anxiously tapping my bare heel on the concrete floor and watching the clock like the impatient New Yorker I have come here to stop being for a little while.

We thread our way back to the boat on the ribbon of concrete through the village, or hamlet, or whatever word is appropriate for a tiny island covered in shacks, back on the boat and on the Sting Ray Point. I am sunning myself on the aft dock again and considering skipping the second dive to stay here basking, I am not sure I want to fall back into the cold dark water when I could be up here but I am leaving tomorrow, this is my last chance, there are no more mananas left for me here so I suit up with everyone else, one by one we roll back off the boat and slowly sink below the surface.

I am more comfortable this time, breathing deeply and evenly, and there is less coral here too which makes me glad. Divers usually go to the coral because that is where the interesting reef fish live, your best chance to see something cool, but I am happier over the sand patches where I am not swimming in constant terror of bumping into the delicate, ancient organism and destroying it and everything is distorted and looks closer and bigger and I can’t see anything other than what’s directly in front of me and can’t feel what the fins are doing and when we’re in the reef I am convinced that I am killing the fish rather than observing them in some ecologically friendly way. Down to the sand patch then, slowly equalizing and adjusting the pressure in my ears, eyes wide open and aware, aware, trying to be aware of everything around me and also every miniscule adjustment in my body to being here underwater where this mammalian body has no business being. We are looking for rays in the sand but no luck again this time, we see a flounder and I like the flounders, they are so awkward and ungainly, like large amoebas on the ocean floor propelling themselves along with cilia just like things I looked at through a microscope in high school biology classes. Again, though, they’re common and therefore we swim on, seeking the rare fishes or rays and there are rumors that whale sharks have been sighted here before.

Down and around and back over to the coral wall, and I check my depth gauge and look up I can’t believe I’m 60 feet underwater and feeling totally fine with that. Etienne thinks he sees something and swims ahead and deeper than we are supposed to go, we follow equalizing every few feet keeping the pressure inside our bodies and ears in sync with the water pressing in on us. It was nothing and onwards, and barrel rolling again to see the water around me, the visibility is better here than on the last dive, the water a lighter blue, aquamarine which literally means “water blue” and no imagination required there, sometimes we have to use the obvious word because it is the only one that fits.

We play with the garden eels on the ocean floor for a little while, they look like strings floating up from the sand but they recede down into their holes when we approach, and then slowly seek their way back up when we back off. We watch for a little while and then flipper a wave through the water back at them and down they go again, it’s a little bit like playing with those roly-poly bugs, I don’t think I ever knew what they are really called they were always just roly-polys to me. No rays, no whale sharks, and we slowly ascend once again and that is the end of my last dive here on Utila, and it is bittersweet as I lay back in the sunshine on the aft deck for the last time trying to squeeze every second of bliss out of this possible, I am stocking up on sunshine to carry me through the cold winter I return to tomorrow. They guy whose name I forgot teases me about going home tomorrow, he just arrived and is looking forward to weeks of sunshine that I am already looking back on. He suggests that I stay longer, so do Ellie and Kim, it’s a suggestion I’ve bowed to over and over for the past week but no more, I have to go home I am out of time here.

Back into the lagoon and to the dive shop dock, we unload the boat and rinse our gear out with freshwater and put it all back neatly. Kim has something she wants to do this afternoon I’m not sure what, so we part ways, I grab my pack out of the office and head across the street to the dorms where I’ll be staying tonight, no hot water but then again the water heater in the apartment I left this morning had broken anyway, a suicide shower with electrified knobs that has given me a couple of unpleasant shocks in the past couple of days. I dump my bag on the only available bed and decide I will wait on my shower, I will soak up the heat of the day until the cold water feels good. I grab my book, not that I will really read it, it’s more of a prop than anything, make sure I have my cigarettes and stake my claim on the hammock on the porch overlooking the water. I have my iPhone as well so I put it on shuffle and relax back into the sunshine, sweat sheening my body, my book falling from my listless fingers.

There are new people in the dorm today, new arrivals just beginning their stay here, replacing the divers I met last week, Haley and Jes and Jay and Gareth are already gone as if they were never here and now there is a talkative German guy and Chris, a Finnish guy who joins me on the porch. He browses through my iPhone while we smoke, he asks me what I’m doing and I gesture languidly at the hammock and myself in it, “Nice,” he approves, this is what he has to look forward to. Within the first few minutes of conversation he is urging me to stay longer, he just met me and I’m leaving tomorrow morning, but that is the way these things go ships that pass in the night or travelers who pass in the sunshine, no point chatting or bonding with new people now I am leaving tomorrow.

The sun sinks through the clear sky and I sweating more but it is moving towards being a gorgeous sunset and I don’t want to abandon this tropical sun for even a few minutes to take a shower so I stay in the hammock, sweat cooling on my brow as we take pictures of the sun painting the clouds pink and red and of the local kids jumping off the dock, stunningly silhouetted against the blazing orange sky. There’s a sailboat out there on the horizon as well, it does not get more picture postcard than this and I stay on the porch until darkness descends entirely and the evening cool is coming in and it is time for that cold water shower now, I am going out for my last dinner tonight with Kim and Laura and maybe the German dude and his friend will join us.

We are all puttering around the beamed dorm room at various cross purposes, showering or unpacking or some people are studying their SCUBA course books that was me a week or two ago, and we trickle back out to the porch to decide where to go for dinner. I am running low on lempiras and refuse to go back to the bank, but I want a good seafood dinner tonight dammit, no more bad burgers or tacos. Kim doesn’t eat seafood though so she’s not inclined to follow my suggestion out to Chepes Beach and the Champas Bar, where a weathered French man cooks the most delicious seafood I’ve ever had in my life. We decide to walk towards Chepes, there’s an Indian restaurant that might be open tonight, and maybe Dave’s is open but we’re not sure, most restaurants are only open a few nights of the week and not in a way that makes much logical sense. Laura has joined us, she’s a British girl who’s staying over at the Iguana Center, I can’t remember now if I met her through Kim, or AJ, or Haley and Jes who have left already. The German guy is interested in coming with us, but he and his friend need to stop off and check email first, we tell him “Dave’s, or the Indian place, or maybe Champas if neither of those is open,” and of course we end up at La Piccolo which is none of those places but not to worry, it is a small island, we can all be reasonably confident that we’ll end up at TreeTanic.

La Piccolo is an Italian restaurant, but they have kingfish on the menu and it’s delicious. I don’t even know what kingfish is, I think it’s a local word for some other kind of fish that I might recognize, but whatever it is it’s really good. AJ has joined us as well, she’s the gal from Minnesota or Montana or somewhere Midwestern or Western that’s really cold right now, she was working at Coco Loco bar for two days and then quit, she met Kim traveling a few weeks ago and they’ve been hanging out since. Or maybe they met through Nif, the New Zealander who is on a two year backpacking tour of Central America, the purveyor of the pot brownies that have been decimating everyone nightly, but Nif left yesterday or maybe the day before and has left this fragile friendship as her legacy.

Leaving the restaurant, and we wander further up the road away from the dock, we are walking AJ home she has decided to pass on TreeTanic tonight. There’s some discussion amongst this group of girls whether or not we’re going out at all tonight, I am trying to be easy and laid-back and not insist but it is my last night here. We meander back, stopping to talk to the hippies selling jewelry across from Evelyn’s Grill, Kim is talking to the guy for a while so Laura and I grab a section of makeshift concrete curb and wait, trying to ignore the smell coming from the ditch, it wasn’t noticeable until we sat down but there’s nowhere else to sit and we’re rather tired. Kim’s done now, we are back at the crossroads and yes, we have finally determined that we are going to TreeTanic after all, all the discussion was a moot point really. We turn away from the ocean and walk up Cola de Mico road, turning in at the Jade Seahorse on the left just before the next intersection, after that the road goes onward up the hill towards the airport to Bar in the Bush which is the really rowdy late night bar, the one I’ve never been to because I am here on this island alone and it has a reputation for being unsafe for women alone.

TreeTanic is a different story though, and I’m not alone tonight. The bar is packed as we push up the narrow staircase after walking through the mosaiced garden, the bar is built in a treehouse to look like the prow of a ship wrecked amongst the boughs. This place is a fantasy of found art, every surface decorate with mosaic glass and encrusted with seahorses or maybe rubber toys found washed up on the beach and blown glass marbles, you could spend hours looking at a tiny part of this complex and its not tiny, with garden paths winding up to the cabanas and bridges flung over fountains. It’s a clear night, not raining at last, and we get beers at the bar and then find a bench to sit on. Kim’s not drinking, she has a deck of cards and proffers that as conversation falters. Laura asks me quietly if “Kim is always quiet like this,” I say no, she hasn’t seemed so, but I’ve only known her a few days so what do I know and is it so bad to be a little quiet some nights, really the social pace of making new acquaintance is somewhat exhausting from time to time. I am feeling social tonight for sure though, I am going to make the most of this because I have been often alone the previous weeks and I am ready to soak up this wild otherwordly ambience for the last time. I see Ellie and her husband, wave and squeeze over to their side of the bar, we dove together for two days there is some sort of bond. I chat with them for awhile, and with the other guy they’re talking to, Dave I think his name is. He introduces himself to me, not remembering that he has introduced himself to me three different times on a previous night, a night when he was much drunker than he is now. We tease him about that for a little while, and then I drift off, there is Etienne so I talk to him for a while, he shares the joke about using the SCUBA hand signals applied to drinking, left fist to right shoulder means “low on alcohol,” left hand making cross motion across throat means “out of alcohol,” pointing to your buddy’s bicep means “you are alcohol donor, we will share alcohol.”

The bar is filling up even more and I wend back over to Laura and Kim, they don’t look like they’re having a very good time. Kim is drinking with us now at least which is good, I am on my last drink based on the lempiras I have left in my pocket. We chat a bit and then Laura’s stalker shows up, she’s told us about this guy and we ran into him at Coco Loco the other night. He’s the other volunteer at the Iguana Center, a tallish chubby nondescript man with no social skills and he has been clinging barnacle-like to lovely, socially adept Laura, and it’s a small island its hard to avoid people. He hovers nearby, turns for a second and we quickly make a break for another table, squeezing our way into a corner with Chris our Finn friend, there is a little more room to breathe back in this corner and we are hidden from the stalker dude. Chris is talking to a couple who recently arrived, we are laughing and trading travel stories about different places, this girl talking about stocking up on illicit pharmaceuticals in Korea. Chris is flirting with me, or trying to I think, and keeps saying that he wishes I were staying longer, “Stay” this is what you say to people who are leaving the island, “stay” as if it matters, as if there won’t be someone new tomorrow, “stay” as if you won’t be leaving too and sooner rather than later, nobody stays forever.

I see Kim through the crowd, my dive instructor who managed to get me certified through sheer force of will, hers not mine, I was wondering if I would see her tonight to say goodbye, a goodbye obviously more meaningful to me than to her, she sees her students leave every day. I squeeze through and say hello, she is drinking from a plastic tumbler not a paper cup and I comment that it looks like the ones in my apartment, the apartment that isn’t mine anymore. She tells me that it’s a bar thing, tourists get the paper cups and residents get their drinks in these plastic tumblers. The residents being those who stay for months or maybe even a year, I wonder where the line is between tourist and resident because its not as if anyone is really going to stay here, and stay here, nobody stays forever but whichever way it slices there’s no doubt that I’m a tourist with my paper cup.

Lizzie, the bartender, rings the bell to get everyone’s attention—there’s a snorkel test tonight. Ahhh, that’s why its so crowded here, that and the beautiful skies here in the rainy season. Someone has completed their divemaster training, and after months of diving and practicing skills underwater and completing all the other tests and training tasks, the snorkel test is the last. The new divemaster, a girl I didn’t catch her name but she’s been diving with Cross Creek, is seated on a bar stool and fitted with her mask and snorkel. Lizzie takes a two liter Pepsi bottle which has been filled with some vile concoction of various liquors, shakes it up to uproarious cheers, and then funnels it into the snorkel. I can see the divemaster’s eyes wide open, she is swallowing as fast as she can and remember she can’t breathe through her nose it’s in the mask, Lizzie keeps pouring and about a minute later the girl spits out her snorkel, there is a groan of disapproval and she puts the mouthpiece back in and starts again, Lizzie keeps pouring and then the girl has had enough again, that bottle is still half-full but apparently this is sufficient alcohol guzzling to be considered as passing the snorkel test, another round of cheers and she takes off her mask, she is a Divemaster now. Lizzie is pouring from the bottle into open mouths around the bar, she offers it to me but I demur.

With no warning rain starts pouring out of the sky, tropical rain pounding down. It’s a treehouse bar, an open air bar, there’s little shelter to be had and this place is packed tonight, I cram under an eave with a huddle of strangers not sure what happened to Laura and Kim, or Etienne or Chris or the other Kim or Ellie or Dave. I am on the outer edge of the huddle and still getting somewhat wet, which is bad because this is my last set of vaguely clean clothes and I need to wear this on the plane tomorrow, I can’t get soaked I don’t have time to dry out again. The rain slackens after a few minutes, not stopping entirely but enough that I leave the safety of the eave to say goodnight to everyone, I have to get back while I still have some hope of staying dry enough to fly tomorrow.

I wave, and hug, and we all make awkward noises about staying in touch, and how of course I’ll come back to Utila but if I came back in a few months these people wouldn’t be here, not even the residents like Kim drinking out of her plastic cup because she’ll be gone by March, it will be new people arriving and leaving daily and we won’t keep in touch, we won’t see each other again, I won’t come back and we know it, people leaving every day and not coming back and so the hugs are perfunctory, each turning their attention back to the new people that are here today, new acquaintances with whom they’ll roll off the boat, and have dinner, and go to the beach, and watch snorkel tests at TreeTanic and I am leaving tomorrow morning. “Stay,” they say one more time, but their eyes are already looking past me and that’s fine, it is, I have done the same thing myself time and time again in different places around the world and I push carefully down the staircase and out into the road, walking under the bright moonlight back to the dorm, the rain is still holding back for my walk so I am successful. I stop at a tienda on the way back and have just enough lempira to grab one more beer, when I get back I sit on the porch, climb into the hammock one last time looking at the moon over the water and the skies cleared again like the rain never happened except my hair is still damp, my bag is packed and ready to go before dawn tomorrow, I am leaving Utila and its like I was never here at all but I had today, I had the sunshine and the water and the bliss and I will take that back with me, it will stay here but I am taking it with me too.

Leaving Utila, Honduras (Dec 2008)

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)