A Past Literacy

My first memories of the ocean are of summer days on the first public beach in America, Revere Beach. These were days of  taking the bus to the beach with my mom and little sister, playing in the sand, and getting ice cream. Swimming was not always possible, though, because the water was too polluted. Despite the pollution, I was always fascinated by the ocean.   

I imagined myself as a SCUBA diver. I would live somewhere warm and spend my days saving ocean creatures, especially dolphins. As a teenager, I volunteered at the New England Aquarium once a week for several summers. At that point, I felt no fear of the ocean — just awe. It wasn’t until I made my dream of being a SCUBA diver a reality that I felt true fear of the ocean.  

I became a certified SCUBA diver in 2002. For the next few years, I dove in several tropical locations, each time logging depths, calculating times, and noting interesting fish and marine life in my diver’s log. Although my certification allowed for independent dives, I always opted to go with a master diver. Local dive operations know the good locations and best times to go, and logistically, it is easier to get transportation back and forth from dive sites.

A typical diving day includes multiple short dives (usually around 30-35 minutes). The first morning dive is the deepest, and the afternoon dive is the shallowest. When ascending from a deep dive (90-100 feet), at least one safety stop must be made at 15-20 feet to avoid decompression sickness, also know as “the bends.” A safety stop for a 100-foot dive should be about 3 minutes long. Off the coast of the Grand Cayman Islands on a warm February day in 2004, I lived the longest five minutes of my life.

“The Maze” dive includes swimming through rock caverns, from about 65 to 100 feet. The stunning beauty of the coral, fish, and marine plant life is breath-taking. For me, it was especially so as I rememer the awe I felt that I was able to experience this world so different from my usual New England scenery. After about 20 minutes of moving through the maze at 95 feet, my group popped up from the caverns to discover a reef shark nearby. The shark was not advancing on us, so it did not seem like a threat. At about this time, my new mask began seeping water, and it was pooling below my nose. The mask had been bothering me all dive. I could no longer ignore the water as it got up my nose.

Instead of clearing my mask as I was trained, I panicked. I remember thinking that I was being irrational — I knew how to solve this problem. I have to tilt my head back and blow the water out of the mask. This also requires breaking the seal on the mask and blowing hard out my nose, but I am already beginning to cough because of the water up my nose. As my heart raced faster, my breathing quickened, exacerbating my problem by adding the worry of running out of air at the end of the dive.

In a panic, I use a serious sign: I get the attention of the master diver and sign that I am out of air when really I am out of my mind (is there a dive sign for that, I wonder). He sees my filled mask and through the blur, I see him pantomime clearing the mask. I am coughing and trying to stop breathing through my nose. I shake my head “no” and see my hair elastic floating out beside me adrift in endless ocean. Beyond my elastic, there is nothing but deep blue ocean. It looks the way the sky does out the window of a plane, but it is so much more menacing at that moment. I am surrounded by that deep blue, hundreds of feet below and at least 50 feet above. I have the realization that I am about to drown myself in the ocean.

I am told that I ripped my regulator out of my mouth, but I have no recollection of that. The only clear memory I have is Mark, the master diver, holding my arm as I tried to ascend too quickly. I remember my panic subsiding when I pinched my nose, closed my eyes, and focused on breathing through my mouth. I opened my eyes at the first safety stop but had to close them again when I saw we were still at 30 feet. When we finally broke the surface to the water, I looked up into the sky, barely believing I was experiencing fresh air. As I sat on the boat after, I wondered at the way my brain could become so irrational, and I wondered if I would ever dive again.

A few hours later, I put my reg back in, and sank through 15 feet of water to sit on the bottom. For the next 20 minutes, I practiced clearing my mask, even taking it off fully and putting it back on. Some views are worth taking a risk for, and I knew that if I did not get back in the water that day, I never would. So even though I have not been SCUBA diving in more than a decade, I know that when I am ready, I will not hold that terrified memory as my last of the brilliant underwater world.