Diving Off the Deep End

Oh the difference a page can make. The last time my pen touched these pages I was a million miles away – figuratively and literally. Now my possessions are no longer contained in one backpack. My lunch no longer costs less than $5 and my biggest decisions have nothing to do with where I’ll lay my head down tonight or how I’ll get there…Well, maybe they still do.
Between the flights, the catching up, the unpacking, the rearranging, and the readjusting I’ve had time to do everything but write. Someone commented after hearing of my travels that I must have ‘itchy feet’ which is probably very true but I think I also have itchy fingers. They keep wandering back to these pages and these old inkblots. One of my long-term dreams has come true – I’ve taken my concept of travel to a new level. I have seen and smelt and touched the things that my best daydreams were made of. How fitting then that my subject today is the stuff of my oldest dream.
Scuba diving has a lot of technical jargon involved with it. There are depth charts and gages and tank readings that can easily erase all the romantic and mystical attributes that this activity holds. But I have a love for the ocean that is equaled only by the depth of that selfsame entity. It should obvious that I didn’t enroll in our Scuba Certification Course on the island of Ko Toa for depth charts or gages.
But those things were a part of it. Turns out getting certified is a lot of work. There are textbooks and classes and tests. Of course the result for those things is much more rewarding than most grades or report cards I ever received.
The whole process is a tease. They show you videos with skills and lessons vital to your success as an underwater diver. Each film has tantalizing shot of gorgeous coral and beautiful fish life which managed only to distract my easily wandering mind.
Then they equip you just as you would to dive in the open ocean and once you have donned all of that cumbersome and enormously unflattering gear (if you have been through a course you know what I mean), they lead you to a pool. A pool which in our case was dead center in the middle of a very nice resort which was populated by normal tourist wearing very flattering suits. It’s kind of like that dream where you are standing before a large audience completely naked. I am now convinced that naked is actually better than neoprened.
And the humiliation is far from over. Once in the pool you are asked to do seemingly simple tasks like float without shooting cork-like to the surface or sinking rocklike to the bottom. They ask you to remove your mask and replace it or take out your mouthpiece and put it back without drowning yourself in the process. After a while I thinking that these exercises were solely for the entertainment of our dive instructor.
But then you find yourself aboard a rickety dive boat in the China Sea with ripples of early morning sunlight waving up at you from the warm turquoise waters and you realize that the teasing is over, the waiting is done. You are about to take the plunge in the most literal sense imaginable.
The surface of the sea looks different from underneath. It’s like the back side of a mirror – a silent, silvery window to a world that feels somehow real and dreamlike all at the same time. My bubbles chased each other up up up as I sank down down down. Here was another world, another reality filled with a deafening kind of silence, with a shadowy, foggy clarity and with inhabitants who cast unblinking stares your way.
Was it the brilliance of the coral colors or the oddity of the little boxfish? Was it the endless and liquid movement of the large school of barracudas? Or was it the minuet detailed saltwater slugs and tiny rockfish that opened my eyes the widest and distracted me so completely that thoughts of depth and oxygen disappeared with the tiny bubbles heading to the surface? Whatever it was, it became easy, effortless, interesting.
Dreams are funny things. We spend so much time thinking about them, planning for them, moving toward them, that their arrival catches us y surprise or, in this case, we can forget to realize that they are coming true at all. We are too busy living them, learning from them, and loving them to label it as ‘accomplished.’ And some dreams grow and change and adapt so that we are continually accomplishing them – with every different dive, with each new location, and at every depth definable.