by Tim Cahill
My buddies, professionals all, and I ascended according to plan, and we hung off on the anchor line for twenty-five minutes. Hanging off, or decompressing, is not nearly as much fun as reading Silas Marner. The purpose of hanging there at two hundred feet for all that time with nothing to do or see is to let all that excess nitrogen bleed out of your system.
Remember, the nitrogen was absorbed under pressure. If you shot straight to the surface from a hundred feet, all these nitrogen bubbles in your brain and nervous system would expand to four times their size, and you'd spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair explaining to people why they call it the bends.
So I hung there, bleeding nitrogen, and no longer narked in the least. Atlantis seemed a long way off, unimportant now compared to the realization that the Blue Hole had acted like a psychological syphon, had tried to pull me down into its darkest depths. Another fifty feet and I never would have stopped diving. I would have died happy in the warm womb of the hanging Virgins.
Diving is a sport for the lazy: there are sets of tables that tell you how deep you can go and how long you can stay, and if you follow the table, you will never have to decompress. Safety in diving is largely a matter of cerebration. Plan your dive, and dive your plan. Here's the plan for my most recent dive: a guide and I anchored over a reef just opposite Rum Point, on the north side of Grand Cayman, an island about one hundred fifty miles northwest of Jamaica. Toward shore the reef drops off to a shallow floor, which slopes up to the shores of the island. The outer section of the reef fronts the Cayman Trench, which at its maximum depth is a little more than 4.7 miles deep. We're talking abysmal depth here.
The outer section of the reef forms a vertical wall, a wall that seems to drop off forever. We were anchored over the reef proper, and about forty feet below us, on the top of the reef, was a small opening. Long Tunnel runs down on slant. It is about sixty feet long altogether and empties out on the wall at a depth of about ninety feet.
Checking the tables, we found we could stay at ninety feet for thirty minutes without decompressing. Call it twenty-five minutes, just to be safe. A very gentle current was sweeping to the west along the wall; so we'd swim east for the first half of the dive, then turn around and let the current float us back to the boat. We decided to hang off for five minutes at ten feet, for no other reason than that it made us both feel smart.
We dropped over the side and entered the tunnel, which was so narrow we had to go single file. The oval passageway was dark and so smoothly sculpted with strange and grotesque shapes that it seemed to have been purposely crafted, but by forces unseen and inhuman.
At ninety feet the tunnel spit us out into the brilliance beyond the wall. The sensation there, with the wall dropping away forever into the abyss, was precisely that of dream flight. There was a euphoria there too, the emotion
I feel in my dream state when I realize how silly I've been all these years for not using my powers of flight. All this was touched by the sweetest tinge of purple narcosis.
Visibility—I swear it—ranged to one hundred fifty feet, and off to my left the open water was deep blue, like the Montana sky on the clearest of days. I looked to the wall. Every niche and ledge was overlaid with bizarre and unearthly shapes: purple pagodas from some alternate universe, barrel sponges a man could stand in, sea fans bluer than a baby's eyes. And all about, swimming purposefully, like citizens of a busy city, were hundreds upon hundreds of fish: the regal moorish idols, angelfish, long-nosed butterfly fish, sad-eyed squirrel fish, blue-and-black wrasses.
Every minute or so I'd check my watch and pressure gauge and depth gauge. After fifteen minutes of deep diving along the wall, we rose to the top of the reef—forty feet or so—and let the current urge us back toward the boat. No reason to swim if the ocean will do it for you. The top of the reef was choked with color, like an alpine meadow in spring. Blue and green and black and yellow crinoids— fernlike invertebrates that feel like Velcro to the touch— were interspersed with all manner of soft corals. There were green and gold and purple-red sea fans, there were flowering corals, and long golden sea whips swaying in the gentle surge.
We rose to examine a spire that jutted steeplelike from the top of the reef. Near the top of the spire and nicely centered in it was a particularly baroque niche or window. Set deep back into the middle of the niche was a flattish green barrel sponge, like a child's chair. To the right stood a long purple tube sponge that looked like the kind of floor lamp a color-blind person might buy at Woolworth's. To the left of the little green chair was a small white octagonal sea fan, which looked like a doily set against the gold-flecked plate of green-red sheet coral that formed the wall of the niche. All in all, it looked like a tiny room built by an aquatic hobbit with a psychedelic habit.
We rose to the anchor line and hung off on the rope. The most physically demanding part of the dive had been the two minutes it took us to don our equipment.
There is no record of any diver being eaten by a giant squid like the one that got Captain Nemo's sub in that movie: the diving industry blames the movie Jaws for a perceptible dip in sales, and I'm sure they'd like me to point out that not all sharks are particularly scary. In Australia the small epaulet shark tries frantically to escape divers and snorkelers. The little fellow feels safely hidden if he can get his head into a coral niche. No matter that his body is completely visible; the epaulet shark, this ostrich of the sea, can't see you, and he lies still as a stone, thinking he is a very clever fish. Incidentally, the epaulet shark has no teeth. He is affectionately referred to as a "gummy."
The carpet shark is a sedentary fish, and he is often seen loafing on a circular plate of coral. His coloration is intense in a mottled, ancient sort of way. He looks like the most ornate carpet in Grandma's house. A little fringe of beard, like white lace coral, hangs from his chin, making him look like an elderly dandy. The carpet shark simply sits and waits, snapping up the occasional unwary parrot fish. Once at Heron Island, on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, I watched as a woman, posing for a picture, sat on a carpet shark's head. The shark bucked in an irritable manner, and the woman came off her perch like someone shot from a cannon. The carpet shark glared up at the divers with its widely spaced, milky-white eyes. I thought of a grouchy old man forced to dress as a teenager.
Reef sharks, such as the blacktip, are considered harmless animals. I've seen them five and six feet long, and I've swum with them on patrol. They are beautiful, in the manner of a samurai sword—form follows function—and they make good diving buddies if you can keep up with them.
There are sleeping sharks off the Caribbean coast of Mexico, sharks so docile that divers have been known to pull their tails. Caribbean nurse sharks are large enough to generate a full-scale adrenaline rush, and they are the ones local divers look for when they want to watch sharks. In Cozu-
mel, Mexico's premier dive resort, I talked to a woman named Rita Shess, who sometimes works as a shark handler for feature films. She told me about her work on a film called The Zombie II The zombie, an underwater sort in this trasher, likes to grab topless female divers. These are rare off Mexico, but the zombie perseveres. In the end the zombie is carried off by a shark, and the Caribbean is again safe for starlets.
The zombie stood on the ocean floor in his weighted boots. Rita and her team of three stood just out of camera range to the left. Another team of three stood to the right. Rita's team pushed the shark out toward the zombie and in front of the camera. It drifted lazily by the guy in the rubber mask, indolent and indifferent. The second team caught the shark, turned it around, and Ping-Ponged it back to Rita's team. They did this dozens of times while the zombie waved its arms and spouted great gouts of artificial blood. The film would be cut in such a way that sales of diving equipment would be sure to suffer.
Experienced divers often choose a dive site where they know they will see sharks. They want to see sharks. Some diving guidebooks specify areas where sharks are usually present. Here's Nancy Sefton in Di
ve Cayman: "Shark Alley ... a moderate depth site . . . noted for the frequent sighting of reef sharks. . . . Chances of seeing sharks are fairly good. ... In Cayman waters these have proven to be harmless creatures, even shy."
I do not mean to suggest all sharks are shy or harmless. There are more than two hundred species of shark extant, and some—hammerheads, great whites, tigers, grays—can be dangerous. But even if you do come upon one of these bad guys, your chances are something on the order of half a million to one against being attacked. Knowledgeable divers consider such sightings a privilege.
There is good diving near you: while I like diving big walls, I feel obliged to point out that there is great diving all over the world. The cold waters off northern California could never support a reef, but diving the kelp beds there is like dropping into a series of ice-water cathedrals. A strand of kelp anchors on a rock, and a bulbous head on the other end floats on the surface, so that the bed itself is a forest of long, green strands. Diving a kelp bed feels very much like walking through the redwoods. Sunlight scatters throughout the bed, just as it does in a redwood forest, and the feeling is equally Gothic and mysterious.
Even in Montana, where I live, there are a number of interesting dive sites. The Firehole River in Yellowstone Park is fed by numerous geysers and thermal springs. The water stays relatively warm all year round, and a popular dive site is set in a spectacular canyon. The water pushes a diver through smooth rock corridors, shoves him up over the top of a small wall—the water is about thirty-five feet deep here—then rockets him over an odd grouping of humpy, sculptured volcanic boulders. The pool at the end of this fast, roller coaster run is full of cutthroat trout, and they can often be seen feeding voraciously on a sudden snow-fly hatch.
Not far from where I live, there is a pond fed by a thermal spring. The water temperature never drops below sixty-nine degrees, and someone has stocked the pond with colorful freshwater tropical fish. You can cross-country ski to this unusual site.
On the other end of the state, a railroad track runs along a ledge above a mountain lake. Many years ago a train derailed and rolled into deep water. I know of no other place in the world where you can dive to see a train wreck. The point is this: if there's good diving near me, then there just has to be good diving near you.
You get to go around wearing tight rubber suits, and nobody thinks you're weird: this is our little secret.
guys who honk bicycle horns for fish—are actually California sea lions.
Out in the dark water, near the kelp beds, a few of the sea lions lay on their backs, floating there in lazy immobility like vacationers in the Great Salt Lake. Their flippers, which projected out of the water, looked like the fins of small sharks, makos perhaps, or blues.
I dropped into the water and swam for the nearest kelp bed. I was wearing scuba gear and a black hooded wet suit, and I expected to pry a few scallops off the rocks for dinner. Sea lions can be playful diving companions, but they are thieves as well. So awkward on land, they can swoop and dive like pelicans in the water, and they can make off with a goody bag full of abalone or speared fish in a manner that makes a diver feel furiously helpless, like an elderly and arthritic woman victimized by a purse snatcher on a city street. It is therefore prudent when diving in the presence of sea lions—or in waters where there may be sharks—to tie the nylon mesh or goody bag to your weight belt with a long rope, secured by a slip knot, an offering to these fat lords of the Channel Islands. If you have no choice but to cooperate, better to do it on your own terms.
I reached the kelp bed and dropped beneath the entangling mass of green blades on the surface. This particular variety of seaweed attaches itself to a rock on the ocean floor. A kind of air bladder forms on the upper leaves, allowing them to float to the surface. Diving in a kelp bed is like walking through a triple-canopy jungle or a redwood forest. Sunlight filters through the thick upper vegetation in the pure shafts that ought to be accompanied by an angelic chorus.
The beds are full of life. A cold-water current rushing down from the Arctic runs out of power here off Southern California, and the sea life is an amalgam of cold- and warm-water organisms. Little animals hide in the depths of the kelp, pursued by hungry, larger life forms that, in turn, are
careful not to stray too far toward the edge of the bed where the really big predators lurk.
I was twisting through long stems of kelp, thinking of scallops (sauteed in butter and garlic), but the bed was small, and I decided to swim to another, larger stand that was closer to shore and the sea lion colony. It was there, just out of sight of both beds, in the open sea, with the sandy floor opening up like a desert on all sides, that the vertigo hit me.
Divers and pilots, even experienced ones, suffer from complete disorientation on rare occasions. It happens to pilots in no-visibility situations, on instruments, when they suddenly realize they no longer know up from down. The same thing can happen to divers moving through open water where there are no points of reference. There is a sense of dizziness and nausea, compounded by irrational thoughts and confusion. I reminded myself that bubbles rise and managed to orient myself in two dimensions. There was nothing I could do about the confusion, though. I found myself thinking about sea lions, about the things that Karen Straus, who has spent years diving the Channel Islands, told me before this trip.
"Is it safe to dive with sea lions?" I had asked. "Oh, sure," she said. "It's fun." "Any danger?"
"Not from the females, generally. If the males think you're another male, there could be trouble. It's rare." "What do they do?" "They beat you up." "Oh."
"Of course, since you're not nearly large enough to look like a male, it's more likely that they'd think you were a female." I was thinking about this because, at six feet and two hundred pounds, I was about the size of your basic female sea lion. The black wet suit looked like the slick and
shining skin of a wet seal. Vertigo presented me with the unsettling thought that a powerful six-hundred-pound beast could just possibly fall in love with me, here in eighty feet of water.
"What happens if he thinks you're a female?" I had asked.
"Well, he'll try to separate you from your diving partners. Try to drive you out to open sea."
"Okay, but once he gets you where he wants you, what, uh (I wasn't sure I wanted to know this), what does he do?"
"He beats you up," she said.
Did I look like a female sea lion? What if one of the big fellows decided I was some desirable exotic, a worthy addition to his harem?
It was not a salubrious image: a life spent on the beach, wallowing around fatly with the other females. Knowing the shame of being the ugliest wife: the sad slow one who keeps getting her scallops snatched away, the outcast with the far-off, wistful look in her eye. Imagine lying there on the rocks trying to chat with the other wives, those complacent lard-buckets, secure in their own blubbery allure.
"Looks like we're in for a storm." "Ark, ark, ark."
And every once in a while, every month or so, a freighter would steam by a few miles off the coast and there I'd be, standing in the wet sand, waving my arms, screaming for help, a damsel in distress, an innocent imprisoned in the sheik's seraglio. "Help me! For the love of God, they think I'm a female sea lion, and the big guy wants more kids." No answer from the ship, but here comes the male, this six-hundred-pound tyrant, huge, dominant, terrifying. He's sliding rapidly over the beach, using his flippers and leaving a furrow in the sand the size of an irrigation ditch. The big guy is moving fast now, not nearly so cute as he might in the circus, and instead of honking a bicycle horn, he is growling deep in his throat, making the message abun-
WET WORK 185
dantly clear: "Siddown and shaddup." He glances around at the other wives as if to say, "Yeah, she's ugly, but ya gotta admit, she sure smells different." A chorus of sarcastic laughter here: "Ark, ark, ark."
And then I was moving into the second kelp bed and the vertigo dropped away from me like a rock kicked o
ver the lip of the Grand Canyon. The relief was primal, instinctive: back to the trees and safety. What the hell: trapped in some blubbery harem? What had been going through my mind? Could such a thing really happen? Or was it the fact that I'd just seen Tootsie?
At the far reaches of my vision, in open waters beyond the kelp, a sea lion began slicing through gray waters in my direction. It looped toward the surface and the tangle of vegetation there, then dived straight down, disappearing into the cathedral of light in the depths of the kelp. I couldn't tell if it was a male or a female.
described the result of a bite. The single recorded fatality may have been due to the victim's severe reaction to the venom. If you know you have an allergy to sea snake venom, perhaps drunken diving for poison sea snakes is not for you.
Equipment: The craftsmen of Daan Bantayan can make you a pair of goggles. These are carved from wood to conform to the contours of your face and they will fit no one else. Glass is glued to the wood and a headstrap is fashioned from an old automobile inner tube.
You'll need a flashlight and a clear plastic bag. The bag is placed over the flashlight and secured with tape, twine, tire-strips, and glue. This is your underwater light. Get an old tire and make two rubber bracelets, one for each wrist.
Preparing for Work: The snake divers believe that alcohol, taken internally in sufficient quantities, thins the blood and renders a bite less harmful. Any liquor will do, and the stronger the better. Rum, either Anejo or Manila, is good, but coconut wine flavored with anise, called malloroca, is favored by most of the divers. They particularly like Green Parrot brand. The wine is clear and thick and tastes like licorice. It comes in a clear beer-type bottle; the cork under the cap is usually black and a little crumbly.