Atlantic High (6 page)

Vane took me down, in stages, to seventeen feet, after first lecturing me sternly on the point that there is no such thing as a macho diver; there are only bright and stupid divers, the latter defined as those who continue to go deeper even after feeling pain in their ears. You “clear” your ears (there are technical ways of saying all this) by applying pressure, over the rubber of the mask, to close your nostrils and then attempting to blow through your nose. Either you do, or you do not, experience instant relief. If you do, proceed on down. After another ten or fifteen feet, the pain will resume. Clear away. And proceed.
Don’t Go Down Farther Than 120 Feet
. Because below that depth odd things happen to the nitrogen content in your blood, to dissipate which your rise to the surface has to be achieved more gradually than your tank’s capacity makes possible. When you do rise, do so gradually. It is a good idea, while ascending, to breathe out. When there is no breath left, pause, inhale, and then resume the ascent while exhaling. At the surface a dinghy that has been carefully following you by tracing the wake of your bubbles will be waiting. Its pilot will lift the tank off your back, collect the other paraphernalia and—perhaps a little chilly, but certainly greatly exhilarated—you will reboard the master vessel, maybe with a fish or two in Vane’s pouch.

Except that my mask leaked a bit, I found it as easy to habituate myself to underwater life as I would to get used to a freshly discovered Mozart symphony. The pleasure of the weightlessness …of three-dimensional movement …the disappearance of gravity …the lights in greater, more playful variety than ever seen before …the underwater life which, observed behind the glass of aquariums, seems menacing and slimy, now suddenly friendly, frisky, endearing (though Vane pointed at a crevice in a shoal, shaking his fingers and forming an M with the two thumbs and index fingers—all of which was later explained to me as the means of warning against a moray eel he had spotted). We descended to 120 feet, and I never felt more carefree, even while observing, more frequently than my experienced companions, the gauge that indicated how many of the precious thirty minutes of air were left to me.

The Fiji Islands are famous for the opportunities they give you to dive. I wish I could successfully transcribe the formulae by which Vane led us, day after day, to the wonder spots, but one could as easily explicate the dowser’s art. He did require, I remember, that the water be deep, preferably over 100 feet. The tide should recently have come up against the reef structure, which is something like an underwater Gothic cathedral. That is where the fish collect, individually and in little and great schools: It was nothing to see ten thousand fish of one hundred distinct species and sizes during a single dive. The whole thing has only one disconcerting impediment, that it is impossible to smile. If you smile, alas, you drown; so that nothing is permitted to be wrenchingly funny, or wry. But the impulse to smile, as one would at a spectacular sunset, or burst of wildlife, or during an aria splendidly executed, requires concentration to overcome, particularly when there are comic encounters, as when your rump backs into something and you wheel about convinced you have backed into a shark. Nothing is less sharklike than Bindy (Viscountess Lambton), whose rump it was, though probably she is bigger than any shark, like Kirsten Flagstad. She is the original earth mother, with a whimsical rolling laugh that chokes off the words that are constantly amusing her and, through her, you. On Sunday she accompanied me to Mass at Suva because, she said, although not a Catholic she thought it would be good to pray for the new pope designated as such the previous day. I told her that was a very nice thing to do, that I had to confess the unlikelihood that I would go to Mass specially to pray for the new Archbishop of Canterbury, and she said I most certainly should, since the poor man has few enough people praying for him these sad, schismatic days.

The beautiful Bindy requires the coordination of two men to hoist her on board the dinghy, but whole armies would disengage for the pleasure of serving Bindy, who only yesterday could have posed for the most convincing statue of Brünnehilde ever struck. She saw that I was cold and, after the first day, gave me her spare wet suit, greatly increasing my comfort. And, as soon as we got back on board, she would make up for all the laughter we missed during the two half-hour dives Vane permitted us every day (more than one hour out of twenty-four in the deep does something, once again, to the nitrogen content of your blood, which needs rebuilding). It was Bindy who said to me innocently, a book on her lap during the cocktail hour, “What is an irresponsible flake?”

“A
what
, Bindy?”

“An
‘irresponsible flake.’
That’s what it says here.” She showed me page 146 of
Safe Scuba
, under the heading “Selecting a Buddy.”

I was introduced to what is the most hilariously periphrastic English in print. The co-authors must, between them, have attended at least five teachers’ colleges to achieve their prose style. “Most often, we have little choice with regard to the selection of a buddy,” you read on, “in many cases we may be married to our buddy, or involved in a similar relationship to marriage, or we may be assigned a buddy by a divemaster on a boat, if possible, regardless of how our buddies are selected it is an extremely good idea to know the person with whom you are going to dive. You should know your buddy’s character patterns and diving skills. If your buddy is an irresponsible flake on the surface, the chances are excellent that the same idiotic behavior patterns will continue underwater.”

I told Bindy that honest injun, most people in America don’t talk that way, and took the book from her. There are acres and acres of the same kind of thing. The authors’ intention, clearly, is to persuade anyone who wants to scuba dive that he (or as
they
would put it: “he or she, as the case may be”) should spend dozens of hours and thousands of dollars in instructions. My very favorite passage deals with the rather simple question: Can you swim? “…failure of a swimming test may not demonstrate the student to be in poor physical condition, but only that the student lacks effective swimming skills. The swimming does not necessarily demonstrate that the diver will function well in the sub-aquatic environment. Mental conditioning, cognitive and affective, and proper habit patterns may be far more relevant to learning diving skills and surviving in the open water than physical conditioningas the prime criteria in dive student selection.” All that and one mashed potato will get you two mashed potatoes. But I had already resolved never ever to do anything, in the sub-aquatic environment
or
in the super-aquatic environment, to permit Bindy to think of me as an irresponsible flake.

Wednesday
. The captain and crew got up early and powered the
Tau
northeast sixty miles to the island of Taveuni, which is the third largest island in Fiji, and said by some to harbor the most spectacular diving and snorkeling reef in the whole area. It is the Somosomo Strait, and of course Vane led us unerringly to a spot that could not have been more enchanting. In the late morning we dinghied out on the
Tau’s
Zodiac, into which the sea-skittish Drue was coaxed on the solemn promise, reiterated by all hands, that Zodiacs have the distinctive feature of being
absolutely unsinkable
, a proposition Drue finally came to believe until, a few days later, the Zodiac sank in front of her eyes, disappearing into the vasty deep without so much as a gurgle of resistance, leaving Captain Philip in great distress.

We went ashore in part to ogle at Fijian life, little of which we had observed. We found it to be exactly as described by
National Geographic—men
and women of all shapes and colors, pleasant, a little lethargic, that admixture of Polynesian, Micronesian, Melanesian and, finally, Indian (the Indians immigrated halfway through the nineteenth century as indentured laborers, the tending of agriculture being unappealing to the native population). They are now a peaceable race of people, and it requires an exercise of the imagination to recall that on his famous voyage from the
Bounty
to Timor in
1789 (3,600
miles in an open longboat) Captain Bligh did not dare to pause in these islands, so notoriously were the natives given to killing, and then eating, uninvited guests. The natives are cheerful, apparently unexcitable, notwithstanding the sweat they work up in their nightclub acts when imitating the frenzied manners of their forefathers. They have been self-governing since 1970, after ninety-six years of colonial rule by the British who had the uncommon good sense to leave 82 percent of the land in native hands. I am not qualified to say whether the
600,000
Fijians are competently governed, but whatever evidence there is of commercial sloth, justice is certainly swift. On Tuesday we read in the local paper that three men had been convicted the day before of raping a young woman of eighteen, receiving sentences of from two to four years of hard labor. The rape had occurred the preceding Saturday. Earl Warren never sojourned in Fiji.

Through the town of Waiyevo, on the western shore of the island, the
180th
meridian runs, and the spot on the roadside where this happens is of course properly designated, with wooden signs tapering in opposite directions, one of them marked “Today,” the other, “Yesterday.” We did a great deal of picture taking, inevery conceivable pose, one foot firmly planted on Tuesday, the second on Wednesday—that sort of thing.

It reminded me of an experience a half-dozen years earlier at the exact geographical south pole when an escorting colonel, in the fifty-degree-below-zero cold, asked whether I would like to have my picture taken while standing on my head, making possible a postcard depicting me as carrying the world on my shoulders. That being a characteristic personal burden, I readily assented and was lifted by my boots by an aide. At exactly which moment my brother Jim, then the junior senator from the State of New York, in a fit of chauvinism fired off a firecracker which was programmed to waft to earth in the form of the New York State flag, which he would photograph and send out to his constituents. Unhappily the firecracker went instead directly to my nose, so that there exists only a picture of me standing on my head, being bloodied by the flag of New York State.

No such infelicity marred our picture taking this time around, though I was later advised by an obstinately literal historian of the area that the official boundary marking the international date line was, in answer to a local provocation, made to jag eastward, then south, then west, and back to the 180-degree mark so that the whole of Fiji might repose, unconfused, in the eastern hemisphere. All that bureaucratic geographical commotion was in retaliation against an ingenious Indian vendor whose shop straddled the date line and who got around the sabbath laws by selling from the eastern end of his shop on the western Sunday, and from the western end of the shop on the eastern Sunday. That is the kind of problem the UN was born to solve.

We returned to the
Tau
undecided whether to stop by at the neighboring islands of Nggamea and Lauthala, which are owned respectively by the American tycoon Malcolm Forbes and the Canadian-born actor Raymond Burr. Everyone knows Malcolm Forbes, whose hospitality is in any case widely advertised. The closest tie any of us had to Raymond Burr is that I had patronized his hotel in the Azores during a transatlantic crossing in 1975. I pronounced this an attenuated relationship, whereupon we all decided that in any event we really did not want to visit anybody at all, so we read, and had our wines, and chatted, and listened to beautiful music from the cassette deck I had so thoughtfully provided, and went to bed in high excitement, because the very next day we would visit the fabled Wallangilala.

Thursday
. Wallangilala even Captain Philip had never visited. It is a perfect coral crescent. More accurately, a mile-wide coral necklace, with three beads missing at the top, through which you enter. The inside is ringed with white sand, with palm trees on the eastern end. It has a voluptuarian appeal for anyone who cares at all about, or for, the sea. Its stark loneliness in the South Pacific is itself striking. The perfect protection it gives from wind or, rather, from the seas—the height of the coral is insufficient to block the wind—might have been specified by a civil defense engineer. The water is every shade of Bahamian blue; the diving and snorkeling could consume days. There was only a single other vessel there, a 45-foot ketch owned by an oil rigger who works six months of the year in the North Sea, accumulating enough money to sustain him the other six months of the year in Fiji, where he cruises with his wife and child, endlessly, from island to island, disdaining, except in extreme circumstances, the use of his engine, thus doing little to consume the mineral he is paid so handsomely to make available to others. At dinner that night we resolve that now that we have reached the easternmost part of our itinerary, we shall insist on using only the sails as we proceed south to the Lau group of islands. We retired with that vinous determination, which tends to silt away overnight, to be firm with the captain, but we dove before breakfast and this meant, by Jack’s hallowed tradition, a glass of red wine with breakfast (Vane does not permit us to eat before diving). And so, refortified in our resolve, we stipulate that
only
the sails will be used for our passage south to Mbalavu—from which Pat and I shall have to leave the party, to meet engagements in Australia more closely related in purpose to taking oil out of the North Sea than to cruising in Fiji.

Saturday
. It was a fine sail, and I suggested to the first mate that we board the Zodiac and take photographs of the
Tau
under sail. The first part of the operation was accomplished, but at full power in the Zodiac in a choppy sea we found we could not keep up with the
Tau
, so bracing was the wind that morning and so lively the Tau’s performance, unleashed on a broad reach, even with the mainsail reefed. It was an awful exercise in frustration, attempting to communicate to the people on the boat that they must slow down in order that we might photograph them. All boats should have walkie-talkies, perfect for contact between dinghy and the mother vessel. Pat has mastered the exploitation of these, and reaches me at remote grocery stores in native villages with such importunities as
“Don’t forget the guava jelly
,
OVER
!” The photograph reproduced in these pages is the forlorn result of attempting, on a cloudy day, to capture the
Tau
, headed adamantly across the same sound Captain Bligh passed through on his determined, legendary voyage. That night, another fine dive having been consummated, a sadness overtook the departing members, and the thought of going anywhere without Vane to guide me and Bindy to console me, and of leaving Jack and Drue, was a cruel capitulation to the world of getting and spending. The lot of them boarded an ancient open bus to see us off at what is called the airport. Our fourteen pieces of luggage were segregated and weighed outside a thatched hut where lukewarm orange soda was available. The terminal’s scales were brought out. The device was what you get from Sears, Roebuck for the guest bathroom, and one by one the bags were weighed (and a careful calculation made of the overweight) and lugged into the belly of one of those airplanes Clark Gable used to fly over the Hump; and we headed downwind, because into the wind would have required taking off uphill, and we were, miraculously, airborne. Suddenly it was sunny, and all the blue, and the coral reefs that have decimated the merchant marines of the world, spread out ahead, carpeting us the
150
miles to Suva, where the maw of convention was waiting, impatient to swallow us up.