A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (24 page)

Strangely, I’ve stopped my habit of visiting the airline office and reconfirming my flight every day. I think I’m becoming almost Marquesan in my attitude: if I’m on the next plane out, fine. If not, what the hell. My work is going well, the food is good, the land is vibrant, I’m content and my dog loves me for no very good reason. Money is no problem. There is plenty to eat growing on the hills above town if it should come to that. Worrying about something I can’t control, something like another missed flight, would simply spoil an otherwise perfect day.

D
iving doesn’t upset your stomach, as aspirin often can: I got firmly and incurably hooked on diving several years ago when I was doing the pool work necessary to become a certified diver. It was early one Monday morning. The day before I had attended a wedding where I was forced, very nearly against my will, to drink massive quantities of champagne for hours on end without surcease. I woke up that Monday in my own bed, but I was still wearing the rental tux, and the overhead light burned like an ugly accusation. My tongue was made of sandpaper. I felt diseased.

That very day I had an appointment to go lie in ten feet of water, at the bottom of the pool in the scuba school. I would be down there for about an hour. The exercise was designed to help a student become familiar with the sensation of being underwater for long periods of time and to help him learn proper use of the scuba gear.

I pulled on the wet suit and put on a fifteen-pound weight belt, which weighed somewhere in excess of two hundred pounds, then fell into the pool, the tank on my back, the regulator in my mouth. At ten feet I took the regulator out of my mouth and blew a little of the pressurized air I had been breathing into the vestlike piece of equipment known as a buoyancy compensator, or BC. That was the extent of the exercise: put enough air into the BC so that its lift precisely equaled the downward drag of the weight belt. I lay a foot and a half off the bottom of the pool, very nearly
comatose, like a man in a sensory-deprivation chamber. Each time I took a breath, I’d rise a few inches; each time I exhaled, I’d sink a like amount.

I was neutrally buoyant, completely free of the gravity that had seemed a cruel and unreasonable force only an hour before. The silence sang, and the moral aspects of my condition began to recede. I really wasn’t such a bad guy, and it probably wouldn’t cost all that much to get the tux cleaned and mended. The pain in my joints, which had made my arms and legs feel the way trees growing at the edge of the tundra look, had begun to subside. Each time I exhaled, another portion of my pain arose inside the bubbles and burst on the surface of the world, leaving me feeling stronger, healthier, more morally staunch.

And so it came to me, as I lay on the bottom of the pool, exhaling ailments, that scuba diving cures hangovers. And I was hooked.

W
e can learn from the wacky antics of our underwater friends and even apply these lessons to our everyday life: a single example should suffice. In tropical waters, especially around coral reefs, one often sees small blue-and-black or yellow-and-black fish known as wrasses. They usually hover close to coral heads and escape into small niches when big, predatory fish approach. A few of the smaller species of wrasse, however, stay well away from any protection. Out in the open water, in what is called a cleaner station, these cleaner wrasses twitch about in such a way that their colors catch the sun and attract the very fish that habitually eat most wrasses.

The predator in question may be a two-foot-long grouper. It approaches the cleaner wrasse and opens its mouth wide. The wrasse swims directly into the grouper’s open mouth, an apparent suicide, but there it eats the tropical parasites that accumulate and annoy the grouper. This is an
example of a good business deal: the wrasse gets a meal; the grouper gets rid of its parasites. Symbiosis. Mutual advantage.

In these same waters there is another fish that looks very much like the upright and businesslike cleaner wrasse. The blenny, however, is an entirely different type of fish. The sly blenny finds a wrasse in full dance at its cleaner station, and there it sets itself up for wicked business by imitating the dance of the honest fish. When the grouper approaches, mouth open, the blenny darts in, tears off a hunk of flesh, and escapes to a nearby niche the enraged grouper can’t penetrate. The blenny is a fish that lives in treachery and feeds off the flesh of those who would freely feed it. It is sometimes called a false cleaner, though I prefer to think of it as a lawyer fish.

D
iving makes you feel so good you could just die: rapture of the deep is a wonderfully poetic name for nitrogen narcosis, an intoxication produced by breathing nitrogen gas under pressure. The only time I’ve been noticeably “narked” was in the Blue Hole, a four-hundred-foot-deep pit off the coast of Belize (formerly British Honduras). The hole is set in shallow water, about an hour by light plane from the coast, and it contains structures that help prove a long-held scientific theory. It is thought that during the ice ages so much water was concentrated in the form of ice at the polar caps that the seas of the world were actually shallower by some four hundred feet.

To see the structures that support that theory, I was going to have to dive deeper than the maximum safe sport-diving depth of one hundred thirty feet. There are several dangers involved in exceeding recommended depths, and to understand them you have to know a bit about gas laws. The air in your tank is just ordinary air. But it is packed in there at somewhere between two thousand and three thousand
pounds per square inch. The genius of the regulator is that it feeds air into your mouth at ambient pressure: if the water is pressing on you at five times the surface pressure, then you are getting air that is five times as dense as surface air.

You
need
this pressurized air. Your body is mostly water, and for diving purposes, it is best to think of it as a sealed plastic sack full of water. The lungs are two air-filled balloons inside that sack. The deeper you dive, the more pressure on the sack, and the more the balloons want to collapse. Breathing ordinary air at a hundred feet would be as difficult as trying to suck that air into your lungs from the surface with a narrow straw.

At one hundred feet, a diver is breathing air that is four times as dense as sea-level air. Each breath contains four times the normal component of nitrogen. Nitrogen is pretty much inert, and it is passed into the tissue and fluids of the body without being utilized. The fatty tissues of the brain and nervous system, however, seem most susceptible to nitrogen absorption. All this excess nitrogen banging around in your brain can make you perilously goofy. Divers use martinis as a rough measure of narcosis: each thirty-three feet of depth makes you feel as light-headed as one martini on an empty stomach.

To see for myself the reason that the Blue Hole is an object of scientific study, I was going to have to go about two hundred feet, or a little more than six martinis’ worth. At that depth some divers have felt a euphoria so intense they’ve given their regulator to a fish and died laughing.

The hole is shaped like an hourglass, and I sank past its high waist at about ninety feet. The wall sloped inward then, forming a “ceiling” over me. At one hundred thirty feet I saw the first structure. It was a stalactite, hanging from the roof of the wall. There were others, deeper down, twelve to fifteen of them. They were huge, twenty-five to thirty feet long, and there was no oceanographic explanation for them. Stalactites can only grow in terrestrial caves, which meant the Blue Hole must have been a dry cave or
sinkhole during the shallow-water times of the ice ages.

I remember floating upside down, looking at the stalactites, pleasantly aware of a growing euphoric narcosis. The stalactites pointed down, deeper down, and they were of a shape I remember from church. They looked like statues of the Virgin in her robes. The sound of my exhalations was symphonic, and the Virgins hung there, pointing into the darkness far below. Inexplicably I thought of Atlantis. If the legendary island had been an oasis of culture and knowledge
during the ice ages
, then
the flood
that destroyed it must surely have come
when the polar caps released their water
. The thought seemed monumental, earthshaking, historic in import. Bubbles rose up my body and rolled up a Virgin’s robe, so that in one small corner of my mind I knew I was still upside down, and I was shining a light on the end of a stalactite, and there were crimson blotches, like carnations, where the face of the Virgin should have been. She was pointing down into the darkness, and oh, I wanted to dive deeper. Even deeper.

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.

D
iving 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.