Open Water

Open Water

A few years ago there was a movie called Open Water that was about two scuba divers who got left behind on a drift dive in the Caribbean. I once did a drift dive off of Cozumel back in the years when I was actively scuba diving and I can tell you that the idea of being accidentally left behind in the open ocean is a scary thought that probably occurs to most divers at one time or another. I am not sure why I am thinking of scuba diving this morning since I have not been in what must now be thirty years. It was in the interregnum of my first and second marriage that I decided that I wanted to try diving, so while living in Toronto, I took a course in a local pool. There is a lot to learn about going under water and the scientific part of the learning experience should be enough to convince any sane person that it is not an activity human beings were meant to engage in. Just the fact that going ten feet lower than you are supposed to or rising to the surface (a natural self-preservation instinct) can prove to be deadly or at least harmful if you do it too quickly and don’t calculate the dive computer math about the nitrogen in your system just right.

But none of that cerebral functioning is what makes the whole thing so unnatural, that happens when you put your face into a mask and a regulator into your mouth and go under water and start breathing. I can still remember the distinct in and out of my breath as I stared around the surreal world that was visible in the framing of my dive mask. That feeling where you can hear and feel every breath that keeps you alone and conscious is where the other-worldly experience starts. You might think that like slow breathing as you try to go to sleep, that the audible portion of the experience will fade away as you get used to it, but it never did for me. My diving experiences consisted of 30-60 minutes of breathe-in/breathe-out, breathe-in/breathe-out, look from this side of the mask to that side of the mask and then back again, totally in a different world than we are used to inhabiting. It simply never took on a natural instinct state for me, though I imagine it must for others who do it more often.

I get a momentary flashback of how that felt when I put on a full-coverage motorcycle helmet with the visor down and closed. There is that moment when you hear your breathing inside the helmet and everything else is muffled from the outside world. But since you are breathing outside air and you generally keep the visor up unless the weather is inclement, its only a momentarily similar feeling,one that fades away quickly. Nonetheless, I have often described long distance motorcycle ing riding as being other-worldly where you get into your helmet like its a different world. There is something about encasing your head and its orifices into some sort of enclosure that takes the mind to a different place and focuses the attention in a different way.

When I did scuba dive, I always did it in relatively warm waters and without a wetsuit. I most often dove in the Caribbean, but also had occasional to go diving on the Barrier Reef of Australia, back when there was a living reef and not one that Global Climate Change had started to erode noticeably. As special as the barrier Reef is supposed to be, I think I had my best dives off Grand Cayman Island, which happens to be where I took my PADI certification dive. There you could get the full range of diving experiences. There was the shallow sand bar dives where the stingrays would come up to you in herds, looking for the frozen shrimp you had brought to attract and feed them. There were the all dives where you could give yourself a quick adrenaline rush by encountering either a moray eel poking his head out from between two rocks or you could swim within inches of some very quietly menacing barracudas, who just stare at you, probably sizing you up for lunch. And then there were my favorites, the wreck dives where you could go down and actually wander through the upper portions of some old freighter that had gotten caught in a storm and pulled under. It was those types of dives that I remember with the greatest fear. You would think that encountering a few six-foot sharks would be the highlight of that diving fear index, but in deep water, sharks just don’t tend to scare you the way Steven Spielberg made us fear sharks on the surface of the water. The two things that did scare the bejesus out of me were the thought of getting trapped in an enclosed space (like an old rusted wreck) where your tank and/or regulator hose would catch on something behind you and you would be unable to free yourself. The horrors of the panic that would inevitably ensue were so horrific to me that I would simply not go into any spaces that looked like there might remotely be a chance of getting stuck. It never seemed to bother other divers so much, but it sure rang my bell.

The other fear I had was the fear of the abyss. When you dive in certain spots you feel like the bottom is quite broadly visible and that you know how far you can and should go with your tank of compressed air. But there are other spots, often on those wall dives, where the bottom is not within sight, but consists of a dark black hole that goes on seemingly forever. We all logically know there is a bottom, but we also know that you cannot dive more than 130 feet as recreational diver and that if you want to go deeper, you need a special air mixture. Most recreational dives take place between 30-60 feet just to be safe. I remember on one dive we were supposed to stay at 70 feet. At one point the instructor came up to me and tapped me and told me to surface. I didn’t understand the problem until we got back on the boat. he told me to look at my dive computer and toggle the maximum depth I had gone on that dive. It told me that I had gone to 110 feet. It had happened gradually and without my awareness. On that wall I had lost any perspective of depth and had just kept swimming forward and, unbeknownst to me, I was swimming at a downward incline rather than staying at a set depth of 70 feet. It was so easy and I could have probably kept drifting down to 200 feet and been unaware. The really bad thing would have been if I had bothered to look at my depth gauge and realized how deep I was. I’m sure I would have been overwhelmed by panic and done something stupid and dangerous like swim straight up to the surface. When you are down there it almost seems like the deep lures you into its grasp and that is anything but a comfortable feeling. I get the shivers even now thinking about it all these years later. It’s like standing on a precipice, looking down, and feeling compelled for some irrational reason, to jump.

I don’t dive any more and doubt that I ever will again. It was an interesting experience while it lasted for me, but its attraction was mostly in its being so different rather than in the sensation or spectacle of the doing. Life is a series of experiences and some collect them life trophies. Others stumble into them and stumble out. I will embrace the open road on a motorcycle for many more years but I will leave the open water to those who felt great while they were listening to their breathing and staring at the constrained world through their mask.