Monday, June 15, 2015

My Life Aquatic


 


         




 During my "staycation" this summer, dreaming about Hawaii....a piece



I wrote....

            Even the names there are dazzling: Redlip Parrotfish. Moorish Idol. Teardrop Butterflyfish. Epaulette Soldierfish. Devil Scorpionfish. Snowflake Moray. I had been to the ocean before. I had swum in the ocean. But I never understood that there was a complete environment, an entire universe below its surface, until I snorkeled for the first time at the age of thirty-eight. For someone who had always loved being in the water,  this was an entirely new level of wonderful. Snorkeling was transformative, an awakening. After entering the domain of the reef and meeting its population, I could never again see the world in quite the same way.
            The happiest hours of my childhood were spent in lakes and pools, and I found this amphibious capability, the power to transform from land dweller to swimmer, one of the best parts of being a human being.  Each time, I marveled at my transition from dry land into that watery world. I was shape-shifter, mermaid, a double agent.  I wanted to freeze frame the journey, to witness how I might have changed during the leap from dock or high-dive. If only I had been able to breathe underwater, my dualism would have been complete. I could have lingered there well past the point when my fingertips became pale and pruney, and my teeth began to chatter. I would have, as my mother was fond of saying, “spent so much time in the water that I would start to grow scales.” But no matter how long I practiced holding my breath underwater (Two laps of the pool! All the way to the cold muddy bottom of the lake!) I eventually had to come up for air, gasping and disoriented.
            I grew up in the smack-dab center of the United States and did not see the ocean until I was ten, when my family took the Amtrak Super Chief from Kansas City to Los Angeles, California, home of The Pacific Ocean. When we arrived at our little hotel on the beach, I was so excited that I leapt out of the car and ran headlong into the surf, still wearing my clothes from the train. I was promptly clobbered by a wave, me the fly, it the swatter. The power of that breaking wave flushed my sinuses with burning saltwater, scraped up my knees and elbows, bounced me like a basketball onto the hard ocean floor, filled my underpants with sand, then spat me out onto shore.  Yet I was newly baptized, giggling wildly, and eager to try again. My mother, an Australian who had grown up by the sea and had never stop missing it, understood, and let me rush back in, but cautioned me with one sentence: Never turn your back on the ocean.           
            There was always a love-fest with water: suburban sprinklers, skinny dipping in quarries and waterfalls at college, or, once I moved to California for good, sunning on rocks like a stupefied lizard on the banks of the Yuba River, trying to raise my body temperature enough to brave its icy currents.  Entire road trips were built around the pursuit of hot springs.  But the ocean was different, gigantic, foreign, wild. I needed to be a part of it, to explore. It took me three decades, but I finally found the solution to my longstanding frustration with not being able to breathe underwater:  a mask and a snorkel.
            My inaugural snorkeling experience took place at Makua Beach, also known as The Tunnels, in Kauai, Hawaii. I did not know anything about reefs or what to expect there. I did not know that putting my fins on so far from the water’s edge would force me to goose-step ridiculously, stumbling several times before even making it to the wet stuff. I did not know how to keep my mask clear, the drops I put in giving my first viewing of the undersea world a Vasalined effect and burning my eyes to boot. I did not know that the reef would appear and disappear, that there were layers, canyon-like formations, impossible darkness giving way to  gobsmacking light and color. Crossing the deeper parts of the reef demanded a willingness to be far outside my comfort zone. I felt so vulnerable in these depths,  ill-equipped, experiencing the familiar they-can-see-me-but-I-can’t see-them feeling of horror movies.  But heart hammering, I moved forward steadily, trying to make my breath sound less like panting, until just ahead, I was able to make out a shape the size of manhole cover, if a manhole cover had wings. It was a turtle, the Green Sea Turtle known locally as Hono, and I was close enough to see the striated patterns on its shell, curved lines with feathered tips, like shafts of wheat. It looked back at me, and when our eyes met, I forgot all fear. I was intent only on following this spectacular creature as it seemed to beckon me onward with that front flipper, a “come on, this way’ gesture that was impossible to resist.
            How to explain the beauty of what followed? My mask became the eyepiece of an oceanic kaleidoscope, yet all that prismatic color and movement was created by living things: anemone tentacles that swayed with the currents, schools of Technicolor fish, chartreuse corals that looked like toadstools. I did not know the actual names of any of the reef fish at that point, so I dubbed them by features: Blue Dotted Puffers, Little Darting Neons, Mohawked Orange Fish, Flattened Canaries, Turquoise Pucker Lips.  I imagined the bubbles coming up from my snorkeling tube containing my exclamations, the “Ooh!” “Wow!” “Amazing!” becoming audible when they popped in the air above me. It was like shrinking to the size of a bee and entering a big bouquet of vibrant flowers.
            I learned something new each time I entered the water. Simply by changing my focus, I could alter the sea life I saw. In time, I noticed that the almost transparent Needlefish tended to hang out near the water’s surface, their snaky, cellophane bodies parallel to my own. Bands of mercurial Jacks or Yellow Tangs preferred the middle depths, and a well-camouflaged octopus the color of sand, might materialize on the bottom. If I wanted to experience a more microcosmic view of the reef,  I developed a technique I called “skimming.”  This was like swimming, but in such shallow parts of the reef that I had to make my body flat as a leaf, moving forward, arms at my side, using tiny flutter kicks, to avoid scraping my knees or belly on the coral mere feet below. In these up-close-and-personal viewings, I could see little explosions of polyps, colonies of shaggy sponges, two-inch long bug-eyed Blennies, delicate shrimp and lacy algae, swaying with the tide. Once, farther out, by patiently hovering above a crevice, knowing that most holes in the reef were prime real estate and probably inhabited, I was rewarded by a sighting of the puppet-jawed head of a Moray Eel emerging and looking around, before ducking back inside its lair. Sometimes, I would shut my eyes to allow my sense hearing to sharpen, and could then discern the sounds of fish chomping on coral, and, on several occasions, have even been fortunate enough to hear the organ-pipe call of a whale or the bird-like chortles of dolphins.
            Some of the snorkeling routines I began during that first foray continue to serve me well on my yearly visits to Hawaii, and I have never strayed far from these. I get up at dawn when the waters are calmer and the palm trees swish their fronds against a sky the color of pink lemonade. I never touch the coral or crowd the Honos; it is their home and I am a guest. I stay in the water until the winds pick up or I begin to shiver, whichever comes first.  Rinse off snorkel gear at a public shower…. stop at road-side stand to stick a straw in a freshly macheted coconut….pass the time as a land dweller until the next dawn…repeat.  And today, even after dozens of dives, when I visit the reef, my eyes still tear up, but now it’s not from the mask-clearing solution. My eyes tear up because there is always a surprise awaiting me each time I enter the ocean. My eyes tear up from the great gift of being able to be a part of another world. My eyes tear up because at last, I can breathe underwater.