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.
