The Soul of an Octopus Read online

  Myrtle had been moved only the day before. A diver lured her with lettuce toward a white, sea-turtle-size plastic crate, with floats at the handles and holes through which water could flow. As Myrtle chewed her treat, another diver simply spun the 550-pound reptile around by her shell and gently pushed her inside the crate. She was then hoisted out of the water, wheeled into the elevator, and lifted into the penguin tray. Myrtle’s legs began to whir as soon as the water flooded into her crate, and with a tip of her box from one of the four divers attending her release, the calm old turtle swam out confidently to her new home, apparently unfazed.

  Myrtle’s transition had been more successful than my own. I had hoped to return from my scuba weekend triumphant, a changed creature. But when Christa and Wilson asked me, I was forced to confess I was a washout.

  Wilson was sympathetic, having tried scuba himself once. “This is not an easy sport,” he said. Both his daughter and son are skilled divers, having logged many dozens of dives—including one on which a fellow diver died of decompression sickness.

  I shared details of my failure as we visited Kali. She was at the top of the barrel before the lid was off, her body a rich, reddish brown, staring at us with golden eyes. Unlike the previous week, she was quite energetic, her arms reaching and grabbing at us with her suckers. “Easy, honey!” said Wilson, hurrying to feed her a squid and two capelin. Her suckers conveyed the food to her mouth in seconds, and in a minute it was gone. Then she turned her attention to playing with us, grabbing and pulling. Each sucker hugged and kissed us at the same time. I felt consoled.

  Christa, always cheerful, was upbeat about my scuba setback. “I know you’ll be able to do this!” she assured me. And in fact, I had already set in motion my next plan. About halfway along my drive to the aquarium is a dive shop, Aquatic Specialties, in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and I had arranged for private lessons, starting next week—so it would be possible to complete my open-water certification before New England’s waters get too cold or too rough. My instructor was a volunteer at the aquarium, which I took as a good omen.

  In fact, at the aquarium, everyone who worked on Tuesdays knew my new instructor. They called her Big D. Doris Morrissette, fifty-nine, red-haired, and possessed of mischievous humor, is only five foot one, but her spirit is huge. And she’s an exceptionally patient and effective instructor because, she cheerfully admits, if you can make a mistake, she’s done it.

  As a child, she’d been enchanted with Jacques Cousteau and Sea Hunt on TV. But even though she was a strong swimmer and loved the sea, it didn’t occur to her until she was fifty that she might be able to scuba dive herself—because all the divers on TV were men.

  Finally she took a “Try Scuba” mini-course on a Caribbean vacation. After about thirty minutes of classroom instruction, her group went out on a boat, suited up, and jumped overboard. “Except me,” she said. “I wasn’t even in the water and I freaked out. I just couldn’t do it.” She tried again, taking lessons, working with two personal instructors and a nutritionist to get strong—and the next year got certified.

  By 2010, she was an instructor. Since then, Doris has taught many dozens of grateful students. She leads weekly summer dives in New England and dives around the world. By the time I met her, she’d completed 375 open-water dives and, since she started volunteering at the aquarium in 2009, 180 dives in the GOT.

  My two sessions with her in Aquatic Specialties’ smaller, shallower pool were easy and fun, but as autumn advanced, I grew increasingly anxious about completing the four open-water dives I needed to finish the course. Big D had been forced to abort the last two dives she’d planned in Atlantic waters due to strong surf. But for me, she had a solution: I would earn my open-water certification in New Hampshire’s Dublin Lake—only minutes’ drive from our house.

  Unfortunately, it was by then October, and the spring-fed lake was 54°F.

  The ancient Spartans believed that cold water is good for everything, including your hair. Water temperatures in this range do, in fact, cause physiological changes—one of which is known as the cold-shock response, a “series of reflexes that begin immediately upon sudden cooling of the skin following cold-water immersion.” During this reflexive response, “blood pressure, heart rate, and the workload of the heart all increase, making the heart more susceptible to life-threatening rhythms and heart attack. Simultaneously,” an online text explained, “gasping begins, followed by rapid and deep breathing. These reflexes can quickly lead to accidental inhalation of water and drowning. This rapid and seemingly uncontrollable over-breathing creates a sensation of suffocation and contributes to feelings of panic. It can also create dizziness, confusion, disorientation, and a decreased level of consciousness.”

  I’m glad I didn’t know this at the time.

  To keep from freezing in New England’s chilly waters, the scuba diver dons quite a bit of neoprene: I was to rent a seven-millimeter-thick, overalls-type wet suit, over which I would wear another seven-millimeter, long-sleeved, short-panted “shortie” wet suit. Pulling the legs of the overalls on was as difficult as it was awkward, with much tugging and grunting, but Doris assured me it would be worth it, because the harder it was to get on, the better the fit—and the better the fit, the warmer I’d be. But since the shop did not have a huge selection of rentals, and women customers are rarer than men, I was issued a men’s size small. Of particular note was the roomy crotch, which caused me to adopt the walk of a woman whose panty hose are falling toward her knees.

  I would also need to buy boots, gloves, and a hood. Putting on the hood is like pulling a plastic surgical glove over your head. It bent my ears in half like a pita bread around a falafel, and I felt certain I would smother. The neck was so tight I felt like my head was going to pop. Once the hood was on, I hoped it would smooth and stretch the skin on my face, giving it the pleasing look of a face-lift; but instead it squished my cheeks toward my nose, as if my head had been caught between the closing doors of an elevator.

  Another feature of extra neoprene is it increases buoyancy, so the diver needs to don more weight. So in addition to the more-than-30-pound tank and the weights I was already wearing to dive in the pool, now I would have to string even more lead on a belt around my waist. This brought the total amount of extra pounds I would carry to nearly 70 . . . 57 percent of my body weight.

  The increased weight, the cold, the extra gear, and the low visibility of its turbid water make open-water scuba in New England practically a technical dive. Both Doris and my previous instructor, Janine, both said the same thing: “If you can dive in New England, you can dive almost anywhere.”

  Big D and I loaded the gear into our cars and drove the hour from Merrimack to Dublin. Again I thrashed my way into the two-piece men’s outfit. Struggling into my neoprene wardrobe by the side of busy Route 101, a road often traveled by friends and neighbors, I prayed nobody I knew would be driving past and recognize me right at that moment.

  Finally dressed, I thought, Okay, this is so uncomfortable I won’t even notice the cold water. I staggered into the lake, stepping from rock to rock to muddy bottom, and for a moment, I was dry and warm. Then the water began to seep in. I remembered longingly that Janine had told us that there are only two kinds of divers: those who pee in their wet suits, and those who lie about it. Ninety-eight point six degrees would have felt mighty good about then. I wished I’d had more to drink before I came.

  That first day was foggy and rainy, but Big D was chipper: “The raindrops look awesome when you look up from underwater,” she said. I dived beneath the surface only to careen between sinking to the bottom and shooting to the top. My legs cramped in the cold. In the murky water, if my instructor swam more than ten feet away from me, she would vanish from sight.

  Miraculously, I was able to perform all the scuba skills to Doris’s satisfaction. We surfaced after twenty minutes, and she announced our next dive would be “just for fun.” We could look for the big bass with which the New Hampsh
ire Fish and Game Department stocks the lake; there are also landlocked salmon there. In the murk, we saw none. But Big D was right: The raindrops did look awesome viewed from beneath.

  For the final dive, two days later, I practically fell back into the water. This time I was not even looking for fish. I just wanted the next dive to be over.

  But then, a six-inch bass swam right up to my face mask.

  It was unlike any encounter I’d ever had with a wild animal. Normally, you first see the animal at a distance; if you’re lucky, gradually it might approach you or allow you to come close. They don’t just appear inches from your face and stare at you. The bass may have been surprised, too. Some say that because their faces aren’t as mobile as ours, fish don’t have expressions, but they are wrong. His look was quizzical: “What are you doing here?”

  We held each other’s gaze for many seconds. Then one of us blinked. Since I was the only one with eyelids, it must have been me. The bass vanished as suddenly as a shudder.

  But the fish should have been happy, because that day—the day I earned my certification—I was the one who was hooked.

  When I return to the aquarium, I find the last fish have been evacuated from the GOT. Aquarium engineers pulled the plug on the 200,000-gallon tank at 10 a.m., October 2, draining it at the rate of one inch per minute. Finally, divers could use ladders to reach the lower water level and catch the speedy tarpon, permits, and jacks in nets. While I was diving in Dublin Lake, Bill was on the crew that worked from 3 to 9 p.m. over the weekend, moving the eight four-foot-long, 40-pound tarpon. “They’re big. They’re hard,” he said. “That’s why they left them till last.”

  Every move is fraught with drama and danger. In September, a team of four divers, three veterinary staffers, a thirteen-member bucket brigade, one curator, and a handful of volunteers worked together to move the two three-foot-long blacknose sharks, a male and a female, from the GOT.

  For weeks, divers had been acclimating the sharks to the nets, holding the nets in the water so the animals would not fear them. The team had successfully moved the bonnethead sharks the day before; but the blacknose sharks are more sensitive, explained curator Dan Laughlin, and might freak out. A frightened shark is nearly impossible to catch, which is why Dan had briefed everyone not just on plan A but, in case that didn’t work, plans B, C, and D. (Plans B and C involved crowding the sharks by cutting off their usual swimming areas with nets or partitions; D meant waiting till the tank was nearly drained.) Worse than frightening a shark is injuring one, and this can happen easily if the shark thrashes against the sharp edge of a coral sculpture. “Don’t strike,” Dan warned the two divers armed with big scoop nets, “unless you’re sure you’re going to get them.”

  The plan was simple: The two netters, one of whom I recognized as Myrtle’s friend, Sherrie Floyd, another, Quincy husbandry aquarist Monika Schmuck, would face each other, standing on opposite coral sculptures, in the center of which was a deep trough. A third diver, hovering in the water of the trough, would tempt the sharks with a herring on a pole. Once the treat captured a shark’s attention, the diver would swing the pole toward the familiar net—into which everyone hoped the shark would eagerly swim.

  At first the sharks seemed uninterested in the herring. They made one pass, then two, around the pole. Then a third. But the team had made sure the sharks were hungry. At the fourth pass, the female blacknose swam right into Sherrie’s net. Sherrie scooped it up in one fluid motion and handed it to another staffer on dry land, who ferried the shark to the tank—which had been filled with salt water by the bucket brigade, assisted by a single pump—already waiting in the elevator.

  The second shark, everyone thought, would be harder to catch. But just two passes later, the male was in Monika’s net. Because he was larger than the female, and strong enough to flop out, our hearts stopped until someone clapped a second net on top of the first to prevent his escape. The two sharks were on the truck to Quincy before the divers even got into the showers.

  Alas, the tarpon transfer had not gone so easily. They’d had to dissolve anesthetic in the water to slow the fish. One tarpon didn’t recover from the anesthesia and died.

  This was hard on Bill. On an earlier visit, I had watched him hold tenderly onto one of his more elderly charges, a redfish, while vet techs fed him through a tube. “He’s not been eating,” Bill told me with deep concern. The redfish’s problem was a common one: He had a gas bubble in the eye, and the pain had ruined his appetite. He was being treated with steroid eye drops for the bubble, but as he recovered, it was important he keep his strength up. Bill was visibly tense until the redfish recovered from the drug and could be returned to his tank behind the scenes, which he shared with a fellow redfish and a brown eel known as a rock gunnel, both species common in nearby Maine.

  Animal-keeping institutions aren’t all the same in the care they give sick inmates. When a friend of mine was working at a small zoo in the early ’80s, their kangaroo fell ill. She called a zoo in Australia for help. “What do you do when your kangaroo gets sick?” she asked. “Shoot it and go catch another one,” came the reply.

  But at the New England Aquarium, each animal, no matter how common, receives compassionate, expert care. Everyone loves these animals; nobody wants to see them suffer or die. One of Bill’s surf perches was recovering from an episiotomy. These fish give live birth and her babies, stuck inside her, had ruptured her cloaca, exposing her intestines. The aquarium’s boyish, cheerful vet, Charlie Innis, had operated on her with the same focus and urgency he brings to saving the dozens of injured, critically endangered wild sea turtles the aquarium rescues, rehabilitates, and releases each year.

  The four-inch surf perch took a month to recover from the surgery. Today, Bill gently scoops her from her recovery tank and places her in a blue bucket, where she’ll be anesthetized so two gowned and gloved vet techs can remove the stitches. One holds her on a yellow sponge towel while the other snips the sutures. Soon she will be released to a tank behind the scenes, which she’ll share with some sea pens, beautiful, soft coral animals whose feathery appendages look like old-fashioned quill pens. Bill shows me the tank. It’s next to one that once held lumpfish, and after that ocean pout, and now is filled with white anemones—animals that had only recently been moved there from the Pacific Northwest exhibit. This is the tank to which Bill would like to move Kali.

  But when? The little octopus isn’t so little anymore. When we visit her, she is active and affectionate, her suction leaving red hickeys on our hands and arms, but we all worry that in her small, boring barrel—with nothing to play with, nowhere to hide, nothing to see—she could become depressed. On top of the space crunch brought on by the GOT renovation, soon Bill will leave on the aquarium’s annual collecting expedition to the Gulf of Maine to bring back more animals, which will further complicate the game of musical tanks.

  Seeing Kali in her barrel only feeds my longing to meet an octopus in the open ocean. I have no idea how or when this will happen. My next assignment will be taking me, in just two weeks, to Niger, to document a survey of desert antelope. Nothing could be further from my watery heart right now than an ocean of sand.

  But when I return from my day at the aquarium, shocking news awaits me. Al-Qaeda operatives in nearby Mali have spread to Niger, and terrorists are kidnapping visiting foreigners. The expedition is canceled. Instead of going on safari to the Sahara, I will be diving for octopus in the Caribbean.

  The Merrimack dive shop organizes this trip every autumn to Cozumel, one of the best scuba-diving locations in the world. The island, twelve miles off Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, gives its name to Cozumel Reefs National Marine Park, protecting 29,000 mostly pristine acres of the second-largest barrier reef in the world, in some of the ocean’s clearest waters. The park boasts some twenty-six species of coral and more than five hundred species of fish, and the chance to see octopus.

  “Normally, seeing an octopus is rare,” says the shop’s ow
ner, Barb Sylvestre. Most other divers I spoke with agreed. My grocer, for instance, after diving around the world for twenty-five years, has seen only one—who inked at his approach. “But in Cozumel,” Barb says, “we usually see a load of them on the night dive!” “A load” for a rarely spotted species might be only two or three, but still, what a thrill that would be.

  On the first Saturday of November, I meet my fellow travelers at the Manchester, New Hampshire, airport. This year, eight people—an auspicious number, I think—are going to Cozumel: besides me and Big D, and Barb and her husband, Rob, our group consists of three other divers and one non-diving spouse. We are a buoyant, excited group, but, after delays at Mexican immigration, when we finally arrive at Scuba Club Cozumel to get ready for our checkout dive—my first in the actual ocean—I’ve grown stupid with exhaustion. And now it is getting dark.

  In the dimming light, the equipment looks unfathomably complex and alien. I strap my BCD to my air tank sideways. Big D (so tired, herself, that she put her wet suit on inside out) helps me reposition it. I screw on my hoses—backward—damaging an O-ring. (Isn’t that what made the space shuttle Challenger blow up?) Now I have an air leak. I haul the cylinder back to the dive shop, get a new one, attach the hoses. Wearing my mask, my lime-green fins, and my new black and pink wet suit, at last I waddle to the dock, stride purposefully over it, and plunge into the Caribbean Sea.

  An alarming amount of which immediately goes up my nose.

  I bob to the surface, coughing. The water tastes like a nosebleed. I gasp for “real” air by removing the regulator. Big D gives the thumbs-down signal to descend. But I can’t sink!

  The other divers rush to help me: One fetches more weights from the dive shop. Rob stuffs them into the pockets of my BCD. Salt water is much more buoyant than fresh, and this is why I need this checkout dive now: to get the weights right before I step off a boat into the ocean. But I still can’t sink. Rob adds two more pounds, then four.