The Soul of an Octopus Page 15

  Now it’s completely dark. I can’t see anything. Water keeps pouring into my nose. Frightened by my mistakes, I can’t remember how to do anything. I feel completely shot.

  “It’s your first night dive!” Big D says encouragingly. Somebody procures a light. Rob has now outfitted me with 12 pounds of extra weight. I follow Doris into the sea and swim through an underwater archway. For a moment I feel exhilarated, flying through the water. But I am grateful to finally haul myself out via the stepladder—except I can’t, because I can’t get my fins off.

  Big D helps me. I check my dive computer to see how long I’ve been diving in the actual ocean. Was it an hour? Forty-five minutes? I look on the screen and see I went to ten feet for two minutes—not even enough to log as a dive. The rest of the time, I was bobbing at the surface, gagging and gasping.

  My God, I think. What am I going to do tomorrow?

  The next morning, I spend half an hour in front of the mirror like a primping schoolgirl. I’m fiddling with my mask, tightening the strap, and arranging it in different configurations around my pony-stail in hopes my nose won’t fill up with salt water. We’ll depart at 8:30 a.m. on board the Reef Star, a 55-foot-long Viking-hull, custom-made in the U.S. fifteen years ago, which can travel at 20 knots per hour. Our first dive of the day is a drift dive, in which we drift with the current. After we leave the boat, we won’t see it again till it comes back to pick us up. We’ll be far from any pier.

  “We are diving at a place called El Paso del Cedral,” our charismatic, barrel-chested divemaster, Francisco Marrufo, explains just before we reach our destination. It’s a long, backbone-like reef, with coral heads along a ridge separating a shallow sand flat from a deeper one. “A slow current runs along the line of corals, where we may see moray eels. There may be large schools of French grunts, yellow and blue fish who grind their teeth. We may see many red snapper . . . and”—Francisco looks directly at me—“we may see octopus.” Earlier, he had shared that he especially enjoys finding these animals. “If you scare them, the eyes pop up—like a person,” he said. There could be four different kinds, but it can be difficult to tell them apart when each of them can assume many shapes, sizes, and colors.

  The captain cuts the motor. I slip on my BCD, close the Velcro cummerbund, adjust the chest straps, de-fog my mask, put on my fins.

  “Okay, let’s go!” Big D says. Holding my mask to my face, I stride off the boat to follow her into the water.

  My mask does not flood. I’m breathing fine. Carefully, I look down, and discover a fantasy world of colors and shapes from a psychedelic poster. Except these colors and shapes are alive: fishes, crabs, corals, gorgonians, sponges, shrimp. Corals pout like the lips of giants, and point like the fingers of skeletons. Sea fans flutter more delicately than the finest lace. The sand is New-Hampshire-snow white, the water piercing turquoise, and all around us, wild animals swim by as if we aren’t there. It’s like being an invisible time-traveler to another planet. Except this is the planet where I’ve lived for more than half a century, visiting all continents save Antarctica. And yet most of the planet has remained a distant mystery to me. Until now.

  Fish are everywhere; visibility, virtually unlimited. My fear has vanished.

  Almost immediately Francisco points out a five-foot moray eel, hiding beneath a ledge. It’s a beautiful ribbon of velvety moss green. When it opens its mouth, I can see its pointy teeth. Scott told me there was once a moray at the aquarium who opened his jaws exceptionally wide, inviting divers to carefully scratch inside his mouth, which the gentle fish enjoyed very much. I feel as if I am meeting a friend of a friend.

  Francisco is part Mayan, but he is also, I think, part fish. He slips through the water with the casual ease of a local showing us his neighborhood. So I follow him closely, keeping an eye out for Big D. We swim farther; at one point I note on my dive computer that we are at 50 feet, and my ears feel fine. Now Francisco turns to beckon us. He points at a hole beside a huge brain coral.

  I see an eye, then a funnel. I hold up eight fingers, and Francisco nods. Brown mottling, white suckers. Peeling one arm away from its rock, the octopus advances, eyes tall, looking at us. Its head is only the size of a fist. It suddenly flashes red, then blanches, then shows a turquoise sheen. It withdraws all but its eyes from the hole. Then the animal peeks out farther, showing the head again, then the mantle. The funnel aims at us, then swings to the side. The gills flash white with each breath.

  I could stay forever here just watching it breathe. But everyone else deserves to see the octopus too, so I move aside, inventing a new signal for Francisco: my fingertips slightly overlapping, palms toward my chest, bringing my hands in and out toward and away from my hammering heart. But Francisco already knows, has seen the rapture on my face. For more than a year and a half, since meeting Athena, since coming to know Octavia and now Kali, each time I’ve reached into the tanks where we have brought these creatures into our world, I’ve longed to enter theirs. At last, in the warm embrace of the sea, breathing underwater, surrounded by the octopus’s liquid world, my breath rising in silver bubbles like a song of praise, here I am.

  There follows a parade of wonders: A splendid toadfish hides beneath a rock. Once thought to live only in Cozumel, it’s pancake flat, with thin, wavy, horizontal blue and white stripes, Day-Glo yellow fins, and whiskery barbells. A four-foot nurse shark sleeps beneath a coral shelf, peaceful as a prayer. A trumpet fish, yellow with dark stripes, floats with its long, tubular snout down, trying to blend in with some branching coral. Big D invents a hand sign on the spot: a fist to the mouth, holding the thumb of the other hand, with fingers up and wiggling, as if loosing the notes of a wind instrument. A school of iridescent pink and yellow fish slide by inches from our masks, then wheel in unison like birds in the sky.

  I have known no natural state more like a dream than this. I feel elation cresting into ecstasy and experience bizarre sensations: my own breath resonates in my skull, faraway sounds thump in my chest, objects appear closer and larger than they really are. Like in a dream, the impossible unfolds before me, and yet I accept it unquestioningly. Beneath the water, I find myself in an altered state of consciousness, where the focus, range, and clarity of perception are dramatically changed. Is this what Kali and Octavia feel like all the time?

  The ocean, for me, is what LSD was to Timothy Leary. He claimed the hallucinogen is to reality what a microscope is to biology, affording a perception of reality that was not before accessible. Shamans and seekers eat mushrooms, drink potions, lick toads, inhale smoke, and snort snuff to transport their minds to realms they cannot normally experience. (Humans are not alone in this endeavor; species from elephants to monkeys purposely eat fermented fruit to get drunk; dolphins were recently discovered sharing a certain toxic puffer fish, gently passing it from one cetacean snout to another, as people would pass a joint, after which the dolphins seem to enter a trancelike state.)

  The desire to change our ordinary, everyday consciousness does not seize everyone, but it’s a persistent theme in human culture. Expanding the mind beyond the self allows us to relieve our loneliness, to connect to what Jung called universal consciousness, the original, inherited shapes shared with all minds; unites us with what Plato called the animus mundi, the all-extensive world soul shared by all of life. Through meditation, drugs, or physical ordeal, certain cultures encourage seeking altered states to commune with the spirits of animals, whose wisdom may seem hidden from us in ordinary life. In my scuba-induced altered state, I’m not in the grip of a drug: I am lucid in my immersion, voluntarily becoming part of what feels like the ocean’s own dream.

  Who is to say that dreams are not real? Hindu mythology tells the story of the ascetic, Narada, who won the grace of Vishnu and was invited to walk with the god. When Vishnu became thirsty, he asked Narada to fetch him some water. Narada went to a house and there met a woman so beautiful he forgot what he came for. He married the woman; together they farmed the land, raised c
attle, and had three children. Then came a violent monsoon. Floods threatened to carry away the village’s houses, the cattle, the people. Narada took his wife by the hand, his children by the other. But the waters were too strong and they were lost. Narada was swept beneath the waves. Washed up on shore, he opened his eyes . . . to see there, still waiting for his drink of water, Vishnu—the god who is often pictured as sleeping on a fathomless ocean as his dreams bubble forth to create the universe.

  Once back on board the Reef Star, I pull off my mask and weep with joy.

  Daily, I am drunk with strange splendors: three-inch yellow sea horses with prehensile tails like those of possums; angelfish of six species, with dorsal fins trailing like bridal trains; fish with yellow lips, fish with purple tails; fish bright as parrots, fish shaped like disks; fish with elaborate patterns like chain mail or with leopard spots interspersed with tiger stripes; fish with evocative names: sergeant major. Blue chromis. Harlequin bass. Fairy basslet. Slippery dick.

  One night, we dive from shore. Instantly, I lose our group in the dark and join another by mistake. Disturbed and disoriented, I swim back to the dock, disappointed to have to abort the dive. But Rob and Big D return. “Let’s find you an octopus!” Rob says. Rob holds my hand and shines his light on a porcupine fish, who can blow up like a balloon when disturbed; a cowfish, with horns on the head like a steer; a flat, ghostly southern ray lying on the sand . . . and then Rob squeezes my hand and points the flashlight at something else on the bottom. At first I think he’s showing me the fat orange starfish. But just next to it, from a crack in the dead coral, something brownish red is oozing out toward us. The octopus unfurls its arms, showing its white suckers, its eyes standing up tall. Irritated by the light, it turns bright red and pours itself back down its hole, vanishing like water down a drain.

  Tuesday, November 7: “Today,” Francisco tells us at the dive briefing, “we’re gonna dive one of the parts of Columbia: Columbia Bricks.” In my guidebook, I had read about this reef at the lip of the drop-off at the island’s southern tip: “Huge pillars of coral loom over white sand and slope downward on the seaward side to the successive terraces below. . . . ” It’s known for gigantic plate coral, gorgonian sea fans, giant sponges, huge anemones.

  “Right where we start the dives are lots of bricks and one anchor,” Francisco continued. “After we meet on the bottom, we’re gonna swim across the shelf and come to the drop-off. There are pinnacles, some with overhangs, and then we’ll go out to the wall. You may see turtles. Last week, twenty-five big dolphins came up to us from behind, toward the middle of this place. We will see sharks and stingrays, and sometimes there are ten lobsters in one place.

  “We’re going to dive to eighty feet. If the current goes fast, stay close to the reef. And when you come up, keep drifting.”

  Big D strides overboard first, and I follow. But something’s wrong. At ten feet my ears hurt. I ascend slightly and try to clear them by holding my nose and blowing. It doesn’t work. I see the others on the bottom. I try to descend, but the pain is too bad. I sign to Doris “trouble equalizing ears” and then sign the same to Rob.

  Rob shows me some tricks: tipping the head to one side, then the other. Blowing out the nose without holding it. Rising just a little more and trying again. But nothing works, and I suppose it’s no wonder: I did three dives yesterday including the deepest of my life, 84 feet, and then this morning I forgot to snort my usual decongestant spray.

  Rob and I surface. “How much can this hurt and I still continue?” I ask. “Better not risk it,” Rob advises. And I consider: Tomorrow is the night boat dive—the best chance of the week to see octopuses. I can’t afford to miss it.

  The crew helps me clamber back onto the boat and I sit miserably on a bench, my head and its uncooperative ears in my hands. I swallow a Sudafed, hoping it will clear my ears in the hour and a half between now and the next dive.

  I expect the time to drag, but it goes quickly. In the sea, perhaps, time itself is slowed by the water’s weight and viscosity. Even with just my hands in Kali’s or Octavia’s tank, time proceeds at a different pace. Perhaps, I muse, this is the pace at which the Creator thinks, in this weighty, graceful, liquid manner—like blood flows, not like synapses fire. Above the surface, we move and think like wiggly children, or like teens who twitch away at their computer-phones, multitasking but never focusing. But the ocean forces you to move more slowly, more purposefully, and yet more pliantly. By entering it, you are bathed in a grace and power you don’t experience in air. To dive beneath the surface feels like entering the Earth’s vast, dreaming subconscious. Submitting to its depth, its currents, its pressure, is both humbling and freeing.

  A half hour later, when my friends emerge, my ears are no better. I discover Mike, another diver in our group, also had trouble with his ears, but unlike me, he completed the dive. Now he has a nosebleed and must sit out the next dive, also disappointed.

  Francisco begins the briefing for the dive Mike and I will miss: It will be at Parque Chankanaab, which is known for its lobsters and toadfish. “The second part, for me, is the best,” Francisco says, “because we might see a turtle. If we do, it will be a green sea turtle.”

  “Like Myrtle!” Big D says to me. Today, she notes, is the day she usually volunteers at the aquarium: “I wonder if Myrtle’s missing me today?”

  “Fifty feet, max,” says Francisco. “Be careful. The sand is like powder and easily disturbed.”

  And then Mike and I watch as our friends stride into the turquoise water without us.

  For once, I can watch the transformation. Till now, I’ve been so focused on my own frantic preparations. We enter the ocean by walking overboard, shuffling on our big fins, an entry method called “performing the giant stride.” It sounds stately and accomplished, but doing it, even Jacques Cousteau looked like he’d just left Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks. To see my friends, seasoned, graceful divers, looking so pathetically awkward and helpless, so willing and vulnerable, is a shock. In a heartbeat, the diver is reborn, swallowed into another reality, transformed from a shambling monster into a being of weightless grace. Is this what happens to the spirit at death when it flies up to heaven?

  Wednesday dawns, the day I’d normally see Kali and Octavia. This Wednesday is the day of the night dive from the boat, the best chance to see wild octopuses of the entire trip. There is much discussion about my ears. Mike and Rob think I might be okay, but Big D and Barb strongly feel I shouldn’t attempt the first morning dive, because it will be the deepest, 70 feet. After that, there is an afternoon dive. And after that, before the night dive, a dive at twilight.

  So though I come on the boat with the others, I skip the first dive, sad I’ll miss the green morays, turtles, and sharks Francisco tells us are here. It’s a choppy day, and the current is strong. Everyone hurries overboard, eager to get below the big waves. But something’s wrong with Big D’s gear. The inflator hose on her BCD is not attached properly. Two boat hands help her right the problem, fast as a pit crew, but everyone else has descended already and Big D is late. Once she strides overboard, I watch anxiously to see if she has joined the others. But because of the waves, I see nothing, not even bubbles, no evidence that my beloved instructor ever existed at all, and no proof she has joined our vanished friends. The boat moves off, to drop off another group. Big D must know what she’s doing, I think, but I’m worried nonetheless.

  The captain shares my concern. After dropping the other group, he turns to go back. But the water is crowded with boats and divers. Where is our group? Suddenly we see a tall, skinny orange inflatable—a “safety sausage,” as it’s called—and with it, Big D! Is she hurt?

  She’s fine, but she lost the group. “I kept lookin’ and lookin’,” she says matter-of-factly, “and I’m thinkin’, I don’t know if I’ll be able to find ’em!” Big D is typically cheerful as she hauls herself out of the water and onto the deck. “I had this safety sausage for four years, and neve
r before got to use it!”

  The boat hands scan for fizz on the waves, the bubbles of the others. Ultimately they spot the group—and back down my big-hearted instructor goes, completely unfazed.

  Others won’t be so calm today, though. Because of the chop and the strong current, many divers had the same problem Doris had. During the second dive, which I also sat out, the water was crammed with more sausages than a German butcher shop. We rescued one of the lost floaters—an older gentleman who was quite shaken by the experience. “Usually when I surface, my boat is waiting for me!” he sputtered. But he couldn’t remember the name of his vessel or his divemaster. We had room for him on our vessel because we had lost the unfortunate fellow we dubbed the Pukey Guy, after he had earlier thrown up, not over the rail as you are supposed to, but on deck, inspiring others to do the same. Later we spotted him on a different boat, which he had boarded by mistake. We eventually found the lost gentleman’s vessel and retrieved the Pukey Guy, who managed to leave his weight belt on the other boat.

  With so many divers lost in the daylight, I worry: What will happen on the night dive?

  We meet at the dock at three for the twilight dive, because we have to travel an hour before we reach the site. “This place is called Delilah,” says Francisco. “There’s no reason to go deeper than 60 feet. It’s early. It’s not going to get very dark. But take a little light. Check inside the craters. This time of day, we get to see turtles going south, nurse sharks looking for a place to sleep, and parrotfish, too. If the current picks up, stay close to the reef, okay?”

  I pray my ears will hold out.

  I descend very slowly, equalizing repeatedly as I go, under Big D’s watchful eye. At the bottom, I signal her “okay”—and notice that everyone else is watching to make sure I’m okay too. Forty minutes fly by, and even though my dive computer registers that I’ve dived to 90 feet, I feel no pain, only delight, as a large blue mutton snapper follows us the entire time. As the water grows darker, I feel increasingly confident. I can do this. Now all I need is for the octopuses to cooperate.