The Weight of Depth

Crisp morning air dances across my skin; it too can feel the anticipation on the boat. The sun is not risen, and yet the crew is vibrating around me, loading gear. I am going over my checklist. All my equipment lays across the deck in front of me and I begin. The process is religious. The ocean is God; the gear is my saviour, and I treat it with this level of reverence.

I recall in the fog of memory a time when the Buoyancy Control Device, the inflatable jacket that lets a diver rise or sink, felt like a strait jacket. I remember my regulator, the tangle of hoses that becomes your lungs underwater, wrapping around me like a snake strangling its prey. Now it is all habit. I slip the BCD strap around the tank and cinch it tight. I lift the jacket to test the weight. No movement. Good.

I check the tank valve’s height against the back of the jacket. Years of diving make you meticulous about small things. It seems trivial on the deck of a calm boat, but when the current is ripping and your air is running low, the last thing you need is the cold thwack of a tank valve against the back of your head.

Around me the captain starts the engines, and the crew unties the lines, readying to shove off. The conditions aren’t ideal: wind-against-seas. The wind tears across the surface in the opposite direction to the swell, smashing the waves into chop and whitecaps. The result is a pitching boat and a crew turning green. I glance at the horizon between checks to keep my breakfast down. It will all still once I descend.

I pick up my regulator. It comes in two parts. The first stage bolts onto the tank valve and tames the pressure of the air inside, turning the violent force in the cylinder into something a human body can breathe. The second stage is the mouthpiece, the part between my teeth underwater, delivering that air breath by breath.

I remove the dust cap from the tank and crack the valve open for a quick burst of air, clearing any debris before I secure the first stage—finger tight—onto the valve.

Once the gear is assembled it must be checked. Every time.

Does the air taste strange? That could be carbon monoxide and lethal underwater.

Is the tank pressure lower than expected? The dive plan changes.

Listen. Is there a hiss? A leak somewhere in the system.

All of this is habit and yet it cannot be. Habit implies a mindlessness that a diver can never have. One missed check, one unsecured strap, and in an emergency, I might fumble for my alternate air source.

The sun glares over the horizon, glinting off the buoy that marks my dive site. My kit is secured to me, everything except my mask, and I squint once more over my research plan.

At the reef I will secure a transect line, a measuring tape stretched across the seafloor, to the mooring. Twenty kick cycles east I will pin it into the sediment with a spare weight. Then I will place the quadrat, a small square sampling frame, beside the line and begin recording the invertebrates inside it.

I will take two measurements. At each point I place a quadrat on the left side of the transect and record the invertebrates within the frame on my slate. Two samples, no more. My bottom time is ten minutes.

Then I begin the ascent. Decompression stops at thirty, twenty, and fifteen feet below the surface and then I can safely swim for home, the air.

My computer will track the schedule, but I cannot be mindless.

Okay. Not a moment longer, I spit into my mask to keep the fog at bay – nobody said diving was pretty. I secure the mask to my face, place my regulator in my mouth, one hand over my mask and regulator, and then I roll backwards.

Bubbles, waves, scramble, and I inflate my BCD. My head is at the surface, gazing back at the boat, one hand on my head shows I am okay. Fingers graze my gloves as I am handed my research equipment. The dive computer is set, and I check the time on my watch. I slip below the surface. The world stops.

…

Someone who has never been diving might think a diver must be frightened. After all, you are risking your life. And yet a diver knows that beneath the surface is one of the most peaceful places a person can be. No noise. Cool water. Slow breath.

The calmer you are, the less air you use, so relaxation becomes a necessity. Once, I remember teaching myself a rhythm, four seconds to inhale, six to exhale. Now my body does it without thinking.

My fingers wrap around the descent line and I begin to sink. A diver learns to go slowly. Every pocket of air in your body is noticing the pressure change. You feel it most in your ears.

Children know the sensation too. They feel it when they dive to the bottom of the deep end of a swimming pool. They reach clumsily for the tiles, but the pressure builds in their ears, sharper and sharper, until they twist and scramble back to the surface for air.

Divers know the trick. The pain comes from the pressure difference between the water outside and the air inside your sinuses. All you have to do is equalize, pinch your nose and blow gently to push air into your ears and balance the pressure.

Good divers can do it without even touching their nose.

As I sink, I pause every few feet to equalise my ears, checking my depth each time. The ritual slows the descent and gives the ocean time to unfold around me.

Spadefish and crevalle jacks drift close, curious, brushing lazily against my fins as if testing whether I belong here. Below, sergeant majors patrol the reef in their neat yellow and black uniforms, indifferent to my arrival.

A burst of bubbles rattles against my mask and I watch them wander upward, growing larger and brighter as they climb toward the surface. For a moment I follow them with my eyes, watching the world above dissolve into a wavering mirror.

I guide myself down the line, careful to avoid the mustard-coloured patches of fire coral. Sunlight falls through the water in long, trembling shafts, catching clouds of phytoplankton drifting through the water column. Each one a life suspended in chance. Who might they become? Perhaps a larval crab, feeding in this slow snowfall of light before it settles somewhere on the reef to begin a harsh life of claws and territory.

The water presses closer as I descend. I add small bursts of air to my BCD, compensating for the quiet squeeze of pressure against my suit. Above me the boat wavers like a ghost on the surface.

Then a sudden ribbon of cool water slips across my skin. I have passed through the thermocline: the moment where the warm surface water meets the cold of the depth. I am snapped back into focus on my descent. I check quickly my gas and depth gauges and make a mental note of my timings. Plenty.

I am so focused on the numbers that I hardly notice when I reach the bottom. It is the faint crunching that alerts me. A queen parrotfish works steadily at the coral, its beak rasping against the reef.

I watch it for a moment. Then I begin. There is work to be done, and no time to chat with the queen. I have 10 minutes. I secure my transect to the descent line, sweep my left arm behind me to find my gauges clipped at my hip, check my bearing on the compass, and begin kicking east.

I glance occasionally at the transect trailing behind me, though I hardly need to. Divers measure distance in kick cycles. I know that twenty of mine carry me roughly thirty meters, so I count them off quietly in my head as I move across the reef. At thirty meters east of the line, I secure the transect with a weight and pause for a single steady breath before beginning the survey.

When I drop the quadrat onto the reef it drifts down gently, settling into a small crevice as though it belongs there. Inside the frame I immediately notice the delicate skeletal arms of a brittle star. I pull out my slate and begin to write. A quiet excitement creeps in, and I find myself grinning behind my regulator. Saltwater slips into the corners of my mouth, and I savour the taste. At forty meters, the corals are so muted that I wonder what colours would bloom if I shone a light on them.

Shit, I realize I have forgotten my last count. I start quickly recounting the feather duster worms when a comb jelly bounces past my mask, tumbling away in the turbulence of my own exhaled bubbles. Its chaotic cascade draws my eyes to a cloud of sand a few meters ahead. From it emerges a colossal eagle ray. She must be eight feet wide, her snout tossing up sand as she hunts for crustaceans and molluscs for breakfast. Dim light shimmers along the white leopard-like spots on her back, and I wish I had a camera to capture her in all her glory.

Around her, the rippling sand reminds me of tumbling hills back home. Instead of grass, the slopes are dotted with bobbing heads of a meadow of garden eels. I imagine their eyes widening as they notice the ray approach before darting back into their holes. I wonder what they make of my alien form moving through their grove. I notice again that my mind has drifted from my sampling and shake these distractions away, time is limited and I cannot allow distractions.

I begin kicking toward my next sampling spot along the transect and feel suddenly exposed and vulnerable. I am dissecting this feeling when I notice the quadrat, four kick cycles behind, perched on the reef. Frustrated, I turn back for it and stir up my own cloud of sand to match my cartilaginous friend.

I kick back, grab the quadrat, turn, kick again along the transect and drop the quadrat. It settles into its new home with a soft clink against the rock. A small cleaner shrimp darts into a crevice at my disturbance, I note his presence. My handwriting tilts on the slate, letters swelling across the page as I struggle to document sponges, corals, stars. Space is running out.

My focus drifts. My fingers fumble the pencil. Suddenly, I forget the way I normally hold it. Clumsiness spreads through me, nostalgic, like a preschooler first learning to write her letters. The comforting hug of the 2 atmospheres of pressure wraps around me. I imagine lying on the sea floor, covered in a blanket of sand and wary flounders, drifting into sleep with plankton and jellies instead of stars.

Then an alarm jolts me awake. Screeching. Piercing. My chest tightens and I remember I was never asleep. I giggle, half in disbelief, and force my focus back to the quadrat. The alarm is relentless. Suddenly I recognise the sound, my dive computer is warning me. I have exceeded my dive time. My heart hammers, it can't yet be ten minutes? I gather the quadrat and swim down the transect to collect the weight at the end of the line. Delirious giddiness pulses through me, but dull urgency lingers.

I grab the line. My quadrat slips again. I am grappling with every piece of gear at once, baffled that my former self carried it all so effortlessly. Now it feels like a tether, dragging me toward the surface world.

The dive computer’s beeping rises, shrill, impossible to ignore. A part of me knows I should panic. But the ocean is still, and my body flows with it, and in the drift, it is impossible to worry. My kicks are floppy and I can no longer focus long enough to count them. I waste energy in zigzags and clumsy paddling of my flippers. Time stretches, and the transect line spreads out in front of me. Endless. A patch of Christmas tree worms catches my eye; I give into temptation and disturb them to watch them disappear into their tubes. I am tempted to linger, to disregard training and instinct and to stay in the embrace of the euphoria that has enveloped me.

I reach the descent line and grip it to steady myself. I can tell I have lost control of my buoyancy, I am kicking up sand. Fire coral stings my palm sharply, grounding me. I moan, dragging myself up like crawling from bed on a cold winter morning. The computer flashes and screams in fireworks of light and sound. The reef falls behind me. My computer is the only force pulling me from my coralline oasis. I am dragging myself to the surface, but the beeping is relentless.

I realise I have blown past my first stop. I can't maintain focus and I am gulping down air. I grab the line with both hands and force myself to pause. The computer sighs with relief and begins to count down my decompression stop. Minutes tick by and with them I feel the euphoria and confusion drip from my mind.

The memory of the last 10 minutes sit heavy in my gut. Decades of training and yet where was my focus, my discipline? It was not drunkenness, not sleep, not panic. Instead, a weightless euphoria swelled through me, softening every misstep. I recall the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, that eradicates fear in rats and mice, coaxing boldness where they should be cautious, emboldening Jerry against Tom. I am aware that the nitrogen in my body tissues mimics this mischievous influence, softening my vigilance and amplifying my wonder. Divers know this as gas narcosis, a symptom of the increased partial pressure of Nitrogen at depth. Frighteningly, I never detected it at depth, it is only now as the nitrogen is off gassing from my tissues that I can start to piece together the danger.

The memory of the dive is murky, like a deep silty lake. I palm through the poor visibility, trying to cling to the details. I remember the eagle ray and her radiance. I remember the eels and shrimp. Light. Plankton. Bubbles. Yet I can hardly recall my research objectives with any clarity.

Alarmingly, I realize that at no point during the dive did I check my air. My tank pressure is a mystery. Panic threads through me as I recognize that, in my delirium, I let it drop far below the limits of my dive plan. Five hundred psi.

By decompression stop number two I have 400 psi. My chest tightens. Every breath feels borrowed. My air has never been this low. At my final stop, I have 350 psi. I hover fifteen feet below the surface. I could cry, but not from relief of being nearly safe, nor from sadness at leaving the depth. It is something else entirely: a sudden awareness of the grip the ocean had on me. My computer alerts me that finally I can safely ascend to the surface. But I hesitate, watching instead my tank pressure gauge wobble as I suck more air. At the surface, almost no time has gone by, yet for me, it is near a lifetime.

Breaking the surface is jarring. Bright sunlight burns against my eyes. Wind smashes waves against my mask, and the quiet of the deep is replaced by noise. Water slaps. Gulls cry. The crew mumbles indistinctly on the boat. I lift the regulator from my mouth and replace it with my snorkel. And I float, breathing open air that feels strange and alien after the resistance of the gas from the second stage. My body recoils at the weight of gravity or more specifically the 18 lbs of lead strapped to my hips and the aluminium cylinder strapped to my back.

I check my dive computer. Minutes of the dive remain indistinct, blurred into drifting images of reef, fish, and rising bubbles. Suddenly I am overwhelmed again by the pressures of my day to day life. I know I will climb on the boat and enter my data into data sheets. I will prep for future dives and go home and eat dinner and rest But the depth had felt warm, weightless, welcoming. Time slowed in the embrace of water, each second suspended, each breath a gentle pulse that belonged entirely to me.

Looking down into the dark blue beneath the surface, I recognize something unsettling. It would have been very easy to stay. Not because of the dazzling beauty of the reef, but because the stress of the world above seemed small, unimportant, and far away. The ocean had claimed a piece of my mind, my body, my very rhythm. I feel the pull even now, as the wind blows wisps of my hair, as the waves slap my chest, as my heartbeat resumes its hurried pace.

For a moment, I am suspended between two worlds. One is harsh and bright, noisy and occupied. The other is quiet, endless, and entirely my own, yet unforgiving. And for that moment, I almost miss the fog and confusion. Almost wish I could sink again, and drift, weightless, into the calm that waits patiently beneath the surface, and rest alongside the reef. Instead, I unclip my BCD and pass it up to waiting crew. I haul myself up onto the boat and remove my mask. My binder is balanced on the bench and I flip to the next blank page to update my notes while my dive computer presents me with my mistakes.