About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory Read Online Free PDF Page A

localities. Reefs in the Florida Keys, for example, have been severely damaged in spots by thousands of dive-boat anchorings, by the snatching and impact of divers unable to control their buoyancy and drift, and by divers carelessly kicking out with their fins.)
    When I emerged from Bonaire’s waters each day, I would enter in my notebook the names of the fish I had seen on Leonora’s Reef or in one of the other places where ten or twelve of us dove at a time: cornetfish, smooth trunkfish, yellowhead wrasse, long-spine squirrelfish, balloonfish, midnight parrotfish, honeycomb cowfish, whitespotted filefish, lizardfish—and then the crabs and snails, the eels, the sponges, the corals, until I was worn out, paging through the reference texts and inquiring among the divemasters who supervised our excursions.
    One afternoon, walking back to my room from the boat dock, I stopped next to a frangipani tree in which a single bird, a bananaquit, was singing. I imagined the dense thicket of the tree’s branches filled with forty or fifty kinds of singing, energetic birds, and that I had only a few moments to walk around the tree, peering in, to grasp some detail of each to memorize. I had no paper on which to write down a name or on which to sketch. Then, I imagined, they flew away. Who were they? How could I know where I was, really, if I didn’t know who they were? It was like that every day underwater—an unknown host, confounding and esoteric as the nine choirs of angels.
    T HE REFLEXIVE HABITS human beings must develop to stay alive underwater with scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus) are inherently risky. They have largely to do with controlling the rate at which pressure on the body’s tissues changes. Divers who are physically fit and diving under supervisionin a benign environment like Bonaire, and who possess even amateur technical diving skills, rarely experience a problem. Still, diving is dicey, strange. The stress the human body is subjected to by the change in pressure at a depth of only 16 feet compares with the effect of a change in altitude of 18,000 feet on land. Releasing the increase in pressure too quickly can be fatal. In holiday circumstances like those prevailing on Bonaire, one can be lulled into thinking nothing will ever go wrong—with the salubrious weather, the magnificent reefs, or one’s own dive technique. It is the feeling, of course, one vacations in search of.
    The divemasters on Bonaire cautioned us repeatedly, in a friendly way, not to dive deep, not to go below one hundred feet. It is not only inherently dangerous (four atmospheres of pressure at that depth is enough to precipitate nitrogen narcosis and disorientation), but for most, unnecessary—the density of marine life drops off quickly after about sixty feet. As much as anything, their cautions were a reminder to pay attention to air consumption, to the time you spent at each depth, and to your rate of ascent to guard against decompression sickness, the so-called bends.
    Few scuba diving accidents occur at depth. Most happen at the mysterious surface, a wafer-thin realm where air bounds water, where light suddenly changes flux, ambient sound changes register, and the body passes through a membrane fraught with possibility or, coming the other way, with relief. When water closes over a diver’s head, a feat that once had seemed implausible, to breathe underwater, seems suddenly boundless with promise. There is often little indication at the undulating, reflective surface, the harrowing transition zone, of the vividness, the intricacy, the patterns unfurled below.
    Something, most certainly, happens to a diver’s emotions underwater. It is not merely a side effect of the pleasing, vaguely erotic sensation of water pressure on the body. (Doctors subjecting volunteers to greater atmospheric pressure in hyperbaric chambers don’t find the increased flow of plasma beta endorphins—the “buzz” hormones—that divers