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

frequently experience.)Nor is it alone the peculiar sense of weightlessness, which permits a diver to hang motionless in open water, observing sea life large as whales around him; nor the ability of a diver, descending in that condition, to slowly tumble and rotate in all three spatial planes. It is not the exhilaration from disorientation that comes when one’s point of view starts to lose its “left” and “down” and gains instead something else, a unique perception that grows out of the ease of movement in three dimensions. It is not from the diminishment of gravity to a force little more emphatic than a suggestion. It is not solely the exposure to an unfamiliar intensity of life. It is not just a state of rapture with the bottomless blue world beneath one’s feet, what Jacques Cousteau called “
l’ivresse des grandes profondeurs
.”
    It is some complicated run of these emotions, together with the constant proximity of real terror, exhilaration of another sort entirely. I have felt such terror underwater twice, once when I was swept away in a deep countercurrent in the Gulf of Mexico, and another time beneath the ice in Antarctica, when a piece of equipment froze and a sudden avalanche of events put me in a perilous situation. Afterward, I was not afraid to go back in the water, but I proceeded with more care. The incidents made me feel more tenderly toward anything at all managing, in whatever way, to stay alive.
II
    O NE DAY , walking into town from the resort where I was staying, I saw a man making a wall of coral stone, three feet high, two feet wide, and hundreds of feet long. The wall would separate the grounds of a new resort condominium from the public road, Kaya Gobernador N. Debrot. He controlled the definition of this stretch of space by fitting randomly shaped stones in a rulerstraight wall with its edges perfectly square. We didn’t speak. I did not stare while he worked but came back in the evening to appreciate the lack of error in what he’d engineered. He had the firmest grasp of this reality.
    No such attentiveness marked the resort meals available where I was staying. They so lacked imagination in their preparation that after one or two dinners one had experienced the whole menu. Nothing was to be found under the surface. Seeking an alternative, I began to walk into town with my dive partner Adam Apalategui, an American Basque, to see what we could find. Kralendijk, meaning “the place of the coral dike” in Dutch, is the largest of Bonaire’s two towns, and locally more often called Playa. We located a good spot there, a small pub and restaurant named Mona Lisa. One evening, after the chef had elaborated in English for us on his French-language menu of the day, he suddenly offered to make something special, a medley of local wahoo, barracuda, and dorado, brought in fresh only an hour ago. At an adjacent table he went over the same menu again, speaking Dutch. The meals he served were set out beautifully on the plate, distinctively flavored, punctuated and savory. His appreciation of the components of the meal that night intensified for me moving images of the three species of fish. As we ate I imagined one thread of succulence tying the Dutch chef, our dives, and the indigenous fishes together. The chef, lingering with us as he had in his initial description of the meal, meant the connection to be made, to enhance the experience of Bonaire.
    In most every settlement or rural village I’ve visited in Africa, in China, in Australia, I’ve taken a long walk in the late evening air after such a pleasant meal. Sudden bursts of domestic noise, the sprawl of sleeping dogs under a yard light, the stillness of toys on pounded earth, the order in wash hung over a line—all compel a desire to embrace the unknown people associated with these things, as if all the unwanted complication had gone out of life. One evening, as Adam and I strolled north along the main road back to our resort and rooms, I