What lies beneath

Yesterday night we had the last dive of the course. Tomorrow we take the written exams and, with luck, i'll be a certified open water diver afterwards. Oceans of the world, watch out!

Har-har. Actually, i'm still consuming about triple the amount of air the instructors do, which means i'm breathing and moving too fast, or fussying overmuch with the air controls in vest and dry suit. Both, probably. Also, my control of buoyancy is rather suckful, and that's the reason why you might still find me about one meter below or above where i want to be at any given moment.

Anyway, performance angst aside, the point is we were not supposed to dive at night. What happened was that the boss did not want to have to work through the weekend again, and so he packed all the dives into monday and tuesday afternoon; yesterday it got a bit late, and voilá! We had a dive in the dark.

It was incredible. We went down all together (4 of us) and spent 20 minutes below, each with a flashlight... Ironically, you see much more of marine life at night than in daylight. Everything seems to have awakened: clams taking off from the silt at the bottom and shooting across your field of vision, opening and closing their shells rythmically (jet propulsion, obviously, but so awkward-looking!); crabs with snail shells mounted on their backs, picking out invisible food out of the water, their mouths churning constantly; fish attracted to the light, coming closer and closer and then suddenly darting off; jellyfish pulsing all around you, different sizes and kinds, some with tendrils meters long, catching the light like spiderweb strands do in sunny summer days... After a while one of the instructors came around and signaled us to settle down on the seafloor and to turn all our lights off. When we did, we couldn't see him nor each other any longer, but this tiny blue sparks started appearing in the place he'd been. They were exactly the color of stars, and about their size, except they blinked in and out of existence. At first you distrusted their existence, but after a while their reality became more obvious, the pinpricks of light defining the arches of the instructor's hands waving in the water, the turbulence around them. He himself was not visible, but the sparks drew what he was doing. We caught on, and started to shake our hands too, and soon there was a cloud of plancton phosphorescing all around us.

Because you can't talk to anyone, you can't see anyone, and you can only hear the air rushing in and bubbling out of you... Well, i don't know what happens because of that. It felt very different.

How does one transmit these things, and what for? I can think of people who might read this and wish you'd been there with me, and there's a bit of regret you weren't, and this is my vicarious way of sharing this with you... Or perhaps i'm simply trying to make you envious.

I think writing about such experiences has to do, in part, with the freedom that writing allows you over speech. I may tell of this experience over the phone or face to face to my dearest friend, but to say some of what i write would feel awkward. Writing lets you go more into detail, right? Say the things that went through your mind at that moment, but that would be too awkward or out of place to repeat in regular conversation...

Or perhaps all this additional stuff is just an indicator that i write in a very stilted way. Should one write precisely in the way that one says things? There has to be a balance, i think, but how does one find it? After all, the amount of what one speaks is part of the way one does it, and sometimes there are days in which people won't speak the number of words they need to write a single paragraph. Does that mind they shouldn't write?

Blarb blarb. Got to go to norwegian class.