A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (25 page)

Every minute or so I’d check my watch and pressure gauge and depth gauge. After fifteen minutes of deep diving along the wall, we rose to the top of the reef—forty feet or so—and let the current urge us back toward the boat. No reason to swim if the ocean will do it for you. The top of the reef was choked with color, like an alpine meadow in spring. Blue and green and black and yellow crinoids—fernlike invertebrates that feel like Velcro to the touch—were interspersed with all manner of soft corals. There were green and gold and purple-red sea fans, there were flowering corals, and long golden sea whips swaying in the gentle surge.

We rose to examine a spire that jutted steeplelike from the top of the reef. Near the top of the spire and nicely centered in it was a particularly baroque niche or window. Set deep back into the middle of the niche was a flattish green barrel sponge, like a child’s chair. To the right stood a long purple tube sponge that looked like the kind of floor lamp a color-blind person might buy at Woolworth’s. To the left of the little green chair was a small white octagonal sea fan, which looked like a doily set against the gold-flecked plate of green-red sheet coral that formed the wall of the niche. All in all, it looked like a tiny room built by an aquatic hobbit with a psychedelic habit.

We rose to the anchor line and hung off on the rope. The most physically demanding part of the dive had been the two minutes it took us to don our equipment.

T
here is no record of any diver being eaten by a giant squid like the one that got Captain Nemo’s sub in that movie: the diving industry blames the movie
Jaws
for a perceptible dip in sales, and I’m sure they’d like me to point out that not all sharks are particularly scary. In Australia the small epaulet shark tries frantically to escape divers and snorkelers. The little fellow feels safely hidden if he can get his head into a coral niche. No matter that his body is completely visible; the epaulet shark, this ostrich of the sea, can’t see you, and he lies still as a stone, thinking he is a very clever fish. Incidentally, the epaulet shark has no teeth. He is affectionately referred to as a “gummy.”

The carpet shark is a sedentary fish, and he is often seen loafing on a circular plate of coral. His coloration is intense in a mottled, ancient sort of way. He looks like the most ornate carpet in Grandma’s house. A little fringe of beard, like white lace coral, hangs from his chin, making him look like an elderly dandy. The carpet shark simply sits and waits, snapping up the occasional unwary parrot fish. Once at Heron Island, on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, I watched as a woman, posing for a picture, sat on a carpet shark’s head. The shark bucked in an irritable manner, and the woman came off her perch like someone shot from a cannon. The carpet shark glared up at the divers with its widely spaced, milky-white eyes. I thought of a grouchy old man forced to dress as a teenager.

Reef sharks, such as the blacktip, are considered harmless animals. I’ve seen them five and six feet long, and I’ve swum with them on patrol. They are beautiful, in the manner of a samurai sword—form follows function—and they make good diving buddies if you can keep up with them.

There are sleeping sharks off the Caribbean coast of Mexico, sharks so docile that divers have been known to pull their tails. Caribbean nurse sharks are large enough to generate a full-scale adrenaline rush, and they are the ones local divers look for when they want to watch sharks. In Cozumel,
Mexico’s premier dive resort, I talked to a woman named Rita Shess, who sometimes works as a shark handler for feature films. She told me about her work on a film called
The Zombie II
. The zombie, an underwater sort in this trasher, likes to grab topless female divers. These are rare off Mexico, but the zombie perseveres. In the end the zombie is carried off by a shark, and the Caribbean is again safe for starlets.

The zombie stood on the ocean floor in his weighted boots. Rita and her team of three stood just out of camera range to the left. Another team of three stood to the right. Rita’s team pushed the shark out toward the zombie and in front of the camera. It drifted lazily by the guy in the rubber mask, indolent and indifferent. The second team caught the shark, turned it around, and Ping-Ponged it back to Rita’s team. They did this dozens of times while the zombie waved its arms and spouted great gouts of artificial blood. The film would be cut in such a way that sales of diving equipment would be sure to suffer.

Experienced divers often choose a dive site where they know they will see sharks. They
want
to see sharks. Some diving guidebooks specify areas where sharks are usually present. Here’s Nancy Sefton in
Dive Cayman:
“Shark Alley … a moderate depth site … noted for the frequent sighting of reef sharks.… Chances of seeing sharks are fairly good.… In Cayman waters these have proven to be harmless creatures, even shy.”

I do not mean to suggest all sharks are shy or harmless. There are more than two hundred species of shark extant, and some—hammerheads, great whites, tigers, grays—can be dangerous. But even if you do come upon one of these bad guys, your chances are something on the order of half a million to one against being attacked. Knowledgeable divers consider such sightings a privilege.

T
here is good diving near you: while I like diving big walls, I feel obliged to point out that there is great diving all over the world. The cold waters off northern California could never support a reef, but diving the kelp beds there is like dropping into a series of ice-water cathedrals. A strand of kelp anchors on a rock, and a bulbous head on the other end floats on the surface, so that the bed itself is a forest of long, green strands. Diving a kelp bed feels very much like walking through the redwoods. Sunlight scatters throughout the bed, just as it does in a redwood forest, and the feeling is equally Gothic and mysterious.

Even in Montana, where I live, there are a number of interesting dive sites. The Firehole River in Yellowstone Park is fed by numerous geysers and thermal springs. The water stays relatively warm all year round, and a popular dive site is set in a spectacular canyon. The water pushes a diver through smooth rock corridors, shoves him up over the top of a small wall—the water is about thirty-five feet deep here—then rockets him over an odd grouping of humpy, sculptured volcanic boulders. The pool at the end of this fast, roller coaster run is full of cutthroat trout, and they can often be seen feeding voraciously on a sudden snow-fly hatch.

Not far from where I live, there is a pond fed by a thermal spring. The water temperature never drops below sixty-nine degrees, and someone has stocked the pond with colorful freshwater tropical fish. You can cross-country ski to this unusual site.

On the other end of the state, a railroad track runs along a ledge above a mountain lake. Many years ago a train derailed and rolled into deep water. I know of no other place in the world where you can dive to see a train wreck.

The point is this: if there’s good diving near me, then there just has to be good diving near you.

You get to go around wearing tight rubber suits, and nobody thinks you’re weird: this is our little secret.

T
he headlands of Santa Cruz Island—a wall of dark, crumbling rock, the kind that climbers call “vertical mud”—rose a sheer eight hundred feet out of the Pacific Ocean. Pelicans soared against the face of the cliff, drifting by on a current of air. Our boat was anchored in a rocky cove, just under the shadow of the cliff. Pillars of jagged rock rose out of the tranquil sea, and there were several small beds of kelp a short swim from the boat.

The pelicans, with their long beaks and pouched, oddly shaped necks, looked vaguely reptilian in flight, miniature versions of the Japanese movie monster Rodan, that boxcar-sized, Tokyo-stomping pterodactyl. Off on a rocky beach, not far from the boat, a large group of sea lions discussed our arrival. “Ark, ark, ark,” they said.

There were several hundred of the beasts sunbathing on the rocks. The animals are dark brown, almost black when wet; but on the beach they took on the color of the sun. The eight-foot-long males can weigh up to six hundred pounds. The females, a couple of feet shorter, seldom weigh more than two hundred pounds. The males fight among themselves to establish harems of up to twenty females. Unlike true seals, sea lions can rotate their rear flippers, and they moved from the beach to the rocks with an endearing awkward waddle. Humans seem to find this mode of locomotion cute, in the same way they consider penguins cute. Most of the trained seals you see on television or in the circus—the
guys who honk bicycle horns for fish—are actually California sea lions.

Out in the dark water, near the kelp beds, a few of the sea lions lay on their backs, floating there in lazy immobility like vacationers in the Great Salt Lake. Their flippers, which projected out of the water, looked like the fins of small sharks, makos perhaps, or blues.

I dropped into the water and swam for the nearest kelp bed. I was wearing scuba gear and a black hooded wet suit, and I expected to pry a few scallops off the rocks for dinner. Sea lions can be playful diving companions, but they are thieves as well. So awkward on land, they can swoop and dive like pelicans in the water, and they can make off with a goody bag full of abalone or speared fish in a manner that makes a diver feel furiously helpless, like an elderly and arthritic woman victimized by a purse snatcher on a city street. It is therefore prudent when diving in the presence of sea lions—or in waters where there may be sharks—to tie the nylon mesh or goody bag to your weight belt with a long rope, secured by a slip knot, an offering to these fat lords of the Channel Islands. If you have no choice but to cooperate, better to do it on your own terms.

I
reached the kelp bed and dropped beneath the entangling mass of green blades on the surface. This particular variety of seaweed attaches itself to a rock on the ocean floor. A kind of air bladder forms on the upper leaves, allowing them to float to the surface. Diving in a kelp bed is like walking through a triple-canopy jungle or a redwood forest. Sunlight filters through the thick upper vegetation in the pure shafts that ought to be accompanied by an angelic chorus.

The beds are full of life. A cold-water current rushing down from the Arctic runs out of power here off Southern California, and the sea life is an amalgam of cold- and warm-water organisms. Little animals hide in the depths of the kelp, pursued by hungry, larger life forms that, in turn, are
careful not to stray too far toward the edge of the bed where the really big predators lurk.

I was twisting through long stems of kelp, thinking of scallops (sauteed in butter and garlic), but the bed was small, and I decided to swim to another, larger stand that was closer to shore and the sea lion colony. It was there, just out of sight of both beds, in the open sea, with the sandy floor opening up like a desert on all sides, that the vertigo hit me.

D
ivers and pilots, even experienced ones, suffer from complete disorientation on rare occasions. It happens to pilots in no-visibility situations, on instruments, when they suddenly realize they no longer know up from down. The same thing can happen to divers moving through open water where there are no points of reference. There is a sense of dizziness and nausea, compounded by irrational thoughts and confusion.

I reminded myself that bubbles rise and managed to orient myself in two dimensions. There was nothing I could do about the confusion, though. I found myself thinking about sea lions, about the things that Karen Straus, who has spent years diving the Channel Islands, told me before this trip.

“Is it safe to dive with sea lions?” I had asked.

“Oh, sure,” she said. “It’s fun.”

“Any danger?”

“Not from the females, generally. If the males think you’re another male, there could be trouble. It’s rare.”

“What do they do?”

“They beat you up.”

“Oh.”

“Of course, since you’re not nearly large enough to look like a male, it’s more likely that they’d think you were a female.” I was thinking about this because, at six feet and two hundred pounds, I was about the size of your basic female sea lion. The black wet suit looked like the slick and
shining skin of a wet seal. Vertigo presented me with the unsettling thought that a powerful six-hundred-pound beast could just possibly fall in love with me, here in eighty feet of water.

“What happens if he thinks you’re a female?” I had asked.

“Well, he’ll try to separate you from your diving partners. Try to drive you out to open sea.”

“Okay, but once he gets you where he wants you, what, uh (I wasn’t sure I wanted to know this), what does he do?”

“He beats you up,” she said.

Did I look like a female sea lion? What if one of the big fellows decided I was some desirable exotic, a worthy addition to his harem?

I
t was not a salubrious image: a life spent on the beach, wallowing around fatly with the other females. Knowing the shame of being the ugliest wife: the sad slow one who keeps getting her scallops snatched away, the outcast with the far-off, wistful look in her eye. Imagine lying there on the rocks trying to chat with the other wives, those complacent lard-buckets, secure in their own blubbery allure.