Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (70 page)

The usual diving protocol is that you surface and wave an arm in the air, then the dive boat comes and picks you up. When I bobbed to the surface, I saw that the current hadn’t carried us as far as it had seemed thirty or forty feet below. Cheerily, I waved my hand over my head. The youthful captain was looking vaguely in my direction, and I waited for him to motor over. But the boat just sat there. So I waved again, a bit more vigorously. Still the captain stared my way with a glassy expression, and still I continued waving, now using both arms. I raised my mask and took the regulator out of my mouth and tried to shout, but the wind was blowing straight into my face and I knew he couldn’t hear me over the wind and choppy water. I thought of that “whistle for attracting attention” that is always mentioned on airplane life jackets.

Now remember that a person normally feels exhausted after a dive, and that the Australian sun is fierce, and the waves were not insignificant, and the current was forceful. So I really needed to get out of the water. Channeling late-night television, I tried a Tarzan yell. The captain then walked around to the other side of the boat, which left me staring at a blank prospect.

When I faced into the wind toward the boat, the waves broke over my head. I’d not previously understood how anyone could drown while wearing a life jacket, but as I pumped up my BCD, I realized that I couldn’t keep myself oriented toward the boat without achieving unwanted hydration of my pulmonary and digestive systems. It was nature’s version of waterboarding. So I turned away from the boat, twisting my body every few minutes to check whether the captain had come back into my view, in which case I would be in his. I waited, and I waited, and I waited, and after about ten minutes, he finally came back and once more appeared to be looking right at me. By now, my waving was worthy of Cirque du Soleil—both arms oscillating rapidly over my head, back and forth and front and back and sideways. I even tried using my flippers to jump partway out of the water, like a sort of flying fish with arms. The captain gazed calmly in my direction for a few minutes, then resumed his little peregrination around the deck.

When you do scuba training—be it in Pennsylvania or in Zanzibar—you get a great deal of tutelage about what to do if your air fails, learn signs to alert your divemaster to what’s wrong, and memorize techniques to compensate for a wide variety of potential errors, failures, and dangers. But you don’t get any advice about what to do on the surface if you have somehow become invisible.

The current was carrying me away from the boat, so I tried to swim into it. Even with my strongest freestyle stroke I didn’t make any headway, and I soon realized that I couldn’t swim into the waves, especially loaded down with the air tanks and weight belt, and keep breathing unless I kept my mask on and used the remaining air from my tanks. I’d come up to the surface in the first place because I was running out of air, and I needed that air not only to breathe but also to stay afloat, because my BCD was leaking slightly, and I had to keep reinflating it. What about my diving weights? The advantage to keeping them on was that they slowed the rate at which I was drifting away from the boat. The disadvantage was that they likewise slowed my swimming and might be increasing the drag on my ever-deflating BCD. I tried to awaken my logical mind and make a decision, but despite more than a half hour to think about it, I had no idea what to do. The others had to be on board by now, getting ready to come look for me. The divemaster, despite the lack of landmarks, knew where I’d surfaced. I’d gone in only one direction: that of the current. It couldn’t be so hard to find me. I kept the weights on, figuring that the closer I was to the boat, the easier I’d be to find.

Then there was nothing to be done but to let myself drift with the current and conserve energy, my face away from the wind and the boat, surrounded by the limitless sea.

Finally, I heard a reassuring sound. The boat’s engine fired up. I breathed a great sigh of relief, spun around, resumed my Olympian waving—and watched as the boat chugged into gear and set off in the opposite direction. Away from me, speeding into the horizon.

Now I was alone at sea, with nothing but water and sky in every direction. There was no one to wave to, nothing to swim toward. For the first
time that morning, I thought, “People die this way.” I assumed that the current was sweeping me farther out to sea. I remembered that the Pacific Ocean is a rather large body of water; I remembered that there are sharks in it—most of them harmless, but some, aggressive. My bobbling little head seemed a small target for whoever might ultimately come out to search.

Sometimes I felt scared stiff; sometimes I thought that I’d be fine so long as my BCD worked and I could simply float for a day or two. I’d never fully imagined drowning, and I wondered how long it would take and how painful it would be. I couldn’t bear the possibility of being unable to breathe, though I dimly remembered that some people who had been revived after nearly drowning had said the experience conferred a certain semifinal peace. I speculated how long the remaining air in my tank would keep me afloat. I was so tired; I wondered whether I would eventually fall asleep even floating in the sea.

Then I heard the voices of my parents. I envisaged my father saying, “You took this risk so you could see exotic fish?” I could hear him suggesting that I try spending way too much time in aquariums instead. Not a cloud scuttled across the sky, and I imagined my mother, who had died twenty-five years earlier, chastising, “This is why you should always, always wear sunblock.”

The waves seemed to be growing. If I drifted out beyond the reef, I’d be rolling in huge swells, and I wouldn’t keep my head above water for long.

Sometimes I tried to swim again, just for something to do, and then gave up again.

And no one came. And another twenty minutes passed. And forty minutes passed. And an hour passed.

I felt sorry for John, who would be worrying on board. I envisioned John and Sue explaining to George what had happened. I thought about my daughter Blaine, who was in Texas with her mother, and I felt crestfallen that I might miss her growing up; I was so curious about who my children would become. I thought of Oliver and Lucy, our older children, who lived in Minneapolis with their two moms. I had accomplished much of what I’d always wanted from life: love, children, adventure, a meaningful career. I was
grateful for the life I’d had, even if I wasn’t going to have much more of it. I thought that my disappearance might kill my father, and I regretted his pain. Mostly, I worried that my children might feel I had abandoned them, and I felt guilty about that—guilty and terribly sad. I wondered whether they would remember me.

I mused, “These may be my last thoughts. I should be thinking something important.” But I couldn’t think of anything important to think. My mind drifted to Shakespeare and the great philosophers, but I didn’t have any new insights. I tried to get my life to flash before my eyes, but all that was flashing were the squinty prismatic colors caused by too much time in the sun on the sea. I considered my last words, even if no one was around to hear them. I couldn’t come up with anything profound or witty to say to the waves. I found myself dwelling on my favorite Winnie-the-Pooh story, “In Which Piglet Is Entirely Surrounded by Water,” when a frightened Piglet misses Pooh and thinks, “It’s so much more friendly with two.”

I was glad that John was safe and that he would be able to care for George and Blaine, and I was sorry he wasn’t with me—both, at once. By that time, I’d been trying to stay afloat for about an hour and a half. I was sunburned to a crisp and felt a little feverish. I seemed to have swallowed gallons and gallons of seawater.

I had never felt so alone.

I remembered the literary trope that we all die alone, no matter how we die.

I tried to enumerate what I had planned to do with and for my children. My own life wasn’t flashing before my eyes, but their lives were. I’ve never been good at the present moment, so I once more took refuge in planning an unplannable future.

I felt my own insignificance; I felt the smallness of man. I felt how little it mattered, really, whether any one person lived or died.

My reverie was punctured by a voice on the wind—a voice that sounded eerily like John’s—shouting, “Help! Help!” I tried to shout back, but the wind still stymied me. Then I heard another voice. It dawned on me that the other three must be in the same situation I
was. Because I was downwind, I could hear them, but they couldn’t hear me. Judging by their voices, we were far from one another and from the boat. But perhaps the divemaster knew the answers I didn’t.

On the horizon, I suddenly saw a boat, though I wasn’t sure it was our boat.

Something that resembled a giant pink breast, perhaps five feet tall, came into view, heading toward the now clearly discernible boat. Perhaps the voices, the boat, and the breast were mere hallucinations. The boat, which was beginning to look clearly like our boat, moved toward the pink breast, and they appeared to merge. Then the boat headed in the direction from which the other voices had arisen. It stopped for a few minutes.

And then it began to move toward me.

Never in my life have I greeted any lover with the joy I felt when I grabbed the dive ladder. I climbed up shakily and collapsed into John’s arms.

John had had a difficult experience, too, but quite different from mine. He was with two other people, one of them a divemaster, and they had surfaced about forty-five minutes after I did. They had faced the same dilemma of being unable to get the attention of the boat captain. They had taken turns trying to swim to the boat, but it always had motored elsewhere before they could reach it. Once, John got within about fifty feet of it. The pink breast was actually an emergency balloon the divemaster had been carrying. Later, I wondered how anyone who knew such a thing might be needed could have let a novice such as me return to the surface alone. The divemaster had inflated the balloon when she spotted the boat, then swum with it until the captain finally saw it and motored over to pick her up. Once on board, she had pointed the boat toward John and the aquarium girl. All the while they were stranded, John had assumed that I was already back on board; he became frantic when he learned that I was unaccounted for. But the divemaster had heard me trying to holler back to John and pointed the ship accordingly. I’d been afloat for nearly two hours and had drifted several miles.

Only after I climbed aboard did I begin to get angry: at the boat captain, at the divemaster, at the hotel management. But I also felt
so grateful to be alive, and it’s hard to be angry and profoundly grateful at the same time. I hugged John; I hugged the aquarium girl; I hugged the divemaster; I hugged the man from Maryland, slightly to his dismay. The boat captain tried to make cheery conversation, to which I replied in what John later described as my “Linda Blair voice,” a guttural growl like that of the demon-possessed little girl in
The Exorcist
.

You actually can be grateful and angry at the same time.

While I was adrift, thoughts of my children had occupied me. It’s not that I have such a high opinion of myself as a parent, but I do have a sense of my responsibility. Back on land, we decided not to tell George what had happened. I thought it would frighten him, as it was still frightening me. But while I was largely silent, he eagerly recounted his adventures of the morning—what he’d eaten for breakfast, where he and Sue had been digging, what washed-up shells and twigs he had found, and how far he’d swum all by himself. In the urgency of his speech, I found the complement to my mishap. I understood that the daredevilry of ordering eel for lunch or going skydiving or visiting war-torn lands pale in comparison to the adventurous domesticity of being a parent, which involves simultaneously reckoning with the vastness of the world and agreeing, at least for a little while, to be that vastness to one’s children.

W
hen I set out to assemble this book, I suffered under the gross misapprehension that an anthology would involve merely scanning some things I wrote a long time ago and sending them to my publisher. In fact, the process has entailed selecting the articles; writing the introduction to the collection; composing prologues and epilogues; and endlessly polishing essays I’d already written, some of which had to be reworked. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that he didn’t want to repeat his innocence, but that he’d like to repeat the pleasure of losing it, and putting together an anthology of this kind provided a chance to grow out of my naïveté all over again.

The trip down memory lane was a return not only to my bygone adventures but also to the editors with whom I’d worked on the original pieces. I have been fortunate both in being sent to fantastic places and in having my reports on them edited with exquisite care. I thank Nicholas Coleridge and Meredith Etherington-Smith at
Harpers &
Queen
, who sent me out on my first big reporting trips, and believed in me before there was any apparent reason to do so. For their guidance at the
New York Times Magazine
, I thank Jack Rosenthal, Adam Moss, and Annette Grant, who helped me grow into myself and find an audience. At the
New Republic
, I was fortunate to work with David Shipley. In connection with my work for the
New Yorker
, I thank David Remnick, Henry Finder, Amy Davidson, and Sasha Weiss for their sterling care. As soon as she took over
Travel + Leisure
, Nancy
Novogrod began sending me everywhere I’d always wanted to go; she gave me a bigger and better life than I would ever have had without her. Our decades of collaboration are among the bright spots of my professional and personal life. I also thank the editors with whom I worked at
T
+
L
, particularly Sheila Glaser and the wonderful Luke Barr. For her support at
Food & Wine
, I thank Dana Cowin; no one has ever had a better friend, and I’d gladly have given the world away in exchange for the joy her generous affection and steady wisdom have given me. I thank Catherine Burns and all her colleagues at the Moth for the steadfast good humor with which they helped me to craft stories.