The Sponges Are Spawning

It’s pretty difficult to translate the experience of being/breathing underwater into words.  That fleeting nanosecond of panic when your face drops below the surface and you take your first breath through the regulator before normalcy resumes; the illusion, when looking from below, that the surface slowly bends towards you and appears concave; the moment when “here” and “there” swap meaning as you drop from sea-level and approach the ocean floor.    How to describe swimming along the side of a sheer wall that drops beyond sight?  A wall covered with coral so intensely colorful and developed that it almost seems as if it had been art-directed?  As if it were someone’s fantasy of coral and not something that could really exist in nature?  Can language convey the sensation of seeing a huge school of fish—just like in your aquarium when you were a kid, but ten times the size—swim directly towards you and then around you as if you were meaningless in their world?  Or a stingray the dimensions of a good-sized area rug passing just below as you maneuver through a cleft in the rock?  How can I describe the childlike joy I feel when I allow myself to hover completely upside-down, feet pointing towards the surface, just because it’s fun?

 

I can’t.  I’ve come to the conclusion that these things need to be experienced first-hand.

 

What I can do is post some photos I took underwater.  Even these give only an approximation of what I saw with my eye.  Color underwater is problematical.  So is getting a fish to stand still for a shot.  For that matter, getting oneself to stand still is not much easier:  by the time you’ve decided, “this is my shot!” you’ve already floated past the perfect framing.

 

On one trip with Ellie, my dream instructor, I noticed some tubular sponges surrounded by cloudy water.  I pointed at them and shrugged, “what is that?”  Ellie took out her slate and wrote, “The sponges are spawning their eggs and their sperm.”  I took the pencil from her (a plain old no. 2 pencil, amazingly enough) and added:  POETRY!

 

Poetry, indeed.