Thursday, July 9, 2009

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.











8 comments:

  1. Breathtaking and perfectly described as always. Thanks for the brief escape!

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  2. "We got no troubles. Life is the bubbles. Under the sea."

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  3. Beautiful! I love the pics of the men-maids too! Thanks Tom.

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  4. Well, I've never had the chance to dive (yet), but now I know why I want too... Your words and pictures sufficed just fine... Thank you for the creation of another new goal... To see under water, as I have seen above it...

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  5. Tom -- Your photos are delightful. When I snorkeled in Phuket, Thailand, I realize that those killjoys who claimed "That's not a color found in nature" had never been under the water. It's a Crayola Cacophony

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  6. Tom,
    We loved your story. The pics were good too, but I really enjoyed the picnic. Love you.
    Dave and Gail

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  7. The pics are amazing--one's going to be my screensaver, don't you know--

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  8. hi,tom;do u know dillon buck? he is a gay porn star n escort just as u did.he likes to scuba diving,too.check up his blog:dillonbuckxxx.blogspot.com

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