Last year I dove for a week on
a live-aboard dive boat, the
Caribbean Explorer. She's big and sleek, out of St. Maarten in the
Netherlands Antilles, set up for luxurious diving with compressors,
diving stations and a superb crew. She runs at night from dive site to
dive site while the divers sleep. You eat, dive, off-gas on the
sundeck, and dive again. Capitol Divers, my raffish semi-cowboy dive
club out of Washington, had chartered the beast in her entirety.
They're experienced, rowdy, bull-headed, addicted to outrageous
practical jokes (but that's another story) and splendid company.
My motives were an assignment
from Soldier of Fortune, for which I am the scuba editor, and a
desire to spice up the column with far places and exotic climes. Maybe
more the latter. Every time I go anywhere off the main roads of
existence, readers want to know what's out there. Many seem quietly
unhappy with their lives and looking for escape. Even in a rattle-trap
web column. It's, if not quite sad, then poignant.
On my return I found myself
talking about diving to a group of Washingtonians, nice people but
sedentary by the nature of their jobs. I told them about the islands,
where life is slow and hot and dominated by the ocean and people
usually don't have a lot of money or much of a career, but don't seem
to care.
A faraway look came into their
eyes, not so much envy as longing. Gosh, they said, some of them, I've
always wanted to do something like that, but . . . well, I got
married, the kids came, responsibilities. They seemed to feel trapped,
to suspect that a train had pulled out that maybe they didn't want to
be aboard, that life somehow had promised more than it was delivering.
Some of this is to be expected. Some, I think, comes from a sense of
the emptiness of the remote suburbs that dominate America now.
The particulars of the
undesired train differ. Many had just followed the crowd. They got out
of school, took a job thinking it was just for a while, moved into a
huge mortgage they found they didn't much like, bought two cars that
bored them and got trapped by the retirement system. Others, less
attractive, were ambitious, worked eighty hour weeks to make partner,
dressing in K-Street fatigues from Brooks Brothers to claw their way
onto a pinnacle that, when arrived at, seemed more a depression.
There are pinnacles and
pinnacles. You have to decide which ones you want. There's a doozy in
the waters somewhere off St. Maarten. I encountered it one morning
somewhere off Statia, if memory serves. Everyone geared up and went
overboard. The water was warm, endlessly blue, a delight. A giant
stride off the dive deck, a profusion of bubbles, and you float like
thistledown in another place entirely. I never get tired of it. I hung
on the mooring line at fifteen feet and waited. The other divers
exploded from above and buddied up. We started down.
Near 90 feet, where light
begins to fail and the sea becomes chalky blue in the distance, we
found the top of The Finger (I called it), an enormous rock spire
dropping way deep and having no discernible reason for existence. It
was just there, encrusted in the twisted growths that look grey and
brown in the dying color of beginning depth.
I stayed above 110 feet to
save bottom time and just drifted around the thing. I wondered why I
didn't live in the islands, do this whenever I wanted. A lot of people
wonder, and some of them could. A few small sharks swam by, lithe
creatures of a line more ancient than ours. They were curious about
the bubbling hunchbacked apparitions with huge feet but do not regard
divers as being in their food chain. In the gangrenous tangle covering
the spire, in cups of barrel sponges, wee crabs squatted, little
mechanical monsters waving pincers.
It beat making partner.
The islands are as much an
attitude as a place. The crew of the Caribbean Explorer were expats
and about par for the time and place: A Canadian gal who served as
hostess, dive guide, and chief underwater videoman, her French
boyfriend, a South African if memory serves, and such like. They were
good people-which is also par for the islands. Folk who work with
their hands, who deal with the sea and with boats and with the things
in the sea have something that people don't who spend their time
lying, maneuvering, stroking, and backstabbing.
Back home, as Washington then
was, I'd talk about the islanders and get the response: Americans
could imagine themselves living on a boat, driving into the dawn with
people assembling BCs and regulators on deck, salt spray chill in the
air, hearing the diesels pound--something that had some flavor, that
reminded them of spring in high school. Not all: Some were happy with
their lives and liked what they were doing. But so many didn't. They
were just waiting.
It is a mistake to think that
boatmen are crude roustabouts. You don't drive a large boat with
sixteen divers far from land without being very good with boats, very
good at diving, and very good at keeping a boat running. It is not the
nature of boats to run. They want to break. People who can fix them,
who can manage night dives without losing anyone, repair gear or
invent expedients, have a self-confidence that obviates the need to be
disagreeable. The pettiness of minor bureaucrats springs I think from
knowledge of their innecessity and a consequent desire to push people
around in the only exercise of power they will ever know.
Those worlds are out
there-dive boats in the islands, cabins at Prudhoe Bay, bars in Phuket.
Many of those in these places had jobs they hated in the States, got
fed up, bailed out, and winged it. A friend of mine, once a high-end
bond dealer, pulled over his Lexus somewhere in Massachusetts and
thought, "Why the hell am I doing this?" He couldn't find an
answer. He has a dive shop in Manzanillo now.
Back at St. Maarten, we
gravitated to an open-sided restaurant boisterous with laughter and
tropical shirts and people tanned by the sun to the color of a
baseman's glove. Waiters raced about with trays of beer and fish. The
afternoon light slanted in over the water. Very few there knew who the
Majority Whip was. Fewer would have known what he was good for, except
maybe bait.
