CHAPTER FIVE

Transformation

The Art of Breathing in the Ocean

I am drowning.

Well, not quite. But there is water in my airway, I am 14 feet underwater, and it appears even more water is pouring in. My usual response to such a state of affairs, one that has worked well for over half a century, is to get my head out of the water and gasp. But my scuba instructor is horrified.

“No, no, no! You must not surface so fast!” the young guy with a French accent admonishes once I bob back to the life-giving air.

“I’m sorry,” I gurgle. “Water was coming into my regulator. Why is this happening?”

Later that day I learn from another instructor that my problem was the same that sinks ships: loose lips. I need to grip the regulator more strongly with my lower lip, which I am not doing very well because, apparently, I am spending a lot of time underwater actually smiling. Here in the MIT swimming pool, I am practically delirious, reveling in my amphibious transformation. I am imagining my not-so-distant future, swimming among corals, among fishes, among sharks and rays and moray eels and most of all, among octopuses. I can’t help but grin like a lunatic.

But nothing wipes a smile off the face as fast as nearly drowning. The French fellow admonishes me, “Baby steps!” But for me, the very idea of scuba is a giant leap from everything I have previously known.

I am taking the intensive scuba course just outside Boston, as Scott had suggested—alas, without Christa, who had to cancel at the last moment. Though I miss my friend, I wasn’t worried about taking the class. I have always been somewhat aquatic. I’m not a particularly graceful or strong swimmer, but I’m a fearless one. From the Gulf of Siam to the murky waters of the Amazon, I have always felt confident I’d be fine if I obeyed Rule One of swimming, and that is: Don’t Try to Breathe Underwater.

Except now this is exactly what we are supposed to do.

Everything in scuba is completely different from life on land, and also from previous experience swimming. Scuba equipment is intimidating and heavy. Just assembling the gear—the nearly 40-pound air tank, the vestlike buoyancy compensation device, or BCD, with its additional pounds of lead weight in the pockets, the hoses and gauges and mouthpieces that hang from tubes everywhere like sleepy eels—takes seven complicated steps to accomplish. Screw up any of these and you have a big problem. Yet the assembly still seemed to me—a person who had managed to make it through not just one, but two high schools without mastering the combination to my locker—an impenetrable mystery.

In my rented gear, my body feels utterly alien. The giant fins are big as clown shoes, the mask prevents peripheral vision, and breathing through the regulator in my mouth makes me sound like Darth Vader. The BCD has air pockets that you can inflate or deflate to make you float or sink in ways you never did before. I’m wearing a rented mask that somebody else spit in (you spit in your mask to defog it), a wet suit somebody else peed in (we’re told everyone does—in the ocean, not the pool), and a regulator that somebody else may have thrown up in. And in this gear, I’m not even supposed to swim normally. I’m supposed to fold my arms in like a kangaroo and propel myself only by kicking my fins.

Nothing looks right: Objects seem closer and 25 percent bigger in the water. Nothing sounds right: Sound travels four times faster in water than in air, and directionality is distorted. Nothing feels right: Since you’re not really swimming, you can’t warm up, and water carries heat away from the body twenty-five times faster than in air. Even though the pool is 80°F and we are wearing wet suits, everyone’s lips are blue with cold by the end of the first session.

Yet I was doing the impossible and having a blast.

It was only when the water started filling the regulator that I panicked.

I was certain things would get easier as the weekend progressed. But I was wrong.

Everyone was spent after the first day of scuba lessons. Even our main instructor, fit, twentyish Janine Woodbury, admitted she was pretty beat. And, she confessed, her ears hurt. Mine too. Bad enough that I had taken a sleeping pill the night before, because the pain was keeping me awake. (I later learned this was dangerous and could have damaged my heart or lungs.) But on hearing (though more faintly than usual) my young instructor’s admission that her ears hurt too, I felt better. Maybe your ears are supposed to hurt. In this I was wrong.

The pain did not decrease, but to my surprise, I was able to assemble the gear. I didn’t have to think twice to remember how to clear my regulator or inflate or deflate my BCD. I felt strong and ready to learn new skills, including breathing from a buddy’s emergency air supply, which is, to my delight, called an octopus. But my ears felt as if they were going to explode.

Janine had once actually seen one of her students’ eardrums explode. “Bubbles came out of his ear underwater,” she said. “It was gross.” And incredibly painful. Unfortunately, permanent ear damage from scuba is not as rare as one would hope. Scott no longer dives because of ear damage that he suffered on a relatively routine expedition in Massachusetts waters, collecting live rock—pieces of dead coral that have been colonized with algae and sponges that, back at the aquarium, work as biological filters in tanks—at a depth of 100 feet. While surfacing, he suffered a “reverse squeeze” from pressure changes, and damaged his cochlea so badly his doctor forbade him to dive again.

I made the gesture for “trouble clearing ears” underwater to my instructor. She gestured for me to hold my nose and blow—a trick for equalizing pressure called the Valsalva maneuver. I did so with great enthusiasm and heard a very loud noise from inside my head. “Okay?” she signaled. But now it hurt worse. I signaled “something’s wrong” and pointed again to my ears and blew again.

I ascended a couple of feet and tried the Valsalva again. I also used the Frenzel maneuver, another way of opening the eustachian tubes, by moving the jaw around like a snake trying to swallow something bigger than its head. This didn’t work either.

“Okay?” Janine signaled.

No, I replied with my hand. I Valsalvaed yet again. I tried sinking a little—maybe this was a “reverse squeeze” and could be solved in this manner. But no—if anything, this made it yet worse. I rose again, slowly, pinching my nose and blowing the whole time.

“Okay?”

But I was not okay. No matter what I did, the pressure in my ears was blindingly painful.

I got out, and sat with my eyes closed, doubled over. Pain was not the sole source of my suffering. It was the prospect of defeat. I desperately wanted to be able to enter Octavia and Kali’s world. Encumbered with my awkward skeleton and air-hungry lungs, I could not begin to discover much of anything about what it might be like to be an octopus without at least learning how to breathe underwater. I wanted to meet octopuses who lived in the wild ocean. In the shower, I began to repeat in my head the first words of the Fisherman’s Prayer, the words to which John F. Kennedy kept on his desk at the White House: “Oh God, Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small. . . .” I fervently longed to get out of that boat and enter the Creator’s great ocean, if only for an hour at a time, as a breathing, swimming sea creature. How could I do this without scuba?

Then I noticed the vertigo and nausea. When Scott suffered his cochlear damage, the pain had been accompanied by dizziness. When he surfaced he had thrown up.

But I was determined to try again. My instructor suggested Afrin, a nasal spray pilots often use. I wobbled to a drugstore and bought some, along with a macrobiotic bento box for lunch. The lunch did not stay down.

Janine gently suggested I bail. I did not want to lose my hearing. I have three smart, resilient friends who are deaf, and even they have a hard time in the hearing world. So I agreed. I would go home early, having failed to complete the first half of the course.

Defeated, I crawled off to my car, where I discovered I was too dizzy to drive.

I lay down in the backseat, on the blanket where our border collie sits, her paws and belly often plastered with mud, on the drive after our hikes in the woods together. Inhaling her scent, I felt instantly calmer. Within half an hour, though my ears still hurt horribly, the vertigo had eased enough for me to drive the two hours home.

When I returned to the aquarium the next Wednesday, everything had changed. The top floor of the Giant Ocean Tank was closed to the public, and the walkway along the big tank was now draped with white cloth to screen the work under way. Eighty-gallon plastic tubs were scattered around, ready to receive fish. The top floor was littered with large wooden boxes in which the larger section of the reef would be carted away.

Octavia was in a strange spot, way farther back in her lair than usual, and at least fifteen rows of egg chains were visible, some of them nine inches long. She hung from her arms as if lying in a hammock, and she was exceptionally still.

Everything, in fact, seemed unnaturally subdued. The aquarium was nearly deserted. Visitors were few. Scott was at a conference in Tucson; Bill was on vacation in Florida; Anna was back in school. The penguins were gone, and their tray held only Myrtle and her fellow turtles.

Myrtle had been moved only the day before. A diver lured her with lettuce toward a white, sea-turtle-size plastic crate, with floats at the handles and holes through which water could flow. As Myrtle chewed her treat, another diver simply spun the 550-pound reptile around by her shell and gently pushed her inside the crate. She was then hoisted out of the water, wheeled into the elevator, and lifted into the penguin tray. Myrtle’s legs began to whir as soon as the water flooded into her crate, and with a tip of her box from one of the four divers attending her release, the calm old turtle swam out confidently to her new home, apparently unfazed.

Myrtle’s transition had been more successful than my own. I had hoped to return from my scuba weekend triumphant, a changed creature. But when Christa and Wilson asked me, I was forced to confess I was a washout.

Wilson was sympathetic, having tried scuba himself once. “This is not an easy sport,” he said. Both his daughter and son are skilled divers, having logged many dozens of dives—including one on which a fellow diver died of decompression sickness.

I shared details of my failure as we visited Kali. She was at the top of the barrel before the lid was off, her body a rich, reddish brown, staring at us with golden eyes. Unlike the previous week, she was quite energetic, her arms reaching and grabbing at us with her suckers. “Easy, honey!” said Wilson, hurrying to feed her a squid and two capelin. Her suckers conveyed the food to her mouth in seconds, and in a minute it was gone. Then she turned her attention to playing with us, grabbing and pulling. Each sucker hugged and kissed us at the same time. I felt consoled.

Christa, always cheerful, was upbeat about my scuba setback. “I know you’ll be able to do this!” she assured me. And in fact, I had already set in motion my next plan. About halfway along my drive to the aquarium is a dive shop, Aquatic Specialties, in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and I had arranged for private lessons, starting next week—so it would be possible to complete my open-water certification before New England’s waters get too cold or too rough. My instructor was a volunteer at the aquarium, which I took as a good omen.

In fact, at the aquarium, everyone who worked on Tuesdays knew my new instructor. They called her Big D. Doris Morrissette, fifty-nine, red-haired, and possessed of mischievous humor, is only five foot one, but her spirit is huge. And she’s an exceptionally patient and effective instructor because, she cheerfully admits, if you can make a mistake, she’s done it.

As a child, she’d been enchanted with Jacques Cousteau and Sea Hunt on TV. But even though she was a strong swimmer and loved the sea, it didn’t occur to her until she was fifty that she might be able to scuba dive herself—because all the divers on TV were men.

Finally she took a “Try Scuba” mini-course on a Caribbean vacation. After about thirty minutes of classroom instruction, her group went out on a boat, suited up, and jumped overboard. “Except me,” she said. “I wasn’t even in the water and I freaked out. I just couldn’t do it.” She tried again, taking lessons, working with two personal instructors and a nutritionist to get strong—and the next year got certified.

By 2010, she was an instructor. Since then, Doris has taught many dozens of grateful students. She leads weekly summer dives in New England and dives around the world. By the time I met her, she’d completed 375 open-water dives and, since she started volunteering at the aquarium in 2009, 180 dives in the GOT.

My two sessions with her in Aquatic Specialties’ smaller, shallower pool were easy and fun, but as autumn advanced, I grew increasingly anxious about completing the four open-water dives I needed to finish the course. Big D had been forced to abort the last two dives she’d planned in Atlantic waters due to strong surf. But for me, she had a solution: I would earn my open-water certification in New Hampshire’s Dublin Lake—only minutes’ drive from our house.

Unfortunately, it was by then October, and the spring-fed lake was 54°F.

The ancient Spartans believed that cold water is good for everything, including your hair. Water temperatures in this range do, in fact, cause physiological changes—one of which is known as the cold-shock response, a “series of reflexes that begin immediately upon sudden cooling of the skin following cold-water immersion.” During this reflexive response, “blood pressure, heart rate, and the workload of the heart all increase, making the heart more susceptible to life-threatening rhythms and heart attack. Simultaneously,” an online text explained, “gasping begins, followed by rapid and deep breathing. These reflexes can quickly lead to accidental inhalation of water and drowning. This rapid and seemingly uncontrollable over-breathing creates a sensation of suffocation and contributes to feelings of panic. It can also create dizziness, confusion, disorientation, and a decreased level of consciousness.”

I’m glad I didn’t know this at the time.

To keep from freezing in New England’s chilly waters, the scuba diver dons quite a bit of neoprene: I was to rent a seven-millimeter-thick, overalls-type wet suit, over which I would wear another seven-millimeter, long-sleeved, short-panted “shortie” wet suit. Pulling the legs of the overalls on was as difficult as it was awkward, with much tugging and grunting, but Doris assured me it would be worth it, because the harder it was to get on, the better the fit—and the better the fit, the warmer I’d be. But since the shop did not have a huge selection of rentals, and women customers are rarer than men, I was issued a men’s size small. Of particular note was the roomy crotch, which caused me to adopt the walk of a woman whose panty hose are falling toward her knees.

I would also need to buy boots, gloves, and a hood. Putting on the hood is like pulling a plastic surgical glove over your head. It bent my ears in half like a pita bread around a falafel, and I felt certain I would smother. The neck was so tight I felt like my head was going to pop. Once the hood was on, I hoped it would smooth and stretch the skin on my face, giving it the pleasing look of a face-lift; but instead it squished my cheeks toward my nose, as if my head had been caught between the closing doors of an elevator.

Another feature of extra neoprene is it increases buoyancy, so the diver needs to don more weight. So in addition to the more-than-30-pound tank and the weights I was already wearing to dive in the pool, now I would have to string even more lead on a belt around my waist. This brought the total amount of extra pounds I would carry to nearly 70 . . . 57 percent of my body weight.

The increased weight, the cold, the extra gear, and the low visibility of its turbid water make open-water scuba in New England practically a technical dive. Both Doris and my previous instructor, Janine, both said the same thing: “If you can dive in New England, you can dive almost anywhere.”

Big D and I loaded the gear into our cars and drove the hour from Merrimack to Dublin. Again I thrashed my way into the two-piece men’s outfit. Struggling into my neoprene wardrobe by the side of busy Route 101, a road often traveled by friends and neighbors, I prayed nobody I knew would be driving past and recognize me right at that moment.

Finally dressed, I thought, Okay, this is so uncomfortable I won’t even notice the cold water. I staggered into the lake, stepping from rock to rock to muddy bottom, and for a moment, I was dry and warm. Then the water began to seep in. I remembered longingly that Janine had told us that there are only two kinds of divers: those who pee in their wet suits, and those who lie about it. Ninety-eight point six degrees would have felt mighty good about then. I wished I’d had more to drink before I came.

That first day was foggy and rainy, but Big D was chipper: “The raindrops look awesome when you look up from underwater,” she said. I dived beneath the surface only to careen between sinking to the bottom and shooting to the top. My legs cramped in the cold. In the murky water, if my instructor swam more than ten feet away from me, she would vanish from sight.

Miraculously, I was able to perform all the scuba skills to Doris’s satisfaction. We surfaced after twenty minutes, and she announced our next dive would be “just for fun.” We could look for the big bass with which the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department stocks the lake; there are also landlocked salmon there. In the murk, we saw none. But Big D was right: The raindrops did look awesome viewed from beneath.

For the final dive, two days later, I practically fell back into the water. This time I was not even looking for fish. I just wanted the next dive to be over.

But then, a six-inch bass swam right up to my face mask.

It was unlike any encounter I’d ever had with a wild animal. Normally, you first see the animal at a distance; if you’re lucky, gradually it might approach you or allow you to come close. They don’t just appear inches from your face and stare at you. The bass may have been surprised, too. Some say that because their faces aren’t as mobile as ours, fish don’t have expressions, but they are wrong. His look was quizzical: “What are you doing here?”

We held each other’s gaze for many seconds. Then one of us blinked. Since I was the only one with eyelids, it must have been me. The bass vanished as suddenly as a shudder.

But the fish should have been happy, because that day—the day I earned my certification—I was the one who was hooked.

When I return to the aquarium, I find the last fish have been evacuated from the GOT. Aquarium engineers pulled the plug on the 200,000-gallon tank at 10 a.m., October 2, draining it at the rate of one inch per minute. Finally, divers could use ladders to reach the lower water level and catch the speedy tarpon, permits, and jacks in nets. While I was diving in Dublin Lake, Bill was on the crew that worked from 3 to 9 p.m. over the weekend, moving the eight four-foot-long, 40-pound tarpon. “They’re big. They’re hard,” he said. “That’s why they left them till last.”

Every move is fraught with drama and danger. In September, a team of four divers, three veterinary staffers, a thirteen-member bucket brigade, one curator, and a handful of volunteers worked together to move the two three-foot-long blacknose sharks, a male and a female, from the GOT.

For weeks, divers had been acclimating the sharks to the nets, holding the nets in the water so the animals would not fear them. The team had successfully moved the bonnethead sharks the day before; but the blacknose sharks are more sensitive, explained curator Dan Laughlin, and might freak out. A frightened shark is nearly impossible to catch, which is why Dan had briefed everyone not just on plan A but, in case that didn’t work, plans B, C, and D. (Plans B and C involved crowding the sharks by cutting off their usual swimming areas with nets or partitions; D meant waiting till the tank was nearly drained.) Worse than frightening a shark is injuring one, and this can happen easily if the shark thrashes against the sharp edge of a coral sculpture. “Don’t strike,” Dan warned the two divers armed with big scoop nets, “unless you’re sure you’re going to get them.”

The plan was simple: The two netters, one of whom I recognized as Myrtle’s friend, Sherrie Floyd, another, Quincy husbandry aquarist Monika Schmuck, would face each other, standing on opposite coral sculptures, in the center of which was a deep trough. A third diver, hovering in the water of the trough, would tempt the sharks with a herring on a pole. Once the treat captured a shark’s attention, the diver would swing the pole toward the familiar net—into which everyone hoped the shark would eagerly swim.

At first the sharks seemed uninterested in the herring. They made one pass, then two, around the pole. Then a third. But the team had made sure the sharks were hungry. At the fourth pass, the female blacknose swam right into Sherrie’s net. Sherrie scooped it up in one fluid motion and handed it to another staffer on dry land, who ferried the shark to the tank—which had been filled with salt water by the bucket brigade, assisted by a single pump—already waiting in the elevator.

The second shark, everyone thought, would be harder to catch. But just two passes later, the male was in Monika’s net. Because he was larger than the female, and strong enough to flop out, our hearts stopped until someone clapped a second net on top of the first to prevent his escape. The two sharks were on the truck to Quincy before the divers even got into the showers.

Alas, the tarpon transfer had not gone so easily. They’d had to dissolve anesthetic in the water to slow the fish. One tarpon didn’t recover from the anesthesia and died.

This was hard on Bill. On an earlier visit, I had watched him hold tenderly onto one of his more elderly charges, a redfish, while vet techs fed him through a tube. “He’s not been eating,” Bill told me with deep concern. The redfish’s problem was a common one: He had a gas bubble in the eye, and the pain had ruined his appetite. He was being treated with steroid eye drops for the bubble, but as he recovered, it was important he keep his strength up. Bill was visibly tense until the redfish recovered from the drug and could be returned to his tank behind the scenes, which he shared with a fellow redfish and a brown eel known as a rock gunnel, both species common in nearby Maine.

Animal-keeping institutions aren’t all the same in the care they give sick inmates. When a friend of mine was working at a small zoo in the early ’80s, their kangaroo fell ill. She called a zoo in Australia for help. “What do you do when your kangaroo gets sick?” she asked. “Shoot it and go catch another one,” came the reply.

But at the New England Aquarium, each animal, no matter how common, receives compassionate, expert care. Everyone loves these animals; nobody wants to see them suffer or die. One of Bill’s surf perches was recovering from an episiotomy. These fish give live birth and her babies, stuck inside her, had ruptured her cloaca, exposing her intestines. The aquarium’s boyish, cheerful vet, Charlie Innis, had operated on her with the same focus and urgency he brings to saving the dozens of injured, critically endangered wild sea turtles the aquarium rescues, rehabilitates, and releases each year.

The four-inch surf perch took a month to recover from the surgery. Today, Bill gently scoops her from her recovery tank and places her in a blue bucket, where she’ll be anesthetized so two gowned and gloved vet techs can remove the stitches. One holds her on a yellow sponge towel while the other snips the sutures. Soon she will be released to a tank behind the scenes, which she’ll share with some sea pens, beautiful, soft coral animals whose feathery appendages look like old-fashioned quill pens. Bill shows me the tank. It’s next to one that once held lumpfish, and after that ocean pout, and now is filled with white anemones—animals that had only recently been moved there from the Pacific Northwest exhibit. This is the tank to which Bill would like to move Kali.

But when? The little octopus isn’t so little anymore. When we visit her, she is active and affectionate, her suction leaving red hickeys on our hands and arms, but we all worry that in her small, boring barrel—with nothing to play with, nowhere to hide, nothing to see—she could become depressed. On top of the space crunch brought on by the GOT renovation, soon Bill will leave on the aquarium’s annual collecting expedition to the Gulf of Maine to bring back more animals, which will further complicate the game of musical tanks.

Seeing Kali in her barrel only feeds my longing to meet an octopus in the open ocean. I have no idea how or when this will happen. My next assignment will be taking me, in just two weeks, to Niger, to document a survey of desert antelope. Nothing could be further from my watery heart right now than an ocean of sand.

But when I return from my day at the aquarium, shocking news awaits me. Al-Qaeda operatives in nearby Mali have spread to Niger, and terrorists are kidnapping visiting foreigners. The expedition is canceled. Instead of going on safari to the Sahara, I will be diving for octopus in the Caribbean.

The Merrimack dive shop organizes this trip every autumn to Cozumel, one of the best scuba-diving locations in the world. The island, twelve miles off Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, gives its name to Cozumel Reefs National Marine Park, protecting 29,000 mostly pristine acres of the second-largest barrier reef in the world, in some of the ocean’s clearest waters. The park boasts some twenty-six species of coral and more than five hundred species of fish, and the chance to see octopus.

“Normally, seeing an octopus is rare,” says the shop’s owner, Barb Sylvestre. Most other divers I spoke with agreed. My grocer, for instance, after diving around the world for twenty-five years, has seen only one—who inked at his approach. “But in Cozumel,” Barb says, “we usually see a load of them on the night dive!” “A load” for a rarely spotted species might be only two or three, but still, what a thrill that would be.

On the first Saturday of November, I meet my fellow travelers at the Manchester, New Hampshire, airport. This year, eight people—an auspicious number, I think—are going to Cozumel: besides me and Big D, and Barb and her husband, Rob, our group consists of three other divers and one non-diving spouse. We are a buoyant, excited group, but, after delays at Mexican immigration, when we finally arrive at Scuba Club Cozumel to get ready for our checkout dive—my first in the actual ocean—I’ve grown stupid with exhaustion. And now it is getting dark.

In the dimming light, the equipment looks unfathomably complex and alien. I strap my BCD to my air tank sideways. Big D (so tired, herself, that she put her wet suit on inside out) helps me reposition it. I screw on my hoses—backward—damaging an O-ring. (Isn’t that what made the space shuttle Challenger blow up?) Now I have an air leak. I haul the cylinder back to the dive shop, get a new one, attach the hoses. Wearing my mask, my lime-green fins, and my new black and pink wet suit, at last I waddle to the dock, stride purposefully over it, and plunge into the Caribbean Sea.

An alarming amount of which immediately goes up my nose.

I bob to the surface, coughing. The water tastes like a nosebleed. I gasp for “real” air by removing the regulator. Big D gives the thumbs-down signal to descend. But I can’t sink!

The other divers rush to help me: One fetches more weights from the dive shop. Rob stuffs them into the pockets of my BCD. Salt water is much more buoyant than fresh, and this is why I need this checkout dive now: to get the weights right before I step off a boat into the ocean. But I still can’t sink. Rob adds two more pounds, then four.

Now it’s completely dark. I can’t see anything. Water keeps pouring into my nose. Frightened by my mistakes, I can’t remember how to do anything. I feel completely shot.

“It’s your first night dive!” Big D says encouragingly. Somebody procures a light. Rob has now outfitted me with 12 pounds of extra weight. I follow Doris into the sea and swim through an underwater archway. For a moment I feel exhilarated, flying through the water. But I am grateful to finally haul myself out via the stepladder—except I can’t, because I can’t get my fins off.

Big D helps me. I check my dive computer to see how long I’ve been diving in the actual ocean. Was it an hour? Forty-five minutes? I look on the screen and see I went to ten feet for two minutes—not even enough to log as a dive. The rest of the time, I was bobbing at the surface, gagging and gasping.

My God, I think. What am I going to do tomorrow?

The next morning, I spend half an hour in front of the mirror like a primping schoolgirl. I’m fiddling with my mask, tightening the strap, and arranging it in different configurations around my pony-stail in hopes my nose won’t fill up with salt water. We’ll depart at 8:30 a.m. on board the Reef Star, a 55-foot-long Viking-hull, custom-made in the U.S. fifteen years ago, which can travel at 20 knots per hour. Our first dive of the day is a drift dive, in which we drift with the current. After we leave the boat, we won’t see it again till it comes back to pick us up. We’ll be far from any pier.

“We are diving at a place called El Paso del Cedral,” our charismatic, barrel-chested divemaster, Francisco Marrufo, explains just before we reach our destination. It’s a long, backbone-like reef, with coral heads along a ridge separating a shallow sand flat from a deeper one. “A slow current runs along the line of corals, where we may see moray eels. There may be large schools of French grunts, yellow and blue fish who grind their teeth. We may see many red snapper . . . and”—Francisco looks directly at me—“we may see octopus.” Earlier, he had shared that he especially enjoys finding these animals. “If you scare them, the eyes pop up—like a person,” he said. There could be four different kinds, but it can be difficult to tell them apart when each of them can assume many shapes, sizes, and colors.

The captain cuts the motor. I slip on my BCD, close the Velcro cummerbund, adjust the chest straps, de-fog my mask, put on my fins.

“Okay, let’s go!” Big D says. Holding my mask to my face, I stride off the boat to follow her into the water.

My mask does not flood. I’m breathing fine. Carefully, I look down, and discover a fantasy world of colors and shapes from a psychedelic poster. Except these colors and shapes are alive: fishes, crabs, corals, gorgonians, sponges, shrimp. Corals pout like the lips of giants, and point like the fingers of skeletons. Sea fans flutter more delicately than the finest lace. The sand is New-Hampshire-snow white, the water piercing turquoise, and all around us, wild animals swim by as if we aren’t there. It’s like being an invisible time-traveler to another planet. Except this is the planet where I’ve lived for more than half a century, visiting all continents save Antarctica. And yet most of the planet has remained a distant mystery to me. Until now.

Fish are everywhere; visibility, virtually unlimited. My fear has vanished.

Almost immediately Francisco points out a five-foot moray eel, hiding beneath a ledge. It’s a beautiful ribbon of velvety moss green. When it opens its mouth, I can see its pointy teeth. Scott told me there was once a moray at the aquarium who opened his jaws exceptionally wide, inviting divers to carefully scratch inside his mouth, which the gentle fish enjoyed very much. I feel as if I am meeting a friend of a friend.

Francisco is part Mayan, but he is also, I think, part fish. He slips through the water with the casual ease of a local showing us his neighborhood. So I follow him closely, keeping an eye out for Big D. We swim farther; at one point I note on my dive computer that we are at 50 feet, and my ears feel fine. Now Francisco turns to beckon us. He points at a hole beside a huge brain coral.

I see an eye, then a funnel. I hold up eight fingers, and Francisco nods. Brown mottling, white suckers. Peeling one arm away from its rock, the octopus advances, eyes tall, looking at us. Its head is only the size of a fist. It suddenly flashes red, then blanches, then shows a turquoise sheen. It withdraws all but its eyes from the hole. Then the animal peeks out farther, showing the head again, then the mantle. The funnel aims at us, then swings to the side. The gills flash white with each breath.

I could stay forever here just watching it breathe. But everyone else deserves to see the octopus too, so I move aside, inventing a new signal for Francisco: my fingertips slightly overlapping, palms toward my chest, bringing my hands in and out toward and away from my hammering heart. But Francisco already knows, has seen the rapture on my face. For more than a year and a half, since meeting Athena, since coming to know Octavia and now Kali, each time I’ve reached into the tanks where we have brought these creatures into our world, I’ve longed to enter theirs. At last, in the warm embrace of the sea, breathing underwater, surrounded by the octopus’s liquid world, my breath rising in silver bubbles like a song of praise, here I am.

There follows a parade of wonders: A splendid toadfish hides beneath a rock. Once thought to live only in Cozumel, it’s pancake flat, with thin, wavy, horizontal blue and white stripes, Day-Glo yellow fins, and whiskery barbells. A four-foot nurse shark sleeps beneath a coral shelf, peaceful as a prayer. A trumpet fish, yellow with dark stripes, floats with its long, tubular snout down, trying to blend in with some branching coral. Big D invents a hand sign on the spot: a fist to the mouth, holding the thumb of the other hand, with fingers up and wiggling, as if loosing the notes of a wind instrument. A school of iridescent pink and yellow fish slide by inches from our masks, then wheel in unison like birds in the sky.

I have known no natural state more like a dream than this. I feel elation cresting into ecstasy and experience bizarre sensations: my own breath resonates in my skull, faraway sounds thump in my chest, objects appear closer and larger than they really are. Like in a dream, the impossible unfolds before me, and yet I accept it unquestioningly. Beneath the water, I find myself in an altered state of consciousness, where the focus, range, and clarity of perception are dramatically changed. Is this what Kali and Octavia feel like all the time?

The ocean, for me, is what LSD was to Timothy Leary. He claimed the hallucinogen is to reality what a microscope is to biology, affording a perception of reality that was not before accessible. Shamans and seekers eat mushrooms, drink potions, lick toads, inhale smoke, and snort snuff to transport their minds to realms they cannot normally experience. (Humans are not alone in this endeavor; species from elephants to monkeys purposely eat fermented fruit to get drunk; dolphins were recently discovered sharing a certain toxic puffer fish, gently passing it from one cetacean snout to another, as people would pass a joint, after which the dolphins seem to enter a trancelike state.)

The desire to change our ordinary, everyday consciousness does not seize everyone, but it’s a persistent theme in human culture. Expanding the mind beyond the self allows us to relieve our loneliness, to connect to what Jung called universal consciousness, the original, inherited shapes shared with all minds; unites us with what Plato called the animus mundi, the all-extensive world soul shared by all of life. Through meditation, drugs, or physical ordeal, certain cultures encourage seeking altered states to commune with the spirits of animals, whose wisdom may seem hidden from us in ordinary life. In my scuba-induced altered state, I’m not in the grip of a drug: I am lucid in my immersion, voluntarily becoming part of what feels like the ocean’s own dream.

Who is to say that dreams are not real? Hindu mythology tells the story of the ascetic, Narada, who won the grace of Vishnu and was invited to walk with the god. When Vishnu became thirsty, he asked Narada to fetch him some water. Narada went to a house and there met a woman so beautiful he forgot what he came for. He married the woman; together they farmed the land, raised cattle, and had three children. Then came a violent monsoon. Floods threatened to carry away the village’s houses, the cattle, the people. Narada took his wife by the hand, his children by the other. But the waters were too strong and they were lost. Narada was swept beneath the waves. Washed up on shore, he opened his eyes . . . to see there, still waiting for his drink of water, Vishnu—the god who is often pictured as sleeping on a fathomless ocean as his dreams bubble forth to create the universe.

Once back on board the Reef Star, I pull off my mask and weep with joy.

Daily, I am drunk with strange splendors: three-inch yellow sea horses with prehensile tails like those of possums; angelfish of six species, with dorsal fins trailing like bridal trains; fish with yellow lips, fish with purple tails; fish bright as parrots, fish shaped like disks; fish with elaborate patterns like chain mail or with leopard spots interspersed with tiger stripes; fish with evocative names: sergeant major. Blue chromis. Harlequin bass. Fairy basslet. Slippery dick.

One night, we dive from shore. Instantly, I lose our group in the dark and join another by mistake. Disturbed and disoriented, I swim back to the dock, disappointed to have to abort the dive. But Rob and Big D return. “Let’s find you an octopus!” Rob says. Rob holds my hand and shines his light on a porcupine fish, who can blow up like a balloon when disturbed; a cowfish, with horns on the head like a steer; a flat, ghostly southern ray lying on the sand . . . and then Rob squeezes my hand and points the flashlight at something else on the bottom. At first I think he’s showing me the fat orange starfish. But just next to it, from a crack in the dead coral, something brownish red is oozing out toward us. The octopus unfurls its arms, showing its white suckers, its eyes standing up tall. Irritated by the light, it turns bright red and pours itself back down its hole, vanishing like water down a drain.

Tuesday, November 7: “Today,” Francisco tells us at the dive briefing, “we’re gonna dive one of the parts of Columbia: Columbia Bricks.” In my guidebook, I had read about this reef at the lip of the drop-off at the island’s southern tip: “Huge pillars of coral loom over white sand and slope downward on the seaward side to the successive terraces below. . . . ” It’s known for gigantic plate coral, gorgonian sea fans, giant sponges, huge anemones.

“Right where we start the dives are lots of bricks and one anchor,” Francisco continued. “After we meet on the bottom, we’re gonna swim across the shelf and come to the drop-off. There are pinnacles, some with overhangs, and then we’ll go out to the wall. You may see turtles. Last week, twenty-five big dolphins came up to us from behind, toward the middle of this place. We will see sharks and stingrays, and sometimes there are ten lobsters in one place.

“We’re going to dive to eighty feet. If the current goes fast, stay close to the reef. And when you come up, keep drifting.”

Big D strides overboard first, and I follow. But something’s wrong. At ten feet my ears hurt. I ascend slightly and try to clear them by holding my nose and blowing. It doesn’t work. I see the others on the bottom. I try to descend, but the pain is too bad. I sign to Doris “trouble equalizing ears” and then sign the same to Rob.

Rob shows me some tricks: tipping the head to one side, then the other. Blowing out the nose without holding it. Rising just a little more and trying again. But nothing works, and I suppose it’s no wonder: I did three dives yesterday including the deepest of my life, 84 feet, and then this morning I forgot to snort my usual decongestant spray.

Rob and I surface. “How much can this hurt and I still continue?” I ask. “Better not risk it,” Rob advises. And I consider: Tomorrow is the night boat dive—the best chance of the week to see octopuses. I can’t afford to miss it.

The crew helps me clamber back onto the boat and I sit miserably on a bench, my head and its uncooperative ears in my hands. I swallow a Sudafed, hoping it will clear my ears in the hour and a half between now and the next dive.

I expect the time to drag, but it goes quickly. In the sea, perhaps, time itself is slowed by the water’s weight and viscosity. Even with just my hands in Kali’s or Octavia’s tank, time proceeds at a different pace. Perhaps, I muse, this is the pace at which the Creator thinks, in this weighty, graceful, liquid manner—like blood flows, not like synapses fire. Above the surface, we move and think like wiggly children, or like teens who twitch away at their computer-phones, multitasking but never focusing. But the ocean forces you to move more slowly, more purposefully, and yet more pliantly. By entering it, you are bathed in a grace and power you don’t experience in air. To dive beneath the surface feels like entering the Earth’s vast, dreaming subconscious. Submitting to its depth, its currents, its pressure, is both humbling and freeing.

A half hour later, when my friends emerge, my ears are no better. I discover Mike, another diver in our group, also had trouble with his ears, but unlike me, he completed the dive. Now he has a nosebleed and must sit out the next dive, also disappointed.

Francisco begins the briefing for the dive Mike and I will miss: It will be at Parque Chankanaab, which is known for its lobsters and toadfish. “The second part, for me, is the best,” Francisco says, “because we might see a turtle. If we do, it will be a green sea turtle.”

“Like Myrtle!” Big D says to me. Today, she notes, is the day she usually volunteers at the aquarium: “I wonder if Myrtle’s missing me today?”

“Fifty feet, max,” says Francisco. “Be careful. The sand is like powder and easily disturbed.”

And then Mike and I watch as our friends stride into the turquoise water without us.

For once, I can watch the transformation. Till now, I’ve been so focused on my own frantic preparations. We enter the ocean by walking overboard, shuffling on our big fins, an entry method called “performing the giant stride.” It sounds stately and accomplished, but doing it, even Jacques Cousteau looked like he’d just left Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks. To see my friends, seasoned, graceful divers, looking so pathetically awkward and helpless, so willing and vulnerable, is a shock. In a heartbeat, the diver is reborn, swallowed into another reality, transformed from a shambling monster into a being of weightless grace. Is this what happens to the spirit at death when it flies up to heaven?

Wednesday dawns, the day I’d normally see Kali and Octavia. This Wednesday is the day of the night dive from the boat, the best chance to see wild octopuses of the entire trip. There is much discussion about my ears. Mike and Rob think I might be okay, but Big D and Barb strongly feel I shouldn’t attempt the first morning dive, because it will be the deepest, 70 feet. After that, there is an afternoon dive. And after that, before the night dive, a dive at twilight.

So though I come on the boat with the others, I skip the first dive, sad I’ll miss the green morays, turtles, and sharks Francisco tells us are here. It’s a choppy day, and the current is strong. Everyone hurries overboard, eager to get below the big waves. But something’s wrong with Big D’s gear. The inflator hose on her BCD is not attached properly. Two boat hands help her right the problem, fast as a pit crew, but everyone else has descended already and Big D is late. Once she strides overboard, I watch anxiously to see if she has joined the others. But because of the waves, I see nothing, not even bubbles, no evidence that my beloved instructor ever existed at all, and no proof she has joined our vanished friends. The boat moves off, to drop off another group. Big D must know what she’s doing, I think, but I’m worried nonetheless.

The captain shares my concern. After dropping the other group, he turns to go back. But the water is crowded with boats and divers. Where is our group? Suddenly we see a tall, skinny orange inflatable—a “safety sausage,” as it’s called—and with it, Big D! Is she hurt?

She’s fine, but she lost the group. “I kept lookin’ and lookin’,” she says matter-of-factly, “and I’m thinkin’, I don’t know if I’ll be able to find ’em!” Big D is typically cheerful as she hauls herself out of the water and onto the deck. “I had this safety sausage for four years, and never before got to use it!”

The boat hands scan for fizz on the waves, the bubbles of the others. Ultimately they spot the group—and back down my big-hearted instructor goes, completely unfazed.

Others won’t be so calm today, though. Because of the chop and the strong current, many divers had the same problem Doris had. During the second dive, which I also sat out, the water was crammed with more sausages than a German butcher shop. We rescued one of the lost floaters—an older gentleman who was quite shaken by the experience. “Usually when I surface, my boat is waiting for me!” he sputtered. But he couldn’t remember the name of his vessel or his divemaster. We had room for him on our vessel because we had lost the unfortunate fellow we dubbed the Pukey Guy, after he had earlier thrown up, not over the rail as you are supposed to, but on deck, inspiring others to do the same. Later we spotted him on a different boat, which he had boarded by mistake. We eventually found the lost gentleman’s vessel and retrieved the Pukey Guy, who managed to leave his weight belt on the other boat.

With so many divers lost in the daylight, I worry: What will happen on the night dive?

We meet at the dock at three for the twilight dive, because we have to travel an hour before we reach the site. “This place is called Delilah,” says Francisco. “There’s no reason to go deeper than 60 feet. It’s early. It’s not going to get very dark. But take a little light. Check inside the craters. This time of day, we get to see turtles going south, nurse sharks looking for a place to sleep, and parrotfish, too. If the current picks up, stay close to the reef, okay?”

I pray my ears will hold out.

I descend very slowly, equalizing repeatedly as I go, under Big D’s watchful eye. At the bottom, I signal her “okay”—and notice that everyone else is watching to make sure I’m okay too. Forty minutes fly by, and even though my dive computer registers that I’ve dived to 90 feet, I feel no pain, only delight, as a large blue mutton snapper follows us the entire time. As the water grows darker, I feel increasingly confident. I can do this. Now all I need is for the octopuses to cooperate.

It’s getting dark and cold. During the hour we wait topside, off-gassing the nitrogen built up in our blood, Big D and I huddle beneath a shared towel, shivering and giggling. Now I’m nervous. I think: My ears; the dark; it’s night, and this is the ocean.

Francisco convenes the dive briefing. “We are almost there,” he says. “Paradise: this place is called Paradiso. Of all the places in Cozumel, this is the place of the night dive. I am thinking we are going to see octopus and shark. But every night you are here is different. One night there will be lots of octopus. On the full moon, the octopus is out because he is a predator and the moon is his strobe. But lobsters stay in their hole. You may see huge crabs. You may see large squid, too. There are eels, the sharp-tailed eel who looks like a snake. You find him on the side of the reef.

“We’ll meet at the surface first, at the back of the boat, and go down together. Get your light on. When you use hand signals, light your hand. And when you surface, when you come up, shine the light on your head so the boat can find you.

“I have an orange-brown light and a green one. If you see that, that’s me. Okay—let’s go!”

We each have two lights: a flashlight and a glow-stick on our backs. I stride in right after Rob. Because of the problems with the shore night dive, he decides to hold my right hand throughout the dive. We descend together slowly. At three feet I start equalizing. I feel a squeeze. I blow and blow and descend some more. At ten feet, I signal Rob “trouble with ears.” We rise, together, a foot or two. I Frenzel. I Valsalva. I tip my head to one shoulder, then the other. That’s better. I shine my light on my left hand, signaling “okay.” I drop a foot, two, three. My ears squeal. But unless the pain is shattering, I am going to continue.

Finally Rob and I are on the bottom with the others. We proceed along the reef in the dark. I am so glad he is holding my hand, because I am finding it very difficult to adjust my buoyancy, use my flashlight to see my depth gauge, clear my ears and sometimes my mask, and look for animals in the small disk of light from my flashlight all at once. It feels as if I am traveling in a small capsule in outer space. Around me the darkness is heavy and enveloping. My senses have constricted and intensified to focus only on this tiny circle of light. And here it reveals a huge crab—a tall purple turret of coral—a bright blue angelfish! A school of snapper mass beneath a coral. A spiny lobster waves its antennae. Ahead there are flashes of light, like heat lightning, from my friends’ cameras, contrails of light trailing from their BCDs. And then: an octopus! I squeeze Rob’s hand, but he has already seen it, oozing from its hole. It’s brown with white stripes, then becoming lighter as its arms boil out of its lair. Three arms walk forward, and then it turns its head, its eyes looking directly into our faces, turns green, then brown, then disappears.

Yellow coral animals are extending their feeding tentacles. Purple and orange sponges heave into view. A second octopus! Its eyes pop up, then down. The area surrounding the eye seems yellow, the pupil a slit. In an instant, it flashes speckles on its skin, a starscape, and then pours itself back down its lair.

Ahead, my flashlight reveals that Francisco is playing with a puffer fish, who for some reason allows him to gently palm its belly. But Rob is twirling his light to catch my attention. Directly below us is a third octopus. I flip head down, feet up, to observe it. This octopus is larger than the other two, and the animal doesn’t seem as alarmed. Its funnel faces away from me as it crawls toward me. It flashes stripes, then dots. I feel as if it’s testing me, like a scientist conducting an experiment, to see what I’ll do. I want to stay, but the current is sweeping me away, and so is Rob, who must not let us get separated from the others in the dark. I feel like Dr. Zhivago having just spotted his long-lost Lara in the busy city at the end of the eponymous movie—but I am in the ocean’s grip and its currents propel me forward.

Marvels flash before me in the circle of my light: a sharp-tailed eel, its tail a flat paddle, pointed at the tip. Striped grunts, so named for the grinding sound they make with their teeth. A bright blue angelfish. A huge crab. But the pressure in my ears is building. I am having trouble focusing my attention. I constantly blow out my nose, trying to equalize, but instead create a bizarre underwater sound track inside my head, squeals and bubblings accompanying the Darth Vader hissing of my regulator. If it were not for Rob’s hand holding mine, I would be completely disoriented.

And then, a fourth octopus, this time on a reef wall! This one is quite small and shy, and all I see are eyes and suckers peering from a hole in the corals. My ears are screaming as Rob gives the thumbs-up sign that it’s time to surface. I ascend with him slowly, like a dying soul reluctant to leave its body, and we watch the silver trail of our bubbles rising above us like shooting stars.