Looking back I see that I was always afraid of something: of the dark, of displeasing people, of failure. Anything I accomplished had to be done across a barrier of fear.
—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
“So it seems my Ivy League–educated daughter has run away and joined the circus?” The voice on the phone was joking but concerned.
I groaned inwardly. “Hi, Dad.” I knew I shouldn’t have e-mailed him the pictures from my trapeze class. This was a man whose favorite coffee mug read: Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason. But my parents had been so skeptical about the entire Year of Fear project. I thought the absurdity of the trapeze class might warm them to the idea.
There was a fluttering in the background and I knew my dad was flipping through the Wall Street Journal, which he’s read front to back every day for the last twenty-five years. (When he found out what paper Matt wrote for, my dad sniffed, “Well, I hope he’s not one of those elitist liberal kooks. That paper’s full of them. See, what I like about the Journal is that they’re not biased.”)
“Did I catch you at a bad time?” he drawled. “Busy trainin’ for the ice capades?”
“I’ll have you know, I’m at a coffee shop, working on a freelance article for a magazine.”
“Have you thought any more about law school?” he asked. Leave it to Dad to dive right in. “Now that’s job security right there. You could make $300 an hour writing wills.”
“And then I would die of boredom, which would have an agreeable symmetry.” With my free hand, I started massaging my temples to ward off the headache that always followed this debate. My dad was a businessman, specializing in fiber optics, whatever that means. When I was a kid, he was always dragging me to the office to groom me for corporate life. I’d usually pass the hours Xeroxing my face. Once he’d realized I wasn’t destined for business, he latched onto the idea that I should be a lawyer and hadn’t let go for two decades.
“Well, I think you should consider moving out of that city and coming home to Texas.” My parents viewed my living in New York as if I was studying abroad or on some kind of caper. I sensed they were awaiting my return to “real life.”
“New York is my home,” I said firmly.
“Well, it’s an awfully expensive place to live when you don’t have a full-time job. How much are you payin’ for that apartment these days?”
“Bye, Dad!”
I laid my head down on my keyboard and banged it a few times, causing jfkdjfkdjflkdjfdlkjfdlksjfdlsjf to jump onto the screen. When I went to delete it, I saw that I had an e-mail from my friend Bill. It contained only one line: Want to rage in the cage with me this weekend?
“Excuse me?” I wrote back. “Are you challenging me to a steel cage match?”
“Close,” he replied. “I’m going shark cage diving this weekend. Sharks are on your list of fears to conquer, right?”
I hesitated. Sharks are a long-held fear of mine stemming from a 1986 home screening of Jaws. The ocean, I’d suddenly learned, was full of beasts that killed indiscriminately and with musical accompaniment. Warily, I clicked on the link Bill sent me. It was a website for a shark cage diving company called Happy Manatee Charters. It was hosting a two-day expedition this very weekend. The boat left on Friday morning and returned late Saturday afternoon.
Since taking that first step off the trapeze board three weeks before, I’d taken on one fear a day, per my mission, but they’d been small victories, things that I would’ve let slide before, but not under the new Eleanor Roosevelt administration. I’d sent my salmon back at a sushi restaurant for being too fishy. I’d called up my credit card company and asked it to lower my interest rate, and after speaking to four different supervisors, they finally agreed. Matt and I had gone to a sold-out movie and were pleased to find, in the packed theater, one row that was completely empty except for a single college-aged guy sitting in the center. Apparently, he’d been sent ahead as a representative for less punctual friends because when we went to sit down, he called out smugly, “This entire row is saved, bro.” We turned to keep walking up the steps; then I stopped.
“Not anymore!” I declared. Over the guy’s sputtering protests, I plopped down in one of the forbidden seats, pulling Matt down into the seat next to me. Normally I would’ve slunk away and stewed about it for a while. It was nerve-racking but exhilarating.
I’d realized in the previous weeks that I needed to be practical about this experiment. If I was going to keep this up for a year, not every challenge could be as elaborate or expensive as trapeze lessons. Some fears had to be faced in small moments, whether preplanned or things that just came up during the day. When I started paying attention, I saw how often I avoided confrontation. I’d told myself this was a sign of maturity. After all, wasn’t it childish to make a fuss about trivial matters? Now I realized that at the heart of these situations was a fear of offending someone. But if I couldn’t stand up to people when there was little at stake, how would I summon the courage when it did matter? Standing your ground could be even scarier than standing on a two-story platform.
I didn’t feel ready to face sharks yet. There was only a month left of summer and I’d been hoping to put sharks off until next spring so I could work my way up to it. But maybe Bill’s e-mail was a sign that it was time for another big challenge. Besides, putting it off would be another instance of me avoiding confrontation. And to quote Eleanor, “What you don’t do can be a destructive force.”
Screw it. “I’m in,” I e-mailed back.
On Thursday afternoon, I boarded a three-hour train to Greenport, Long Island, where the boat, The Manatee, was scheduled to depart the following morning. Upon arrival, I checked into a cheap motel room and called Bill.
“There’s a beer bottle opener nailed to the bathroom wall in my motel room. Jealous?”
“That room obviously knows what you’re going to be facing tomorrow,” he said. “Sorry I can’t be there to help you put it to good use.”
Bill cohosted a nightly television talk show and couldn’t take off work Friday. So as soon as he was off the air, he’d jump in a rental car and meet our boat at Martha’s Vineyard late Friday night.
“It’ll be nice to see you, Hancock,” he said. “What’s it been—seven, eight months?” Wow, had it been that long? Like so many of my friendships lately, ours had been subsisting on e-mail and texts, a sort of friendship life support system.
Bill, in particular, had been totally behind the concept for a Year of Fear. He and I had met ten years before during my summer internship at Stuff magazine. He was the features editor, and as soon as I saw that he kept an inflatable alligator raft on the floor next to his desk, I thought, I need to be friends with this man.
“So are you prepared to die a horrible death tomorrow, Hancock?” he teased.
“Don’t remind me.” I groaned. “I can’t believe you actually do this stuff for fun.”
Actually I could believe it. He was a direct descendant of William Dawes Jr., who accompanied Paul Revere on his famous midnight ride. Fearlessness was practically in his DNA. This was a man who, in his late twenties, sneaked into a college and posed as a student for a week to see if it was as fun as he remembered. He finished the Walt Disney World marathon in Orlando. This wasn’t particularly unusual except that he did it in drag, changing every five miles into a different Disney princess costume.
When we sign off, Bill said, “I’ll see you on Saturday.” Then, pausing dramatically, he added, “Hopefully.” I hung up on his cackling, movie villain laughter.
This adventure seemed especially apropos considering water was one of Eleanor’s longest-running fears. It started when she was three years old, traveling by steamship to Europe with her parents. On the first day of the sail another boat got lost in the fog and collided with their ship, killing and injuring passengers. Elliott and Anna Roosevelt fled to a lifeboat while Eleanor stayed on deck. The plan was for the crew to drop her overboard and Elliott would catch her. “My father stood in a boat below me, and I was dangling over the side to be dropped into his arms,” Eleanor wrote. “I was terrified and shrieking and clung to those who were to drop me.” She screamed as she fell through the air and into Elliott’s waiting arms. Water and heights, unsurprisingly, fell out of Eleanor’s favor after this encounter. It didn’t help that Anna and Elliott sent their traumatized daughter to stay with relatives while they continued on their six-month tour of Europe. From then on they usually left her behind when they traveled because of her fear of boats. Being fearful, Eleanor learned, came with consequences.
A few years later there was another unfortunate incident while visiting cousins in Oyster Bay. Uncle Teddy Roosevelt “was horrified that I didn’t know how to swim so he thought he’d teach me as he taught all his own children, and threw me in,” Eleanor recalled. “And I sank rapidly to the bottom. He fished me out and lectured me on being frightened.”
The next morning I walked to the dock and met The Manatee’s captain, Gus, a hefty man with long brown dreadlocks and a monotone voice. The fishing boat was smaller and more rustic than I’d expected. The sleeping quarters were belowdecks in the hull. There was only room for two people to stand up at a time. There were bunk beds—bunk benches, really—built into the slanted walls. There was no shower on the boat, just a hose on deck with water pressure that would be the envy of any fire department. And while I’ve never considered myself someone who demands the finer things in life, I do enjoy a good roll of toilet paper, and there was none in the bathroom—or “the commode,” as Captain Gus called it. I dug my cell phone out of my backpack and called Bill from the deck to ask him to bring toilet paper. Then, after making sure no one was within earshot, I hissed into the phone, “What if I have to go number two before we dock at Martha’s Vineyard?!”
“Maybe you’re supposed to use the hose on the back of the boat,” Bill answered cheerfully. “Just think of it as an industrial-strength bidet.”
All three of the other people on the trip were experienced divers. I took an instant liking to Ronald, a retired lawyer whose T-shirt read: WORK SUCKS, I’M GOING DIVING! On the back he had written BITE ME! in black marker and drawn a shark face, portrayed in three-quarter profile. Les, an underwater photographer, was a good-looking blond guy, but there was something creepy about his manner that I couldn’t quite explain. Mandy, a special-ed teacher from Pennsylvania, took off her swimsuit cover-up to reveal a neon pink bikini and an assortment of tattoos. Stretching across her lower back was an underwater seascape featuring sea horses, coral, and sea turtles. There was also a scuba diver tattoo on her left shoulder and, for the sake of variety, a mouse riding a motorcycle on her right.
“They were done by my friend, Mona. She really is an artist!” she said, arranging her body on the deck for optimal sunbathing.
The plan was to make the six-hour journey over to Martha’s Vineyard—stopping along the way to do some shark cage diving—and dock for the night. Then we’d repeat the journey, in reverse, the following day. The motor coughed to life, and soon Gus was navigating us out of the hamlet, steering with his right foot while eating a bowl of Cheerios. My stomach flip-flopped. There’s nothing more nauseating than the sight of milk in ninety-degree weather. An hour into the sail, I was downright queasy. I’d never been seasick before, but I knew my day had come as I watched Gus toss pieces of cut-up fish (called chum) into the boat’s wake to create a slick for the sharks to follow. Once the slick was several miles long, we dropped anchor and Gus pulled out a sealed, perforated bucket full of frozen fish.
“What’s that for?” I asked in a weak voice.
Gus tied a rope around the handle and pulled on it a few times to make sure it was secure. “I’ll throw it overboard and the smell will leak out of those holes and attract sharks.” He tapped the bucket fondly. “I call it my chumsicle.”
“Sharks can smell blood up to a mile away and—” Ronald added, but was cut off by my heaving my bacon, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwich over the railing.
“Great!” Les said with a leer. “More chum!”
Ronald patted my back sympathetically.
Most of the deck was taken up by the four-by-four-by-seven-foot shark cage that Gus had welded himself. The cage could hold two people at a time, and the top operated on a hinge so divers could get in and out. The bars were six inches apart. When Gus first built it, he’d left a three-by-three-foot hole in the middle so people could photograph the sharks without having bars in the way. Then one day a blue shark swam into the cage with one of the divers and started thrashing around. No one was hurt, but afterward Gus filled in the space with bars that are about eight inches apart.
“So have any sharks gotten in since then?” I asked.
“Just a few mako sharks.” Gus shrugged. “But they usually just swim right out.”
Usually?
“So, uh, what do these makos look like?” I asked, but Gus was busy lowering the cage into the water at the back of the boat.
“They have long slender bodies,” Ronald piped up. “That’s how they can fit between the bars.”
Les held out his camera. “Here’s a picture of one.” It was fairly short, by shark standards. Its long thin snout gave the impression it was accusing you of something.
“That looks like my old boss,” I said.
SPLASH!
All eyes turned to the water where a dark silhouette glided ominously just beneath the surface.
“A blue shark,” Ronald observed. “About ten feet long, I’d say.”
“Noelle, come over and shark wrangle while I get the cage ready,” Gus said.
Wrangling entailed dangling a piece of string knotted with fish into the water, then when the shark went for the bait, pulling the string out of the water the way a matador rips the red flag from in front of a bull. It was pretty fun, actually. This move was designed to keep the shark near the boat, instead of taking the bait and flitting off. But the blue kept darting away.
“Am I doing it wrong?” I asked.
“Something is spooking her,” Ronald said knowingly. “Usually that means there’s a mako nearby.”
“Why would a smaller shark make the big shark go away?”
“Mako sharks are the fastest fish in the ocean and very aggressive. Sometimes they eat other sharks. In fact, mako embryos sometimes consume each other for nutrients while gestating in their mother’s body.”
“They eat their brothers and sisters before they’re even born?” I asked. “That’s cold.”
This biological detail didn’t faze Ronald, who was already climbing into the cage with Les, eager for some face time with Big Blue. She never returned, however, and after a half hour in the water, the two of them came back up looking disappointed.
“Dude, I told you guys when you signed up, there’s no guarantee how many sharks we’ll see on these dives,” Gus said, his tone defensive. “Sometimes there aren’t any at all. I just do what I can and hope for the best.”
Les started telling me personal stories to take my mind off the seasickness. He recounted the time he’d slugged his daughter in the face “to show her who was in charge,” at which point I announced, “I think I’ll go down in the cage with Mandy.” I snapped myself into a wetsuit and tried not to think about my lack of diving experience. Technically you don’t need to be certified if you aren’t going below twelve feet of water, but I’d never breathed with a respirator before. My mind kept returning to a Choose Your Own Adventure book I’d read as a kid. The main character in the story was a scuba diver on the hunt for sunken treasure, and at the end of the story the reader got to choose his fate. You could choose to risk the small amount of oxygen left in the tank and go for the treasure. Or you could play it safe and return to the boat, but risk never finding the treasure again. I kept my finger on the page and skipped ahead to see what happened. The one who took the chance ended up running out of air and suffocating on the sea floor. The one who turned back went on to live a happy, but presumably boring, life.
Gus gave me a three-minute tutorial on the correct way to use an air hose and how to empty my mask if water seeped in. My stomach turned over. This time it was nerves and not seasickness. Wait—the seasickness!
“What if I throw up underwater and start choking?” I asked.
“Vomit into your respirator,” Gus advised, and I looked at my respirator in disgust.
“What do I do if I’m in trouble and I need to come up?”
“Signal me by opening the top of the cage. I’ll see you from the surface and reel you in,” he said. “But don’t forget to close it immediately.”
“Why?”
“If the door is flapping open, I can’t grab the cage and lock you into the back of the boat when you get to the surface.”
“What happens then?”
“Then the cage goes underneath the boat,” he said.
I shuddered.
He added: “Oh, and keep an eye on your hands when you’re holding on to the bars. That’s an easy way to get bit.”
Once Mandy and I were securely in the cage, Gus shut the top, tied it closed with a bungee cord, and lowered us down twelve feet. Soon we were riding on an underwater roller coaster without seat belts. The choppy water jerked us back and forth, and we had to hold on to the bars to keep from crashing into the walls and ceiling. Mandy and I stood back-to-back. That way, if a shark approached, one of us would see it coming and signal the other. I clenched my respirator so hard my lips ached and then lost feeling entirely. Breathing underwater felt claustrophobic, as if the water actively wanted to get inside my body.
Mandy grew bored after twenty minutes of no action and signaled to Gus. He pulled the cage up to the boat to let her out.
“Had enough?” he asked me.
“I’ll hang out for a while.” The old Noelle would’ve quit while she was alive and followed Mandy, but I was determined to see this through.
“Rock on!” He flashed me the “sign of the horns” hand gesture and lowered me back down.
Now I stood in the middle of the cage, arms gripping bars on opposite walls to keep steady. I canvassed the murky water in front of me. I looked over one shoulder, then the other. I checked on my hands to make sure they were still there. Visibility was low. I wouldn’t be able to see the sharks until they were pretty close.
Suddenly, a flash of tail in the distance. Then nothing.
Oh shit.
I once read that Steven Spielberg had technical difficulties with the mechanical shark while making Jaws. The animatronic fish (nicknamed “Bruce”) kept shorting out, delaying production, so Spielberg compensated for Bruce’s absence by using it to create tension. Now I understood why his technique worked—not knowing was worse than knowing. The scariest parts of the movie were the times when you didn’t know where the shark was but felt its presence, loitering in the shadows.
Then I saw it, about seven feet long and winding its way over to the fish Gus was dangling in front of my cage. A mako. Naturally, this was the shark that showed up on my watch. When it was about a foot away from me, Gus yanked the fish out of the water. The mako, frustrated at having lost its meal, shoved its face through the bars of my suddenly too small cage. It shook its head back and forth. With a muffled scream, I let go of the bars and backpedaled against the current that was propelling me forward. Its long pointy snout reached about a foot into the cage, and it took all my strength to keep from crashing into it. Suddenly, the shark reared back and bit down on the bars. There was a grating clank of five rows of teeth hitting metal. My breath fired out of the respirator in panicky spurts.
As Ronald predicted, the mako was thin enough that if it tilted a bit and came at the bars on an angle, it could have fit between the eight-inch gaps. Death seemed inevitable. This was an animal that ate its own relatives, so I didn’t presume it would spare me. Looking down at my turquoise and purple rubber suit, I couldn’t believe I was going to leave this world dressed like a Star Trek character. I desperately wanted to signal for help and realized the sheer stupidity of Gus’s emergency plan. Opening the top of the cage right now would be like opening your front door when a killer was trying to break into your house. The mako poked its face into the cage again. In desperation, I reached up and clung to the ceiling as the waves urged me toward its snout. Suddenly, it extracted its head and took to circling around me, eating the steady supply of chum being tossed out. I lost sight of the mako only to be blindsided as it rubbed itself alongside the bars. A couple of times, Gus dangled a fish in front of me and did the matador move, causing the shark to ram into the cage.
After about twenty minutes, someone threw out another fish, about twenty feet away from the boat. The mako darted after it, its tail whacking into the cage as it made its exit, leaving me literally and emotionally rattled. Realizing there was no more food coming, the shark lost interest and left for good. As The Manatee hauled me back in, I sighed a bubble trail of relief. There were high fives all around as I climbed out of the cage.
“That was so hard-core!” Gus said. “Well done!”
“So how was it?” Ronald asked.
Mostly I was just relieved to be alive, but I didn’t want to disappoint him, so I mustered some enthusiasm and said dramatically, “I can still hear the sound of its teeth hitting the titanium . . .”
It was sunset when we motored into the Martha’s Vineyard marina. From far away the island looked slightly foreboding with craggy cliffs and steep bluffs, but the harbor was welcoming. There were enough fishing boats to feel cozy but not crowded.
As Mandy and I changed in the cramped sleeping quarters, she leaned in conspiratorially and said, “Let’s have a girls’ night!”
“Sounds great!” I enthused.
Ronald and Les headed into town while Mandy and I ambled past the Victorian gingerbread-style inns that lined the main street and settled on a burger joint. This is my kind of woman, I thought when she kicked off dinner by asking for a “bird-bath-sized margarita.” But it became increasingly clear that she was a time-release weirdo, who seems normal at first but whose freakishness unfolds over a matter of hours. At one point she launched into an extended screed against the Puerto Rican community.
“I don’t mean to be racist,” she began—a qualifier invariably followed by a racist statement—“but I just feel like they’re trashy.”
I thought, This is coming from a woman with an aquarium on her back?
After several drinks, her anecdotes about her boyfriend grew increasingly bizarre. It also turned out she was sleeping with Les, whom she met on a diving trip a few months before. In fact, he’d paid for her passage on this trip, but she wanted to break it off so she’d been ignoring him since they got here. Hence, her suggestion we have a girls’ night out.
It was after 11:00 P.M. when we returned to the boat and accidentally stepped on Gus, who was sleeping on deck. Traffic was bad and Bill had texted that he was still hours away, so he was going to grab a hotel room and meet us in the morning. I hosed off as best I could while still wearing my swimsuit. There was no saving my hair. It looked like it was not only styled by the mice and birds from Cinderella, but also serving as their primary residence. I eased down the ladder into our cabin, trying not to wake Les and Ronald, who was lightly snoring. I grasped at the darkness until my hands found my cushioned bench bed. Sleeping without a blanket felt almost as vulnerable as being in the shark cage. The encrusted salt bit into my skin every time I rolled over. I dreamed my body was being attacked by millions of tiny sharks.
“Hancock!”
I was sitting cross-legged on a padded seat on deck, reading the previous day’s newspaper, when I heard my name. I squinted into the morning light to see Bill climbing aboard, grinning his lopsided grin, brown curls barely contained beneath his White Sox cap.
“You’re here!” I exclaimed.
He came to a stop in front of me and raised one hand in a jaunty sailor salute. “Front and centies!”
“You’re in surprisingly good cheer for someone who got in at three A.M.,” I said as he tossed me his backpack. “Where did you sleep?”
“In my rental car in the marina parking lot,” he said with a laugh. “Didn’t seem worth it to pay for a motel.” He was wearing Birkenstocks, cutoff jean shorts, and a bright yellow T-shirt with JAMAICA ME CRAZY! printed across the front. That was essentially what he’d worn every day when I worked with him at the magazine, even though the office was in a corporate high-rise in Midtown Manhattan. There were introductions all around, and within minutes he was regaling the group with an anecdote about a narrowly missed ferry. They were instantly taken with him, as I knew they would be. Bill can—and will—talk to anyone.
The wind felt almost combative as we headed out of the harbor, and soon I was securing my matted hair in a ponytail to keep it out of my face. The sea was rougher than yesterday as well. The boat pitched mercilessly until the horizon resembled a possessed seesaw. Soon I was clutching the rail and throwing up again. Bill disappeared below to get me some Dramamine from his bag.
“Wow, it smells awful up here!” he said cheerfully when he returned, the smell of vomit having fully mixed with that of chum. “It smells like puke that puke puked.”
An hour later, it was time to dive again. I had no desire to get in that cage again, but it would take care of my scary thing for another day. And the others would think it was weird if I came all this way to dive only one time.
I rooted around in the bin full of weight belts. “Is this the same weight belt I used yesterday?” I asked, holding one up. No one answered. Gus was busy helping Ronald and Mandy from the cage, and Les was fixing something on his camera and didn’t look up. I shrugged and tied it around my waist. When it was time for Bill and me to climb into the cage, he offered to hold my disposable underwater camera since I was getting in first. As I was easing my body into the chilly water, I heard a plasticky clicking sound. I looked up to see Bill holding up the camera, squinting one-eyed through the viewfinder.
“Smile, you son of a bitch!” he said in his best Roy Scheider voice.
I plugged the regulator into my mouth and slipped silently beneath the surface, followed by Bill a minute later. Gus shut the top of the cage with a clang and tied it shut with the bungee cord. I could feel the cage lowering around me, but I wasn’t going with it. Instead I was hovering in the middle of the cage, halfway between the ceiling and the floor. The weight belt. It must not have been the same one from yesterday, which had been heavy enough to keep me firmly on the floor. The ocean was more turbulent today. Suddenly, an enthusiastic wave pushed me upward. I bonked lightly against the rapidly descending ceiling. I shook my head to get my bearings and realized my matted hair was caught in the rubber bungee cord that held the roof shut. I was hanging from the top of the cage by my ponytail. My legs kicked out like a condemned prisoner on the gallows, fighting to the end. The weight belt was pulling me downward and the force of my hair being yanked upward lifted my mask and seawater trickled in. Trying to get leverage, I stepped on two of the cage’s horizontal bars to hold myself up while I untangled my hair. As my feet stuck out over the edge, I remembered Gus telling us not to stick our hands or feet outside the cage because “sharks will take a test bite out of anything.” I tore at my hair frantically. This would probably have been a good time to signal for help by opening the cage door if my hair hadn’t been tied to it. After about five minutes, I ripped my ponytail free and joined Bill at the bottom of the cage, an inch of water lolling around the bottom of my mask. I tried the trick that Gus taught me to get the water out—looking up while gently pulling open the bottom of the mask—but instead more water rushed in. (Later I would find out I forgot to exhale though my nose at the same time that I’d lifted the mask.) I looked at Bill with pleading eyes. “I have water in my mask and I can’t get it out! What should I do?” I wanted to shout. I pointed to my mask and he shook his head, not comprehending.
I tightened my mask, but when I pulled the strap, even more water poured in. I tried to isolate my breathing and just inhale through my mouth, but every time I automatically breathed in through my nose, too. I was sniffing seawater at a fast clip and wondering if there was enough room on a death certificate for “died of complications from unmanageable hair.” By this point, the water in my mask had crept up past my nostrils. My eyes stared down the bridge of my nose like two flood victims on the roof of a house, wondering if the water was going to overtake them. If that happened, I was fucked. Not only would I be trapped in a cage, inhaling seawater, I’d be blind and trapped in a cage inhaling seawater. Instinct told me to swim to the surface as fast as possible, but there were sharks in the water. The question was: Did I want to drown or be eaten alive? Choose your own adventure!
I gave Bill the double thumbs-down, the international sign for “I am displeased” and motioned that I wanted to get out. I unfastened the bungee cord and opened the top of the cage, but the current was so strong that I couldn’t close it again. The cage door was swinging wildly when Gus pulled us up and he couldn’t grab hold of the roof. The cage slipped horizontally underneath the boat, thudding dully against the hull. It was on its side with the roof wide open so any shark could swim inside. I glanced over at Bill, who gestured helplessly. He hadn’t heard Gus’s speech from yesterday about needing to close the top of the cage. He had no idea what had gone wrong. I scrambled for the cage door and yanked it down but a strong wave ripped it free again, almost pulling me out of the cage. I braced the tops of my feet against the cage’s horizontal bars for leverage and pulled with all my strength. As the cage jerked around, the metal tore easily into the thin skin on the tops of my feet. Then we were moving, being slowly towed forward; Gus was reeling us in. When we reached the surface, he locked the metal cage in its place at the back of the boat. I exploded out of the water, dropping my regulator and dry heaving. Hands scooped me up underneath my shoulders from behind and dragged me into the boat. “Easy, take it easy,” voices urged.
I rinsed off, taking care not to aim the hose above my neck where it would surely blow the eyelashes and eyebrows right off my face. Weakly, I made my way over to an empty space on the boat deck and lay down, warm in my wetsuit in the summer sun.
“You okay over there?” Gus finally called out in a tone that implied he no longer thought me hard-core.
I nodded without opening my eyes.
“In that case, Les, you go down with Bill.”
I sensed Bill was standing over me. Or, more accurately, I felt him dripping on me.
“Really, are you okay, Noelle?” Bill almost always called me Hancock; hearing him say my first name was jarring. “Do you want me to stay with you?” he asked. I was instantly moved that he’d come all this way and then offered to give up his shark dives for me.
“I’m fine. See?” I sat up, as proof of my okayness. “Now get back down there!”
He turned and made his way back to the cage, taking slow, exaggerated steps to avoid tripping. “If you have any last-minute advice on how to avoid drowning, I’m all ears,” he called over his shoulder. “Seriously, my ears are huge!”
I rolled my eyes and smiled. “Just watch those girly curls of yours around that cable.”
Eleanor didn’t learn to swim until she was a mother and wanted to be able to watch over her children when they were in the water. So, in the winter of 1924, Eleanor took lessons at the YWCA pool in New York and learned to swim at the age of forty. Diving took longer—until the summer of 1939, in fact, when she was fifty-six years old and took lessons from Dorothy Dow, a junior member of her White House staff.
“Finally she could dive,” Dow wrote, “not only from the side of the pool but from the diving board as well. She was anxious to perform for the President, as he said he didn’t believe she could do it. . . . So, Mrs. R. walked out on the board, got all set in the proper form and went in flat as could be. She could have been heard down at Poughkeepsie! I thought the President would explode laughing, and his hand came down on my shoulder so hard I almost fell over. Mrs. R. came up red in the face, with a really grim expression, said nothing, walked out on the board again, and did a perfect dive.”
Les was laughing when he and Bill surfaced twenty minutes later. “You could’ve gotten your hand bitten off!” he said between gasps.
Bill looked sheepish as he told us what happened. They’d been down for a few minutes when they were greeted by an eight-foot blue shark. Bill wanted a picture of himself giving the shark a high five. He motioned for Les to get his camera in position; then he reached through the bars, grabbing onto the fin. Bill barely managed to yank his hand back into the cage as the blue turned its head and snapped at him.
“Do you want to dive again?” Gus asked me.
“No, I’m good,” I said quickly. Before I lowered my eyes, I saw the disappointment on Gus’s face.
On the ride home, everyone lapsed into that exhausted silence that signals the end of a vacation. Bill and I sat beside each other on the deck, knocking together companionably whenever the boat hit a big wave. Every time I thought of myself refusing to get back in the cage, I felt a flash of irritation. Bill’s bravado only made me feel like more of a failure. He’d also been in the cage when we were trapped underneath the boat. But it hadn’t stopped him from going back down. I’d had my second chance, but unlike Eleanor and Bill, I hadn’t tried again. I’d had my first setback and I’d given up.
“How do you do it?” I asked. “How can you be so daring about everything?”
Bill shrugged. “I’m not so brave.”
“You’re just trying to make me feel better.”
“I’ve never hit on a woman sober.”
“What?”
“I’m thirty-three years old and don’t have the stones to ask a woman out unless I’m drunk,” he said. “So you see? We’re all afraid of something.”
“Except me.” I chuckled. “I’m afraid of everything.”
Bill’s face darkened. “What’s happened to you, Hancock?”
“What do you mean?”
“When you were our intern, you’d come into the office every morning and entertain us with a new story about some wild thing you’d done the night before. Like the time you were on your way home and some girl on the subway started talking smack to you? But you talked smack right back and held your ground. Even when she pulled out a knife!”
“Well, that was totally stupid.”
“Where is that Noelle?” he asked impatiently. “Because I want her back. This self-deprecating shtick you’ve been working for the last few years is getting really old.”
I was surprisingly stung by his words. I’d changed. You’d think that because I already suspected this to be true, his confirmation wouldn’t be that painful to hear. But there’s still hope within suspicion, a chance that your problem exists only in your imagination. To have it confirmed and articulated by someone else meant it was real.
For a long time, I stared out at the ocean. It made me think of Matt. Since he was a child Matt had spent every summer at his parents’ beach house in the Hamptons, frolicking through these rough Atlantic waters. The first time Matt coaxed me into the water was also the last time. I was used to the Gulf of Mexico, where the waves don’t go over two feet unless there’s a hurricane. But Atlantic waves attack in a group assault, knocking down unsuspecting victims for a thorough beating. The effect is similar to being mugged. And when you finally stagger to your feet, you’ll often find yourself without a bathing suit bottom. Over and over, I was knocked down, rolled, and came up sputtering.
“You have to dive under the wave,” Matt instructed. “Like the surfers do.”
“I was under the wave, Matt. I was under about eight of them simultaneously, in fact.”
As I was saying this, another wave plowed into me, dragging me across a bed of crushed seashells. When I stood up, I had two bloody knees. I promptly threw my hands in the air in a leave-taking gesture.
“And that’s it for me!” I told the waves. “Thanks so much! You guys have been great.”
“Awww, don’t leave,” Matt begged.
Making my way toward shore, I called out, “I’m going to lie in the sun with the normal people who prefer to kill themselves slowly.”
“He’s right, you know,” Dr. Bob said later when I told him the story. “The problem is in your approach, bracing yourself and trying to hold your ground where the waves are strongest. When you dive under the wave, it rolls over you, and you come up on the other side. Eventually you’re out there happily bobbing up and down, moving with the waves instead of against them. The same thing is true for scary situations.” Dr. Bob inched forward in his chair, like he was about to tell me something vital. “Rather than tensing up and trying to stand your ground when the scary situations come at you, you should dive into them. Roll with them rather than struggle against them. It’s rough at first, but once you put yourself out there, it’s much easier to ride the ups and downs. And it’s far more enjoyable than spending your life sitting on the beach and watching.”
I thought about Dr. Bob’s wave metaphor as our boat pulled toward the dock. Although I was proud of my successful shark dive the day before, I hadn’t achieved the same sense of accomplishment I’d had with the last big challenge. During the apex of my last swing on the trapeze, I’d experienced a joyousness that I never would’ve felt had I not gone up there. My shark encounters, on the other hand, had been full of terror and panic that hadn’t stopped until they were over. Not all fears are worth chasing, I realized. What had I really gotten out of this? Sure, I’d lived and I’d have a good story to tell, but shouldn’t life be about more than just survival and bragging rights? Shouldn’t it be about growth? Being afraid of sharks was like being afraid of fire. There was no psychological upside to overcoming one’s fear of sharks. We’re supposed to be afraid of them—they’re monsters! From now on I’d choose my challenges more carefully. As I stepped off the boat onto the dock, I calculated how many days I had left on the experiment: more than three hundred days. That’s a lot of tomorrows.