Return Underwater
The desert air was hot enough that it made the air shimmer in the midday around the small, deep lake. The water was surrounded by a rocky outcropping crowned with cottonwoods that drank from its unending supply of year-round 62-degree water that flowed from the artesian well in the limestone. As the sun followed its path, the water progressed from navy blue to azure and back again. From 60 feet below the surface, the light shone turquoise as we waited for our scuba instructor to test us on the various skills we’d practiced in the deep end of a pool. I emerged, shivering and thankful for the warmth of the summer sun at Blue Hole in Santa Rosa, New Mexico.
Swimming in high school gave me the confidence to take a scuba class in my sixteenth or seventeenth year. It seems that even in that arid land the water called me. I’d been exposed to it through my dad. He’d taken scuba in college, and he and my mom had met on a dive trip in Mexico. A family album of that trip and the occasional reminisces of my father’s own undersea adventures inspired me. I don’t have too many memories of the classwork at the strip mall scuba store. However, my dad had explained a lot of the concepts over the years, and these came easy, though the math of the dive tables was intimidating.
Looking back, I’m impressed at the initiative of my younger self. I wish I could say this story ended with me spending the next 30 years exploring the world below the surface of the oceans, but until this last spring those four certification dives in the high desert were all I had to my name.
However, the surface of the ocean would go on to play a significant and ongoing roll in my life. This last spring I decided that it was time to return under the water. I live in Seattle now and had heard that beneath the surface of the Puget Sound waters I knew so well had a reputation for cold, but beautiful dives.
Though a scuba certification is technically for life, it felt prudent to start from the beginning and this spring a friend and I began a class at Underwater Sports in Seattle. The store was strangely reminiscent of the dive shop in the strip mall from 30 years ago in Albuquerque. Not much else had changed except that the course work was not books, but online. It seemed like dive computers made knowing the dive tables a more conceptual exercise, but you still need to know about the tables and follow them for safety.
Our certification dive was by Alki Point in West Seattle next to a fishing pier under grey clouds and a light rain. The water was ten to fifteen degrees colder than the Blue Hole but manageable in the 7-mm wetsuit. From the outset, the water was fairly teaming with life compared with the sterility of high desert artesian spring water. After checking off our skills, we scanned the bottom finding orange sea cucumbers nearly two feet long, anemones of almost the same size, crabs, and tiny alien looking nudibranchs.
The next day we dove at a dive park in Edmonds, Washington. Anchors and train wheels had been sunk along with a PVC dome structure built as habitat now entirely covered with massive white sea anemones waving their ghosty appendages in the current. Fish were plentiful, as were crabs. An octopus swam between us, and this was enough to excite the instructor who had something on the number of thousands of dives to her name. The Giant Pacific Octopus is a creature to behold and one of the creatures northwest divers look for and cherish seeing. (links: https://best4boats.com/remarkably-bright-creatures-a-touching-tale-of-octopus-intelligence/ and https://best4boats.com/was-a-giant-octopus-the-top-predator-of-the-dinosaur-age/
Since then I’ve managed one more dive on top of my certification dives. A big win considering the three decades that stretched between my first dives in the desert. I’m no Cousteau yet, but I’m traveling this summer and with a skill relearned I’m feeling excited to restart my journey to explore at least a little bit of the bottom of the sea.
A spear gun my dive instructor had found at 90 feet. Still worked. Maybe I’ll find one on the bottom of the sea on some of my new adventures?
