Fish Out of Water
How diving after a broken engagement led me to peace
To my right stood Santa Rosa Wall, enormous and bejeweled in crustaceans, sponges, luminescent fish.
The water to my left emptied into an abyss, a dark blue thickness both ominous and deceptive in its apparent absence of life.
A chill pierced my wetsuit and ran through me.
I turned my back to the abyss and faced the reef.
The current leaned into me like a shoulder.
It was like looking at a wall of text in an alphabet I couldn’t read. Creatures and seaweed and coral wove into a beautiful but indecipherable work of art. There are 105 types of coral and 262 species of fish in Cozumel Reefs National Park. My memory couldn’t possibly hold them all, much less describe them later.
The current continued to push against me, relentless and invisible. I pushed back.
I’ve spent most of my life a thousand miles from the ocean.
I have altitude built into my lungs and cracks permanently embedded in my chapped hands. My world is the high desert of Colorado’s Front Range, but while transplants to the state dream of breathing clear mountain air, I’ve always found it to taste vaguely of dust.
I was born landlocked, and landlocked I have stayed.
After a childhood of hikes and camping trips, after my education in pine forests and 14,000-foot mountains, I began to long for the ocean.
I paid the sea sporadic visits, but always returned to shore. Jostled by sand glued to my thighs, sunburn on my lips, pretty shells now dry and crumbling in my bag. The ocean was an infatuation I mostly admired from my thousand-mile distance, an entity whose language I did not speak, a faraway stranger I couldn’t understand.
I would leave the ocean each time as a bottomless cup.
My thirst for saltwater was only quenched when I tried scuba diving.
Diving offered a different way to know water. It was something else to do besides stand a few feet from shore and wonder what to do next.
It was novel and exciting and I felt daring.
My thirst for the sea wasn’t the only reason I chose to dive.
By the time I arrived in Cozumel, Mexico, for my first dive trip, it had been almost a year since I’d broken off my engagement to my partner of seven years.
This dive trip was supposed to be our honeymoon, and our diving certification was paid for by a close family friend. The friend presented us with a gift certificate on the very night we were planning to call off the engagement.
When I opened the certificate, enormously expensive and non-refundable, my heart sank. I couldn’t bring myself to say that there would be no wedding.
I had to complete the training and go diving — and do all of it with the partner I wasn’t going to marry.
Most people’s first exposure to scuba is a Discovery Dive, a short and closely guided experience where an instructor gives you the SparkNotes version of a real dive.
You spend half an hour practicing breathing in chest-deep water and become acquainted with your cumbersome scuba kit. Then the instructor drags you around by your Buoyancy Control Device — an inflatable life vest, or BCD — through a reef for twenty minutes.
A mere glimpse of diving, to be sure, but my Discovery Dive felt like being in outer space. I had never drawn so close to such a starkly different world, one awash in blue and replete with coral and fish.
Water coated my senses like a blanket, like I had entered a blurry, muted dream at half-speed.
When I resurfaced, I couldn’t believe another world dwelt just beneath my feet. Invisible with my head above water.
I had to see it again.
And the only way to do that was to get an Open Water Diver certification.
The wonder that overcame me during my Discovery Dive was absent during my Open Water training.
Whereas my first experience had been free of any sense of danger, the training instilled in me a near-terror of dying underwater. There was so much to remember and master on the first try, so much to coordinate and practice in case of emergency.
Worse, getting certified as a scuba diver in Colorado means diving into a freezing reservoir the color and density of dark roast coffee. I could barely see my hand in front of me, much less navigate back to shore.
Submerged in the muck, this thought floated into my head:
Humans are not meant for water.
The fact that I have to don 100 pounds of gear in order to stay alive underwater should indicate that water is no place for a human.
We shove ourselves into fake neoprene skins and pull artificial fins over our toes and seal foggy goggles over our eyes and breathe through a hose to a tank that holds precious little air.
And even then, there are about a hundred ways to get hurt or die.
You could get sliced by a boat propeller or brush against a box jellyfish or get lost among the coral or run out of air or get swept away by the current or suffer decompression sickness simply because you weren’t paying attention and spent too long 100 feet below the water’s surface.
You may not even realize what’s happened until it’s too late.
Water numbs.
It mutes and blurs and dulls your sensual clarity. Everything appears clouded and delayed.
You become inured to your own panic.
Humans don’t recognize trouble that way.
The panic of an avalanche, for example, is deafening, blinding, too swift for us to grasp. Everything amplifies.
But in water, it’s different.
It’s voiceless and blue-filtered and heavy down there. You can only hear the dive master tapping on his tank and hollow air bubbles as they escape like balloons from your regulator.
And you are always at the ocean’s mercy. She never listens to you.
She has continents to surround, fish to house, tides to time and keep.
But people dive anyway. I dove anyway.
I had heard Cozumel was like diving in a swimming pool compared to that impossible Colorado reservoir. At that point, anything seemed better than another Colorado reservoir.
As I descended in Paseo el Cedral on that first day in Cozumel, I asked the ocean to reveal itself to me, to give me the privilege of its seaweed and camouflaged creatures and directionless, dark caverns.
I sunk into the sea exactly how I’d been taught in diving school: I cleared my ears and mask to manage the building pressure in my airways; I let tiny bursts of air escape from my BCD to pull me further down. I stayed close to my partner and drew long, slow breaths.
I did what divers are supposed to do to stay alive, to witness the hidden world below the surface.
Between long breaths and glances at my dive computer to determine how far under water I’d sunk, I drank in the overwhelming array of newness around me.
Paseo el Cedral reef descends nearly 45 feet along the southwest coast of Cozumel, and among its rough coral and rope sponges dwell smooth trunkfish, snappers, porkfish and black groupers. The names of those fish were alien to me at the time, but I could tell this was a rare place where coral hadn’t yet been bleached, where biodiversity and pristine water still existed and thrived in spite of human presence.
Between the ornate coral, neon fish and mossy caves, I fought to keep my curiosity in check. I felt like I had no sooner discovered something new than the dive master was already leading us onward. More than once, I noticed I was bringing up the tail of the group, and I’d have to abandon whichever fish I was inspecting. I’d kick my fins faster to catch up.
On my third attempt to rejoin the group, my right fin fell off.
As I rearranged my burdensome scuba gear and attempted to reattach my fin, I began to ascend.
The rest of the group floated further and further below me while I wrestled with my fin.
Ascending during a dive is much more dangerous than the descent. The nitrogen buildup in your tissues, an unfortunate product of spending time at depth, can release like a shaken bottle of soda if you ascend too quickly. This is decompression sickness, and it can be serious enough to send you to a recompression chamber after you surface.
If you hold your breath as you ascend, you can suffer a lung overexpansion injury. Imagine a pair of balloons expanding and popping as they rise in the air.
The same thing can happen to your lungs if you don’t remember to breathe.
I feared one of these things would happen as I slipped the fin strap over my heel and tried to stop my ascent. My partner was nowhere in sight.
A rough, plump hand grabbed my ankle from below.
One of the other divers in the group had seen me ascending and now pulled me back to a safe depth.
Relief swept through my lungs.
The diver began a slow, controlled ascent with my forearm firmly in his grasp. When we reached the surface, he instructed me to remove my gear and hand it to the boat captain.
I noticed I was out of breath. Shaking.
“You panicked,” the diver said, removing his own gear and boarding the boat with me. “You weren’t breathing while you were putting your fin back on. That’s why you went up.”
I opened my mouth to defend myself, but the man was probably right. And he had probably saved my life. So I sat quietly on the boat, wondering why my partner hadn’t been the one to grab my ankle and pull me back to safety.
He surfaced moments later. He had mistaken another diver for me, and when he realized I had disappeared, he came up.
An honest mistake, but a telling one, I thought.
If we couldn’t stay together for half an hour underwater, what made us think a lifetime above water would be any better?
Could we really lose one another so easily?
I felt like I had failed.
The storms in our relationship had been mounting in our skies in the months surrounding our engagement. After being together and living together so long, marriage just seemed like the obvious next step — but it wasn’t the correct one.
He wanted to move to the Western Slope of Colorado and raise sheep; I wanted to stay in Denver, where I wouldn’t be isolated from family and friends.
He got up early and seemed to be at the mercy of his job; I was depressed and felt my life lacked direction.
He thought I was snarky; I thought he was slow.
There was no bottom to my frustration.
I kept sinking into it, unable to ascend out of sullen moods that would last for days, sometimes even weeks.
The night I told him I couldn’t marry him, we lay in our bed and held each other and sobbed.
I’ve never lost a child, but the rawness of that night reminded me of how a miscarriage might feel.
Like a deep loss.
Like staring out at the storm and wondering if our cracked boat would survive the waves.
We damaged that boat.
I damaged that boat.
The cloak of sadness tied itself around everything I did for weeks.
For months.
In spite of a canceled engagement, we tried to repair our relationship. I moved out, but we stayed together.
I fanned blankets over daily emotional fires, but we stayed together.
It’s a small miracle that our relationship lived a full year in the aftermath of a broken engagement.
In many ways, that year felt a lot like being underwater.
Nothing I did, none of my major, life-altering decisions, felt as serious as they turned out to be. The night I said we couldn’t get married and the day I moved out were clouded in the same kind of muted thickness, the same kind of numbness, as resolving an emergency 60 feet under the surface.
My actions couldn’t wait, but I hoped I could somehow reverse them if they turned out to be mistakes.
My decisions would save or sink us.
I hoped we wouldn’t sink.
I willed my next five dives to be different than my disastrous first. To my relief, each subsequent excursion proved I was getting better.
I learned to stop kicking my fins so hard.
I learned to relax and take long, slow breaths.
I learned how to stay more buoyant so that I wouldn’t scrape my knees on the coral or go shooting up to the surface again.
By the last dive, I was able to stay down for 55 minutes — a marked improvement from my first dive, which clocked in at 22 minutes.
While I learned how to be a fish, the life around me kept breathing its eternal breath. Moray eels and nurse sharks lurked in their caves. A spotted eagle ray floated above me, its long tail and venomous stingers soaring behind it. Fluorescent parrot fish crunched coral between their toothlike beaks.
Nothing cared that I was there.
I once spent a year teaching English in Korea.
It saddened me, when I was there, that I couldn’t see any mountains outside my window. I had grown up with the Rocky Mountains always situated next to me, and their absence was noticeable. When I returned home, I swore I’d never take such a landscape for granted again.
And yet.
Within a year, I had become accustomed to those peaks outside my window again.
Marriage was my familiar mountain landscape, far away from the novelty and adventure of the sea. It was something that seemed natural to me, but wasn’t necessarily where I wanted to be.
I still felt like I was missing out on experiences, that I was wasting time in my familiar, boring life. My fear of missing out on adventure suggested I was becoming landlocked in more ways than one, stuck in patterns and a dullness and the comforts of home I clung to and despised.
Marriage was that bag of crumbling shells, once so attractive, ravaged by my own greed for something new and beautiful.
Despite my terror at sinking into a lifetime of boredom and normalcy, I wanted to believe my partner and I could be adventurous and challenge one another.
Diving together was new territory for both of us. Before we went to Cozumel, I believed that if we could conquer the challenge of diving, perhaps we could undertake our relationship challenges, too.
That we could resuscitate something that was drowning.
We completed PADI training.
We traveled to Cozumel.
We logged nine dives.
And as I closed my eyes on the plane ride home, I considered that perhaps each of us had mastered diving on our own, in our separate ways. Such a personal experience couldn’t be held responsible for the survival or dissolution of our relationship.
It had nothing to do with being together.
On our last day in Cozumel, we sat on a cloudy, secluded beach and watched the tide go in and out.
We talked about our families — the way they shape us, the secrets they keep, the shadows they weave into us. We talked about the people we became as a result of the people we know.
It’s a strange feeling, to be so intimately understood and understand a person, while at the same time knowing it’s the end of your adventure.
My partner and I always operated more like friends than lovers, and I could finally see the broken engagement and the misery that ensued becoming part of our past.
We were almost family. Almost.
The splendid toadfish is one of the rarest creatures on Cozumel.
This zebra-striped fish likes to hide in sand patches and usually refuses to be seen out in the open. Bright yellow stripes line its fins and tail like caution tape. Being that it is endangered, extremely shy, and endemic to Cozumel, divers consider themselves fortunate to ever see one in their lifetimes.
When I first learned of the splendid toadfish, it struck me how determined it is to survive in the same place, on the same slope of sand, for its entire life.
The splendid toadfish isn’t curious about any other reefs.
It doesn’t wonder what life would be like somewhere else.
That’s its nature: to preserve its home for as long as it can.
Danger — or what it perceives to be danger — passes by every day, and the toadfish’s response is to withdraw and hide.
How unlike the splendid toadfish I am.
In the span of a year, I stopped withdrawing from problems that had been staring me down during my engagement. I broke from my landlocked home, if only for a short while, to confront something new. I jumped off my boat and sank into the water, and I surfaced without drowning.
There was no need to hide from risk anymore.
Diving taught me I could confront problems and be okay.
If only the splendid toadfish could know such freedom.
When you’re diving and an emergency arises, there’s no time to pick apart the pros and cons of a choice.
There are procedures to follow, and you follow them or risk death.
It’s much more life-or-death than the decision to marry. Marriage is not so black-and-white, and love is an ocean of gray.
There isn’t one single procedure to save a relationship.
Sometimes it isn’t clear whether saving it is the best decision, or whether it’s better to turn toward the abyss and stare into the deep.
We are all adrift on our own gray oceans.
To face and enter the abyss, I decided, was well worth the risk.
