Alive
How my first diving trip reminded me to be grateful for the gift of life.
“Are you OK?” someone shouted as I surfaced, spluttering and gasping for air. I was bobbing in the sea off Tioman, Malaysia, on my virgin open water dive trip, and I had just been towed what seemed like a few hundred meters by a boat.
It was a novelty at first, exciting even, as the boat sputtered along, before it picked up speed and the waves came crashing into my face in every direction and throwing me into a panic even though I was breathing in through my mouth compressed oxygen from a tank on my back. Fighting not to lose my grip on the rope, I started to inhale reflexively through my nose, and the cold seawater that rushed into my lungs only heightened my panic. Damn, I need to put on my mask, I can’t see. More seawater being sucked into my nose. I could feel myself struggling, flailing one hand in the air, hoping people on the boat can see it, hoping someone would stop the boat. My dive buddy N was grabbing onto me and I couldn’t seem to stop myself from breathing in water. Amid all the panic, there was time for a morbid thought: How many breaths will it take before I start to drown?
And then, suddenly, it was all over. The boat had stopped and N was bobbing beside me, trying to calm me down as I choked and wiped water away from my face. The other divers were in the water nearby; we had all let go of the rope at some point. A few metres away, the divemasters were jumping into the water and swimming as fast as they could towards us to check if we were fine.
Nothing in the scuba-diving training session had prepared me for this, though it was a fluke, I found out later. Certainly, it was not part of what I had imagined when I decided to join an open water course in scuba diving with my friends. After the prerequisite training session where I had trouble equalising my ears in a 2m deep pool, my biggest worry was that I would not be able to descend to the bottom of the sea — at least 15m deep, my friend and divemaster C said — without either my ears bursting or myself bursting out in tears.
True enough, I did encounter tears of frustration the first time I descended. The pain in my ears felt so bad that I was convinced I had ruptured my eardrums a few times. The fins on my feet felt strange and clumsy, I couldn’t control my pace of descent, and I was surrounded by a deep murky blue. The oppressive silence in the water and the knowledge that I could not communicate words added to my distress, and I was all ready to return to shore and hang up my fins forever.
Fortunately, I had a patient dive buddy who all but pulled me down to the bottom of the sea. When I finally reached the seabed, spread out below me were corals and fishes of all shapes and sizes. Everywhere I looked, there were movement and colour: bright orange clownfish frolicking among the waving tentacles of a sea anemone, a school of yellow fishes swimming above nubby brown corals, little flashes of silver darting in and out of a cluster of round neon corals. I was clueless about marine life — later I would find out that I saw a trigger fish, parrot fish, nudibranches, angelfish, and clownfish, among others — but I was simply entranced by the fact that they were swimming around us, seemingly oblivious to our presence, as if we were nothing more than a weird species of fish with ugly protruding limbs and funny eyes. I couldn’t resist the temptation to reach out and try to touch them, but of course the agile fishes all swam away before my fingers reached them. It was fun for a while to pretend to be a great white shark (or a big black whale) and chase them all off the corals, but I had trouble hovering above the corals without knocking into them and scraping my knees. I decided it was better to concentrate on swimming and keep my hands to myself.
The silence slowly took on a peaceful quality as I grew more and more used to breathing through the regulator and moving with fins. Communication was stripped down to its most basic as we could only convey the simplest of expressions with hand signals — OK? Not OK? Look here! Let’s descend. There was no way to express the meandering streams of thoughts that often make up our conversations, and there was no need to. “Reefs are places for solitude and thought,” said Australian marine scientist Charlie Veron once, and I couldn’t agree more. Down here, I could hear myself think — though mostly along the lines of “Where’s C? Oh look, sluggy sea cucumber! Yeech, disgusting slimy things. Where’s N? Damn, am about to knock into the reef. Take deep breath. Where’s C?” — and it seemed like all the niggling little worries of real life had been shelved for the moment, and I could simply just focus on not kicking someone else in the face (sorry, W!).
It seemed like for a while, the responsibility of what to do next was taken out of my hands, and I could simply just be.
After that harrowing boat-towing experience, I was still dubious as to whether I would want to dive again. However, at the end of the last dive, I found myself wishing we didn’t have to ascend when it was time to. As we floated on the surface, faces bathed in the warm sunlight, exhausted but still smiling for the camera — a thought struck me. I am more than just OK. Life is amazing, and, damn, did it feel good to be alive.
