The Scuba Diva

Just to please my wonderful husband of 37 years, I looked for three hours to find my scuba diving card (the tiny thing was in the attic buried in a huge Rubbermaid of papers and things) and then, filled with reckless overconfidence, took off to accompany him on a little scuba diving outing he's been wanting to go on for ages.

We drove about an hour to Midway, Utah, to the lovely Homestead Resort which sports The Crater, a natural hot springs underground pool inside a mass of hollowed-out limestone rock which is all set up for this activity. After signing a lot of papers promising we wouldn't sue anybody if we drowned or had a heart attack or burst our blood vessels and died, we donned our swim suits, fins, and masks.

I could see right away it was going to be bad. Yes, I had certified (lots of lessons, a written test, and some dives) and once swam 60 feet down with 8-foot Caribbean reef sharks, but that was Then. We hadn't been scuba diving in over 10 years and I forgot how insanely complicated and unwieldy and heavy the equipment is, and how insanely crazy the whole idea of humans going dozens of feet under water while breathing is.

The guy there was nice and infinitely patient and gave us a refresher course. But he made us do everything, including checking and finagling with our own personal equipment. Ha-ha, I thought, good joke. For one thing I didn't have my glasses on. What was supposed to be scuba stuff looked vaguely like a dangerous cold metal octopus (what natives call a devil fish) with all kinds of unrecognizable nobs and eyes and suctions and screws and long wiggly arm things hanging off of it in wild abandon.

This refresher course also included the dreaded mask-clear wherein you purposely fill your mask up with water and then position it a certain way while blowing out with your nose which is supposed to make all the water go back out, and the sharing-of-secondary-regulators drill, all of which happens while you are underwater. It also went without saying that we remember and participate in underwater sign language because when you are scuba diving you are underwater where people can't understand anything you may attempt to say and anyway you can't mouth a single word because your lips are grotesquely distorted, plugged up with the end of the hose that is your only hope of receiving essential life-giving oxygen. (Tip: thumbs up does NOT mean I'm okay, you're okay.) This sort of thing is not so difficult one foot under in the little baby pool--I did okay there--but the idea of repeating these drills and skills 20 feet down can begin to freak a rusty diver out. With these dark doubts secretly forming inside my wet head, it was without further ado that we started our descent into the serious depths.

Well, sometimes I forgot that when you are scuba diving you have to remember to purposely BREATHE through your regulator which requires some effort and is really noisy and bubbly, but our instructor reminded me. Also, there was the ear thing. If you breathe underwater, rather than the usual holding your breath, the pressure from the water starts pushing on your eardrums. A few feet down I found that my ears were hurting more than I remembered they were supposed to. Still, down I went, fist over fist, hanging onto the rope, into the murk and gloom. (Besides my eyesight being a bit blurry from not wearing my glasses, it was nighttime and even with the lights the water is a bit murky.) The thing I suddenly recalled was that you have to keep pinching your nose and popping your ears to equalize this pressure, all the while remaining very calm and remembering to breathe both in and out along with signing that you are okay to the instructor. It seemed like I was stopping and doing this every inch, and there was Steve below me waiting, kneeling placidly on the platform as if he scuba dove every day of his life. Although I maintained a calm demeanor, I seemed to be getting more and more stressed out the closer I got to my lowly destination. This was perhaps because I was more afraid than I realized about all those drills regarding my essential airways I was going to have to repeat as soon as I got there. My mouth and throat went as dry as if I were not sinking underwater but crawling across a desert.

And then there's the buoyancy compensator, or BC. This is the vest you wear attached to your humongous, heavy, and unwieldy oxygen tank. It is controlled by a funny-looking inflater you hold in your left hand that has two button-things. One blows air in your vest and the other lets air out. If you can get the air in your BC balanced just exactly right, you won't float up or sink down but remain stationary. In this weightless sort of heaven you can effortlessly swim horizontally along at your chosen underwater latitude which is probably the neatest thing about scuba diving and the closest I have ever come to flying.

The problem was, when I finally got to the platform and let go of the rope I immediately began to sink off the edge and into the abyss. I couldn't seem to get my BC inflated with just the right amount of air. This takes a bit of finesse and, to be honest, I was getting the buttons mixed up. Inflate? Deflate? Whoops, too little! Now too much! I felt like I was jump-roping in a crator of transparent pudding. Our instructor saved me by reaching out, grabbing my arm, and plopping (if you can plop anyone 20 feet underwater) me on the platform. No one seemed surprised that directly after this incident I made the sign that says hey man, enough of this, I'm going up. (Tip: this is thumbs up.)

As anxious as you may be. To get to the surface. And back to your natural habitat. You have to do this slowly. With pauses. Up the rope. Fist over fist. So as not to get bubbles. Of nitrogen in your bloodstream. Which causes painful cramps. And could burst your blood vessels. Which you can die from. Unless you get yourself into a hyperbaric chamber like they showed the guy writhing and screaming in on the old TV show with Lloyd Bridges called Sea Hunt. Needless to say, I accounted for all of this and was prepared to move up oh-so-slowly despite my nervousness.

Of course the others had to come up too and we all breathed a room-air sigh of relief. After we did some debriefing our guy said in a very charitable way that maybe we should just swim around a few feet down from the surface this time out. Steve was a good sport about it and we stayed in the oversized bathwater-warm rock tub another hour floating and twirling and somersaulting like a couple of happy but very complicatedly-outfitted otters.

Relaxing as it may sound, I was totally exhausted afterward. I changed, downed two whole bottles of water, and zonked out.

Happy anniversary, honey!