Neutral Buoyancy

Oh, my people. I have done the best thing ever in the world, by learning to dive. I wish I were underwater on the reef right now.

If you had told me a couple of weeks ago that I would be having the time of my life on a boat with forty strangers, I don’t think I would have believed you. I think I would have thought that I was destined to be in awkward social situations for the rest of my life, and honestly, even though I’d had a good week just doing nothing in Cairns last week, I was more than a little trepidatious about being trapped on a boat for three days with people I wasn’t likely to have much in common with other than the weird idea that it might be fun to put on extremely uncomfortable and unflattering neoprene wetsuits and try to fly underwater.

But it was one of those magical things, man, where everyone was extremely good-looking and funny and friendly and got along really well. We had fantastic weather and stayed in our bikinis or bikini equivalents all day when we weren’t underwater and ate tons of delicious food–there was a new cake ready for us every time we got out of the water, which made it even harder to get into the wetsuits the next time around– and hooked up our iPods to the boat speakers and talked about sharks and dancing and good places to lose your virginity (my suggestion: Peter Pan ride at DisneyWorld) and basically just screaming and laughing and telling lies, which, if you have been following along here at Ampersand for any amount of time whatsoever, you will know is hands-down my favorite thing in the world.

Ooh, except now, I think diving might be my favorite thing in the world. I knew from snorkeling twice a day every day in Fiji last year that I was going to see some really good fish and other cool things–Christmas tree worm! Giant clam! but there’s no way to understand what it’s like to be down there with them, to be able to hang over a bommie (assuming you can achieve neutral buoyancy, which is still a big assumption for me) and just check out all the creatures doing their things. One time I was watching a huge giant anemone with about six anemone fish wriggling around and I was pointing at it and I guess I got a little too close because one of the fish came tearing out of that anemone, baring its wee tiny teeth, and was clearly challenging me to a fight. I saw a couple of nudibranchs and lots of very extravagantly frilled sea cucumbers, as well as a bunch of crinoids and a couple of sea stars, plus all the live corals.

And that’s just the invertebrates! I saw two turtles, which are pretty much the best thing ever, and of course eight million bajillion reef fish–including a huge Napoleon wrasse–in all their awesome colors…one of them was such a nice combination of green and purple and blue and brown that I started thinking about how I’d sort of like to decorate my room in that palette…and, AND, a shark! While I was snorkeling! It was about as long as my outstretched arms and while it was pretty scary because SHARK AHHHH SHARK I didn’t get as scared as I’d expected I would. Every thing I saw was more beautiful than the rest and I found myself getting very dreamy, thinking about how secret the world can be, about everything that goes about its business under the surface.

I want to write so much more, and so much more coherently, but I decided going out would be a good move last night, because what else would you do after getting up at five in the morning but stay out until four the following morning, and then decide to get up at your normal time of 7:30 anyway, right. And also I just started getting some residual seasickness as I’ve been writing this, and also I have this live music festival to go to tonight and I am almost out of internet time because I was adding all my boat buddies to Facebook, so as usual with this holiday entries I must love you and leave you, babies, and tell you that I have a bunch of underwater pictures to post when I get back to Wellington on Wednesday and I’m going to the Daintree Rainforest tomorrow for a couple of days and that I am in a great mood and really glad that I decided to learn to do this delicious, impossible thing.

But maybe I will tell you one last thing, about yesterday morning after I saw the sunrise from beneath the surface of the sea. We’d done our deep dive and changed out of our wetsuits (seriously, I don’t know how the vinyl fetishists do it) and I was standing up on the top deck looking out at the sun and the water, thinking about everything underneath, everything underneath of all of everything.

“How was your dive?” asked the person standing next to me.

“Oh…” I said, looking out at the horizon. “I don’t mean to sound ridiculous, but down there, when we were down there…it’s so…I just…”

“Yeah.”

“Under there…my heart just…feels so big, you know?”

And I don’t even like U2 but you have to believe me when I tell you “Beautiful Day” came on the radio at that moment and that the tears just fell down easily and painlessly, and that it turns out that was one of the perfect moments of my life, right there on the boat in my bare feet, looking at the water and the sun and the sky. Some of those days I talk about and others are so frangible I can’t even think about them very often, but this one was so free and clear and translucent, I know it will always be there just beneath my skin, there to light my way into my future, into my world.