My Actual Birthday

I was so sick when I got back from the dive last night that I got into bed at six and didn’t wake up, head throbbing (“Your eardrum,” said Lucas the impossibly gorgeous Czech dive instructor, “it was a little bit stressed, yes?”), throat on fire. It wasn’t until I turned on my phone this morning, all sweaty from the fever dreams of the night before, and the birthday texts started rolling in that I remembered: oh yeah, I’m thirty-three today!

Yesterday on Milford Sound it was bright yet cool, a pretty much perfect day, and I spent the majority of the ride out to the Tasman Sea worrying that I didn’t have enough dive experience and that I would be too cold to really enjoy this thing I have been wanting to do for months and months now. The other people on the boat were this very hard core British couple who had their own dry suits (and what looked like down comforters to wear underneath them) and were making casual references to times they’d been diving in the frozen Norwegian fjords and times they’d had to cut themselves free with their dive knives from fishing nets in the North Atlantic. I felt pretty embarrassed admitting that I had fewer than fifteen dives under my weight belt, and that they’d all been in tropical water, but fortunately I distracted myself from those considerations by wondering if it’s possible to wear three wetsuits at a time. Lucas the impossibly gorgeous Czech dive instructor treated me a bit like a slightly stupid four-year old, putting my flippers on for me and giving me advice like “When you get into the water, try to go below the surface!” and “I think you should wear both your hoods.” No time to argue though, it was time to hop in and see what there was to see down below.

Down through the zero-visibility layer of freshwater, the sudden and all-uncompassing cold, wondering if this was really such a good idea when suddenly, immediately, like turning on a light switch, the clear cool calm saltwater layer, with more color and life than I thought would be possible anywhere that wasn’t a coral reef. For the first few minutes I was consumed by thoughts of how very cold I was and how very difficult it is to breathe through one’s regulator when one’s chestal region is compressed by three wetsuits, but soon I was able to relax a bit and look around.

I had just decided to dive Milford Sound because I thought it was kind of an awesome thing to do, but I hadn’t really known what to expect. I didn’t imagine that there would be so many fish, so many fantastic invertebrates. I saw so many amazing things, trying to achieve neutral buoyancy, forgetting about the cold. I swam through a kelp forest as if I were an otter and saw a brittle star draped like a Christmas tree ornament over some black coral. I saw some crazy spotted fish, “the sandflies of the sea” as the boat skipper called them, check themselves out inthe reflection of my mask. I saw a sea star bigger than my head inching across the rock face covered with hesitant tube worms, I saw more sea cucumbers in more color variations than I thought were possible, I saw more extravagantly spiked kina than I could count. I saw a school of fish acting for all the world as if they were a flock of sheep or a herd of cows on a steep hillside, settled in the crannies and crevices, taking a bite or two of algae, lookign up at me with mild interest as I lumbered above them. I saw scorpionfish and crays and paua, all impossibly, gorgeously unconcerned with my graceless flailing, my worshipful adoration.

The sun was out when we got back in the boat and I looked out at the water and thought about how glad I was to be alive and to have some sneaky knowledge of what’s underneath the blank waves. We visited a waterfall and a rockpool (still in our dive gear, thanks very much) and cruised around the Sound for a while; we saw some more dolphins and some sleepy-looking seals hauled out on the rocks. On the way back to Te Anau we stopped at a couple of scenic viewpoints, but I was already feeling sick by then so I took a couple of dutiful walks and snapped a couple of the expected pictures and slept the whole way back, halfway wishing I could rip my left ear off my head and be done with it,halfway dreaming of everything underneath.

Today, my actual birthday, though not quite as exciting–not as many sea cucumbers, for one thing–as the day-before-my-actual-birthday, was all right. I was feeling too rough this morning to do anything much but I did manage to get it together to spend some time by the lake with a book, and to treat myself to a lavish birthday iced mocha. I wrote some postcards and drank a lot of orange juice, and in a few minutes I’m going to make myself a big stir-for dinner. I’m planning to have a big knockdown drag out dinner tomorrow in Wanaka though–after all, I was sick and alone on my birthday so clearly I deserve something extra good. In fact I’m going to use that excuse for any excesses of behavior in the next couple of days: Extra cream sauce with that, ma’am? “Well, okay, but only because I was sick and alone on my birthday.” A couple of ridiculously overpriced food porn magazines for the long bus ride back to Queenstown? “I was sick and alone on my birthday!” Strippers, blow, and a hot tub or two? “Sick! Alone! My birthday!”

My sore throat is getting better though, so I won’t be sick for too much longer, I hope. And while it’s true that I’ve spent the thirty-third anniversary of my birth without physically being with any of the people I love or who love me–well, they all live in my heart , every day, all the time, so I am never really alone anyway.