SWIMMING WITH THE (DEAD) FISHES

© MJ McGalliard

additional photos © R. Craig Sanders

I haven’t written about scuba diving even though I’ve been at it for about 9 months.  The big reason for this prolonged gestation is that I’m pretty bad at it.  Or, I seem to have horrible luck.  It is probably a little of both.

So, why do I keep trying?

Well, it’s kind of like this- What if you had the chance to go up in space?  To exit the craft and float in the void, looking at the world from a new perspective?  Some of us would, some of us wouldn’t, and I’m the guy that would.  That’s what diving is, essentially.  Through artificial means it’s possible for us sweaty monkeys to experience a completely foreign environment, a place where our normal sense of gravity, motion and even up and down seem different.  A place where we can fly, filled with creatures that couldn’t exist where we live.

That’s my fascination.  Even on my worst dives it constantly amazes me that I’m there, under the water and breathing, seeing the three quarters of the earth that most people never visit.

And, there have been some bad dives, some scary dives and dives that pretty much didn’t happen at all.  For instance, last summer when it was hot I got heat stroke trying to get from the parking lot to the water in a 7 mm neoprene wetsuit, carrying almost my own weight in equipment.  I pretty much just flopped around on the beach until I could peel off enough layers to keep my organs from failing.  Equipment problems, ill-fitting apparatuses, horrible weather- an awful lot has gone wrong for me in my attempts to go under the sea.

I’ve been on 13 dives and only on half of one did I experience everything working, clear water and enough air left in my tank to enjoy it.  We’ve all read the bumper sticker, we all know what happens and, it seems, most of it has happened to me.

Most people would have had the sense to walk away by now, but not I.  I’ve written before of how much a water-baby I am, being on it, under it, in it, touches my heart in a way I can’t deny.  Even as I sat on the bottom of the training pool, I was hooked.  Looking up I could see the other divers at various depths and I realized this was a place of three dimensional movement, where locomotion was a matter of grace and I felt at home.  However, like that kid in fourth grade who really liked folk dancing, but was really bad at it, my enthusiasm knows no shame.  I will keep doing it no matter how much it hurts.  Like a junkie with a dirty needle, I just can’t help myself.

One of my first disastrous experiences happened on a training dive and has given me pause for a lot of thought.  As you might imagine getting people ready, with all their bits and pieces of diving gear, for an instructional dive in open water is a big deal.  Once a date has been set the dive happens come hell or high water.  That dive had both.  It was in the Salish Sea (Puget Sound) in February.  ( I’m not bragging here, where I got certified says less about my tenacity and more about not being able to afford travel to some place with warm water.)  

The specifics of the dive itself pale in comparison to getting out of the water.  Most of you can imagine a cold rainy day at a rock strewn beach, but instead of a contemplative walk and a cup of coco at the end of the excursion, there was a sewer outlet between us and land.  This wasn’t the really icky kind of sewer outlet; this is where all that water that falls on the street, sidewalks and parking lots, drains off of lawns and construction sites ends up spewing into the sea.  That day, while we were under the waves there had been a cloud burst.  Damp irony, that.  The outlet was between us and the stairs to the pier and it was roaring.  Strewn in front of it were misshapen boulders as big as frozen turkeys and twice as slippery.  We were exhausted, carrying well over a hundred pounds each and, quite frankly by that point in the day a little miffed at this final challenge.  We had to form the classic Boy Scout human chain to get across and it was much scarier than diving down sixty feet into the dark to see the octopus.

But, it got me thinking about, if nothing else the human capacity for justification and gleeful, willful ignorance.

The fella that used to live next door to us (his name was Mike) loved to spray his yard with various mixtures of poisons.    Mike used to complain bitterly about no longer being able to get DDT and other compounds thinking people have decided to leave in the chemistry set.  He even sprayed part of our yard one day while we were gone.  His justification was that if weeds grew in our yard they could get into his.  This somehow this worked with his Libertarian philosophy; in his mind he was defending his land by poisoning ours. It is really amazing how far some people will go to justify selfishness, but I digress.  When I brought up how deadly to all living things the chemicals he was spraying around were and how the lake that we all love was well, just across the street, he said, “Oh, what I’m doing isn’t going to make any difference, there’s not enough of it to hurt anything.”

Which was blatantly untrue, as he’s been gone for three years and still nothing grows over there.  But, a lot of people think that, that their tiny bit of pollution isn’t enough to hurt anything.  The key words in that phrase are A, Lot, of People. 

As I stood in that torrent, my feet numb, my balance thrown off by the weight on my back, the clear and present danger of broken bones and drowning was crowded out by thoughts of Mike’s poisonous concoctions and just what the hell was I standing in?  Mordor’s runoff, a complex combination of compounds randomly made up of motor oil, lawn chemicals, and detergents and probably a dead dog or two washed into the city’s drainage system by thousands of tons of water.

Which gave me pause to think.

If I wash my car in my driveway and let the residue slide down the gutter and into the sewer like a foamy iridescent snake, I probably won’t kill the ocean.  But, if you and your cousins and your cousins’ cousins do it too, and say we throw in a few thousand Mikes spraying their yards with who knows what… Well, where’s the tipping point?  When does one more car wash or one more chemical lawn treatment combined with neighborhood Roundup tally finally form the toxin that will bring down life in the ocean?

I don’t know when the scales will tip as I doubt if we even have a clue as to how much death we pour into the sea every day, we could have passed the point of no return already, in which case, it’s been nice to know you- going extinct now.

What Mike didn’t realize (he was an avid fisherman, BTW) was that he might as well have been spraying the lake with his chemicals and I don’t believe even he would have done that.

All drainage from our civilized society if it doesn’t go directly into the ocean, goes into a river or a stream and then on to the deep blue sea eventually.  Things aren’t gone when they go down the drain; they simply become part of a bigger problem.

The insight I gained from this experience has given me a rule of thumb that just might help people see the light.

And, that is-

Unless you’re willing to get naked in a bathtub with it, don’t pour it down the drain. 

Not that hard to remember.

NEXT A CONVERSATION WITH LANCE, THE RELUCTANT SALMON.