Adventures On The Reef

SCUBACADABRA

The time has come, the Scubist said,
To talk of many things,
Of tanks and tubes and diving gear,
And snorkelers and slings,
And catching squirrelfish by hand,
And why octopi have wings.

Before our scuba trip was over, we had indeed talked of many things. There were the hours driving together to and from the boat landing, plying back and forth from the diving grounds when we lolled around in the salt-soaked, rain-splashed cabin (after the first two days nobody bothered to try to keep dry). There were the few sunny hours when we sprawled on the little deck, among the tangle of tanks, tubes, regulators, weight belts, spears and great napping towels. Above all, there were the lunch-break hours between dives. Then Art, consuming vast quantities himself, always warned the rest of us to "go light" on the food. He would explain how a big meal might suddenly "get stuck here" (pointing to his jugular area) when you dived. He, for example, loved peanut butter. But peanut butter was the worst, especially if you ate hard-boiled eggs with it. "Once, after I and my brother had about 20 of these peanut butter sandwiches, we dive, and first thing, a big Nassau grouper comes along...." This was one of the few sad stories in the Pinder saga: the peanut butter backfired on both Pinders, and the fish got away.

And there were the evenings (never long, for divers who love to dive get to bed early and drink and smoke little). Mostly, Louisa and I spent them together at Sir Victor's. But sometimes we all went to Black Beard's, where Art could get his massive steaks. Art never tired of the sight of fish, but he couldn't bear the taste of them. I fancied that in his subconscious he felt that spearing fish was a form of justifiable homicide but that eating them was unjustifiable—it was cannibalism. Art never speared a small fish (by which he meant under 10 pounds) if he could help it, never left a wounded fish to die in the sea and wouldn't kill any fish that was what he called "kind of pretty." I think he would righteously spear any man he caught spearing a queen angelfish.

Art, to our surprise, often did not know the names of the most familiar little reef fish. My own passion for the tiny blue-and-gold fairy bass and blue-and-sapphire jewelfish aroused his curiosity sufficiently so that on one day's dive he deigned to hang on to a coral spire beside me watching a school of them for almost 10 minutes. Then he flippered away and came back with a bag of chum and tried to help me feed them.

We talked of the difficulties in terminology which surround underwater swimming. Snorkeler and spearfisher are self-explanatory terms. But there is really no popular and accurate word for the person who goes under the water in a self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. "Skin-diver" is not a very accurate description of a person who dives not only with a lung but often wearing thick underwear under an all-over rubber suit, as cold-water divers do. "Tank diver" and "lung diver" are cumbersome terms; "tanker" and "lunger" are ugly, "Scuba-diver" is the most accurate, but "scubist" is shorter. I suggested that if we accepted scubist we could then speak of a scientific scubist, a camera scubist, a scubbiologist, a scubichthyologist, a scubarchaeologist, a scuba worker, a scubindustrialist, a treasure scubist, or a scubexplorer and, of course, a scubbuddy. The field opened out. Art, who had dived the length and breadth of the Caribbean, was obviously not only scubiquitous, he was a scuberman among scübermenschen, except when he was a scubbaby-sitter for scubdubs like scubartist Louisa and scubballs like me.

We talked of scubistic psychology. Why do some people yearn to dive, others shiver with fright at the thought of it? I told Coles about a newspaper account I had recently read of an analyst's speech at the American Psychoanalytical Association in San Francisco.* This analyst had said that the way scuba-divers talk and write indicates that they equate the ocean with their mother's womb; they are, he said, victims of a "shallow-water euphoria" which "makes them think they are somehow once again utterly safe in their mothers' arms." The scubist who comes to crave his feeling of scubeuphoria "thus may develop a dangerous addiction to diving." Fifty feet down he may decide to sack out—for good—in mama ocean's arms.

Coles said, "The guy who wrote that was either never under water or never in a womb."

Alone, Louisa and I spoke of underwater things in a different way. We decided that fish have temperaments no less than humans and land creatures. The queen angelfish is serene, the squirrelfish is definitely cocky, the bream is shy. Porpoises are playful and groupers amiable (until pushed too far). Pipefish are erratic, flying fish flighty, schoolmasters and doctorfish pompous. Sergeant majors are impudent, demoiselles spunky, amberjacks curious, rock hinds placid, sea horses snippy and flounders hopelessly phlegmatic. Fairy bass are hysterical Tinker Bells, and four-eyed butterfly fish are the clowns of the reef. The octopus is timid (really!). Barracudas are treacherous, sharks are maniacal, and moray eels are secretive, treacherous and paranoiac.

We talked, too, of a skin-diver's feeling of deep humility when he knows himself to be a mere human anchovy in the world of the leviathan whale. Of how, as he drifts about within his infinitesimal globule of the mighty ocean "exploring" his splintered splinter of the splintered coral reef, he feels his own ignorance and helplessness, as a blind man must feel his blindness. Of how, nevertheless, down there he feels so keenly God's presence, recognizing the work of the great artist's hand. For the artist is recognized by his style—his subjects change, but his style does not change. We noted, awestruck, the extraordinary resemblance between many coral forms and the cacti forms that bloom on deserts from which the sea subsided eons ago. Is the parrot fish a bird with scales, a parrot a fish with feathers? We saw hope for the world in the sea: the victorious struggle over the centuries of the coral communities against that mightiest force, the sea, bears witness to us that the forces of creation overtake—slowly, slowly—the forces of destruction.