Before The Rope
Posted By Paul Kotik on 20 October 2003
Don't get me wrong. I'm gratified - overwhelmed, really - by the worldwide growth in the popularity of skin diving. Freediving, they call it now, although my accountant assures me it is anything but free. This is a great, great thing, an unexpected and blessed turn of events. Thank you, Luc Besson. Thank you, Jacques, Enzo, Umberto, Pipin....thank you all. You built it, and they came.
But to what ? It is dawning on me that for an awful lot of our new friends and colleagues, freediving is the esoteric Zen practice of swimming up and down a rope, augmented by the sublime meditation of the static apneist floating face down in the swimming pool. For variety and chuckles, it's swimming laps in said pool, underwater, to be sure.
This is all great stuff, but I'm going to invoke my hard-earned privileges as a bona fide Geezer and speak to you of the Olden Days, when .....
I think it would have been about 1965. My folks had shares in a property out on the East End of St. John's, United States Virgin Islands. (Take a deep breath....)You couldn't get there overland, so we'd either buy good provisions in Charlotte Amalie, on St. Thomas, and take a big boat on a long ride to the house, or, go by car to the end of the road in the dusty, narcoleptic village of Coral Bay, on St. John, stock up on Army surplus frozen T-bone steaks and condiments and take a small boat on a short ride to the house. (Okay, breathe)
Most of St. John was, and is, a National Park on land forked over by Rockefellers so the common man would have a nice semi-tropical island to play on, and just 1,300 miles from Brooklyn. The East End had a few private properties, and the house, such as it was, sat on one of them. It was a primitive, plywood affair, with a cistern collecting the occasional rainwater for drinking, washing and so on. Wild goats roamed the area, which had a microclimate reminiscient of Arizona. Dry, and full of sharp things that would cut you good. It was on the water, a bay called Hurricane Hole. It had electricity, no phone, and a Boston Whaler. No radio. No TV.
Life was fantastic there.There was only one thing to do: take the boat, pick a spot and skin dive, okay, freedive it. Spearing dinner was taken for granted - the penalty for failure in the hunt was an aforementioned Army surplus frozen T-Bone steak from Mr. Arnett Marsh's shop in Coral Bay, so one was highly motivated.
It was then an essentially uninhabited area. The US Navy operated an underwater habitat a few miles away, and we had fantastic neighbors, a retired California developer and his wife, who had chucked it all to pioneer this last frontier. When I got to know the Bocks, they'd been living out there for some years, building a house themselves, by hand, locked in an unending embrace with the horrors and delights of that harsh environment.
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