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Posted By Paul Kotik on 19 September 2005
[Editor's Note: This damning testimony was first recorded before a Florida magistrate on November 27, 2001. The transcript, mysteriously 'lost' in a bureaucratic reshuffling of that State's Department of Environmental Recalcitrance turns out now, thanks to the efforts of Deeper Blue's tireless legal affairs department, to have been a mere adumbration of the posting which follows this Note.]
I once was so cool that my teenage childrens' friends used to stop by the house to hang out even when they knew my kids weren't home.
A lifetime of R&D ( Recreation & Downtime) financed by neglect of career and fueled by trivial pursuits had yielded a lifestyle and a persona that most middle-aged men ( and their benighted women) can only dream of.
Everything was in perfect balance.
The beer, which I brewed to my own specifications, was no sooner guzzled than burnt in a 10K trail run. Granola breakfasts enveloped, infiltrated and finally escorted the previous evening's midnight prime rib to the fate that awaits all repasts. Coffee ? Maui Organic, Ono Farms: $35 the pound by monthly air freight from the Valley Isle itself. Ono Farms apparently deals with pests by spraying the beans with caffeine extracted from your de-caf blends. Cigar ? Yes, thank you, Cuban please. My guitars were Fender, and my volume, bass, treble, gain, and reverb at maximum. I lay down just before dawn and rose in the afternoon.
Life was a frat boy's game plan on grown-up's expense account.
Diving was always part of it, but let us not mince words. This is gonzo diving we're talking about. No instruction, no theory, none of those cute plastic insurance cards.
Childhood scuba spearfishing in the early 1960's was the entree to blue water. Certification consisted of forking over a good old American greenback to a very authentic Antillean gentleman who taught diving as a search-and-destroy mission.
We searched for big critters and killed them.
I'd seen Sea Hunt, and one day asked Amador whether he'd ever had the bends.
"Wha dot ?" he queried. I explained- that is, I recited Lloyd Bridge's lines from a recent episode, and Amador listened attentively. "So yo tink dos wha I got dose hurts in me joints all da time whot I dive all day ?" He was the water sports director, so to speak, at the Curacao resort where my family spent a month that winter.
Apnea diving was the happening thing when the under-the-counter scuba market was dried up by pesky judges and insurance companies. Apnea -I'd been doing it since toddler days, scaring the shoes off parents and guardians at beaches and pools.
The big breakthrough, equalizing the ears, came as a gift from a retired stockbroker, a middle-aged American gent I met on the (then undeveloped) south shore of Puerto Rico. I think I was about 14 years old, and this Charlie took my Dad and I out to the edge of the reef. In retrospect I appreciate that Charlie was a pretty good freediver. He lived there near the town of Guanica and was really happy to have enthusiastic company on his boat, inept though Dad and I surely were.
Dad was content to snorkel around above the reef, but I was tuned in to Charlie's drops down the outside wall into what seemed like a bottomless void. I tried to follow him, but was held back by the strange pressure, and then outright pain in my ears and head.
Charlie noticed the blood in my mask and signalled us back into the boat. I guess I was lucky - it must have been a sinus that went before an eardrum popped.
Charlie revealed his method of pushing the mask skirt up to block the nostrils and performing what I later learned is the Valsalva technique.
The cat was out of the bag. Having been let in on the trick, I was soon back in the water and getting some serious depth. How deep ? Couldn't say - I never used a depth gauge until late last year !
Charlie also taught me the useful technique of inverting the cellophane wrapper on my pack of Camel cigarettes to keep 'em dry at sea.
The years rolled by, as did my motorcycles, business ventures, girlfriends, rocking, rolling, soldiering, sailing, studying, drinking, smoking, skiing, fishing, building, bashing and ..... you understand. A typical American Life.
Scuba diving fell by the wayside. Too much like high school ! Books, lectures, tests, diplomas, and permits seemed to me altogether unsuited to the manly pursuit of the sporting life. Besides, by the late 1980's scuba had become so mainstream your Aunt Tillie was doing it, and the studliness index asymptotically approached zero.
The last really neat apnea diving session before marriage and children beached me was in the ruins of Caesarea, the Roman Empire's version of Las Vegas on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. The sea was rough and the visibility none too good, but there was all kinds of interesting and very old stuff to see. That was in 1977.
The 1980's and 1990's were pretty wild and crazy. The object of the game, as far as I could tell, was to work harder, play harder, and sleep less than anybody else. Life was good ! Kids were happy, business was booming, Bordeaux had an unprecedented series of Vintages of the Century and I discovered windsurfing.
Windsurfing.
The enthusiast quickly moves beyond his casual initiation, that seductive, come-hither glide on a glassy lake, or bay, in the gentlest breeze. The learning curve quickly steepens and takes one through smaller and smaller boards, higher and higher winds and then hair-raising swell and chop. Apnea diving became something I did when a giant Maui devil-wave knocked me upside the head and squashed me down on the reef for what's left of a lifetime. Or, when sweet reason governed the affairs of man, a wholesome way to pass the time waiting for the wind to come up.
The windsurfing lifestyle suited me pretty well, too, including as it did lots of high-energy junk food, coffee, and copious apres- sail libations.
Then, at some point during the Age of Lewinsky, my next-door neighbor brought over a rental video called The Big Blue. I'd never heard of it. I agreed to watch it to be polite.
Well, imagine my surprise. Turned out this breath-hold diving thing had really caught on since I'd last looked in on it oh, 20 years earlier. Fantastic !
Competitions, strange gizmos like this sled thing - I had to know more.
Gizmos having permeated every aspect of life in the meanwhile, I went to the World Wide Web and gassed up my favorite search engine.
This led me to Divetech, a business on Grand Cayman whose website painted a credible picture of a rational, normalized approach to teaching what I was led to understand was now called "freediving". Freediving. I liked the sound of that.
Windsurfing, far from being free, had become a financial black hole.
I took the IANTD Master Free Diver course at Divetech in August, 2000. I arrived with a bit of an attitude (".. you hold your breath, you clear your ears, you go down, sideways and then up - where's the rocket science in that, eh?" ) but was quickly and properly adjusted by my instructors, Dan Hodgins and Tara Cunningham.
By the end of the first day I understood that whatever my abilities and experience were, to that day I'd been doing essentially everything wrong and was, in fact, lucky to have survived.
Up until that day, I'd done most of my freediving alone, had never heard of shallow water blackout, never used a depth gauge, never wore a timer, and reckoned the best way to prepare for a day in the ocean was to drink a few extra cups of black coffee in the morning - you know, to neutralize the leftover rum in your system.
Over the next four days Dan and Tara laid out the physiological and physical concepts underlying the reborn art and science of freediving.
The open-water sessions were a revelation. I saw, for the first time, an approach to aquatics that is diametrically opposed to the heart-pounding, blood-curdling, white-knuckle, hair-raising adrenalism of my windsurfing co-conspirators. My instructors' mindset was one of. . . alert serenity. Everyone I'd ever known approached windsurfing or spearfishing as if he were going to war.
Dan and Tara were going to peace.
By the time the course ended I was reformed. Addiction is such a negative concept, isn't it ? Let us say, rather, that I had internalized the instruction and training I'd received and was very interested in doing more. I understood that I was capable of going deeper and staying down longer than I'd imagined were possible, and was willing - eager - to do what I had to do to realize my not-too-shabby potential as a freediver.
Life became a globe-trotting whirl of clinics, courses, diving, more diving, competitions, record attempts and even more diving.
Don't smoke, don't drink, dodge incoming fatty foods as if my life depended on it. Coffee ? But a distant memory. Don't even ask about smoking ! My bedtime is back to what it was when I was in grade school.
I am serene. Whatever is happening around me, my heart rate stays low and my breathing deep and regular - good thing I'm not a bachelor on the make, isn't it ? I'd never know which of the ladies turned me on. Not that it would matter. I've learned that guys who belly up to the bar and order a cranberry juice clear the room pretty fast. No more big hair for this cabellero.
Now, a year later, I am remade : a complete wussy.
All this finally struck me one day in Kona town on the Big Island of Hawai'i. I was attending a Performance Freediving clinic, and rooming with Kirk Krack, Brett LeMaster and Mandy Rae Cruickshank. Three of the coolest, baddest freedivers on the planet. My completed wussification was revealed in a dazzling epiphany, a moment when I realized that the four of us had spent fully 20 minutes reviewing and analyzing the Dairy Queen menu to determine if there was anything we could consume without breaking training. Nope. We retired to Brett's place and decanted a rare root beer, the only brand which had been found (in a previous research project) not to contain the dread caffeine. I drank water, abstaining from this intoxicating, glucose-laden tonic. I was, you see, the designated sleeper.
And so I have become a very dull fellow.
The thing I want most to be doing looks to the casual layman something like this: a guy in a rubber suit floats face down in the ocean for a long time, disappears for a couple of minutes, then reappears and again floats face down in the water for a long time, and so on, over and over. Oh, and one of the ways I prepare for all this excitement is by getting together with a bunch of like-minded people and floating face down in a swimming pool for a while. We call this "static apnea". In the rubber suits. Pretty sexy stuff, eh ? Makes me what the young folks call, I believe, a "babe magnet".
In the secret world of the wussy all this is seen in a completely different aspect.
I'll let you in on it: it's what's down there.
The moment for me is that in which I'm gliding through a domain wherein time and space are elastic, the world of the whales' song and the infinite blue. I am transformed by structures deep in my genes. Another more ancient being is overlays my postmodern human self, ancient software awakened by the depths and executing on my modern meat machine. It is a distinct and different life, the life of the dive.
In the most superficial sense, the life of the dive is lived in fragments of a few minutes each, constrained by our physical limitations as breathless and fragile land creatures.
Here is the secret : it's all one long dive. In the awakened consciousness of Aquatic Being, all the dives are stitched together into one continuous experience of an oceanic life.
If you're a freediver, it's true of you , too. Next time you dive, you'll know at once that I am right.
And that maybe you're a wussy, too.