Authors: Donald R. Gallo
That diving guide, Sydney, knows what he’s doing. He led a barracuda alongside us and away, just by holding his hand solid near its side as it swam. Never saw anything like it. I’d never expected to get so close to one of those ugly faces, with their underjaw all stuck out in aggression. Looked like a killer, all right. I take my hat off to that Sydney.
They feed us squid and shark, and even barracuda, and stew made of conch meat, and they feed us breadfruit, and they put the salad on top of sea grape leaves from the tree just outside our bedroom. And we ate grouper one dinner and sea turtle soup. And we have bananas in everything, in pancakes and in dessert and with coconut for lunch.
Everything is so soft here. Even the voices.
While we’re outside playing, somebody comes in and sweeps the sand out of our room, Patrice’s and mine. And they make our beds.
I sent postcards to my friends by putting them in the handwoven basket on the hotel’s desk. One evening I noticed somebody listening to a shortwave radio there. Communication with the rest of the world seems to be casual and optional.
We dove to thirty feet, to forty-five feet, to sixty feet and beyond. As the depth increases, the color intensity decreases. First the reds fade from mere human sight, then the oranges, the yellows, the greens. In the order of the spectrum, in feet. Completely logical. At ninety feet, all that is left is the blue.
Another physics principle is at work down there, too, invisible to the naked eye. The molecules in water are constantly colliding, in a hugely complicated pattern. Each water molecule has around 10
15
collisions per second—that’s ten, with fifteen zeros following it. It’s called Brownian motion, named for the Scottish botanist who discovered it. Water looks clear because the collisions average out to a uniform whole. It’s just one more bit of evidence that nothing is as simple as it looks.
Our job here is simply to enjoy ourselves. What an unimaginable thing. All we’re supposed to do is have a good time. Fill up the day with pleasure. Go walking, go snorkeling, pick up shells, read, rest, eat. Amazing.
This morning when we were getting our gear ready to go diving, along the dock came a beautiful little shining girl, her dress waving and her bare feet padding on the wooden boards, with hardly enough weight to make the dock vibrate. Black Beauty, who was bent over a pile of weight belts, stopped what he was doing and walked back along the dock to meet her. I watched while they had a short conversation and nodded their heads to each other. Then they hugged and she ran back to shore and he returned to finish gathering the diving equipment. “She is my little sister,” he explained. “Some question she had of me.”
“How old is she?” I asked.
“Oh, she is nine, she is a big girl now.”
“And she goes to school?”
“Well, no, not now,” he said in his voice that always sounds like singing. “Her schoolteacher went away and now they have no school for her.”
“No school? Don’t you have laws? I mean, don’t you have to go to school till a certain age?”
“Well, yes,” he said, slowly as always. “But if there is no teacher, there is no school. Here on this side of the island only four children have been in the school in the one
room. To get a teacher to come across the island for only four little ones, this is hard.”
“You mean her education will just stop?”
“Oh, sometimes she can go to the school on the other side. Sometimes when I go across the island for business. Then she can ride along. Or my mother teaches her at home.”
“What’s your sister’s name?”
“Celestine.”
“What does your mother teach her? At home?”
“Oh”—and with this he carefully placed two air tanks in the stern of the boat—“they sew; my mother teaches her about sewing. And embroidery.”
My stomach got a horrible feeling, like a house collapsing in it. A beautiful nine-year-old girl whose education stops because there’s no teacher.
The patois the islanders speak is so gracious. It’s restful. The human voice at ease with itself.
When Black Beauty’s hand with its gleaming ring pointed downward to my left I looked in time to see the top side of a vast flat something, dark with gold spots, as it fluttered out of the sand and soared over our heads looking like a waving velvet blanket, white on the underside. Its wingspan was enormous. Sydney imitated its wavy motion with his hand and I imitated his. A real underwater
conversation. Later, back in the boat, he showed it to me in Sandy’s fishwatching book. “This is the ray, this spotted eagle ray. That was a big one down there, near two meters across the wings.” Most beautiful English I ever heard in my life.
On day 1, I went out in the boat with the divers and snorkeled. I watched Daddy and Patrice heading down with Sydney and the other grownups. For a while I could follow them completely by their streams of bubbles, which got bigger in coming up toward the top. Then the clusters of bubbles all crowded together and I lost track of them, so I snorkeled around carrying the waterproof fish book with me. One grownup from the boat wasn’t scuba diving, so we went around together. We saw sea fans and brain coral and little fish in all gypsy colors. Day 2,1 had a different grownup with me, and we counted 11 kinds of fish, including three rock beauties that look like yellow and black Volkswagens. Day 3, I couldn’t go because I was sunburned and I had to stay behind, wearing a T-shirt. A girl named Celestine was here and she went for a long walk on the beach with my mother and me for 4 miles. We saw 2 dead sea urchins drying out on the sand. Celestine showed me how to pull the dead needles out and have a beautiful shell left over, all decorated with dots in patterns of 5’s. It stinks from being dead, and she showed me where to take it to the kitchen so they would clean it up for me to take back home. Celestine lives here all the time, the whole year, ever since she was born. She is only 9. Day 4, I got to go snorkeling out at the reef
again but with a T-shirt on. I dove down way deep just holding my breath and Sydney told me afterward I went down 2 and a half fathoms. I saw the MOST AMAZING fish which is a Queen angelfish of all gold and blue, more than 1 foot long and it is flirty-smily just like a queen. I got stung by fire coral on my leg the same day Patrice had the same thing happen to her. Day 5, it still itched. We all got my mother to come snorkeling out at the reef with us and you should have seen her face when she found out how deep down Daddy and Patrice go. She was scared for a while and climbed back in the boat, but I was convincing to her because we were going home the next day. She got back down the ladder and I was her snorkeling guide, sometimes I even held her hand and we saw a complete school of blue tangs which I showed her the name of in the fish book. Their young ones are bright yellow. Tangs are some of the many fish that are tall like a bicycle wheel and very thin. We also saw a trumpetfish who stands on its head.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. I have never seen such wonders all at once. I don’t know of anything in human experience to equal this underwater world, the neighborhood of staghorn coral and sea fans waving to and fro, the community of elegant fish, graceful fish, cute fish, funny fish. Huge fish, tiny fish. Fast fish, slow fish. And colors. Enough colors to keep anybody happy. Not since childbirth have I had such a sense of miracle.
It’s too bad we have to leave this place. This is what you might call a perfect spot on earth.
When we’d had our last dive, I walked back along the dock with Sydney and a tangle of regulators and tanks. I tried to thank him for the most fun I could remember ever having. “I just never saw anything like this. All that life going on down there on the reef. Thanks for a great adventure,” I said.
“It is my pleasure, surely. Will you come back?”
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes.” My mind made a leap.
“Somebody
has to teach in that one-room school.”
He smiled his radiant smile. “You will do that?”
The idea had surprised me, coming out like that. “Maybe,” I said.
“We would like that,” he said. “If you come back here, we will dive again; the reef is very large.”
I wrapped my cleaned-up sea urchin shell in 2 socks to take home with me. And I’m taking 2 conch shells and a whole collection of smaller shells. I wonder if all my friends have gone to the ice skating rink every
single
day of vacation like they said they would. There’s no radio here. There might be whole new songs by the time we get back, and I won’t know any of them.
We had to let twenty-four hours elapse between our last dive and getting on the airplane. The reason is in physics. When we’re underwater, pressure from the water above us causes us to breathe in more nitrogen than we would up top. The nitrogen goes into all of our body cells. If you come off a dive and then get on an airplane, when you enter reduced air pressure as the plane rises, the nitrogen wants to come out of the body cells fast, and can become bubbles in the bloodstream. Waiting twenty-four hours allows the lungs to expel the extra nitrogen more slowly. In scuba, the rules are all based on physics. They make sense. How many things in life can you say that about?
So, on our last afternoon on the island I watched Black Beauty take a boat full of people and equipment out to the reef, and I snorkeled alone and thought about my life.
And this is the way it looked:
The way I lived back home, the laborious, repetitive, stifling sameness of it, suddenly revealed itself. Keep getting an education so you can get a job so you can pay your bills and keep busy till you get old and die.
I like physics and I like research and I like to help people, so I’ve spent lots of time in high school competing for scholarships to college. I would do the same for medical school or another graduate school. Even if I didn’t end up in medical school, I’d work and study nearly seven days a week, year after year, to qualify to compete with other highly qualified people for research fellowships. By the time I’m thirty, I might be getting to do the work I want to do.
For what? For a world that’s so corrupt that even the
people in charge stand around scratching their heads wondering how to manage us?
In a whole week on the island I haven’t seen television, heard a telephone, seen a headline or a computer, tasted junk food, seen or heard or smelled a car, or thought about a movie.
No wonder my body and mind have felt so at ease.
I finned the length of the dock slowly, watched the school of little squid that lived underneath it, finned my leisurely way east, parallel to the shore.
I suddenly thought about the possibility that I’d never see another gleaming butterfly fish in my whole life. It brought tears to my eyes.
At home, my dad begins his day on the exercise machine and ends it at the computer. My mom puts on her makeup on her way to work, while she drives the car. We have two cars so that both Mom and Dad can go to their jobs. In our home we have four phones, two TV sets with remote controls, one VCR, one computer, one microwave, two toasters, a food processor, a blender, a dishwasher, a clothes washer and dryer, an oil furnace, three blow-dryers. And those are just the things on the surface.
I feel perfectly fine without the clutter of things that were daily custom a week ago. We all feel fine. I haven’t see Mom and Dad so relaxed since I can remember. They’ve been late to breakfast three times.
The exquisite balance of the reef is one of the most compelling things. The fish, the coral, the food chain, the age of it. The stability. For more than 500 million years it’s been building, and it’s one thing the human species hasn’t destroyed yet. The island, too. Not spoiled.
I turned over on my back and floated, legs and arms outstretched.
The whole discombobulated, noisy world we left a week ago has stopped mattering to me. As if it had just slipped away. I could walk away from it and not miss a thing. My friends and family could come and visit me for vacations, to get themselves back to normal.
My first choice would be not to go back at all, but I’m opting for my second choice: Go back home, graduate, pack up my things, and let the university know I want to delay entrance, maybe for a year or two. Come back to the island as soon as I can, with my savings to get started on.
I’ll bet they’d hire me to be the tutor at the one-room school. They just couldn’t call me an official teacher. Four children. Reading, writing, math, science, field trips. I could do it.
I’ll write to the university: “I don’t feel that I could sustain my focus at the university, and so with regret I am returning”—No, “declining”—No, “refusing”— “I feel that the university’s trust in me would be misplaced at this time, and I am returning the”—“I don’t want the scholarship, I don’t want to go to college. Instead, I want to scuba dive and teach four children in a one-room school so their education doesn’t stop before they’re ten years old.” What if I just came out and said it like that?
I should have known this was too good to be true. Patrice has lost her mind. She wants to throw away her university scholarship and live on this island somehow, doing something, existing in some way that I just utterly don’t understand. She seems to have an idealized view of
a tropical paradise that’s going to make life perfect, or something. I can’t comprehend any of it.
I sit here on the terrace, under the thatched roof, looking out at the water, and wondering how in the world I’m supposed to know how to cope with this one. Nobody ever teaches you how to be a mother.
Patrice wants to come and live on this island and she says it’s because she wants to be the tutor to Celestine in the one-room school. But it’s really because she wants Sydney to be her boyfriend. When they were talking on the dock beside the whole bunch of Scuba tanks I saw the way she was. She was all ooey-gooey-looking, not her normal-looking face. Her whole body was standing different, with a mermaidy girlfriend look.