Joan Groves: The Last Island

The light spread out in front of me like a plate.

The bottom, where?

Check the two-atmosphere safety tanks first—fore and aft. Good.

Take a breath. Hey, that’s funny.

Keep your mind on the dive. Check your instrument. Go over the dive plan on your slates, again. Practice relaxed breathing. Focus, focus, refocus.

Looks good. Exchange tank one for tank two.

Good exchange. Okay, let’s go.

Let’s go. Tie it here. Make it good and tight now. Make it sure. Make it secure. Looks good. One more pull. Okay. Let’s go. One more pull now.

Keep your mind on the dive. Check your instrument. Go over the dive plan in your mind again. Practice relaxed breathing. Focus, focus, refocus.

There were old, but not rotting, guidelines all about in the area from all the other previous divers—nylon does not rot. Some of the guide cords had sessile life forms lodging upon the free rental surface area of the cord.

There was a stroke of insight to this line. The ugly pink florescent color will be of untold aid.

Why am I talking to myself?

Looking at my dive watch, the dive was asymmetrical. The first half of the dive was too quick and now into the second part of the dive I had fallen behind in time.

This will not do.

At this rate of speed I would in all certainty run out of the needed calories to keep my body temperature steady, to keep my muscles functional, and to have enough warm blood to feed my brain. If I increased my activities, I would become exhausted well short of completion.

A horse is a horse, of course, of course—except if the horse is Mr. Ed! Why am I singing the tune to Mr. Ed?

Keep your mind on the dive. Check your instruments. Go over the dive plan on your slates, again. Practice relaxed breathing. Focus, focus, refocus .

Just breathe. Just keep breathing. Just keep breathing normally. Just breathe. You know the drill.

There it was, the opening into the U-Boat. It went from black to what black imagined black looked like when black was dreaming. It was colder. And the water had much less motion.

I swam into the hole up to my shoulders, trying not to ensnare myself in the razor rust that was once hard steel. The cone of light was faint and dim in the shadowy darkness. Nothing in the internal space could be seen clearly. All the light illuminated was the densely floating plankton that was suspended there.

What reason could I make up for quitting now?

Who could blame me?

A swim-through, maybe, but I hated diving when and where there was something between me and the surface.

Finally inside. I got into a knee-rest position and reached out.

Use only the tip ends of your fins. You do not want to kick up the sediment layer and the suspended materials and make misery miserable do you?

I assumed the dive position and reached into the polluted and fouled water.

A shark!

I had just reached out and fingered the dorsal fin of a shark. I did an instantaneous calculation and, using my arm as a meter stick, it, the shark, was ten to twelve feet in length and I, my belly, was just above his eyes.

What the—!

In a U-Boat on the head of a shark.

The weak light revealed it was a Ginglymostoma cirratum . It was a harmless nurse shark that was just resting in the U-Boat.

Using just the last inch of my dive fins, I swam over and past the still sea monster and into the belly of the steel beast, all the time making sure my guideline was secure and freely unwinding behind me. Following it back was my only salvation. Deeper and deeper I swam through a solution that was ancient sea water, suspended plankton, spent lubricants, and atomized human beings with ever-decreasing illumination and falling ambient temperature.

Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care. Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care.

Shut-up.

Keep your mind on the dive. Check your instrument. Go over the dive plan on your slates, again. Practice relaxed breathing. Focus, focus, refocus.

Just breathe. Just keep breathing. Just keep breathing normally. Just breathe. You know the drill.

Pull on the dive cord.

What was that line?

Oh, yeah. “Little by little we go far.”

Shut up.

I did not know, in truth, where I was. I could have turned around, I could have drifted one way or the other, or maybe I was swimming in drowning circles. I could not use JDNLR. JDNLR had so often saved me from disaster and misfortune. When it came to a final choice, “just does not look right” was the truth of my decision-making, always. But, here and now JDNLR was unusable. It was at the point that the hairs on the back of my neck and the contraction of my bowels were the GPS inputs to my dive and my survival.

Wish I had Mr. Shark’s internal guidance system that’s for sure. Yeah, but Mr. Shark does not have my dive tables .

The thought made me laugh so hard I almost choked.

“I bought you a brand new mustang, 1964. Mustang Sally, you better slow your mustang down...”

Keep your mind on the dive. Check your instrument. Go over the dive plan on your slates, again. Practice relaxed breathing. Focus, focus, refocus.

Just breathe. Just keep breathing. Just keep breathing normally. Just breathe. You know the drill.

Pull on the dive cord .

And, there it was: a darker shade of dark. I had made it through the U-Boat. If I could have breathed a sigh of relief, I would have breathed a sigh of relief. But, down, it was always down deeper and into the stain that had been the black slaver. Then it happened. In a spontaneous moment, I lost every thought and devolved into a Rhipidistian , a lobe-finned fish, and in that crawling “S” motion that is in our spines as an inheritance of motion from our chordate ancestors, I descended. I cashed another inheritance check of violent action in order to collect it and thoughtlessly make the exit from the black and into the dim.

I had collected maybe thousands of fish in gill nets and there was only one outcome for all those fish: death.

But, here I was attached to a line underwater as if I was caught in a gill net. I was not hoping because underwater hoping is hopeless. I had exchanged my spent tanks for other full tanks and had attached myself by means of steel clamps to this survival line. The calculations had been done and checked and rechecked so it would be the science and the math of good thinking that would be my salvation. All I could do was pray that my science and math was correct.

It was in my goodie bag and lovingly I caressed it.

Check the zipper, check the lock, check the goodie bag, and make sure it is attached to you. Now, hang here and rest .

I knew that I had to just hang there like what I was—a dead weight.

It was up to my body to make the physiological gas exchange, now. The gases that had allowed me to survive the dark were toxic in the light and the gases that were life-giving in the light were toxic in the dark. I had to become desaturated from the gases of the dark and become saturated with the gases of the light.

It had all been calculated before the dive.

Now, just hang here until the numbers do their work.

Past exhaustion, I had no physical needs. Past exhaustion, I had no mental capabilities. Past exhaustion, I had no spiritual pleas.

Was this the state of a fish entrapped in a gill net?

Keep your mind on the dive. Check your instrument. Go over the dive plan on your slates, again. Practice relaxed breathing. Focus, focus, refocus .