Joan Groves: The Last Island

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

Time only passes when you have a reference to motion in your life. There was no reference to motion in my life other than the near-death experience that was changing into a death experience.

What, time’s up here. Now, up to the next safety stop.

The gas exchange had taken place. I freed myself from the line. Very slowly I ascended up the line to the next safety stop. Here I would hang and bleed the extra gas pressure from my body. The extra pressure had to be breathed out in exhausting exhales or explode into a foam of untold trillions of bubbles in my blood at the surface.

I simply wanted to get out of the water. The temptation was there to simply ignore the thoughts and go with the will.

What harm would it be this once ?

I knew the answer.

Death.

I kept thinking.

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 .

You have come this far. This is no time and this is no place to surrender to stupidity. Keep it simple and just keep repeating your mantra .

I thought.

It has brought you here. The numbers, the numbers will bring you home. The numbers would bring order to the chaos of the Deep and cut the strings of fate .

I thought.

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.

The numbers nulled, it was time to surface and exit the water—the hateful water. It, the water, had exhausted me but I had survived its innate natural will.

Upon the surface, I turned over upon my back. There was no will in my spirit; gone was the math in my brain and there was no energy in my muscles. I was a blob of gelatinous matter floating on the film of the hydrosphere and nothing more.

The gear of steel and rubber, the gear of numbers, charts, and slates was torn from my body, and it fell and landed where it would. Some landed here, some landed there, and some, because of the force of the rip, returned to the sea.

Does an escaping slave care where the shackles of his enslavement land as he runs toward his freedom?

Finally, on the diamond-cut surface of the fiberglass deck I plopped down into a mass of spent life.

It rested beside me. It hurt too much to look upon it.

It rested beside me. It hurt too much to put my hand upon it.

It rested beside me. It hurt too much to think upon it.

There was no more mantra.

I could now breathe here without command.

The Box jellyfish had not taken my breath away. The sea had not taken my breath away. And, I had gotten a last breath in before the season could take my last breath away.

I stretched out. My arms extended from my shoulders perpendicular to my body. My legs crossed one over the other. From space, it would appear that I had been crucified.

They that go down to the sea in ships; that do business in great waters;

These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.

For He commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof.

They mount up to heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble.

They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit’s end.

Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and He bringeth them out of their distress.

He maketh the storm a calm, so that those thereof are still.

I prayed.

The new rising sun began to warm my blood but I was not able to produce even a muscle twitch. I knew that my blood needed water and food but my body was not able do anything other than lie in the new light.

After all this, this is how I am going to die.

In the water, there were numbers for and of my salvation but here, here, on this plastic plane feet away was fresh drinkable water and enough high quality food calories to sustain me for days and I was glued to this floor too weak to move.

What the—

I felt the passionate rhythm of my beating heart.

I am no disheartened, washed-up, and beached jellyfish on the shore without numbers and without hope.

Sure, it had been fun to lie lazily there on the deck spineless and without will or desire— but that was not the deal.

Thinking back on what my father had said so many times to me as a child, I heard him again:

“A man is what a man does, son.”

And, thinking what my mother had often said to me as a child, I knew what to do:

“Always look the devil in the eye, son.”

I looked upon it and arose from the deck to eat and drink—joyfully.

I was encrusted with sea salt but worse, I was enveloped in the smell of the sea. There are no landmarks on the sea surface, unless you count each wave a landmark but that makes no sense. It always seemed so very strange to me that the much curved un-demarcated surface of the sea could be elucidated onto a plane on a piece of plain paper with utmost definition.

11°22.260 ′ N x 142°35.589 ′ E was the compass destination. Of the closest land there was none unless you counted the sea floor that was 35,827 feet below the surface tension at the surface of the last water molecules of the surface sea.

I opened the navigational charts and made all things ready.

Captain Jean-Michele Adamah on the LaCross in 1612 first floated over this point and named the waters, Les Rouges Eaux du Pacifique . His thinking was that the ocean was bleeding. Captain Adamah in the age of enlightenment was in the dark about algal blooms. As the Global Ecology and Oceanography teams at the GEOLAB now knew, harmful algal blooms producing the red waters of this area of the Pacific were caused by the heterotrophic dinoflagellate, Pfiesteria, and related Pfiesteria Complex Organisms that released Saitoxin, Domoic Acid, and other generated brews of toxic death. The Red Tide was a universal tide of death. Perhaps, all the blood in the water was what the captain saw under his ship.

In 1781, the British National Geographic Society, in order to correct this misunderstanding—and to correct all things French—deemed it their proper duty to give the waters an English name. The name given to the area was the Red Pacific Waters. Much neater, more reasonable, and not French, were all excellent reasons to rewrite history—indeed.

In 1856 the sailing American missionary and thoroughly anti-British evangelist, the Reverend and Good Doctor Adam David Moses, renamed the area the Red Sea of the Pacific for the United States Navy on his third charting expedition of the South Seas.

Today NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association, and the AGU, the American Geophysical Union, have taken all the color from the sea and call this area not by the surface waters, but by the unique spot it has on the planet.

I thought about its name as I moved through the waters toward my destination.

It is the end of the line of the alphabet of named names and now, on the map I am navigating by, is called the simplest of all last-named names .

The spot I was heading for was The Z Hole.

What could be more colorless, what could be more meaningful, and what could be truer. The Z Hole was at best, elite in simplicity, truth, and description.