Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

He teaches me how to clear my ears. Not the way you’d blow out through your nose like during the pressure change of an airplane ride, but by moving the jaw to release air through the eustachian tubes, contracting the cheeks, or moving the back of the tongue upward like a lever.

On the surface, I feel the air move around my head, a gentle clearing of pressure, and as we go deeper, the pressure intensifies until I manage to pop out the air.

I practice for days until Nesto says I’m ready to try it in the open water.

I trust him, and want to try, not because he’s prepared me with a safety protocol, to prevent blacking out below and at the surface, sinking, or swallowing water; not even because I want to go deeper into the sea; but because I want to go deeper toward him.

On Saturdays and Sundays, the waters off the coast of the Florida Keys become a liquid turnpike, filled with weekend boaters, fat-bellied fisherman down from the mainland, those who own second homes lining canals, or people with trailers parked on campgrounds.

Nesto prefers to go out to the blue during the week or when it’s cloudy and the waterways aren’t so congested. But on this day, we decide to hitch a ride with Lolo even though he’s taking a group of scuba divers out, two married couples overloaded with expensive gear Melly convinced them to buy at Lolo’s shop.

Nesto and I keep to ourselves at the front of the boat. He drops coconut rinds and berries into the water, ebbós to both Yemayá and Olokun of the deep, for protection once he goes under. He hands me a few berries so I can make my own offering, and rather than let them turn to mush in my hands, I toss them to the waves.

I’ve never had trouble forcing hope, even when there was none to speak of. But faith has always seemed much more dangerous.

I watch the Atlantic break along the side of the boat as awareness pushes through me of its dark, unknowable depths.

I think of baby Shayna, see her small golden body fall through the air, hear her soft bones shattering as her body carves its way through the water down to the bottom of the sea.

How is it that one baby thrown to the water was saved and the other, thrown off the bridge in the same way, died?

Was it really a matter of winds and currents or could there have been greater forces at work?

I wonder if it’s true when Nesto says I’ve inherited the debts for both a life saved and a life taken.

The divers take longer to suit up. Nesto and I are already in our wetsuits, of a lesser buoyancy, so that we can sink with less added weight on our belts. I’ve got my own suit now. Lolo cut me a good deal on a secondhand one at his shop. It had a tear on the thigh but Nesto patched it with some neoprene and duct tape. They lent us low-volume masks and long-blade fins too. Nesto goes in first, and sets up the float and the rig line while Lolo and his assistant tend to the scuba divers. I jump in and meet Nesto on the line.

We start by floating together, hands on the rig, adjusting to the dips and falls of the waves, the coolness of the water. For real divers, not just those breaking the surface like me, Nesto told me about the mammalian dive reflex — how the farther down one goes, the body enters negative buoyancy and begins to sink in free fall, swallowed by the ocean; the heart rate slows and the blood shifts from the extremities to the center of the diver’s body to feed the organs so the chest won’t collapse. The competitive divers go even deeper, submitting to a meditative and sometimes hallucinatory state as the brain slows down and the lungs compress, fighting the urge to breathe.

Why would anyone subject him or herself to that? I once asked Nesto, but he told me that when I got a taste of the blue, I would understand.

It’s not about the depth. He never agreed with that. It’s not about testing limits. When he was a kid, one of his friends came up from a deep dive bleeding out of his ears and throat, and another boy, trying to beat a friend’s depth, became permanently paralyzed on the right side of his face.

You just want to go deep enough to arrive at that moment when your thoughts stop and all you feel is the water and your heartbeat, he says; you let the ocean possess you, and return to the surface connected to your instincts, enraptured by the mystery of life and of creation.

Even with our suits on, the water is cold, but somehow feels warm, comforting. Nesto guides me through the ventilation patterns as we hang on to the rig and though we don’t say much, he nods and tells me it’s time.

We rehearsed the steps aloud on the boat. After a succession of meditative warm-up breaths to first relax the mind, which Nesto says also burns oxygen, all our energy connected, until the final deep inhale, when I’ll pierce the membrane of the surface to go under for my downward turn, my pulling myself down the rope, which he set with a weighted plate at the five-meter mark. I have to focus on the constant clearing of my ears, or else the pressure of water that is eight hundred times denser than air will be unbearable. Before I know it, I’m down, touching the plate at the mark, and turning back up to the surface while Nesto watches me through his mask.

Nesto moves the plate farther down at each interval as I rest on the rig, regaining my breath. But as I try again, reaching for the fifteen-meter mark, the weight of the ocean presses against my skull, the clearing of the ears is hard to maintain with each pull down the rope, and I notice, maybe for the first time, the astonishing openness of the ocean from the small space I occupy on the line, neon blue slashed with sugary sunlight.

I see the divers float below me, their attention on schools of fish and a couple of curious stingrays flapping by. It’s an entire world, and I take it all in within a second or two before my body forces me upward, breaking out of the shell of water. I gasp for air in Nesto’s arms and he asks for the safety check to show him I’m okay and responsive.

I understand now why he says that he and his friends took to the ocean as kids because it was the only place they could feel free. Even being limited by their breath and by their human forms wasn’t as limiting as the life that waited for them on land.

I watch Nesto take a few dives himself, dropping under the surface so I can watch through my mask, the ease with which he moves. The conversation he seems to have with himself down there, or with those gods he says take care of him while he’s at their mercy.

He’s told me that at around forty feet, the ocean starts to break open, and instead of pushing you back up to the surface, it pulls you into it and you sink deeper and deeper.

When he’s back on the float, his face creased by pressure lines from his mask, he looks changed, and I wonder if I look changed too.

We don’t say anything. He’s still catching his breath.

I remember he once told me the secret to going deeper is you have to think of the other ocean animals as your companions; you have to believe you’re one of them while never forgetting that you are different and still need to come up for air.

A week later, Lolo lets me join one of his weekend scuba courses. I read the book, do the swimming pool dives with the tank on my back, stuff the BC into my mouth, pass the exam, and complete the certification with some shallow dives with the dive group. Out on the boat, I struggle to get into the water, but once I’m in, with Nesto as my dive buddy, we drop foot by foot under the surface and I watch from a seated position as the ocean lifts its curtains and its creatures come into view.

We descend to see a purposely sunk wreck. Above us, a single loggerhead turtle pushes past, and just behind it, an enormous spotted eagle ray, with its odd face, almost like that of a dolphin, yet winged, with a whipping tail.