When you’re underwater the whole world seems to rinse away. It’s just you, the moving tide, and the millions of organisms rushing around your body. Underwater, you can come face-to-face with your greatest fears, or get in touch with your deepest ambitions, sometimes both in the same day.
I arrived in Roatan, Honduras on Feb. 15, 2012. A prison had just burned down on the mainland; inmates and visitors left for dead, but everyone here on the island of Roatan was stuck in an hourglass, simply watching the sand and everything that moved it. The country stood, poised to break out in rebellion, but we were just a bunch of high schoolers who didn’t really care. Our only reminder being men with massive machine guns standing at the gates of our scuba diving resort.
We had left snowy, cold Virginia to trade Uggs for flippers and work in underfunded bilingual schools. Most of us had signed on for the fun -- the promise of a peaceful beach vacation with maybe a little culture mixed in. I came to cross number 27 off my bucket list, swim with a whale shark. With little concern to the Honduran political state, I babble on for months to my mom and dad about finding the biggest fish in the world, possibly brushing up against its black sun-bleached speckled body and maybe take an awesome picture, like so many of the adventurous people before me.
There was only one thing that stood between me and my shark, my ears. Operated on twice, my tiny ear canals can barely hear, let alone clear air as you travel down into the depths of a coral reef. I knew right off the bat, that it wasn’t going to be easy to find my shark, but I was as determined as a rock rolling down a hill to get under that Caribbean tide.
My first dive of the first day went well; I had a patient buddy, who waited for me to descend the line, never very far way. We ended up in a cloud a jellyfish whose stings felt like a limb going to sleep, leaving red welts in their wake. But we merrily pushed on, practicing speaking without words. Diving, though social, is done in the solitary of one’s mind. You can’t communicate verbally or read someone's body language, but rather you can only decipher an unclear abundance of hand signals. I signed ears, and we surfaced shortly after.
The second time I was not so lucky. I was paired with our resident high school burnout. A girl with dreads, piercings and a good sense of fun, who lacks all common sense. We got in the water, and she almost immediately disappeared, leaving me to fend for myself. I tried to descend the line, growing more panicked as others, quicker than me, were already near the bottom. My partner, 20 feet below me, waved and then turned and swam out of sight. I was stuck on the line, unable to clear my ears, while the others were slowly leaving me to go find my shark.
Panicking underwater is strictly forbidden. It is a waste of air, causes unnecessary fogging of the goggles and can escalate quickly, giving the diver a sense of vertigo. At this time, however, as I watched my group slowly slipping away from me I began to be tempted to lose it. No one had noticed I was still on the line, I was now not only alone but in a dangerous position. I decided to follow the group, to stave off my panic. Hopefully I would catch to guide’s eye, or perhaps my partner’s drug infused brain would finally wonder where I was.
Approximately 20 feet above the crowd I only had my own thoughts as company, and I began to process far too many feelings. I thought about all the poor prisoner's families, now without a loved one, of the machine guns guarding our tiny bungalows and of a fiery prison, finally collapsing. I was thinking so hard I didn’t realize that I had caught up with the group, directly above them, I had made a major error.
Air, when blown out of a regulator comes out in large bubbles, and makes one of the most satisfyingly loud puffy noises. The more the bubbles go up the more they break apart into millions of fizzing whirling schools. I was caught in a cloud of them, being pushed upwards too quickly. I try to force my way back down, out of the cloud, away from my group. I end up alone. Not even near the reef we were viewing, floating in the clear blue. Then it happened, just out of the corner of my eye, I saw it, a black speckled mass.
My deepest ambition had found me in a haze of panic. I sit and stare at the whale shark. Absorbing its sheer mass. I then surfaced, unable to find my friends to tell them my tale. I find the boat instead. Our captain, sitting on the edge of the boat, slaps his feet gently against the rising waves. He looks up confused as to why I was back. I start chattering in rapid, broken Spanish trying to communicate what I saw.
