The rain ran down my windshield as I listened to the engine cool. The rivulets formed and fled like my thoughts. Pain flips the circuit breakers of memory. Bulgaria is home to my earliest ones. My family spent seven months in a Ramada Inn in Plovdiv when I was four-years-old.
In the basement of the hotel, there was a pool. That is where I drowned.
I looked across the parking lot and watched the cars speed by. Aurora Avenue, in north Seattle, is notorious for helping people who want to numb their pain. Guns, drugs, and sex are the balms of choice. I didn’t see any evidence of those as I locked my truck and walked into the store. My heart raced for a different reason. I was there to buy a mask, fins, and snorkel.
My company has a dive team. Employees do minor repairs and assessments of our tugboats, checking a drive unit after a log strike, cutting line from a prop, that sort of thing. There are strict rules regarding commercial diving, which is anytime someone is paid. Whenever money changes hands, things get complicated, as evidenced by rolling gunfights on Aurora Ave. One of those rules is that there must be at least three people on every commercial dive team. Thanks, OSHA. When I pointed out that our company only had two certified employees on ours, I was voluntold to get certified.
“Are you excited for your class?” The man behind the counter asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“At the risk of sounding uncreative, the breathing underwater part bothers me.”
“Let me show you the pool,” he said as he finished ringing me up. He led me to the other side of the store and pointed through a window. “That, is the shallow end.” His need to point that out to me made me reassess how I present myself to the world.
“You’ll start there and learn several skills before you progress to the deep end.”
Looking at the pool, I had a name for the devouring-pit that had been gnawing at my gut for several days. It was fear. I had not planned on telling him this, partly because I hadn’t connected the dots until that moment, but I opened my mouth and these words came out, “I drowned in a pool when I was four. I had to be rescued and brought back.”
“Well,” he paused. “We are professionals, but we aren’t psychologists.”
He reminded me that I needed to finish the online training before my class. The material seemed excessive. It showed how to remove and replace your mask, use an alternative air source, and how to signal out of air when yours gets turned off, all at 60 feet underwater. None of those were skills I was interested in mastering, thank you very much. But as one hour of training stretched into six, it began to dawn on me that I might not have a choice.
Saturday we started in the classroom. The instructor asked if there were any questions.
“Will we need to demonstrate all the skills in the online training?”
“Yes.”
Gulp.
We geared up. There were four students and two instructors. We knelt and did a few exercises. I struggled. I inhaled water and came up choking. An instructor swapped out my regulator and back down we went. After a few more skills, including breathing off my buddy’s alternative air source, known as an octopus, for its color and length, it was time to slide into the deep end. The pool went down, down, down, about thirty years by my estimate, and at the bottom was four-year-old me.
The two people on my left were almost to the deep end. It did not help my ego that one of them was a seventh-grader. My buddy inched down to my right. My yellow fins had not crossed the blue line that demarcated the shallow end.
Everything in my body screamed, “NO! This is a BAD idea!” I scooted forward. The devouring-pit engulfed me. I choked on water and shot to the surface.
One of the instructors, Jenn, swam up to me. “Take some deep breaths. Do you want to try again?”
What I wanted to do was to kick off my fins and bolt.
I went under and slid down the ramp, sucking in water. Halfway down I bailed, kicked to the surface, and clung to the wall.
Jenn popped up.
“Talk to me.”
My voice sounded foreign. It was shaky and high pitched. My hands slipped off the wall and trembled. I had become terror. I tried to explain that the problem was me. That I was freaked out and choking on water. She asked if I wanted to continue.
The plurality of my being protested loudly, but there was another part of me, quieter, smaller, that said, do you want to run from this fear or confront it?
I told her I was worried about holding up the class. An attempt to outsource the decision.
“We have two instructors. If you’re willing to try, I will work with you.”
The part of me that was in charge nodded, much to my chagrin.
Back to the shallow end. I looked at the clock with the kind of glance I used to cast at the timepiece in the plywood mill on summer nights, hoping to be saved by the bell. The clock in the pool marked time at the same rate as the the one on the graveyard shift — only about twenty minutes had passed out of a five-hour class.
I stayed in the pool. So did my fear. My muscles remained tense and my body began to ache; my calves cramped from kneeling in the shallows. Jenn ticked off skills on her slate as I did them. In the deep end, I watched Jenn’s blue painted nails, move toward me and back toward her, pacing my breathing, like a barn door in the wind, getting me to stop hyperventilating.
At the end of the day, I managed to accomplish everything in dive one. The other three students completed all the tasks in dive one, as well as dives two, and three.
Still, I decided to count it as a success. The part of me that wanted to berate myself as a failure was the same part of me that had wanted to quit. Staying in the pool had robbed that part of me of its voice, instead of the other way around. You only get to have one internal voice.
As we become more comfortable and confident, we do not become less fearful. Instead, we become braver. But, convincing myself to go back the next day was going to be more difficult than the first; I had been initiated and understood how freighted I was.
People talk of baptism by fire. Well, call me traditional, but this was a baptism by water.
End Part One.
Since some of you liked the bookshelf picture, here is my desk with my mask/snorkel and one of the regulators I’ve been using.
Thank you for running your eyes over this! There will be at least one more part to this story. Next week though, I think I’ll continue with the pattern of sharing another Bookend, but there will be some overlap with the theme of this post. I hope to see you then.
Great ending line!
Getting to the deep end most always starts in the shallow end.