Certified

Vladi and I signed up for dive lessons.  It was all very exciting, a step up, so to speak, to the adventure world of adulthood.  We would get a scuba license that would allow us to dive anywhere in the world.  Anywhere.  

The dive shop itself was intriguing, full of gear and charts and diving books.  Going underwater was escape enough, but getting there was exciting, too, and the shop was always filled with people who had been somewhere foreign and exotic, and their talk was of underwater reefs and bamboo bars, run down boats, iguana tacos and woven hammocks.  Vladi and I looked at one another with boyishly foolish grins and eyes on fire.  

The famous diver himself was often there, and just standing in the room with him, we could smell danger and adventure.  He was a deep diver, a cave diver who had explored previously unknown aquifers, swimming from cave to underwater cave through tiny passages in a dark world of stalagtites and stalagmites lit only by his waterproof lamp, proving that there were networks of water below our feet.  Others had died in the effort.  He was here to tell the tale.

Vladi and I took the six week course, beginning each night in a small classroom where we learned the physics of gases, learned how they could swell in your bloodstream and cause paralysis or death, learning how to read decompression tables in order to avoid The Bends.  Then we would gear up to enter the pool where we were taught how to share our air with another diver in case something went wrong, how to take off our tanks and put them back on, to remove our masks and then replace them and clear them of water.  

Preparing is dreaming if you are romantic, of course, and often the best part.  Those nights spent in eight feet of water lit by the broken rays of the pool's cold lights, listening to the tapping and pinging of the regulator giving rise to the metallic song of rising bubbles, you could imagine yourself anywhere.  Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, floating without effort, flitting forth with the small wave of a hand.  And afterwards at Vladi's house, sitting on soft couches, eating and drinking and talking of where we would go, where we would dive, what we would see, wrapped in the soft velvet blanket of imagination and daring.  

Finally, the class was over and all that was left was to make our open water dives.  There would be two, one in a big, clear lake in town, then one at the beach.  

That Saturday at the lake, we dove for the first time in daylight.  We performed for instructors everything we had done in the pool, then were left to swim about and explore.  Vladi and I dropped to the sandy bottom fifteen feet below us, sitting still so that the fish would come to swim around us, looking up to where the sun shone, a dim outline casting a hundred pillars of emerald light.  

Sunday would be our last dive, our last test, but Vladi could not go, having something to do with his parents and his sister, so he arranged with the school to be tested with another class in a few weeks.  I could not wait, so I drove over alone.  It felt odd that day going without Vladi, less exciting somehow, or maybe a bit more frightening.  There was the beach I'd been to a hundred times with my parents over the years, but transformed somehow, and I felt a little sadness and nostalgia and longing.  

Once everyone had arrived, we huddled on the beach to put on our equipment, then we swam out through the surf, beyond the break where the water cleared a little, and went through the test once again.  But the day was windy and the water was murky, the currents strong, so once we had finished performing, we were shepherded back to the beach.  And quickly, it was over.  We were through.  Everyone had passed the test, but there was little fanfare, for it was chilly, and soon everyone climbed back into their cars.  They were gone.  I was alone.  

The dive over, I drove home, and then to Tommy's to see if he wanted to do something.  I wanted to brag a little, just to feel the power of the thing, for what was it worth if not to inspire envy in others?  I had done it and others had not.  It was an accomplishment.  But when Tommy opened the door, he told me something was wrong.  My mother had called, he said.  My father had been in a bad car accident, a head on collision, and he was in the hospital.  I needed to go over right away.