Idyl

(from "Postcards from Nowhere" series)

There are things worth mentioning but not worth telling.

Vladi and I kept diving, but we had another bad experience in an underwater cave. At 180 feet, I experienced nitrogen narcosis and didn't know up from down. We calculated our decompression times wrong and only caught our mistake just before we dove. We decided to try reef diving instead.

We would drive hours south to clear blue sub-tropical waters where you could swim to underwater reefs from the beach. The reefs were in shallow water, never more than thirty feet, so a tank of compressed air would last us forever. One windy day, we swam out to a second reef beyond the first. We stayed down a long time, and when we came up, the surface of the water was covered by Portuguese Man of Wars. We were wearing full wet suits, so we hadn't been stung, but it was spooky swimming back through the dark purple floats and their long, dangerous tentacles.

We took a trip to the Keys and rented a room in an old hotel on the Atlantic Ocean built around a little cove surrounded by palm trees and coral sand. It was like something out of a romantic movie.

One night, my father told me that "Jack Lestow" was on television at nine.

"Jacques Cousteau, dad. I know."

"That's what I said," he laughed. "Jack Lestow."

That night, Cousteau and his crew dove just hours away form my house with the giant manatees. The next weekend, Vladi and I would go.

The river ran into the Gulf of Mexico and was crystal clear as indicated by its name. We rented a little fishing boat at an old, cracker fishing camp close to where where the river entered the salt water, and there were hundreds of thousands of fish. Millions. We rode slowly past the occasional homes and river shacks until we were far from things and found a hole of deeper water and dropped the anchor. Herons and egrets and ibises of every kind wades along the shoreline. It was winter and the air was cooler than the water. Fish gathered at every rocky outcrop. We found a deep hole filled with larger fish and tiny blind caverns a few feet deep. Vladi and I were both biology majors and when we surfaced, we'd talk about the lack of color in the fish, about thermoclines and haloclines pointing to the places where the fish would gather. And then, while we were floating on the surface gabbing, something bit swam slowly by. It was like a VW bug. There it was--a MANATEE!. And though it was why we had come, each of us hesitated, waiting on the other.

"They can't hurt you, right?"

"I guess not."

Slowly, together, we dropped below the surface and followed the giant sea cow along its herbivorous way, keeping our distance and watching it eat. Closer, we saw the deep scars that ran across its back, victim of an outboard motor. Closer still, we saw the barnacles that clung to its skin. We could see the little hairs that stuck out oddly all over its body. Then Vladi reached out and touched it. The manatee did nothing. I touched it, too, felt the warm blooded softness of its skin in the cold water. Then, like pilot fish, we kept it company as it drifted in the current.

That was the last time Vladi and I dove together. He was going away to another school. That idyl had ended.