To go places no one’s ever gone. To see things no one’s ever seen. That’s the easy answer. Because everyone always asks why you do it. Why you take the risk.
Pressure’s good. I’ve got two air tanks, one mounted to each side. Dive lights are on. Backup dive light is good too. I checked my second regulator before coming in, but it never hurts to check again. All good. I’m not diluting much of the oxygen right now. I’m only at 10 meters. I want to save up on my helium. I still don’t know how deep I’ll be going.
I’m following Miranda’s guide line. I know it’s hers because no one else has ever been here. That’s what I meant before. She drove up to this swampy hole a month ago and, bit by bit, mapped out the cave. Anyone who saw her hop in must have been baffled. No one would think anything was in here. Blue holes are at least blue. This thing is just muck.
Every day she went somewhere no person had gone before. And if I took a turn, veered off the course she set, I would too, I guess. I never cared as much about that as Miranda did. It’s not why I’m here.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
I met Miranda when we got certified for technical diving ten years ago. She was a few years younger than me, but far more experienced. She won me over at our first lunch. It was still early enough that the tedium of our anti-adrenaline, extreme sport hadn’t worn us down yet. One of the guys in the class was a complete douchebag. At lunch, he started wiggling his ears, one after the other in rhythm, asking loudly if anyone else could do it. To my surprise, quite a few of them could. He challenged them to move faster, or match his little ear dances, but no one could keep up. With a grin, he turned to me and said, “Can you imagine what it would be like, to be with a man who has such fine control over his body?”
“Actually,” Miranda spat out, “I think she’d like a man who controls his mouth.”
He didn’t talk again. At least for a few minutes. I made sure to sit next to her when we went back to class.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
Pressure’s good. Just hit 25 meters. Still zero visibility. I can barely see my dive computer. I have to hold it right next to my mask. The guide line is here, though. It’s all I need. And since Miranda put it down, I know I can trust it. I double-check the backup lights again. If the ones on my helmet went out, I’d head straight back to the surface, but I still want to know the backup works.
In recreational diving, you use the buddy system. If something goes wrong, your buddy will help you out. Is your gear on right? Your buddy will double-check. Know your air pressure? Your buddy should be asking you. Broken regulator? Your buddy has a spare. You’ll breathe from the same tank as you resurface.
But technical divers can’t count on each other like that. When you’re squeezing through a two-foot-wide tunnel, and it’s pitch black and one hand is on the guide line, and the other is pushing your detached tanks through a little slit of an opening, you can’t be checking in on someone too. We bring two of everything. We rely on ourselves.
You have to be obsessive about checking in. Anything could go wrong at any moment. The only way to be safe is to never stop checking. Or, at least, that’s the way to be safer. As safe as this ever could be.
It’s not a thrill sport. Not really. It’s why people like that douchey guy don’t stick around long. There are quicker, easier thrills in the world. And they’re all more thrilling than this. Pitch black, silty water, pulling on a rope, foot after murky foot.
For some of us, though, there’s nothing better than this. Even when it’s dark and cramped and there’s nothing to see at all. We’re all trained to work blind. Whenever we had a dive like this, with nothing much to report back, Miranda always said, at least we’re diving. At least we spent some time away from wherever we were.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
Miranda used to be an instructor for recreational divers. That’s how she made her living before going professional with cave diving. When we met, she was teaching an advanced certification course where divers go into deep water for the first time. Deep for beginners, anyway. A normal scuba cert goes to 18 meters, but an advanced one can go to 30. Miranda once dove down to 180, but that’s besides the point. The thing is that your mind can start acting really funny at depth. It’s called nitrogen narcosis. You never know how you’ll respond.
Miranda told me she once led a class where they went down to 30 meters and saw a turtle. It swam up real close to them, and one of the students pulled out his regulator and tried to give it to the turtle. Miranda had to grab the guy’s regulator and shove it in his mouth. She dragged him back up to the surface, and the whole time he kept pulling her arm away, trying to give air to any and all swimmers-by.
I always loved the story. A big, middle-aged man, chasing after a turtle, trying to give it air. Miranda, a young, pretty woman, wrestling the air back into his lungs. It shows both types of kindness at once, the soft kind and the hard kind. Miranda was always good at the hard kind. But you need both. And they aren’t always that different, really.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
35 meters. Pressure’s good. The viz finally opens up. The white limestone walls scatter the light from my flashlight, and it feels bright now. I hit the end of the first guide line, and now the path is horizontal. That’s good. The deeper I have to go, the longer this will take. There’s another guide line, and I start to follow it into the tunnel.
The surface feels so far away. I was going slow on my way down here, but it’s still only been about twenty minutes. Maybe only about six hours since I got the call. But everything up there might as well not exist.
Getting away from everything. That’s part of it too, why we do this. Not that my life is bad. It’s quite good, really. A lot of the time, it’s really good. But it’s not just the bad stuff you want to get away from. I can’t talk about it to most people, not directly, but life can feel so constrained. It isn’t the circumstance I’m in, or the rules of society or anything. I’m talking about life itself. Being this air-breathing, leg-walking, experience-experiencing mammal. No matter how good life is, or perversely, especially when life is really good, I feel this beating pressure all around me. I feel like I’m pushing on the bounds of life, hitting the ceiling. This is all it is. This and no more.
I get the irony. I feel constricted, so what do I do? I put on a suit, cover my eyes with a mask, connect my mouth with an air tank, and squeeze my body through small slits of rock. Taking on the physical constraints gives you access to another world, though. A world of dark depths instead of endless skies. A world with corners and edges where you can rise and fall on a whim. Where it gets so black, you can’t see your own hands.
I detach my air tanks to push them through a narrow slit. I’ve gone through tighter passes, but it does worry me since Miranda is smaller than I am. If these get much tighter, I might not be able to follow.
I squeeze my body through, and the tunnel opens up a little, but not much. There’s a layer of silt on the bottom now, so I’ll have to be careful. One bad kick and it’s a silt out. All that dirt will fly in the air, and I won’t be able to see a thing. It can take days for the visibility to come back, even weeks.
I’ve got Miranda’s guide line in my hand, though, so a silt out wouldn’t be devastating. And even if it took a while for the visibility to clear up, it’s better, I suppose. Better than the things that can’t be undone.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
She and I were on a recovery dive once in Florida. It was a long dive, so we needed a whole team. Miranda and I were support divers, going down partway to bring extra cylinders to the lead diver on his way up. We were floating in the water together, waiting for our staggered entry. I had just started dating Mark back then, and I told her I didn’t know what he found more disconcerting, the fact that a man he had met a few weeks ago died, or that I could so calmly go through my gear checklist after getting the news.
“I tried to explain it was a different kind of caring than he’s used to. That all of us share this thing. That it’s so special and strange, it keeps us together, but that it’s so stark and dangerous, we have to be deliberate and become detached about it. Otherwise, it wouldn’t work. And we wouldn’t be us. It’s hard because he doesn’t know a thing about the water. I don’t think he’s touched the bottom of a pool.”
I thought Miranda would join in on teasing him, but all she said was, “Did you tell him we’d die without this.”
She bobbed on the water in her big dry suit. She looked like a planet with all the air cylinders in orbit around her.
“I don’t think I’d die,” I said. “You know I have a regular job, right? I do other stuff too.”
She saw the people on the surface stirring and grabbed her regulator. “Yeah,” she said, just before putting it in her mouth. “No clue how you do it.”
She got the signal, held her arm up, and drained her BCD of air. I stuck my face in the water and watched her go. After that dive, Miranda’s career really took off. Borneo, South Africa, Mexico, Russia. She went everywhere. She even set a new depth record in Pearson’s Resurgence in New Zealand. I followed all of her posts and read everything she wrote for National Geographic or Outside. She didn’t come home much, but I was building a life of my own here. I made new friends outside of diving, Mark and I got married, bought a house. I kept going in the water. All the time, really. But I didn’t plan all my vacations around it anymore. I got to live that life through Miranda and all her adventures.
Despite Mark’s little jokes, I wasn’t jealous of her. It was enough for me to see it on a screen, to do it all vicariously through her videos and her smiles. But I was still thrilled when he told me she found a project not far from me. She wanted to find the source of a spring, or a resurgence, as she liked to call it. It was a complex system, and no one had bothered to figure it out yet.
I’d finally get to see her in action again. I waited until she got here to tell her I had to take another break from diving. We’d only be able to meet above the water, in the world Miranda thought would kill her.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
I pop out of a tunnel, and now I can see why Miranda kept coming back here. The start of the dive was just a muddy hole and a tight little tunnel. Nothing we’d avoid, but nothing we’d seek out either. But this room…it’s majestic. I can’t quite see the bottom, but it’s at least a hundred feet across. The limestone is shimmering everywhere I shine my light. Somehow, the water is clear as air. It’s like an Italian cathedral, and I’m all the way at the tip top, like an angel.
Miranda would have loved this. She’d have added an hour to her dive to take in this view. I grab the next guide line and get going. I’m not willing to add an hour. Not to this dive.
You can’t just see something beautiful. You have to arrive there too. Physically, emotionally, mentally, it has to unfold. The path you take to beauty changes the beauty you see. Every step you take, or fin you kick, every turn in the path and word that is spoken, and you’re in a new world. If you could somehow tap into my mind and see the same photons I see in this moment, you would see the cavern, you would see the inverted cathedral of limestone dropping endlessly below, but you’d see a different beauty than I do.
Miranda was the first one to see this. She would have had to map out the cave’s entrance, going much more slowly than I did. She’d lay the guide lines and check every little tunnel for a path. It probably took her days to get here, exploring every little crack and turn. She saw a different beauty than me too. Miranda was always good at finding her own beauty.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
When I told her I was pregnant for the first time, I knew she’d be upset. I was all prepared to tell her that having kids wouldn’t mean I’d give up diving. It was a condition I made with Mark. I wouldn’t even give up the dangerous stuff. I’d still dive wrecks, caves, dive as deep as I wanted. But she didn’t bring up diving at all. She stared at me and said, “So many women live their lives for other people. I didn’t think you’d be one of them.”
I knew what she meant. We talked about our mothers a lot, how much we loved them, but how little we envied them. There was this whole world out there, and they showed so little interest in it. At least that’s how we saw it as teenagers. But I wish I had answered her. I wish I could have explained that as much as I liked diving, as much as I liked this other world we visited, I liked the normal world too. I wanted a connection to the goodness of life. And our main connection to that world is through the people we love.
We never talked about it again. And we never talked about the child I didn’t have. The same way I didn’t tell Mark before this dive that I’m two weeks late. He would have said someone else should go. That we couldn’t take a chance with another miscarriage. But I couldn’t let someone else go. Not for Miranda.
It would be hard for life to have meaning if it weren’t good to live for yourself. But I’ve learned it’s so much better to live for other people as well.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
The bottom of the cavern is pure silt. I have to be careful and slow down as I come to a knot in the guide line. The line splits into five different paths. Three of them lead to big tunnels, and two of them lead through crevices so small you’d never think to go through them. At least, most people wouldn’t.
It’s clear which one to follow. It’s the one leading through the smallest crack in the wall. Miranda always marked which line she was on most recently. She was good about that. Leaving a trail. No one ever could have kept up with her otherwise.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
Part of me always felt like it would be freeing when my parents died. It would be awful too, of course. But they were always much more afraid than I was when I would go on a trip. And I always felt their residual fear more than my own. I figured it would be easier after they died. There’d be two fewer people to hurt if the worst happened.
But now that they’re gone, I like feeling their worry a little bit. It means they’re still with me in some way. Before this dive, I heard my mother asking me when I was going to finally give up all this foolishness and give her some grandbabies. I could see my father trying to hold some kind of Spartan composure, even though his face was dripping with judgment and worry.
Eventually, I stopped telling them where I was going, but at first, I argued with them over and over. I tried so hard to get them to believe that this was who I am. That I wouldn’t let them run my life. I didn’t know they were trying to get me to see them. I thought they were trying to dominate me, but they were just fearful little creatures. They didn’t understand the world Miranda and I tried to live in. It scared them to think of it. That the world could have no foundation, no light, no sense. That life could be beyond reckoning. If I saw them this morning, and they pleaded with me again, I don’t think I’d say a word. I’d just stroke my mother’s hair and kiss my father’s forehead.
It’s nice knowing that the people we love stick with us after they’re gone. If not in the real world, at least in the worlds we make in our heads. And who’s to say that that world isn’t real as well?
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
This tunnel is long and narrow. There’s a gentle current at my back, and I’m worried it could change at any moment. My cylinder has been detached the whole time as I push it again and again through the crevices ahead of me. I squeeze through another crack, and the front and back of my ribs press against the rock. Any narrower and I’ll be stuck.
It goes on like this for half an hour, over and over. I’m at 80 meters. The longer I stay down here, the longer it’ll take to go back up. That’s how it works. If I go up too fast, all the nitrogen in my blood will start to boil. It doesn’t matter that I’m mixing helium into my air, I’ll still have to crawl back up, stopping over and over to decompress.
It’s just another thing that separates this world from that one. If you try to rush back, it can kill you.
When I push my cylinder into the next crack, it hits something. I pull it away and reach out my hand and grab a fin. There’s too much silt to see anything, but I know who it is. I pull out my knife and get to work.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
I’m back in the cathedral. It’s my first decompression stop. Ten minutes here, with Miranda in my arms.
I could feel the current turning as I left the tunnel. It could have flipped when Miranda was deep inside. Who knows how strong it could be. Maybe she was testing that crevice, and it was so strong, she got jammed. She must have been close to finding what she wanted to find. I don’t think she would have taken a risk like that without being close.
Her mom is waiting for us at the top. I told her I didn’t know how long it would take, but she just stared at me. What did I think? That she would leave? That she could do some errands while I fetched her daughter’s body?
She’s still up there, I suppose. I don’t know what I will say to her. I have a few hours to think about it. Miranda always said if we died diving, at least we’d have a story. I don’t think her mother is up there waiting for me to tell one.
I float up 20 meters and start the watch again. The limestone walls are clearer now, towering above us. Part of me wishes I could leave her here. I think it’s what she would have wanted. But the world is calling us back.
Being down here feels so far from everything, but it’s not really. The two worlds are connected. It’s all one world. It’s all one life. No matter how far we go, we can’t escape that.