Candle in the Attic Window(92)
Sometimes, the surge of air rushing into your suffocating lungs and brain and muscles is so sudden and liberating that you black out, anyway, but then you’re caught by friendly hands and the record is still yours.
You think the static breath-hold records are a little stupid in themselves, a child’s play at the bottom of the pool. But despite that, you are proud of them. How many people can hold their breath for more than eleven minutes?
The exercise does have a purpose, though. It’s an appetizer for the main course, preparation for the real dives into black water. Those trips are another game, completely. There, you stand on a sled, a slim metal frame with a tank of air connected to two balloons, bright yellow for visibility in low-light conditions, wrapped shut. The sled moves along a thick wire, of the kind that’s used in sailing, and plunges into the deep to a predetermined depth. The sled uses its own gravity and your weight to fall into the blue. All you need to do is hang on, equalize the raging pressure in your ears by using a little of your own breath from a plastic bottle tied to your leg, tolerate the increasing cold and darkness, and refrain from screaming. After less than two minutes, the sled reaches the bottom of the line. Then you just need to be lucid enough to pull the strap that opens the tank and the main balloon, wait until the balloon has inflated and hang on hard while the sled rushes you up to the air and the light.
Some people think using a sled is cheating compared with swimming down yourself and then back up again, which requires considerably more energy and strength. But with the sled and a brief decompression at ten meters on the way up, you can go deeper than 200 meters and up again in one breath. For you, the purest challenge is not the swimming or the climbing, but withstanding the depth and the darkness and the lust for oxygen as long as possible. To go as deeply as humanly possible. The fight against the pressure and the water is an addiction to you and your over-developed diving reflex.
It’s for real, now, a new-record attempt at what is called “No Limits Diving”. No limits. The sled takes you down much faster than your body alone can. After just a minute, you’re down deeper than most divers go with air on their backs, the sled shrieking along the wire. You start in bright daylight in tropical waters and end up in a temperate dusk, where the water is cold enough to bite your hands and stiffen your cheeks. Together with the weight of the water that bears mercilessly down on you, it’s only just tolerable, even for the brief time it lasts. As you plummet down, the deep makes your heart slow and the blood to retreat from your arms and legs. Your organs squeeze up against your spine and your lungs fill with blood plasma to avoid damage.
Beyond the whirr of the sled as it falls on the wire, the deep is always quiet. It’s so quiet it sometimes feels like the building pressure in your ears is caused by the silence and not just the weight of the water. Riding the sled down is a little like lying at the bottom of the pool, only now you need to clench one hand around a handle, the other around the plastic bottle, and wriggle your lower jaw back and forth so your ears pop to equalize the brutal pressure. The cold makes certain you don’t go fully into that silent breath-hold space of the bottom of the pool. You reach the edges of it but not further. That’s why you can hold your breath for more than eleven minutes in a warm and brightly lit pool, but only for seven, or so, on the sled. There is also another thing. An ancient instinct refuses to let you close your eyes in the deep. Some divers fear sharks or eels or jellyfish while they’re down. But there are scuba divers at the top part of the wire and they look out for dangerous animals. If they see one, the competition is delayed until the animal has passed.
No, your fear is much older and more primitive than that. It’s the true fear of the deep. You have dived in many places of the world, from Arctic to tropical waters and everything in between. But everywhere, the deep looks and feels the same. It’s devouringly dark, jealously cold and crushingly heavy. It doesn’t need to strike or bite or poison you, like other dangerous things do. No, the deep simply uses its own weight to pacify you. It sits on you until you give up and leave, or stop flailing your arms and legs. Fortunately, the deep is mindless and doesn’t know you’re there. You regard that as a blessing. Still, you always keep a knife in a sheath on your thigh. Other divers laugh at you, ask if you plan to catch some fish while you’re down there, and wonder if you’re going to bring a harpoon at the same time? You say it’s for cutting yourself free if you get tangled in the wire or the balloons, but you know better. It’s for the ancient fear of the deep.
The sled and you reach the end of the wire. You’re doing fine, not feeling too cold or anoxic. No fainting in sight, the spiders stay away from your eyes, the trip up should be fine. You pull the cord on the tank. Then it is quiet for a few seconds as the air streams into the balloon and the yellow plastic starts to fill up. This is the worst part of the journey. There is nothing to do but take in the view of the hollow gloom around you and the gaping dark below you. On the way down, you fight against the cold current of descent and the increasing pressure. On the way up, you enjoy the view of the flood of bubbles from the balloon and the increasing light as you ascend. Then the depth releases its hold on you, and you are born again into the air and the sun. But that’s more than two hundred and ten meters away in the vertical, a long climb with a merciless angle of ninety degrees. You are literally in too deep. If the main and the back-up balloon don’t inflate, you haven’t got enough air or power in your body to climb back up the pressure well. Then your only hope is the scuba divers watching you further up.