Stephen Harrigan - Water and Light: A Divers Journey to a Coral Reef

Stephen Harrigan

Water and Light

A Divers Journey to a Coral Reef

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS
Austin

Copyright 1992 by Stephen Harrigan

All rights reserved

Reprinted by special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company

Second University of Texas Press edition, 2004

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harrigan, Stephen, date.

Water and light / a divers journey to a coral reef / Stephen Harrigan.

p. cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-292-73120-5

1. Underwater exploration. 2. Diving. 3. Coral reef ecology. I. Title

GC65.H34 1992 91-45623
797.2'3 dc20

Book design by Robert Overholtzer
Map by Jacques Chazaud

The Ballad of Gilligans Isle by George Wyle and Sherwood Schwartz, copyright 1964, 1966 United Artists Music Co., Inc. All rights of United Artists Music Co., Inc., assigned to EMI Catalogue Partnership. All rights controlled and administered by EMI U Catalog. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

Anecdote of the Jar and the excerpt from The Comedian as the Letter C are from Collected Poems by Wallace Stevens, copyright 1923 and renewed 1951 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and Faber & Faber, Ltd.

Portions of this book have been published in several periodicals: appeared in Outside.

ISBN 978-0-292-77660-9 (library e-book)
ISBN 9780292776609 (individual e-book)

DOI 10.7560/731202

My Underwater Self

I no longer live near the ocean. The nearest salt water now is two hundred miles away across a flat coastal plain whose bedrock was formed from the muck and calcium of an ancient sea. But when I was a boy I lived on the coast itself, and I went to sleep every night with my mind peacefully roving through the dark waters of the bay.

The bay was murky, but in my dreams the water became so clear I could feel my eyes straining from the effort to extend their range, to locate some finite point in that endless crystal void. The creatures I saw gliding about underwater were always mysteriously benevolent. They were not fish usually, but half-glimpsed amalgams of real and imagined animals, adaptedas I apparently wasfor underwater life. They had been waiting for me to appear. The waters sudden clarity seemed to have roused them, as if until now they had been physically trapped in their gloomy element like prehistoric animals in a peat bog. I felt released too, beyond the reach of wakeful caution, beyond the jurisdiction of physical laws. I could breathe, I could range wherever my will would take me, soaring along the contours of the sea bottom or spiraling up toward the surface, into the high altitudes of the ocean atmosphere.

All my life I have dreamed one variant or another of that dream. I have had a passion to be underwater. How this passion developed Im not sure, but I remember the longing I feltthe brutal, unappeasable longing of a very young childwhen my mother used to read to me, night after night, a story called The Water Babies,

The Water Babies is a novel for children written in 1862 by a strange, sex-tormented Victorian cleric named Charles Kingsley. According to his biographer, Susan Chitty, Kingsley could only accept the idea of carnal relations with his wife once he had convinced himself that the body was holy and the act of sex a sacrament in which he was the priest and his partner the victim. Kingsley sorted through his obsessions by writing verse and best-selling novels and by producing a series of disturbing drawings that depicted him and his wife, Fanny, in rapturous postures of self-mortificationdrawings that, according to Nathaniel Hawthorne, no pure man could have made or allowed himself to look at.

And yet purity was Kingsleys lifelong ideal. The Water Babies is the story of a poor and abused boy named Tom, whose work as a chimney sweep has left him habitually covered with grime. While servicing the chimneys of a country gentlemans estate, he finds himself in the presence of a sleeping girl whose angelic cleanliness makes him quake with desire and shame. When she awakes and sees him by her bed she screams. He flees from the house, telling himself, I must be clean, I must be clean. Finally he comes to a clear brook. Entering the water, he falls into the quietest, sunniest, cosiest sleep that ever he had in his life and wakes up reborn as a water baby, a little naked human form four inches long, with a pretty lace collar of gills. In this form Tom goes through a series of adventures involving a courtly salmon, a ferocious mother otter, and a dimwitted lobster. The story grows increasingly weird as its authors great throbbing themes of purgative redemption and muscular Christianity crowd out any hope of narrative coherence.

The version of The Water Babies that was read to me as a child was much simplified, a heavily illustrated condensation of the story in rhyming quatrains that appeared in a popular series of childrens literature called My Book House. I still have that volume, and when I open its mildewed pages to Verses on Kingsleys Water Babies I can recall the wondrous sense of possibility that held me spellbound for so many childhood evenings. Perhaps my mother, who never learned to swim and who has had a lifelong terror of open water, invested her reading of this tale of an amphibious baby with a note of fear that seized my attention. And the storywith its naked water fairies, its obsessive note of fast-moving streams and sluicing tides, its protagonists tendency, upon misbehaving, to break out in highly suggestive prickleshad an unmistakable erotic timbre. Its not surprising that over the years scholars have viewed The Water Babies as a parable of sexual awakening. Critics have described it as everything from a cautionary tale about masturbation to a wild fantasy of infantile regression in which the water itself is a symbol of the lost comforts of the womb.

I was certainly not immune to the imagery of The Water Babies. The story disturbed me with its hints of death and altered states and with its insistence on some vague but powerful desire that I could as yet only dimly perceive. For whatever reason, it got hold of me. It seemed to me, at the age of three or four, that it really was possible to slip, unobstructed, from one dimension to another.

The underwater world was magically accessible to me then, and I suppose I have never quite gotten over the disappointment that it did not remain so. When I was older I liked to arrive at the neighborhood pool early in the morning, before any other swimmers had had a chance to rile the surface. Standing on the edge, savoring the chlorine fumes, I would follow with my eyes the black tile track of the lane markers as they descended the concrete slope that led to the deep-water drain. The water had a harsh, denatured brilliance, and I could see every dimple of peeling paint, every lost penny on the bottom with unnatural clarity, as if I were looking through a microscope. Curling my toes over the brick edgework of the pool, I would try hard to execute an elegant dive, wanting my body to pass with barely a whisper into the untouched water.

It seemed a cruel whim of nature that as soon as I entered this world all the marvelous visual detail would disappear. My unprotected eyes saw everything through a gauzy film, and the environment that a moment before had seemed so limitless now was muffled and contracted. Even so, it was enough to be underwater, to be in another sort of place entirely. I would swim open-eyed along the pool bottom until my eyes were so stung and swollen by chlorine that at night I would lie in bed unable to sleep because of the pain.