Alumni Association Home > Minnesota Magazine > Past Issues > 2007 > May-June 2007

Despite the bright Caribbean sky and my friends’ excitement, I felt uneasy. I’d been scuba diving before, but always in clear, relatively shallow water. I’d never been on a drift dive. Instead of propelling myself through calm, protected waters, I’d be giving myself over to an ocean current and carried along a coral reef.

My friends were confident we’d have a great time and said I’d get over my jitters once I experienced floating in the current. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking that I shouldn’t go on the dive. I’d had several chances to back out in the preceding 24 hours, when an unmistakable but ungrounded feeling reverberated in my head: I shouldn’t go. I felt a pit in my stomach as we talked about arranging the dive, again when we made our reservation, once our guides arrived the next day in a small fishing boat to take us to the reef, while we were putting on our gear, and when our dive master, Geraldo, shrugged after I told him I was unusually nervous. And I felt the same pit even as I slipped overboard into the choppy sea.

I paused on the surface while everyone else submerged. Bobbing in the churning waves, I peered down into the gray depths below. Geraldo was beneath me, urgently motioning for me to kick hard. I was still uncharacteristically frightened but couldn’t come up with a rational reason not to go. I could only chalk it up to anxiety about trying something new. After a brief struggle in the waves, I was able to pike my body and swim headfirst toward the bottom of the sea. The current took me. There was no turning back.

Unlike the leisurely dives I’d been on before—slowly following brightly colored fish as they meandered in and out of vibrant coral forests—this dive required all of my attention and energy. As soon as we reached our diving depth of 80 feet, deeper than I’d ever been before, the current picked up speed. Soon it was ripping. I constantly had to fight to keep from being dragged down too deep or from being scraped against or impaled on tall coral.

The water was cloudy and dark. I didn’t see many fish. After a time I realized I no longer saw any of the other five divers. I was alone. My breath quickened and I made a concerted effort to calm myself so I wouldn’t run out of air too quickly. I counted to four with each breath in and each breath out. But my mind was filled with worry. Was I being swept too far away from the others? What were all the things that could go wrong, whether or not I gave in to panic?

Just then, I noticed a sea turtle, smoothly riding the current ahead of me. I watched the way he used his flipper-like legs to shift his trajectory, floating through the water the way a bird sails through the air. Watching him calmed me. He knew how to navigate this environment with ease.

I followed the turtle as long as I could. When Stacy, the only other woman in the group, appeared, I was thankful. We checked the air in our tanks. Nearly empty. So together we rose through the roiling water and returned to the windy air.

A few of the others had already surfaced nearby. I was relieved to see Steve. Three of us on the dive would be part of his wedding party in a few days; we were in charge of keeping him safe. What wasn’t nearby, however, was the fishing boat that had dropped us off half an hour earlier. The driver was supposed to have followed us along our underwater journey by following a red buoy attached to a long rope held by Geraldo.

We all looked at each other, not sure whether to feel relieved that we made it through the dive—it turns out the current was much, much stronger than usual—or concerned that we were adrift in the ocean. But then we rose on a swell and saw the boat far off in the distance. There was relief all around. While Geraldo waved his arms in the air and yelled to get the driver’s attention, the rest of us swam closer together. The guys started joking and talking about how cool the dive had been.

Geraldo continued waving and yelling, but the driver and his passenger didn’t seem to be looking in our direction. “Damn it!” Geraldo spat. “What are those fools doing?” He took his fins off his feet and raised them into the air. Within a few minutes, he became obviously agitated. He turned to us.

“How much air do you have in your tanks?” he asked, clearly upset. We had only a few minutes of air each. Geraldo shook his head then started yelling more loudly. Everyone else went silent. The last person you want to see frightened is your guide. The panic in his voice made me consider just how vulnerable we were. We all took off our fi ns, waved them wildly, and yelled as loudly as we could. But soon we were catching only small glimpses of the boat. Then it simply disappeared from view.

The six of us held onto each other’s arms so we wouldn’t have to fight the current that wanted to separate us. Our situation wasn’t good. The sun was starting to set and we were being swept quickly past the last island before open sea. Our oxygen tanks were virtually empty. Geraldo wasn’t carrying any flares. Within a matter of minutes we had to decide whether to drop all our gear and attempt to swim to the island, which was surrounded by rock and crashing waves, or to drift toward the sunset with the hope that rescuers would find us before hypothermia, or sharks, set in. We opted to drift.

Time slowed. The ocean and sky grew suddenly larger, diminishing us both in size and significance. My mind started to kaleidoscope into myriad thoughts—fears, the face of the man I loved, my parents and how much they would hate this story, everything I ever learned about how to stay alive—but I knew I needed to stay focused. I had to manage my anxiety so I could stay alert. Stacy and I looked into each other’s eyes and helped each other breathe slowly. I could tell she was starting to get chilled, as I was.

An hour is not a long time in the grand scheme of things. It’s an eternity when you’re afraid and floating in the ocean. We’d been drifting uneasily in the choppy sea—all dealing with our fears in different ways, all lost in our own thoughts—for a little less than an hour when Remy remembered he had a whistle. He’d bought it 10 years earlier, attached it to his gear, and forgotten about it until that moment. But who would hear it?

As if to answer the question, we heard the sound of a motor in the distance. Remy started blowing the whistle. When we could actually see the boat, a two-story houseboat, we started waving our fins. Remy blew and blew. We waved and waved. To our surprise, the boat stopped. We whistled and waved, whistled and waved. Suddenly the boat was speeding directly toward us.

Two men, a father and his son-in-law, plucked us out of the choppy water one at a time. On deck, their wives wrapped us in towels and gave us water and crackers. The owner of the boat, a British retiree, told us he’d assumed the faint, high pitch he’d heard was simply the wind in some rigging. To be safe, he’d decided to check his engine. That’s when he realized the sound wasn’t from his own boat. He carefully scanned the horizon. Because of the waves and the fading light, he’d barely made us out, he said.

“I never would have seen you if I hadn’t heard that whistle,” he said. And he said it again that evening over dinner, after the bride-to-be toasted our rescuers. “Good thing for that whistle.”

We all agreed. And that’s when I started to wonder about the whistle that had been sounding inside me for 24 hours before the dive. I’d heard it plainly a few years earlier, as I was preparing for a hiking trip into the Grand Canyon. On that trip I accidentally started a wildfi re. I’d also heard it more subtly in my everyday life, in relationships, and when taking on new challenges. This time the message was loud and clear: I shouldn’t go. Why, then, did I ignore it?

I recently read Gavin de Becker’s book The Gift of Fear, which helps readers recognize their own survival signals. I had indeed felt anxiety about trying something new, a feeling good to overcome. But I’d ignored other important survival signals: the bad feeling in my gut, my hesitation in the water, and genuine feelings of apprehension and fear. To my analytical mind, I shouldn’t go seemed irrational. But to my body and subconscious mind, it was the only logical conclusion.

Today I’m better at identifying the messages my body and subconscious mind send to me. I also know that the next time I have the chance to go on a drift dive, I’ll respect my intuition. If I hear no alarms, I’ll go.

Karen Olson (B.A. ’88), is a Minneapolis writer and former editor of Utne Reader. She studied art history and English at the University of Minnesota and also holds an M.A. in English from Northern Arizona University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Colorado State University.