cts | Eight Feet Under

I know there are a lot of pilots who "always wanted to fly." One of my favorite aviation quotations (there are a pile of them out there) is from Gary Powers, the pilot of the U2 spy plane shot down over Russia. Describing his first flight to his father he said, "Dad, I left my heart up there."

I wasn't like that. I flew in planes, even a few little planes, growing up. One flight all the way from New York City to Dublin when I was seven should have been momentous, but what I remember was the small paper tray which the meal arrived in. As soon as the meal was discarded I was able to start drawing on the inside of this open-top cardboard box, turning it from an Aer Lingus child's meal into a hovercraft for some action figures I had with me. Controls, gauges, piping, wires, screens... my hovercraft probably had more instrumentation than the Boeing I was riding over the Atlantic.

So I liked the machines, but I had no real love of the sky or of flight.

I was always around water. My first seven years were spent on the Jersey shore, a two minute ride from the beach. Summer days were spent on the sand with the Atlantic either lapping at our feet or pushing over the walls of our sand castles. As breaks from the beautiful, endless beaches that stretched all the way up to Sandy Hook, we were taken up to Cape Cod to my father's family place. As a way to get away from all of that, we were taken further north to a tiny lake in Ontario where we had a more solitary fifty feet of sand. Fresh water lapped my feet there.

At the beach club, three years after the first moon landing and those flickering images of men leaping about in reduced gravity, my cousin and I spent as much time as possible in the other world of the swimming pool. The "adult pool" was off limits some of the day, but the kiddie pool was too shallow to get our heads underwater. So we were covert and stayed in the shady end of the big pool, hyperventilating and then sinking to the bottom. I would look over and Trey's hair would float from his head like Medusa's locks, and he would mime relaxing in a chair, or reading the paper, or driving a car. Surfacing, we would gasp for breath through laughs and then plunge down again and I would pretend I was asleep on a bed, or eating a sandwich at the table, or scooping ice cream onto a cone.

Eventually we were exhausted. We had been fueled by lunch and the magic of a Dusty Miller, the sundae the beach club served with vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce and malt. Mouthfuls were dry from the powder, but powerfully sweet and sluiced down by the bland creamy vanilla. On one Dusty Miller you could swim all the way out to where the lifeguards would blow their whistle at you. Or you could spend close to an hour suspended in the teal blue of the swimming pool, taunting gravity with one-handed hand stands or triple flips. When we were exhausted we would collapse into the adirondack chairs, dark green or bright white, surrounding the pool. Shivering shoulders wrapped with the thin beach club towels, we waited for the sun to bake us back to mammalian temperatures.

As the chlorine drained out of my ears I would reconnect with the world. Conversations would turn from the muted warbles we heard in the pool to words, phrases and eventually sentences I could understand. The weight of understanding would press me a little deeper into the slope of the high-backed chair. As a woman within earshot complained to her neighbor about her husband, or his job, or the tennis club's wardrobe rules, I felt the brittleness of similarity. The odd congruence of so many lives being lived in such parallel fashion drove me back to the pool, to a world these people seemed unaware of, a world where communication was only mimed and gravity was a mere shadow of itself.

As I grew older and my lungs grew stronger, I was able to stay longer in that world. Long enough to really see the mirrored quilt of the surface, one of the features of the underwater experience that fascinated me most. And as I learned to snorkel and skin dive up at the lake, and on vacation in warmer waters, I found this other world infinitely more varied and intriguing than the beach club pool suggested.

The most engrossing part of the experience was the calming absence of gravity. Other than the slight tug toward the surface (if my lungs were full), or gradual sink (if I had exhaled enough), I was neutrally buoyant. Eventually I was propelling myself with serious swim fins, peering at the other-world through a large mask, a far cry from the swim goggles my cousin and I used. The sunlight, honey golden shafts tracing across the mossy rocks of the bottom, was dispersed by the silt in the water and didn't provide a definite up or down.

I spent months at the lake. There was not much to do other than read or play in the water, and whenever I could I was under the water. Swimming the same route from the dock to the beach or the dock around to the back bay I should have been passing over the same set of rocks, but they always seemed different. Visits to the other world were periodic, punctuated by the need to surface, clear the snorkel, get a fresh lungful of air and flip back down to my cruising depth of eight or ten feet. At that depth, with a flick of one flipper, I could start a roll and as I torpedoed over the vast, curving granite of the submerged Canadian shield I would swap the up and down. The glinting, mirrored surface would straighten out and stretch ahead like a rippled ground plane. The ballooning, mossy monsters of the bottom became dark clouds of a strange sky. I navigated between the two with absolute authority, belonging to neither and analyzing both.

Careful exhalations led to a neutral buoyancy where there really was no up or down. I could move in any direction, explore any path. Again, after dozens of trips around out abbreviated coast, this should have become familiar (submerged) ground, but it didn't. I believe I was so focused on the sensation of being lost, unanchored, that I did not try to orient myself. I knew the moment I popped my head above the surface I would know where I was, and that wasn't the fun part.

The fun part was the flying.