The American Airlines flight from Miami to Grand Cayman pushed back on time, just after our last passenger ran on, a fifty-ish businessman loaded with luggage who rushed down the aisle, stowed his gear, and flopped into his seat, letting his head roll back and breathing heavily. Halfway through the standard lift-up-on-the-buckle spiel, our nearest flight attendant broke from the script -- our recent arrival's face was chalk-white and he was collapsing in his seat. "We have a seizure," he said crisply and, barely a moment later, there came over the intercom, "Is there a doctor onboard?"
One swiftly volunteered, and in moments they had laid the patient out the aisle and were working CPR: pump the chest five time, then mouth-to-mouth, and again. "Get the paramedics," went the word. About two minutes later they arrived, short-sleeved olive shirts, baseball caps, and a defibrillator kit, briskly forcing their way down the row. (By now most of the passengers were watching.) They shocked him once -- his arms flapping wildly -- checked his pulse, tried CPR, and shocked him again. "Stretcher!" Down the aisle it came, a wood pallet with hand holes along the sides, and the paramedics gradually worked the patient onto it on his back, looking awful but breathing under his own steam. They picked him up, bore him down the aisle like pallbearers, and whisked him off the plane. A few minutes later we lifted for Grand Cayman, the doctor and his wife having been given a free first-class upgrade (and a round of applause), and the captain reporting that, "He was breathing when he left us."
Arriving in Grand Cayman late, we were stuck in immigration lines so long that by the time Nancy and I had cleared them, we barely made our puddle-jumper to Little Cayman, and Nancy's sister Mary and her husband Luis were unceremoniously bumped (fortunately, they caught a later flight and arrived only two hours after we did).
Diving requires a certain kind of concentrated relaxation -- and no, this is not an oxymoron. We left-brain-dominant folks cast a skeptical eye on meditation, prayer, and other forms of self-hypnosis -- when you're meditating, what do you think about? No, no, grasshopper, you must think about nothing, Oh, all right, master -- but diving makes you put into actual practice. Under water, all forms of tension are bad. You crank up your breathing rate and volume, so you burn air much faster and have to come up. You thrash inefficiently in the water, so you tire quickly. And you look like a jerk. This last is a significant consideration on a dive resort where everyone else also dives and there is a distinct, if unspoken, competition to be a better diver (and have the divemasters treat you as less of a blob in a wetsuit).
To be a good diver, therefore, you must learn to manage your breathing, not holding your breath, but settling down to a smooth unhurried rhythm, and to smooth out your moveouts, and keep them slow and easy. Do this and not only do you look good, you can stay down longer, which is a mark of cool. In short, diving co-opts the left brain into the service of the Zen ideals by rewarding the left brain for achieving right-brain consciousness. Zen as winning.
It has taken me more than a hundred dives to achieve this breakthrough to enlightenment (except on night dives, which still drive me nuts with fear). On this trip we did 19 dives in six days (two before lunch on one boat ride, one in the afternoon, and an optional night dive) and, perhaps because of the immersion therapy (literally), Nancy and I found ourselves in mental dive equilibrium -- neither of us ever suggested wimping out on a scheduled dive.
We saw sharks on four dives: twice in the distance, just in the deep blue, and once I found a mild-mannered nurse shark hovering underneath a coral ledge, but on one spectacular dive -- Barracuda Bight -- we swam with a pair of black-tip reef sharks, one five feet, the other six and a half feet.
Marine life is like high school, with distinct schools, cliques of fish, well-established pecking orders, and a general policy straight out of a B. Kliban cartoon: Never eat anything bigger than your head. A grouper three feet long might eat little chromis three inches long, and the chromis might eat plankton.
But in this aquatic life metaphor, sharks stand out. Aside from their size, they have a sleek, fast shape. Most fish are round, with big eyes -- they have the affect of clowns. But sharks are lean and long, bristling with fins, with dead-button eyes and a mouth that gashes the underside of their head. And they move, endlessly, restlessly, their long sinuous bodies writhing slowly as they slice through the water, ever weaving, like an overwrought Type A executive who, arriving at a cocktail party, endlessly circles the room, drink in hand, darting his glance into other conversations but never stopping, never slowing, never giving the other partygoers a chance to trap him into stationary chitchat.
And as they prowl, they are accompanied by a flotilla of smaller fish. Actually, this de facto symbiosis is quite common in the ocean -- stingrays, for instance, which burrow in the sand, often have a bar jack riding shotgun above them to pick off the very small fish that might be tossed up and temporarily spooked. But the shark's entourage is more complex: two small runners just in front of the mouth, a bar jack on one shoulder and a horse-eyed jack on the other, and a remora clinging via suction to the underjowl. Seeing them swim together, the little hangers-on drafting in the leeward spaces around the shark's many-finned body, you are struck by nothing so much as the image of a mafia don cruising into a restaurant, flanked by bodyguards, casing the joint, checking out the options, moving, moving, always moving.
On our dive the sharks came close, but not too close, maybe ten to fifteen feet. If we went after them, they retreated ... but not hurriedly, and not permanently, always returning to their area. Later Laurie, the divemaster, speculated that there was probably something -- a stingray? -- dying in the vicinity, and they were waiting for it to expire before swooping in.
Sharks are also very methodical hunters. They circle their prey, observing, moving closer then away, testing and probing. When they are satisfied the prey is harmless, they will veer in and bump to see if they get a hostile response. Only when completely satisfied that attack is safe will they, suddenly, charge in for the kill.
Except, of course, in the presence of blood, which acts on them like catnip on a cat. Then all bets are off.
If you ever do find yourself in the water with a shark, a few tips:
Now, I've never been forced to try this for real, but I can tell you for a fact that if you approach a reef shark, he will move away. And that is a heady feeling -- indeed, it's so heady that for a moment you are so caught up in the moment that you chase after the shark, and you can quickly wear yourself out pursuing him.
Dive instructors drill into their students, never touch anything, a good rule for two reasons: (1) many corals can be damaged, sometimes fatally, just by human touch, and (2) some small and otherwise inoffensive things like tiny worms and flame coral sting the living bejesus out of your skin. On other dives I've brushed against fire coral, which stings then and burns for half a day thereafter. But fire coral is stationary, and once you have your buoyancy under control you should never run into it.
Jellyfish are another matter, especially the small ones such as box jellyfish or sea wasps. They are little, and clear, and sometimes frankly invisible (there are some string jellyfish about three or four inches long that pack a nasty sting). On one day years ago in Venezuela I had been diving in just a wetsuit jacket, no lycra body suit, and swum up to the surface through an invisible swarm of these things. This time on one dive, I had swum up to the surface to gain our bearings and find the boat, and was swimming back down to Nancy, ten feet below the surface in completely clear water, where my trailing hand encountered one of these beasties. It stung suddenly -- no warning, nothing visible, even when I twisted around to look for it. Under water the sting abates quickly, but the irritation is really nasty only topside -- by the time I got out of the water the bumps were already swelling up. For the next forty-eight hours it itched like blue blazes and I covered my hand in calamine lotion and anti-itch creams. The bumps were vertical for another four days and even now as I write this, three weeks after the event, I can still clearly see on my left hand the anchor-shaped pattern of nine distinct stings I got in that one encounter.
The moral of the story: if it looks dangerous, you're probably safe. If it looks harmless, it probably has a defense against you. Touch nothing, grasshopper.
What do we learn? You can have a heart attack on the plane. You can get stung by a jellyfish. But you're unlucky to be attacked by a shark.