Claustrophobia

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, I learned to scuba dive in Lake Cayuga: a long, cold, muddy-bottomed lake near Ithaca, New York.

I learned to scuba dive in Lake Cayuga because my dad wanted to take us all vacationing in Belize. If I learned in Ithaca and my sister learned in Rhode Island and my little sister, mother and father learned in Pennsylvania, he said, then when we gathered in Belize would could all dive together, being at the same skill level.

That is so my dad.

Anyway. On our first day at the lake, bare trees waved in a strong wind, small branches tearing off and falling to the ground; the grass was brown, dead; picnic tables sat forlorn. We dozen students stood in the dirt at water's edge, shivering in black wet suits and flippers like so many displaced Antarctic penguins.

The instructor told us what to do, pausing every few minutes to remind us that this was a means to an end, that in Belize or the Bahamas or Florida everything would be different. There it would be hot! The water would be clear! It would be blue and alive! You'll see fish there, he said. It won't be like this.

So we girded our loins¹ and flopped into the lake. We tread water. We practiced breathing through our tanks at the surface. We swam out a little ways. Then twelve scuba newbies attempted to dive down through six feet of murk, struggling and splashing, utterly ridiculous. We could not control our buoyancy. Some people sunk, plunk, onto the bottom and then kicked their legs to come up a bit – and their flippers stirred the mud until I could see nothing.

Nothing.

My hands disappeared. My classmates disappeared. I kicked and kicked in a panic, searching for the surface and finding only brown – I did not know where I was, I did not know where anyone else was – I kicked and kicked and imagined I'd reached the center of the lake, where no one would ever find me except Nessie... Finally in exhaustion I stopped fighting and lo, I did float to the surface.

Yeah. Lost in six feet of water.

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I took that class 20 years ago, so I don't honestly remember some of the details I included here, like tree branches being blown down in the wind. However I will never forget how I panicked.

I am easily claustrophobic now: in the children's tent; in a cave; or on the mountain in a storm when I've fallen and have to unclip from my board, struggling through waist-deep snow to reach a steeper pitch, and then clip in again and struggle to get upright, my hand sinking in the snow and my board sinking, too. At such moments I want to rip off my helmet and goggles and breathe, breathe, breathe.

*

Now see, I think a lot of blog posts read as if they were about something else. As if they were code.

No?

¹I had to look up that phrase. In totally unrelated wondering: how is it we still use a phrase that originated more than 1000 years ago?