In this piece, Charles Johnston gives an interesting and creative viewpoint as to how it feels like to explore the depths of the ocean.
Every time I look up at the ocean, I am filled with awe.
One day, when I was older and starting to get used to life on land, I got myself a job. I would be salvaging a ship, right up there, up in the ocean, and though it had been decades since I bounded around my parents’ legs speed-talking about the latest oceanic discovery, a hint of that child-like glee sparked up in me once again.
I had prepared as much as I could for my first expedition. I did all the exercises ‘til I was certain I was the best, read every book they recommended to me, and sucked up to all of my superiors and treated my fellow sailor with just as much respect.
The birds can only get you so close to the ocean.
To penetrate its surface, you need machines.
The day came. We went into that room, and climbed into the ship, one by one, too cocky to say goodbye to our loved ones. I stared up through the skylight at the shimmering surface of the water and suddenly understood that I would be moving from a world of boundaries and edges to limitlessness - and though we had a job, though we were not scientists or explorers, that infiniteness aroused something inside of me.
Closing your eyes was the best way to experience going into the ocean for the first time. You could feel the initial resistance, the tentativeness before the water relaxed and finally let you through - but even then you went through slowly, carefully, waiting until you were fully submerged before thrusting past the suns. It was both entirely what I expected to be, yet felt ever so slightly different, as though a dream trying to replicate a memory I never had. It was symbolic, romantic; it was everyday, it was casual.
The shutters had to close as you went past the suns. Some keep them open - old, retiring, romantic sailors who made the ocean their entire lives, and who wanted the waters to be the final thing they see. I saw drawings of their descriptions of the suns - my father would walk past, scoff, take the papers from my hands and tell me they were just the lustful ramblings of lonely workers. Still, I stared at the shutters and the single beam of light that leaked through.
There were many of us newbies out on the ship, so the captain - a good friend of mine by this point - opened the shutters to let us gawk at the wonders of the ocean. The sunlight was still bright enough that we could see the schools of fish being whittled down by swordfish without having to turn on the exterior lights, their scales all illuminated by the golden bask of the suns. Only some of us stared out at the earth - though I never understood why - the shimmer of the surface and the brightness of the suns making it just a light blue blob with green highlights, getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller.
A week in, there was no more sunlight.
Every hour, there was a man posted at the scanners and at the shutters, looking out into the abyss. A sailor, new, screamed at the sight of a beast whose scales were the size of the ship we were in, but the captain stayed calm. They can hardly see us, he explained, let alone see us as prey. No, it was the smaller ones we had to be afraid of. The small ones in packs who rush past to escape a predator, bashing into our ship and battering the lights. The ones who see movement and charge, headfirst, jaw unhinged and ready for the taste of iron. The ones smart enough to see us as toys, who bounce us amongst their friends like a basketball.
By the end of the week, I could see how easy it could be to perish in this world. Everyone else could too.
The sight of the missing ship, split in half and floating in nothingness, was met with both relief and dread. We were going home - we still had the journey back. It reminded us poignantly that we could be the next salvaged mission. It was odd, the idea of scavenging the corpse of a ship as though it would never happen to you, as though you, a small rickety thing, were somehow superior to that highly funded scientific beast. While putting on my scuba diving suit, my hands shook so much I could hardly zip it up. As I went into the water, I thought, ‘This is it’.
But being submerged once again, even if my eyes were constantly darting towards the abyss around me, was a holy experience. Being completely enveloped in the darkness, swimming through the tight gaps and ravaging for any useful materials made me feel part of the ocean, welcomed in her arms. Though I knew that she wasn’t always merciful - that childlike naivety had disintegrated entirely.
I was wedged into a pipe when it happened, my arms contorted into horrible positions so that the light of my flashlight could scrape the surface and search for anything useful. I felt it - the pipe shifted around in the ocean. Something big was near. Adrenaline filled my body. It was dangerous. It would kill me. I took a deep breath in - the only luxury I had here - and began to wriggle out, my jerking body hitting the edge at every turn, my shaking hands again saying ‘This is it’.
When I got out, it was just me and it.
It loomed over the wreckage, illuminating the vast metal carcass with the blue lights on the ends of its hair and the brightness of its golden eyes, its eyes that were trained on me. I could not meet its gaze - it was too bright - so my eyes scoured its body, one like a human, though covered in scales that drew together at the waist into a fish’s tail, thick and powerful and deadly. It had hands, hands almost exactly like a human’s, but clawed and webbed like a predator - predator’s hands that reached out to me.
I was lost in the deep blue of its skin, the vastness of its scales, and then finally, I looked back up at its eyes and found them not so unbearably bright anymore. They were filled with humanity, with opportunity, framed by the locks of hair that glowed a bioluminescent blue. It pulled me closer, closer, until I could no longer see the insignificant corpse of that ship - it would be pecked to death by other scavengers anyways - but instead could only gaze at her, her face, her body, her glowing hair, until they were the only thing in existence, the only thing that mattered. No matter where I turned, I couldn’t avoid her - to the front was her glowing face, to the sides her hair that blocked out the inky deep, to the back her rough hands that pulled me ever closer to her. I was completely and utterly consumed by her before she even opened her mouth.
I would have stayed there, staring into her eyes, ignoring the hungry teeth and darting tongue, if I had not realised that if I died she too would die with me. Her beauty, the knowledge of her beauty, would all be smeared with my blood and flesh and gore if I had allowed her to completely consume me, so instead I pushed up, away from her guiding hand, and swam back to the ship - all while still facing her, her eyes pressed down into something akin to disappointment.
Comentários