www.bobkull.org
Pargo Gulch
Frank Bob Kull
1995
San Cristobal
de las Casas, Chiapas, México
The man grunted at
the pain in his shoulder as he struggled into the misshapen wetsuit. It had been made for someone else and
now fit more like a hermit crab’s shell than a lobster’s carapace – loose at the
neck and tight across the shoulders.
He wondered, as he always did when he’d been diving deep and stretching
time, whether he was bent. But the
pain stayed with him at depth, a sign that nitrogen bubbles in the joint were
not the problem, so he let the thought go only to have it replaced with,
‘Getting old I guess.’ Not much
better, but at least age couldn’t be fixed by a long trip to the decompression
chamber. Or perhaps it could, he’d
have to think about that sometime – some other time.
The wind howled out
of the south, chopping the bay into froth, then scraped up sand from the beach,
drove it into the man’s leg, and piled it in drifts against the mound of his
equipment.
“Whores and sluts,”
he muttered, “won’t this Christly wind ever quit?” He could barely hear himself cursing as
his voice got whipped away across the sun-hammered floor of the desert, up the
dry, winding bed of the arroyo, and was lost in the mauve mountain-haze
beyond. No matter. The words carried no real wrath, but
were instead a sort of verbal caress expressing the passion and love he’d come
to feel for this pocket of stark wilderness; like the tender filth he’d whisper into
the wanton ear of an eager lover.
Again the man cursed, harder-edged this time, and with enough weight to
push down forbidden memories and a different kind of pain trying to creep in
through deep cracks in his heart.
Sitting flat on the
sand, he shrugged into the tank straps, tightened them, and locked the buckles
into place. Then he linked the
power inflator from tank to buoyancy-compensator (BCD), made sure the tank valve
was open and regulator functioning by taking four hard breaths through the
second-stage mouthpiece while checking that the air pressure gauge held steady
at 3300 PSI. He wound and set the
bottom timer to zero, strapped twelve pounds of lead around his waist, clipped
goody-bag to the belt, and stuffed his navy dive tables into the front of the
wet suit.
Rolling onto his
hands and knees, he turned his back briefly and for the last time on the sea and
staggered to stand up. His gaze
spread across the baked – burnt, some would think – hills and valley. The dry arroyo was choked with dead wood
washed down in the last flash-flood and richly laden with dark, grey-green
mesquite, cholla, palo verde, and a hundred other bushes and stunted trees he
could sometimes recognize but never name.
The scorched sand was splattered with watery shit from the half-starved
cattle and wild burros that roamed the valley trying to survive in the drought
beaten land; the same animals that raided the camps in the night, desperately
seeking food and water. They’d
devour anything – dry spaghetti, tea bags, heads of garlic, rolls of toilet
paper – and were beyond fear
(except, perhaps, when Larry, woken at midnight, would come screaming out of his
camper armed with a six battery flashlight and wrist-rocket slingshot). “Nailed that bastard donkey right in the
ear,” he’d gloat the next day. Or,
“That damn black bull won’t be back real soon. I settled with him square in the balls
last night. Should have seen him
humping off down the road.” It was
the cows though that really unhinged the man. Just the night before he’d vaguely felt
a warm, wet snuffling in his ear, but when, with longing, he’d reached for her –
or at least an adobe make believe – he’d been jarred rudely awake by a sticky
gob of drool dripping onto his cheek and the fading sound of hoofs wheeling into
the dark.
As
he gazed across the land he felt hurt and angered to see its beauty marred by
discarded plastic bags and other rubbish, wind strewn and snagged half hidden in
the tangled arroyo brush, like venereal sores lost in the pubic bush of an
innocent peasant seduced and corrupted by the flash and glitter of her wealthy,
diseased neighbor.
He
turned back to the deep, wild wet of the sea. He could hear the canyon calling to him,
but he wasn’t yet ready to go.
*
*
*
He
had stopped to camp on this beach for only one night, more than five weeks
ago. In the late afternoon he’d
snorkeled out over the shoals that stretched from the north point of the bay and
speared two pompano for dinner. The
flat, sand beach and uniform blue water didn’t suggest an interesting marine
terrain, and he hadn’t planned to make a tank dive. Besides, his dive guide failed to
mention the bay, although that, in itself, might have aroused his interest and
made him suspicious. Since crossing
the border two months before, he’d been driving his old datsun wagon south,
following his dream of a perfect shore dive. Several times he’d sampled what the
guide promised would be exciting fifty to seventy foot dives, only to find
shallow water and a rubble-strewn bottom.
He doubted the authors had ever actually shore-dived Baja at
all.
The next morning he
was packed and ready to leave when Larry came back from fishing. Larry and his wife, Gale, had been
coming down and staying on the beach six months at a stretch for years. Larry following his lust for the action
of yellowtail, dolphin, tuna, and jack
craval. They exchanged
polite sounds for a while then Larry said, “You’re looking for a place to
dive? Well, hell, there’s a three
hundred foot deep canyon right out front here about seventy five yards off
shore.”
So
the man unpacked, geared up, and headed out for a look around. As he surface-swam to a mooring buoy,
supposedly anchored just beside the rim of the canyon, he wondered if he would
be disappointed again. From the
buoy he followed rusty, algae-caked links of heavy chain down through ninety
feet of blue-green water. The bare,
sand bottom sloped away to the south east, and he followed its gentle curve
until abruptly it sheared away into a nearly vertical drop and flung him into
the dark, mysterious void of the canyon.
As he swam silently down past steep sand fields, sheer rock walls, and
shadowed ledges, he felt a quick rush of excitement bring him sharply alive for
the first time in months. Kicking
slowly and slipping deeper into the beckoning dark below, he came to rest in
weightless, boundless space.
Suspended in twilight
between looming granite and bottomless gloom, he heard his breathing slow to a
soft, rhythmic roar past his ears, felt skeletal muscles, freed from their
struggle with gravity, relax, and sensed his heart barely ticking over. The surface and world beyond – of
sunshine and people and things – faded to a faint memory as his mind gathered
and focused itself into the present.
With deepening concentration, his awareness opened and he sensed himself
as other, a speck lost in time; a lone man moving down the ancient wall of a
vast canyon buried in the endless sea.
Rapt in wonder he ceased questioning his need to be on the ragged edge of
the unknown. Whether running
towards something or away, trying to bolster rickety self-esteem or earn peer
respect, no longer mattered, because in all the world this was his favorite
place to be. No need to give or
receive opinions, no concern for the experience of others, no regret or worry
about past and future; only the present moment and lingering in the presence of
the sacred.
As
he drifted down past 120 feet, the pressurized nitrogen saturating his brain
began to seriously warp his perceptions.
Narcosis took hold of him and wrapped its insidious, euphoric fog around
his mind. He leveled out at 140
feet and began to hunt. Fins
sweeping steadily, he stalked the granite face, eyes probing the hazy distance
and crevices of the rock wall, seeking the pargo, grouper, or lobster that might
be lurking there. He came to a
series of textured ridges with thin, black slits that betrayed the massive,
slightly open shells of otherwise camouflaged deep-water scallops. He pried free and bagged a dozen, fed
air into the BCD to neutralize their weight, then hampered by their bulk swam
on.
Though nearly all his
consciousness was absorbed in physical sensation, awe of the eternal, and blood
lust of the hunt, a small, lucid fragment remained intent on survival. That sharp-edged shard, struggling to
remain free of the narcotic dream, had been monitoring depth, bottom time, and
air supply. Ignored for too long,
it now demanded attention at the same moment the man spotted a large pargo
skulking outside its cave some thirty feet below. A childish but deadly serious argument
ensued waged more with vague anxiety and inarticulate longing than with coherent
thought.
“Whoa,
pargo!”
“Forget the fish;
check your air! Only 650 pounds
left; 140 feet deep; 25 minutes bottom time; need 16 minutes decompression;
barely make it; gonna get bent. Go
up now!”
“Yeah but... just take a minute to get
him and start up; barbecued fish.
Yum!”
“He’ll jam into the
cave; you’re too stubborn to leave the spear; run out of air; deeper down there,
need more decompression.”
“Aargh! Yeah well, OK, but...just a few more
minutes; this place is what we’ve been looking for.”
“Air’s at 600; come
back tomorrow.”
“Yeah but...could be
a sand falls just ahead; haven’t seen one in years; these walls are perfect;
just a little further, then we’ll go up.”
“Go up now! Right now!”
Reluctantly he
started for the surface, beginning the long journey back to another
reality. Constantly watching both
depth gauge and smallest exhaust bubbles, he slowly bled air from the BCD to
control his ascent rate. With
decreasing depth the effects of narcosis disappeared, and as his mind cleared,
worry about air supply and decompression time crept over him. But there was nothing he could do except
slow his breathing still further and ascend. At 20 feet he paused for 2 minutes, then
at 10 leveled out and, decompressing as he swam, followed the compass toward
land. Near shore he met the bottom
again, and after checking for sting rays and sharp rocks, stretched out to wait
for time to tick by.
Even when the
required decompression was complete he stayed there to increase his margin of
safety against the bends – drowsing and shivering and basking in the golden
light that shimmered down onto the pale, rippled sand. Finally, when difficulty in breathing
warned him of a dry tank, he surfaced and made his way to the beach where he sat
staring blankly out to sea.
The canyon’s haunting
spell held him by the bay and wouldn’t let him leave. Each day he dove in the morning and then
drove thirty miles over rough, dirt road to fill his tank at the nearest
compressor. He was alone in the
canyon always. Once he had seen
other tank-divers on the beach, but they, as well as a passing group of
free-divers, stayed in the shallow water off the northern point.
Then coming back from
filling his tank one afternoon he saw the face of the beach had changed. Dan and Sharon’s rusted motor home was
still hunkered down against the wind, and neither Larry and Gale’s camper nor
the shark fishermen’s shanties had moved, but his own camp had disappeared
behind the overwhelming bulk of an American Caravan. Three shiny-new, 3/4 ton, 4X4, diesel
pickups had hauled in three enormous travel trailers that could only be
described as gross. There was at
least a quarter of a million dollars of merchandise formed into a U, open end
toward the sea, as though they felt themselves to be a wagon train in need of
protection against hostile natives.
The hollow of the U was tastefully buffered against the harsh, intruding
environment by a pink striped canopy above a carpet of rich, green
Astroturf below. Equally rebuffed were sun, sand, wind,
and ants. To one side a separate
pavilion had been erected to shade their compressor and dive tanks.
‘All in all a fine
job, folks,’ he thought, ‘congratulations... Damned
equipment freaks.’
The three trucks were
at the water’s edge where the men were tinkering with three outboard motors
mounted on three inflatable boats.
The trucks had been used to haul not only the boats, but also the men to
the sea as they and their wives preferred not to exert themselves by actually
walking the two hundred feet from their caravan to the water.
As
he pulled into his campsite, the intruders drove back to their plastic habitat
in response to their beckoning wives, and all six of them began to devour large
slabs of chocolate cake. Even
hunched over their table as they were, he could see they were not lean
people. Between the six they easily
carried enough poundage to suffice for seven or eight. He got out of his car, leaned on the
hood, and stared. This was just
what he’d come south to escape. He
could see them quite clearly because, with the whole beach to choose from, they
had settled less than fifty feet from his camp. The hot sun seemed to boil his
brains. He drank and splashed his
head with water, then stared at them again. Finally, as much in hope of dispelling a
troublesome mirage as to express contempt, he slowly shook his head. They sat munching their cake and gazed
back.
Larry was surf
casting for trigger fish. The man
went over and muttered his outrage.
“Get used to them,” Larry told him, “They were here for three weeks last
year.”
“Shit.”
“Hey, this is your
dream come true. They’ve got a
compressor to fill your tank and plenty of room in their boats to take you
diving with them. Quit complaining
and milk it. Make em feel guilty
for moving in like that, then let em make it up to you. Perfect set up.”
“Can’t do it,” the
man replied after considering. “It’s not right. That would let them think it’s OK to
crowd me out. It’s not OK just cos
there’s six of them with huge rigs and only one of me in a small car. Nah, fuck em.” He stalked back to his camp, stared at
them some more, and then started to pack up and move further down the
beach.
One of them walked
over. “Hey, we’re sorry,” he said,
apparently trying to be friendly.
“We pulled in and started setting up and figured we were far enough
away. But then things just sort of
spread out. I can see we crowded
you a bit.”
“Uh
huh.”
“Well, sorry. Uh, can I help carry some of your
stuff?”
“No, I’ve got it,”
and he turned and walked off.
The next day
returning from what he had decided would be his last dive – his money was too short to keep paying
for tank fills, and the thirty mile drive over rough, dirt road every day was
hard on his car – the man saw two of the guys from the caravan talking to
Larry. They lumbered over and the
one who’d apologized the day before said, “Larry was telling us you’ve been
diving the canyon the past two weeks. Ourselves, we’re not deep divers – not
being in shape for it – but if you’d like to go out off the point into shallow
water sometime, we’d be happy to take you with us. There’s plenty of room in the
boats. And any time you want to
fill your tank, just come on over and use the compressor. We feel bad as hell about crowding you
out like that. We’ve been coming
down here for years and have never had hard feelings before. We’d hate to start now.” The man looked over and saw Larry grin
and give him a thumbs up.
The other guy
straightened up, looked him in the eye, and said, “Lookit, we were
assholes.” No excuses, no hedging,
just straight out, “We were assholes.
You took it a whole lot better than we would have if someone had crowded
us that way. Sorry.” And he stuck out his hand saying,
“I’m Rich and this here is Dave.”
The man had to let it
go; what choice really except to shift the shoe to his own foot and their
self-claimed epitaph to himself. He
felt the tension of anger slip away as he smiled and shook their hands. He didn’t think he was just making the
best of it, or getting bought off with their offer – although damn it was a
sweet deal. There was something
else going on here, something cleaner.
Something that rang true in them.
Either the stereotype was flawed, or, at some level, they didn’t fit
it.
Strange people, real
equipment junkies. But dragging all
their toys with them, they were out on their own kind of edge. They’d driven their monster rigs
everywhere all the way from
There was a wild dog
on the beach, a matted, mangy mongrel.
Left behind by some sorry tourist, it looked to be maybe part poodle and
part terrier. It was very shy of
people and probably had its reasons.
The man had thrown it food and called it over from time to time, but it
always shrank down and scurried away as though he’d aimed a rock at it instead
of a chunk of bread or fish. Nor
would the mutt go near Gale, even though she had tried for months to make
friends with it. It took Dave’s
wife, Judy, three days to get the critter bathed, trimmed and cuddled up in her
lap. Then, feeling secure, and
perhaps remembering her previous life, she opened up to the rest of us and
finally stood guard over the caravan chasing away her former fellow scavengers,
the cows and donkeys. It was more than a vacation romance,
too. They had adopted the dog for
the long haul, and took her into
Sometimes at night
the man would lounge in the quiet dark of his camp watching the stars and
listening to the surf crumple onto the beach and the crabs skittering over the
sand. Over in their caravan his
neighbors were lit up and laughing, doing things their way. He would remind himself that judgment
slams windows and doors, locking out the rich variety of life, and makes the
soul a pauper.
With no need now to drive to fill his tank, he settled more comfortably into the easy rhythm of the beach. He was up at first light to watch the sun appear, meditate, and eat breakfast. After that he took himself to the sea. A few times he went for shallow dives with his new friends, and once took Gale for her first dive, but the pull of the deep, wild canyon was strong in him. Each day he swam out from a different place on the beach and dropped the 80 or 90 feet to the sand bottom which he followed out to the cliff face. It wasn’t the gentle, underwater scenery most divers look for – lovely, colored, coral reefs and brilliant, tropical fish – but was awesome, somber, and immense. It demanded everything from him – physically, mentally, spiritually – and he willingly gave himself. He never tired of exploring, and tried to integrate all he discovered. It seemed the wall he’d been diving was continuous and fairly straight, running from east northeast to west southwest, but it was difficult to form a clear, mental map when his perceptions were always constrained by limited visibility and warped by narcosis mists. He often wondered about the deep gut of the canyon and its far side. He’d heard the bottom was beyond 300 feet, and he’d gone down to 175 and seen nothing but space below him.
One day while looking
out from the edge of the sheer drop toward the southeast into what should have
been empty water, he felt as much as saw a blurred, grey mass. His body tensed into a straining stare
but it was gone. He clung to the
rim undecided, and then, tightly focused on his compass to prevent
disorientation, crept outward.
‘Strange stuff,’ he mused as the depths below him showed mottled grey
instead of dull, opaque green; there was bottom down there. He glanced up from the compass and his
heart leapt ahead toward the rocky outcrop just materializing in the near
distance, an unexpected face of the canyon sculpted into ledges, crevices, and
deep caves. He’d stumbled into one
of the enchanted places the sea hides and saves for driven, directionless
wanderers.
Sometime in the past,
the sea bed had heaved and cracked itself into the deep rift of the canyon. And perhaps at the same moment, perhaps
later, the wall itself fractured and split open at an angle to the main face to
form the narrow notch the man had just passed over.
He
slowly sank into the gulch. It was
alive! Gorgonian sea fans clung to
the ledges, and schools of grunt, sergeant major, and trigger fish swam through
and around the fractured rock.
Following his flashlight he inched into a cave searching for lobster, but
warned off by the sinister leer of a giant, green moray eel that reared up from
the recess of its lair and showed razor fangs that sparkled in the yellow
lamplight. They eyed one another
with mutual curiosity, each holding mouth open to breathe rather than snarl,
then the man eased out of the cave and continued down into the gulch. In places visibility decreased due to
shimmering mirages and swirling debris – evidence of fresh water seeps and
upwelling currents which carried rich nutrients from the canyon floor. As he dropped through a thermo cline at
110 feet and into the cold shadows below, he shivered, stuffed the old towel
more securely into the neck of his wetsuit, and tightened the weight belt to
slow the chill seeping into his muscles and bones.
Ahead in the gloom he
caught swirling flashes of brilliant, gold-orange light, almost like October
leaves stirred by an evening breeze and sent tumbling through rich, slanting
sunbeams. He knew that according to
science light waves from the yellow-red end of the spectrum are absorbed in the
top ten to thirty feet of the water column and that he couldn’t really see what
he was seeing. Hundreds of
beautiful dog pargo ranging from two to ten pounds were working the thermo cline
for food as they circled up the rock wall and then out and down again; beautiful
yes, and also one of the tastiest fish in the sea.
His blood pulsed and
the sea vanished. Intent on his
prey, gun pointed and finger loose on the trigger, he hugged the shadowed rock
and slunk forward until he reached a small ledge with a large sea fan holding
fast to the outer lip. Stretched full length, spear tip past the ledge’s edge, he lay
hidden and waiting. The fat,
full-bodied pargo came swimming up the rock face,
flashed into view mere feet in front of him, and then were gone as they circled
out and down. Some three and four
pound ones were close in, but he wanted one of the big ones that always passed
beyond the range of his gun. His
world shrank to a short, constricted tunnel that held only sea fan, spear tip,
and hypnotic, gold-orange pargo.
Far back in his mind he heard the nagging voice urge
him to check his nearly empty tank, but even that would have to wait as he
waited.
A
sudden ripple shivered across his leg.
A cloud of silt churned from the ledge behind him, fouled the water, and
the pargo were gone. He felt his
neck hair twitch and his balls suck up into a knotted fist. He turned quickly but was alone on the
narrow ledge. Shaken from his
trance, he checked his air and knew he’d stayed too long. He drove for the surface chafing against
the need to ascend slowly. At 60
feet a bullet shape appeared suddenly at the edge of visibility, shot towards
him, then veered off into the distance again. Up he swam, reaching for the surface as
the silver shape, driven by curiosity, circled from behind only feet away. He fired and saw the spear strike, yet
couldn’t stop his ascent and dragged the thrashing amber jack with him.
The gauge read 400
pounds when he reached 10 feet, but he had 14 minutes of decompression ahead and
was breathing hard from fright and from his struggle with the jack. Telling his body that his pounding heart
was confused, he worked his ragged panting into a slow deep rhythm and held his
place in the water instead of kicking towards shore. He didn’t move at all and used only the
buoyancy from the BCD and the volume of air in his lungs to remain at the
required depth. He wanted to
surface directly above the crack in the canyon wall and then triangulate land
sightings to guide him back.
Without accurate sightings his chance of finding the gulch again was
remote, but he guessed the current would move him an indeterminate distance in
an unknown direction before he could surface. He was right.
The next day,
carrying a small float and a hundred feet of fish line, he swam to the place in
the water he’d marked in his mind.
Here, two imaginary lines (one, toward the north, used Dan’s motor home
in front of the spike mountain and the other, to the west, sighted a dead branch
on the tall mesquite behind a large driftwood root) crossed each other. He checked his gear and dove. The water was murkier than usual and
cold. Before he reached 80 feet the
light was swallowed by the empty, forbidding gloom. At 90 feet he ended his futile
descent. There was no bottom, no
canyon wall; nothing around, above, or below but endless, featureless
water. He was lost. Magnified by the absence of visual
anchors, narcosis took its toll. He
felt as though the turbid water was not only surrounding and pressing in on him,
but had forced its way into his head and was roiling inside his brain trying to
loose his tenuous grasp on reason.
The disorientation
became frightening as he peered through his confusion at the suspect dial of the
compass. He fought to trust it and
remember the cardinal lay of the absent canyon wall. His intuition insisted the compass was
wrong, that he must swim to the left, but the faint whisper of reason knew
intuition would lead him in circles.
Eyes riveted to the needle he swam toward where the gulch should be. He swam through a turbid dream, steadily
kicking yet seeming to never move.
Gradually, barely perceptible to his narced mind, dream twisted into
nightmare. Phantom shapes swarmed
from the murky depths. He’d heard
from the local shark fishermen that the canyon ran deep and straight out to
sea. Not far away, less than a
quarter of a mile, it plunged to 600 feet where giant sea beasts lurked that
could swallow him whole – or worse, rip him ravenously into two or three tasty
morsels. The sea lost its
implacability and became a malevolent adversary intent on his destruction as
waves of panic rose, cracked against the stubborn core of his resolve, and
receded.
He
trudged doggedly on, holding to 90 feet and following, as well as his fear and
confusion would allow, a zigzag compass pattern: southwest for a hundred and
fifty kicks, then east southeast for a hundred and fifty – over and over – the
only change was the decreasing air pressure in his tank. He had no idea where he was, and when,
after 40 minutes, he ascended to decompress and surface, he saw he was two
hundred yards further out to sea than where he knew the gulch had to be. Disgusted and bewildered, he swam in to
the beach.
The next day he and
Dave waited until the sun was high and visibility maximum and then took one of
the inflatable boats to search for the gulch from the surface using a handheld
depth-finder. They were looking for
a sudden drop from 90 feet to deep water and then a sharp rise back to 80
feet. The plan was to zigzag back
and forth across the canyon wall in the area he expected to find the notch. The first pass left him as bewildered as
he’d been the day before. It didn’t
seem to be a canyon down there at all, but rather a shelf that dropped off from
about 80 to 300 feet where the deep floor was a labyrinth of up thrust spires
and ridges. The depth finder yo-yo’d as they followed a two hundred yard track straight
out from the drop off: 90 feet, 270, 330, 70, 180, 70, 250, 310, 90, 290.
Cursing technology,
he dove out of the boat and back into fear and confusion. Again he held to 90 feet and swam
through swarms of leering phantoms crouched in the mouths of their shrouded
caverns. Several times he stumbled
into solid rock masses, but they were lifeless and profane. Tense, desolate, and shivering he crept
back ashore, mourning his loss.
He’d searched so long to finally find what was now lost again – the
sacred mystery hidden in pargo gulch.
He got out the tequila and drank the afternoon into
evening.
The next morning he
sat on the beach and waited for the sun to burn away the tequila fog. And then sat on and allowed his
grasping, calculating mind to calm.
Still he waited to feel himself settle into the blowing sand,
mountain-rimmed valley, and brush-choked arroyo. He waited until the sea stopped calling
to him and until his lust for her softened into tenderness and love. Waited until she lay
silent, open, and receptive.
Then in silence he entered, swam out, and dropped directly down into her
secret notch.
He tied the fish line
to a rock and let the float spin and loop its lazy way to the surface far
above. He smiled and sighed as
though the finger of God had dragged across his shoulder. A soft looseness filled his belly
causing his nuts to dangle free and his ass to unclench and the lump of his
heart to turn over in a slow lub-dub.
He knew he’d finally come home.
For more than two weeks he had dived into the gulch or along the surrounding canyon wall at least once and often twice a day, the spell of the canyon always pulling him back down. He went early and late to increase the surface interval between dives, but still he bordered dangerously close to getting bent. He usually shot two or three pargo to eat and share with Larry and Gale, Dan and Sharon and their kids, or the folks from the caravan. Bringing up two three-pound lobsters one day, he had finally convinced Rich and Dave to strip off their shallow water personas and embrace the deep for the first time in years. They found no lobster, but came up murmuring, “World Class.” He’d also found a sand flat on the canyon rim where schools of amberjack often passed then circled back to wonder at his presence. He’d speared several weighing twenty to thirty pounds for barbecuing, but the big jacks, the really big ones, had always kept their distance – except once when he’d shot a fifty pound one. It had thrashed once, snapped the head off his spear and was gone.
*
*
*
Now he was heading
out for his last dive. The caravan
was leaving in a few hours, taking the compressor with them. They were also taking his tank and
wetsuit which he would pick up later in the north. His craving for the sea was sated, and
he had work to do in the rain-drenched mountains of
The man checked the
gun carefully. It was as battered
and scarred as he was, and like him still functional. He’d picked it up for forty dollars at
the swap meet that sprawls over fifty dusty acres just outside
The trigger mechanism was rough and difficult to release, but he’d filed the worn catch as smooth as possible after the gun had jammed a few days before and by now had adjusted to the stiff pull. The knots in the short, nylon cord that attached spear shaft to gun were secure. The shaft itself looked like the hind leg of a crippled dog. It had been bent so severely by thrashing fish during the past months it was beyond straightening, but the tip was sharp enough to pierce the heavy scales of rock fish. It was an old slip tip he’d bought from the guys in the caravan after the fifty pound jack had snapped his fixed tip off the shaft. With a fixed tip, the three foot spear is rigidly embedded in the fish’s body, usually protruding at a hard angle, with the butt of the spear tied to the gun. A big fish generates great leverage as it fights for freedom and can either bend or break the spear. A slip tip prevents this. On impact the tip releases from the shaft but is still connected by eight inches of flexible, steel wire. The barbed tip remains embedded in the prey and there is a straight line of force from fish to gun which prevents lateral stress on the spear shaft. The heavy propulsion rubbers were worn and deteriorated by sun and salt, and needed to be replaced. This size gun is usually rigged with two rubbers, but he had added a third to increase its power and range.
He
bent his leg and set the butt of the gun into the top of his groin, then slowly
stretched the rotted rubbers to their full length and hooked the connecting
wires into the notches on the spear.
If a rubber were to snap during cocking, a thumb nail might easily get
ripped out. Finally ready, he
checked his compass bearing and began to swim. After seventy five kicks he raised his
head to check his position against the land and realized a current was running
and had carried him off course.
Grumbling, he turned and pushed his way into the wind and chop, and
finally arrived to where his new triangulation lines crossed.
He
pulled the dive tables out of his wetsuit to review the no-decompression
limits: he could dive to 90 feet
for 30 minutes, 100 for 25, 110 for 20, or 120 for 15, and return directly to
the surface. He didn’t expect to go
deeper or stay longer, but his dives seldom followed his plans. If he went to 90 feet for 40 minutes, he
would need to stop at 10 feet for 7 minutes decompression before surfacing; to
100 for 40, 15 minutes at 10 feet; 110 for 30, 7 at 10; 120 for 30, 14 at
10. He was using US Navy dive
tables which give estimated limits for young, lean bodies, and the cautious
voice in his head urged him to be conservative and cut back on the recommended
limits. He knew he was breaking all
the safety rules: over-filling his tank, using navy dive tables, diving deep and
passing the no-decompression limits, coming up with no emergency air in his
tank, and especially diving alone, so he tried to be careful. He acknowledged the rules made sense,
but something inside him needed to go beyond the sensible, out to the risky edge
of the unknown.
He
checked timer and pressure gauge again, dipped his right shoulder to find the
regulator hose, and switched from snorkel to mouthpiece of the second stage.
He took several deep breaths, then
dumped air from the BCD and was gone.
Relaxed in mind and
body, he drifted peacefully down.
The rumble of the exhaust past his ears soothed him and thoughtlessly he
watched the translucent bubbles shimmer up and away. He felt his heart open and his mind
settle into depths beneath the shallow chop of scattered thinking and the urgent
pull of emotional currents. As
depth increased, he repeatedly equalized the pressure building against his
eardrums.
Dropping toward the
canyon, reds and yellows faded in the deepening twilight as he moved through
space instead of time. The rock
outcrop appeared and faded again into the ancient stillness. Directly below, pargo gulch was shrouded
in silence, and without pause he swam down through the thermo cline and into its
chill shadows. As he wandered for
the last time along the rock wall, sculpted into caves, cracks, and ledges, and
draped with scattered sea fans and fluted algae, he wondered again at the
mysterious Presence he sensed there.
He knew that for him, whether from choice or by destiny, It would always remain unknowable. He paused in awe and gratitude as he
felt It surround and cradle him as securely as did the
sea in which he floated.
The impossible,
gold-orange gleam of the dog pargo flashed along the cliff face tempting
him. His finger twitched on the
trigger and a hot rush of adrenaline urged him on. But he hadn’t come to hunt, so he stayed
his heart, bathed in their beauty and sacred aliveness, and wished them
well. As he lingered there, it
grieved him to admit the high price he paid for his blood lust. When hunting he became narrowly focused
on the search image he projected onto the world. All that didn’t match became nearly
invisible and lost its value. The
vibrant, interwoven tapestry of three dimensional life – color and shape in
motion – was deformed into a featureless, grey background against which he
sought his prey. He supposed the
hunt was just a metaphor for all goal-seeking and drive to
success...
He
awoke with a grunt at the pain in his head and saw that this wretched
philosophizing blinded him as much as did lust. He waited patiently for the translucent
flow of wonder to burn through the slowly vaporizing pall of rational
thought. The pressure gauge said
he’d used two hundred pounds of valuable air in idle speculation.
Back in the now he
watched the pargo continue to feed, then followed a school of grunts that were
slowly rising up toward the canyon rim.
When he reached the sand flat he stopped. This was where he had often seen schools
of amber jack on other dives.
Motionless and lightly anchored to the sand with the tip of one fin, he
waited. Time slowed, measured only
by the rhythmic pulse of his breathing.
Suddenly, from out of
nowhere, they were all around him, carving the water with their sensuous, silver
bodies. Impelled by curiosity, they
circled in only feet away – great, shining, black eyes, set in amber, staring as
they swept past. They were large
fish, ten to thirty pounds, yet his heart was still. He hadn’t come to hunt, but to worship
and say goodbye.
Then he saw them and
felt adrenaline surge, but he didn’t ride it and it rippled away. There were three of them swimming
leisurely on the far edge of the school, their faint forms nearly hidden by the
milling mass. They were huge. When they turned and headed toward him,
he shut his breathing down to a bare, bubbling trickle and slowly extended his
gun to track their approach. A
sudden movement or burst of bubbles could startle them away. Broad, powerful tails barely working,
they lazily moved closer apparently unaware of the danger, then negligently
turned and passed by fifteen feet away.
Breath ragged from the effort to govern it against the demand of his
adrenaline soaked heart, he shrugged off his disappointment and settled back
into the wonder of the smaller fish still swimming gracefully all around
him. Once again the really big ones
would be there for the future. But
he was wrong, they hadn’t gone. He
spotted them again still there in the distance. Their bodies were vague, almost ghostly,
in the dim light as they turned and angled toward him. He held and waited. Majestically, they slowly approached,
and as they drew near they lost their vagueness, became very solid and grew in
size. At ten feet, just outside the
range of his battered gun, the first two turned away. He held and tracked as the third came
closer, waited until at eight feet it slowly turned and presented itself for his
shot.
The spear sank into
the tough cartilage of the gill cover just behind and below the dark, luminous
eye. It didn’t seriously wound the
jack, but only linked fish and man together by eight feet of nylon cord. The fish seemed not to know it had been
hit, and continued to swim peacefully away. The old slip tip did not release and the
spear shaft began to bend. The man
jerked back on the gun which freed the tip and jarred the fish into
awareness.
The shift in ambiance
was sudden and radical, as though all of them were wired up to the same adrenal
pump. From tranquility – motionless
man surrounded by gracefully gliding fish – the sea exploded into frenzied
chaos. The strength of the jack was
unbelievable. Tail thrashing, it
lunged and tore a circular hole in the water around and above him. If he’d had time, he would have been
frightened by its power. He
was helpless before it, and could only clutch the gun with both hands and spin
to prevent getting tangled in the line.
The other fish were now streaking around the struggling pair, slashing
the water with incredible speed.
Then the great jack
drove for the lip of the canyon barely slowed by the dragging weight of the man
and his gear. Out over deep water
the fish dove, plunging down into the black abyss toward the hidden floor 200
feet below. The man could do
nothing but cling to the gun and clear his ears. He had no chance to check the depth
gauge, had no idea how far the fish had dragged him down, but now he was
scared. He wasn’t sure he could
keep his grip, but he had to stop the downward run. Wrapping one arm tightly around the gun,
he groped with the other hand for the power-inflate valve and fed air into the BCD to increase his
buoyancy and the drag on the fish.
The jack didn’t slow, but instead turned and raced for the surface. Now both its
power and the man’s own buoyancy were thrusting him upward far faster than was
safe. The tiny alveoli in his lungs
could rupture allowing minute air bubbles into the arteries to be carried to the
brain where they would cause embolism, unconsciousness, and death. He gasped air in and out, striving to
equalize with the decreasing pressure of the surrounding sea. Still clasping the gun to his chest with
one arm, he dumped air from the BCD and felt the drag of his increased weight
begin to tell on the tiring fish.
At
80 feet the jack leveled out and headed back toward the rim of the canyon and
the jagged rocks that ringed the sand flat. It circled once and snagged the line
around a sharp rock. For the first
time since their struggle began the man swam against the fish. Kicking to the side as hard as he could,
he cleared the line before it could ravel and break. The jack tore off again, but suddenly
its strength was gone and it collapsed and lay gasping, hardly moving, on the
sloping field of sand. The man
cautiously approached, but when he reached to grasp the gill slit, the fish
lunged away with the last of its energy, then fell back,
exhausted.
The man came to his
prey, embraced its head with his left arm and lay out on it pressing down with
the full length of his body. He
reached down to the sheath strapped to his prosthetic leg and freed the knife he
carried there. He set the point
gently into the small, soft hollow just behind the black shining eye. “Forgive me fish,” he murmured, “thank you for giving
yourself to me.” Then he stabbed
the blade deep into the jack’s
brain. The beautiful animal
thrashed once in his grasp and then lay still as he watched the light fade from
its dying eye.
The man edged back to
look at the magnificent fish lying dead on the sand. He felt nearly overwhelmed by
ambivalence; both grief for the life he had destroyed and gratitude for the gift
of life he had received flooded him.
The other fish had
gone and the churned up sand had settled.
Stillness returned to the rim of the canyon where the man and fish
lay. The only movement was a thin
thread of blood that trickled from the wound in the fish’s head, spiraled up,
and was lost in the vast, eternal flow of the sea.
As
if in a trance, the man began to stir.
He vaguely checked his gauge and knew he had to leave. He removed the barbed spear tip from the
fish and tied a short cord through its mouth and gills. The bent spear would no longer slide
into the gun, so he carried it separately.
He swam slowly along the top of the gulch and whispered goodbye to the
magic and mystery for the last time, then reluctantly began his
ascent.
After decompressing
near the beach he tied a longer cord to the fish and left it floating in the
water while he stumbled through the shore break and onto land. He leaned heavily on his gun to ease the
pain in his stump where the home-made leg dug into the water softened skin and
jammed the severed nerves.
He
hollered to Larry to come and give him a hand, and together they dragged the
jack up onto the beach.
“Jesus that’s a big
fish,” Larry said.
“Yeah,” the man
replied, “it is.” It was the first
time Larry had ever been impressed with his catch, and it meant
something.
The folks from the
caravan came down to take pictures.
“Well,” Dave grinned at him,
“this is the one you’ve been waiting for. Nice you got him on your last
dive.”
“Yeah.” It was good to be surrounded by friends
and hear their congratulations and respect. But still, he felt the ache of losing
his deep connection with the ancient world of the sea and with the fish lying by
his foot. He sensed the shift as he
became a social being again, his consciousness tightly embedded in and limited
by the identities and customs of civilization. He wondered if he would ever learn to
experience other people and his relationships with them as vast and timeless and
sacred.
He
asked the local shark fishermen to bring their scale and they measured the fish
at five feet long and eighty pounds.
Shortly, everyone was gone – caravan headed north, Larry out fishing,
shark fishermen back to sleep – and he was alone with the fish again. It took more than an hour to skin and
butcher it.
He saved a bit of the flesh for himself and gave the rest to local
ranchers who in the drought-hit land welcomed the meat.
The next day he rose
at dawn, and after meditating and fixing breakfast, packed up and left. At the crest of the hills ringing the
sun-scorched valley he stopped for a last look and a leak. A rancher came racketing by in his old
pickup and waved thanks. Down on
the beach the stripped carcass of the fish still lay on the sand. Crabs had eaten the eyes during the
night and now as he stood there several vultures wheeled out of the empty sky
and began to feast on the remains.
The man’s urine splashed down onto the brown dust of the road turning it
to mud, and a small swarm of ants hauling a struggling beetle back to their nest
was briefly bogged down in the mire.
The brush choked and shit splattered arroyo lay baking in the morning sun
as it wound its way up and got lost in the distant, purple mountains. The man grunted at the pain in his
shoulder as he climbed into his car and drove away.
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