A Home Below

Bright Blue Malta… That day we managed to drag out the poolside hermits, and sun-phobics from the villa and go on a proper day trip. We rode the bus into Victoria, picked up some hot pastizzi —found in dazzling supply on every corner of Victoria—and waited for the second bus to arrive. We piled in, proudly showing off our tallinja explore cards. We swung around the bright jade bus poles to take our seats. Those who stood on feet were holding on for dear life as we clattered along those worn Gozitan roads. The countryside on either side of me flickered like a photo album. Hazes of sandstone, terracotta, and faded greens… Then I saw the azure. My eyes widened; I had not seen the sea in that shade of blue before. I had always braved icy Hebridean deeps. This was to be my first dip into the warm waters of Gozo. Here, my arms and legs would not grow red with goosebumps but soften in the salt. I was an olive, bobbing in brine and I was unafraid.

*

'A water baby,’ a phrase that has semantically shifted and drifted, as the icebergs do, is drawn from Charles Kingsley’s novel, Water babies.  These are the creatures who dwell in water. It has now undergone a process of amelioration (depending on your feelings for water), and many consider it a compliment or a term of endearment. It is a phrase given to someone throughout their life to describe their weird and wacky connection to aqua.  A phrase to those of us who’d rather have gills.

There are ways we connect with watery spaces: boats, scuba, submarines, but existence is different below. Our senses are capped; we are awarded only a little vision… only a little hearing but just enough to keep the intrigue. We spend our lives floating above its glassy exterior, immersing ourselves only for bursts of time but always resurfacing. 

Some places you feel a strange sense of connection to but you’d question if you are really welcome there. A place that draws you in with its vibrancy and mystery—teeming with forms of life—but not of your kind. Your body prevents you from staying, making it your home, and so you are left a reader, an observer, a learner. The language of water feels unlearnable, hazy and distant.

Is there a way to let water be more than just a necessity for survival, and a place of which we can call home? For 30 minutes you can look at the marine cities through goggle vision. For up to 205 minutes, you can dive below, peering at oceanic communities, albeit burdened with your regulator, carrying your dive knife in case you are caught in fishing nets.

Weightlessness accompanies the act of swimming. Since Di Vinci’s time, we have visited space, and regular folk can now experience worlds above clouds for small fees. Yet flying is only a spectacle for first-time flyers; it is merely a means of transport to us now. Everyone else is buried in a book, or their work, too busy to look out the window and realise—they are in the sky, they shouldn’t be there. In “The Lost Notebook of Aqueous Perspective”, D.L. Pughe writes, Leonardo  Di Vinci “once believed” that “swimming” was the “closest we can come to understanding what birds do in the air, it can free us from gravity and fear”. Swimming is perhaps no longer the closest we come to flight, but the closest we come to becoming water-dwellers.

Technology has allowed the general public to visit or use the underwater as public transport routinely.The Euro Tunnel, void of windows, is a space that is  distant from the ocean, despite traveling directly under the sea. That disconnect from water has become increasingly more prevalent…a large number of the world’s population have seen the ocean only in pixels.

Craig Foster, a filmmaker who grew up practically within the ocean, exploring rock pools around his beach house in western Cape, South Africa, admitted to this disconnect in his documentary My Octopus Teacher. Whilst filming in the Central Kalahari, Foster met some trackers. He described them as being “inside of the natural world”. They were extraordinary at picking up minuscule signs of wildlife in the desert and following them to their creators.

In his film, Foster also describes in detail, the experience of swimming in kelp forests in his homeland. Over a period of time the body begins to adapt to the cold temperatures and ferocious winds; the more time spent in water the more the body begins to crave the cold discomfort of it. How different is it to feel the water surrounding and saturating skin not to be separated by thick glass, metal, or neoprene? He mentions that after about ten minutes of being encirced by chilly waters, the body begins to accept it, and the water begins to accept you.

*

I was kneeling, bobbing on the board. The black waters below quietly lapping around its  sides. I gently pushed my paddle into the deep, and slowly manoeuvred it behind me, propelling myself forward. My arms were growing tired, and I was wishing I was stronger. I withdrew my oar from the loch and clumsily placed it by my side, making a racket. Slowly, squatting, I tried my hardest not to disrupt the serenity of the loch around me. My shifting weight created ripples all around. And with a wet, unflattering thump onto the board, I was stable and ready to enjoy the peace. I waited. I waited for that feeling of restlessness for I can’t be still for long. For a moment I focused. My palms immersed in the water, cupping it. The blackened waters turned crystal clear as I did so. Aged lines mapped upon my hands were now enlarged; the loch water slowly leaking from my palms zoomed in on the creases. I could see them clearly.

*

Even when people know that danger lies in deep waters, the fascination continues. I quizzed a few friends, asking, “would you be more afraid of exploring outer space or exploring the deep?”. An alarming number of people I talked to chose the latter, despite also saying that they were more afraid of it.

That pull between fear and fascination in me began at an early age. I remember being both traumatised and intrigued by the Anglerfish in Finding Nemo. After repeated viewing, I knew that Dory and Marlin would miraculously escape those dark beady eyes and vicious fangs; yet it still frightened me. In the film, the Anglerfish is introduced as a benign light, a ray of hope for the lost pair of fish; but when the sinister bearer of that glow is revealed, I learned that something could seem beautifully positive yet also malevolent. When we defy our physical capabilities to uncover the world—the deepest parts of it—what can we expect but lures and fangs. 

However, this realisation only piqued my interest in the deep sea. When I was seven, my Nanna bought me David Attenborough’s Blue Planet, and I was confronted with real creatures and their stories. Things were no longer cartooned but were animals with desires and purposes that I was desperate to understand. Curious about their bio-fluorescent lights emitting in the dark attracting the weaker species, I wanted to know how they communicated with each other. Did they use the same senses as us? If they did, did they use them for the same reasons? Something that strikes me about the natural history of the deep is that the features of these creatures, their attributes and purposes are, in the main, speculation. The beauty is their mystery. They keep their stories to themselves while we observe from our airtight bubbles.

*

Interestingly it wasn’t the lack of oxygen that worried my friends. It was pressure. Space feels vast despite being void of oxygen while the ocean feels claustrophobic. The root of this fear belongs to the human need for control. The science fictions we have grown up with have always begged us to explore, to join them on flurries of intergalactic adventures strung like fairy lights around our bedrooms. We can talk in space, free from breathing apparatus squashing our individuality. We can even make up profound quotes there, “One small step for Man, one giant leap for Mankind” (Neil Armstrong).

But what did they say when they reached the bottom of the Mariana trench? Lieutenant Don Walsh who was one of the two men on the Trieste expedition remarked, “I’m afraid we didn’t have any profound word, that could be written down somewhere, it was a quiet moment” (BBC 2012). The deep is deadly silent while teeming with life; the humans lucky enough to take a glimpse through artificial lights, using expensive camera equipment, are called to be quiet. To respect what exists there every day without them…

bite, catch, swish, float…

Life forms in space are still very much imaginary—Exclusive to the visions of Sci-fi creatives. They are unknown; we haven’t had a glimpse of the kinds of characters out there. Yet the deep is full of creatures of which we do know. We have had terrifying examples of what is beneath the waves, and we have learnt that there is much more undiscovered about these watery homes. 

*

It is foolish of me to say I am completely unafraid of water. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is the story of a man so settled in his home that he daydreams to escape it. A series of events leads him to not only escape in his mind but enables him to hop on a plane and travel somewhere new. He lands a job on a helicopter delivering radio parts to a vessel off the coast of Greenland. He is then instructed to jump off the helicopter into a lifeboat that is circling beneath them. However, Mitty doesn’t see the lifeboat and attempts to jump directly onto the vessel. He plunges into the sea. If I were Mitty I would descend into an animalistic state of fear and panic—this is not my home, I am unwelcomed here. Soon after plummeting into the arctic sea, Mitty is confronted with a fin below the waves. But isn’t Mitty the real threat, the imposter is to blame for trespassing, not the animal merely protecting its grounds?

As a child I kayaked. I joined Cub groups. By eleven I found myself within a “Sea Scout” district (ironically, we lived over an hour inland from any sea) Naturally, the leaders were pressed by parents to justify how the “Sea Scouts” were different from other scout groups, and so they decided that in the warmer months we would pay an extra five pounds to use the nearby man-made lakes. We rehearsed our buoyancy and raft-building skills for upcoming competitions (we would do anything to get new badges sewn onto our jumpers).

I don’t know if there was some kind of placebo effect laid on us by our nautical name, but we always were the best district at the raft races. When we began learning how to properly kayak, we quizzed our instructor as to why he had a protective cover over the gap on his boat, and why we kids had our knobbly little knees chattering in the open air. He explained to us that he was “capsize trained.” My eyes widened; capsizing meant swimming, and as much as I enjoyed paddling around in the boat, I wanted to be in the water, as opposed to hovering on top. I wanted to feel it permeate my skin and chill me. I wanted to swim.

*

Can you hold space in your palms and question it? Water meets us in the “every day” whether we skid along the water, salt etched in its folds, spray tickling our faces, or simply have water in glasses, full, perfectly cleansed to drink from. Not a spectacle, not a space mission. Simple, yet unpredictable… like a jazz record, a sax solo that destroys your sense of timekeeping. Have you been listening for twenty minutes or one hundred and twenty?

What we can experience of water is exciting, a weightlessness from drifting in or treading water. Warm water shelters you from external winds, can form comforting currents around your twirling fingers, create tiny whirlpools. Glance at your hair in the sea, see it emulate the kelp on the ocean beds. Your hair is a part of the ecosystems below, becomes like them.

A beautiful short story originally written in Arabic, entitled “The Palm Tree said to the Sea”, is the story of a couple, Salim and Salma, who fall in love beneath a palm tree. The story is told from the perspective of the palm. Salim, a sailor, is ordered to dive in treacherous waters by his captain to retrieve a pearl. Salim drowns and his body is not found. The palm tree retells this story, reminding the sea of Salim and their meeting. The sea recalls that they had “embraced” Salim “at the bottom until he dissolved.” The personification of the natural world, specifically the sea, highlights the difference, the separation, yet also strange desire to be a part of water. We as humans are obsessed with entering worlds our bodies cannot withstand, and here these worlds are given voices. Salim is now part of the ocean world, his body perhaps becoming sustenance for oceanic scavengers. Maybe this means we aren’t as ‘barred’ from these worlds as we think. Rivers, lakes, and oceans are full of human explorers who “dissolved in the sand and the water” as Salim did. Indeed, water speed ups the process of bodily deterioration that is already a feature of our existence. Are the watery worlds any more hazardous than the land we’re already grounded on?

Water isn’t always the same. Philip Hoare writes of Sylvia Plath’s relationship with water that in her youth she saw the “sea as some radiant animal”, and that when she experienced “a hurricane in cape cod” bay she “wanted to be in it”. Later, in an interview, Plath observes, “My final memory of the sea is of violence”. These memories of violent waters stay close to her, despite her remarking that she wanted to be within the storm. She is not alone in her fearful intrigue; windy waters have caused destruction and devastation to many communities over the years. Yet are we all not slightly curious about what it would feel like to be inside an underwater tornado?

My experiences of waters have always been tame, aside from the occasional tumblings I encountered bodyboarding in Cornwall, which made for quite exciting anecdotes around the lunch table. Waters have been kind to me. I should recognise that not everybody has exhilarating memories of water. However, somebody else’s watery traumas do not take away from my fascinations; even my own ‘heart-skipped-a-beat’ moments do not deter me from wanting to explore water in all its facets. The life that it facilitates in me, and its creatures, and the death and destruction it can so easily cause. Water has that power to enlarge things. To clarify things.

Highland Loch water
isn’t blue, grey or green.
It is deep amber.
Every rock, every reed
encased in its sunshine glow.
The skimmed stones,
Sink into rich honey,
the colour of copper pennies.
Contrast the purple sprouts of heather,
taking a dip—
a teabag dropping
into your mug, pre-milk
Highland Loch Water

I am not afraid of exploring deep into trenches, learning about the translucent Mariana snail fishes, and amphipods that live there. I am not even afraid of the Anglerfish and its fluorescent lure. I am only afraid of forgetting water’s hold on me, of growing old and retreating like a tide, of losing sight of the simple things I appreciate. How my fingers wrinkle up after long baths or my teeth chatter under sandy towels. How my hair twists together, raked through with salt or loch. The ability to get used to the discomforts of water.

• Bibliography

  Images (excepting that of the frog fish) by James Dant

  Bibliography (in order of mention)

  Kingsley, Charles, and Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies (London: Dent, 1949)

  Pughe, D.L., “The Lost Notebook Of Aqueous Perspective” [Accessed 8 December 2021]

  Ehrlich, Pippa, and James Reed, My Octopus Teacher (South Africa: Netflix, 2020)

  Stanton, Andrew, Finding Nemo (Hollywood: Pixar, 2003)

  "'At 30,000Ft We Heard A Crack'", BBC News, 2012 [Accessed 8 December 2021]

  Stiller, Ben, The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty (United States: New Line Cinema, Samuel Goldwyn Films, Red Hour Productions, TSG Entertainment, 2013)

  Ahmed, Abdul Hamid, and Thomas Aplin, "The Palm Tree Said To The Sea", Banipal (Uk) Magazine Of Modern Arab Literature, 2011 [Accessed 8 December 2021]

  Hoare, Philip, RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 2017), pp. 103-07

  Hirose, Manabu, and David Attenborough, Deep Ocean: Decent Into The Mariana Trench (Canada, 2017)