Broken Conch Shells

Note: This past Wednesday, June 3rd, I graduated from the Island School, a semester school in the Bahamas. The Island School gifted me with countless meaningful experiences, friendships, and learning moments. In fact, I started this blog as part of a project for the Island School, where I have written a large collection of creative essays that I am posting periodically on this website. One of the vignettes is about a certain experience that I had in the Bahamas. As I transition out of my online learning journey, and into the summer, I thought I would share a vignette about my time at the Island School. So here is a piece about my first time breathing underwater:

Broken Conch Shells

The water, tormented by hissing gusts of wind, ripples angrily across the small swells. Through crusty patches of salt in my mask, I see the palm trees shaking their wild leafy mains like reproachful green stallions. We can see the dark patches of wind race across the surface of the water, so quickly that it bites our ears before we even hear it howl. But in less than a second, we extend our arms and drop below the known world. Silence. A deathly lack of noise that screams louder than gunshots constricts me more than the wetsuit around my neck and ankles. It’s beautiful, but it is harsh. 

As the dry air from our tanks penetrates our throats, our chattering teeth and hissing regulators seem to deafen us in the still quiet. Down. Slowly. Softly. We touch the sand with our fins, digging in for support. My face sinks towards the bottom and a battleground rises to greet my eyes. Broken conch shells lie lopsidedly between rocks with slimy green and grey algae poking out of the flaking holes. The graveyard of abandoned shells stretches on until the still blue engulfs them in the distance. The sun shines beyond the surface, sending beams of light through the ceiling onto the haphazard ripples in the sand that make up the desolate landscape. The beautiful flickering beams hold a kind of irony as they cast dancing rays onto half-buried shells and rocks. Two grey fish frown at us as they pass, unblinking, as they weave through the broken shelled soldiers.

I exhale as I gaze at the simple, stunning beauty of this alien world, suspended in the salty water. As the bubbles from my regulator race away from me, we make eye contact. Through the foggy patches on our masks, I see her eyes wide with awe and I am sure mine are the same. Her hair swirls around her head, her arms waving to keep her upright on her knees, and small clouds of sand billow in slow motion from each place she moves her fins. We are in a different universe. We aren’t supposed to be here, breathing without gills or  swimming without tails. But I love it. I love it because I can feel every part of my body: the sting of salt in my nostrils, the clench of my wetsuit around my wrists, and the clank of my tank against my legs. 

If it weren’t for the cold that grasped ahold of me hours later, I would never want to leave. Despite my awe, the frigid water pierces through my excitement. It creeps in throughout the dive until my teeth chatter uncontrollably around the rubber part of my regulator. It seeps through my wetsuit, through my skin, touching my bones until I cannot ignore it. It seems to frantically grapple for my attention, tearing my focus from the underwater realm to my dissipating body heat. And just as I kneel in the sand, on the first dive of my life, I felt as if I was one of the fallen soldiers on the ocean floor. I felt broken in the powerful ocean, with my lips turning to prunes in the salt and my body convulsing in the cold. I forgot that I was a tall intruder, dressed in black against the light background and not one of the lifeless figures themselves, flaking away on the bottom of the ocean. I notice the sun again, flickering across my mask in my peripheral vison. This time, it is dancing across my own features. This time, it is tickling my own broken figure. I am ripped away from the battleground when I see my instructor signal to ascend. As we rise from the floor, I make eye contact again. Her hair still billows like curtains in the wind around her ears. A moment later, we break the surface. Her hair stops billowing. The wind is gone. The palm trees lay still, refraining from tossing their manes. I am relieved when I leave the ocean. But I will be back. I will return to visit the broken conch shells again.

While these photos are not from the same dive as the one I described in the vignette, they capture the feel of the underwater world that I was momentarily plunged into.

This is my dive group (Shoutout to Team Excellent Strugglebus) learning underwater skills during our scuba certification course.