Pesky Breathing

There was a steel leader attached to the end of the old surf fishing rod, but no hook. I’d forgotten to bring something for bait anyway, so I climbed below to check the junk drawer in the cabin cruiser’s galley for any stray lures. The rhythmic, steady sound of the engines was a bit muffled from the cabin, but a steady ocean breeze coming through partially opened windows would keep you awake.

There was a lure in the back of the drawer that was larger than I wanted to use, about five inches or so. It did have a menacing treble hook in the middle and one at the end, which was good. The lure was originally silver and made to flash like a large bait fish, which was also good, but it was covered with rust all over, which wasn’t so good. Only a fish super-crazy with hunger would hit this thing, but it will have to do. I snapped it directly on the leader.

Randy, the salty deck hand, yelled above the engine noise when I emerged with the pole. “Ain’t nothin' gonna hit that,” he proclaimed, adding “Don’t hook your stepfather with that rusty rig!”

Not every comment deserves a reply, a teacher once told me. I pulled the bail back on the reel, whipped the lure outward on the starboard side, and let the line feed out about 50 feet or so. Paul, the stepfather just mentioned, was flying underwater behind the boat on the dive plane device he invented. He was searching for a lost freighter anchor that was sitting at the bottom of the mouth of Tampa Bay, and he was determined to find it. It was our fourth consecutive day at sea without finding even so much as a broken chain at the bottom, or even a lost bait bucket, for that matter.

The dive plane was in tow about 150 feet astern, with plenty of cushion between the fishing lure and the diver. Once I placed the surf rod in the holder, I double-checked the drag setting and left it plenty loose, since I was using a thinner fishing line, and because we were in motion, doing about 10 knots. I didn’t want to lose the pole in case something did hit it or a fish accidentally snagged itself because it was laughing too hard when it saw this rusty attempt to catch it. I sat in my normal spot in the passenger chair facing the back to watch the sparkling water past the boat’s wake for either Paul or a surfacing dive plane. I was picturing how Paul might be scanning the bottom, probably flying too close, intensely examining each of the barren sand dunes as they went by. 

Paul is not your ordinary average bear. I remember when he first met my mom at the bar in L.A. where she worked during the day -- a dark, kinda smelly place where I used to hang out when mom was working and there was no school. It had a long, dust-covered shuffleboard that I liked to run my hands on while walking alongside it, and the old guys there would give me dimes for the jukebox or to play pinball. My mom’s favorite song was “Delta Dawn.” I would put that on after I played “The Streak.”

Paul doesn’t like drinking very much, so it was curious as to why he was hanging at that bar in the first place. He was a truck driver living on a sailboat in Huntington Beach, and once he started dating my mom, he moved inland to an apartment near us. While he was there, mom would send my brother Tim or myself over to his place to borrow milk or some other needed item. Paul was never grumpy about it and would give us what we asked if he had it.

He'd take us to Disneyland, where almost all of mom’s boyfriends would bring us at one point or another if they were hanging around long enough (Tim and I would pretend we’d never been each time). One weekend he took all of us up to Big Bear Lake in the mountains to a cabin he rented. Tim was younger, and he kept on tripping out about when the big bear was going to attack us and steal our food. It annoyed Paul, but he kept his cool. What impressed me the most about that trip came at night.

The city where we lived had brown and gray clouds on most days and at night as well. What I saw in the sky that first night was much more remarkable than watching the woods for some big bear trying to steal Timmy’s Pringles Newfangled Potato Chips. 

It was stars. Billions of them. Big ones, small ones, sparkly ones, solid ones, a carpet of stars running down the middle of the dark sky, from one mountain top to another. Paul explained what they were, how far away they were, and how people knew little about them. I’d never seen anything like it in my life, and right then, something changed for me: the notion of worlds out there to explore that we knew little or nothing about. It was the same for the ocean, as I was finding out the more time we spent out here.

One morning at home in the city, Tim and I awoke to find our Aunt Pat watching us for the weekend. She said that mom was on a trip. When mom and Paul returned that Monday morning, we had a new stepfather.

Paul sold his sailboat and used the money to buy a camper truck and a small trailer. He announced we were moving to Florida. Aunt Pat was sad, and my grandmother was furious. She had plenty of comments for Paul, right up to the time we pulled out of the driveway and headed toward the freeway out of the city. Not every comment deserves a reply.

We lived in a KOA campground outside town for the first few months. The school bus would come by and pick up Tim and me on the main highway in the mornings and drop us off in the afternoons. Paul got a job working as a bulldozer operator. One day he came home with two sets of Lloyd Bridges masks and snorkels from the Yellow Front store.

He trained us to snorkel dive in the campground’s pool. Tim wasn’t a very good swimmer, as most city kids aren’t, so it took him a while. Once Paul saw I could submerge, then surface, and blow water out of the snorkel without picking my head up, we moved the training to the river at the back of the campground. Mangroves lined the shore, but there was a small beach and a dock. The water was brown-brackish but clear. After a while, I could traverse across the river while remaining underwater. When I got bored with that, I would snorkel underneath the docks along the river to find sunglasses, fishing lures, tools, or other cool things people dropped.

Six months later, Paul took me to a small dive shop where he’d gotten to know the owner, Scott, and was trying to talk him into letting me attend his next SCUBA certification class. Scott’s immediate answer was no, I was too young and would not be able to get through his rigorous course, the toughest in the area. But Paul can be pesky when he really wants something. Scott finally snapped one early evening when Paul was being a little too persistent, and marched us out to the big outdoor pool behind the shop. It was winter, and it was cold out. Scott flipped the pool lights on and snatched an air tank with a backpack from a rack. He lifted it and launched it into the deep end of the pool with an impressive splash: FA-THOOSH. He then threw an air regulator and a face mask in the pool as well, on top of the air tank.

“Tell you what,” Scott said loudly, turning back to Paul. “This is the final test for the adults in the class. If your kid can go down there, put the regulator and tank together, put on the mask and the tank—all the way—and swim to the surface, he can attend the class. If he passes the written tests, I’ll certify him.” Scott then turned to walk away before realizing he had just made a deal, and he should probably stay. To me, he looked like he expected us to decline right there and move our request elsewhere. 

In what eventually turned into classic Paul style, he said nothing back to Scott and turned to me. I looked back at him, then at Scott, and pulled my sweatshirt over my head. I also took off my pants so I would have something dry to put on when I came out. The night air was chillier now. I held the waistband of my stretched-out Fruit of the Looms to keep them on and did a sharp one-handed dive straight to the bottom, directly at the pile of gear, to save breath time. 

The first surprise was the shock of the cold water, immediately knocking half my breath out. I wasn’t expecting that. The KOA pool was heated, and I’d never swam in the river when it was cold. A few kicks, and I reached the gear on the bottom, where I first grabbed the face mask and pulled it on before realizing that I didn’t have a bunch of spare breath to be blowing out of my nose to clear the water out. I left the mask on, still full of water and keeping me from seeing clearly, then felt around and found the air tank mount for the regulator. I felt around again until I touched the o-ring on the tank valve where the regulator goes… then another unexpected thing started happening: my fingers were already getting too numb from the cold water to feel exactly where the regulator mount and the tank matched up.

The two pieces were sliding together but wouldn’t lock up. Now I was sliding them faster. My already foggy vision was starting to narrow, getting dark on the edges, and that darkness was saying I was going to lose. The black regulator mouthpiece drifted by my face. I snatched it and put it in, biting down hard on the rubber in anticipation. Chest aching now, and I could feel the first shards of panic from lack of air trying to take over. I would have to shoot for the surface in a second… then the mount popped on the o-ring, and I quickly tightened the wing nut.

Something I’d never done before was trying to breathe air underwater while the face mask was full of water. When I opened the tank valve and heard the whoosh of precious air, I sucked it in right away. Air came alright, but so did a bunch of stinging water up my nose and down my throat. I started choking and sneezing, bubbles blasting all over the place. By the time all this slowed down, I opened my eyes to see that all the sneezing had cleared the face mask of water. Now I had clear vision of the gear, from above the small water line inside the mask. Large wads of greenish snot were now floating around in the mask water, but I could see and breathe.

My eyes were still watering, so I took a minute to refocus, then tilted my head back and cleared the mask all the way. In the glow of the pool light, I could see the tank clearly, random straps floating, and the black hose leading to my mouthpiece. I’d mounted Paul’s regulator to the tank once or twice before, but I’d never actually put on a tank. I examined the straps. They looked like regular backpack straps, like for school, except there was a belt that goes around your waist. The tank was cumbersome and heavy, so I left it on the bottom and maneuvered above it, facing the surface while slipping my arms in. Once everything felt okay, I sat up with the tank on my back. I double-checked the straps before pushing off the bottom and frog-kicking to the surface.

Scott hadn’t left to do his sudden errand. He was staring at me, treading in the glowing water. Paul was beaming through his brown beard.

“So what day does that class start?” he asked Scott.