The Dive Evangelist

It’s a hard life we divers lead sometimes. This morning was particularly a struggle for me.

At about 7:00 the sound of the lapping sea spilled from my dreams into my waking consciousness. Somehow, in the back of my sleep-addled mind I knew the alarm was going to go off soon, but that didn’t matter. I smiled as the sound I was hearing and the sweet, light smell blowing through the room refined themselves together to remind me where I was. It was the sound of clear blue water lighting on soft white sand and the smell of the islands blowing into Mexico.

The lot of us met for a breakfast of scrambled huevos rancheros, spiced black beans, fresh tortilla, watermelon, and fresh pineapple juice in the dining room of our main suite.

Yes, a hard life we divers lead.

Breakfast done, though, we had to hunker. There was a bit of work ahead of us. As I’ve mentioned before, for cave diving there is lots and lots of heavy gear and before we got to do any of the day's diving, we would have to move said heavy gear from the locker room into the van to the dive site. So we thought.

Roger already did it. The van was packed, all we had to do was pick a seat and get in.

Not me, Roger. Our driver, Roger. The man is the Scuba Fairy. Every time I turn around, my gear is not only already set up, but set up precisely where I would have put it. Coming up from our first dive of the day, we'd found that Roger had already humped fresh tanks for all of us down the longish flight of stairs to the entry site. I sort of wonder if I wish during mid-dive that I had more air, whether Roger wouldn't just show up around the next turn wearing only a snorkel and some loud swim-trunks with full tanks.

The drive to Taj Mahal Cenote was… bumpy. The land these sinkholes populate are owned by family collectives called ejidos and are not the most developed corners of the planet. Lizards skittered out of the van’s way as we made our slow progress over great, rocky swells in the dirt road through the jungle. Roger pulled the van so that the back doors faced a sketchy looking, steep set of stairs cut straight into the limestone.

Curious as to just what we had gotten ourselves into, I followed the stairs down and found myself on the set of an Indiana Jones movie. Or possibly a documentary about bats or geology or ecology or something. My efforts as a photographer are lamentable in capturing the karma of the place. Between the ancient formations, the mysteriously deep shadows, and the reflected light from the pristine water it is easy to see how the Maya found the cenotes to be holy places. Such mystical serenity.

Our first dive we swam towards the Juma River. The distance between the underground Juma River and the Taj Mahal Cenote was incredibly tight and not for the claustrophobic. When I say, “incredibly tight and not for the claustrophobic” I mean, “One could easily get a bunch of friends together and drive the entire Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade through these tunnels and not worry about even putting the slightest knick in Snoopy.” Without any exaggeration, the Holland Tunnel is a covered bridge in the middle of Vermont compared to the size of these caves.

The second dive was a little more tricksy.

Halo: Greek for “salt.” Cline: derivative of Kevin Kline. He, being terribly divisive on good acting, has become synonymous with “place where two things separate.” Salt water, since it is full of salt, is a little heavier than fresh water. The added weight settles itself to the bottom of this or that place while the fresh water sits on top. Where the two meet is called a Halocline. It’s like a parfait, but saltier.

Haloclines are tricky bastards. They barely look like anything at all. Only if you're paying attention and look at it from an angle does it look vaguely like a shimmer of water already underwater. But, as you pass through it the whole world goes scrambled. You can tell that the water is gin clear, but it seems you have a lahsa-apso in each of your contacts, so you can’t focus on anything.

“There is a little bit of a tight area that is all halocline before we get to the Chinese Garden,” warned Victor, a local cave instructor and friend of Paul's who is joining us for a few days.

It was an understatement.

It was a tunnel that I and my tanks just barely fit through together. As each diver in front of me swam straight into the halocline, it was as though they had swum into an alternate dimension. It was a sea of vaseline. Sometimes I could make out fins a few inches in front of me. Mostly I couldn't. More than once was the introduction made, "Rock, meet head. Head, meet rock."

Then it stopped.

Viz opened up. Instead of a tunnel that made you feel like toothpaste, there was another of those vast hangers full of so many cave decorations as to stun you into absolute reverence. A pillar from the ceiling to the floor, 40 feet below, must be 15 feet around. Drip and drop by drip and drop that great formation created itself over the course of millions of years. There is one stalactite (tight from the ceiling) hanging down at least twenty feet through the water. And among those singular formations there are countless thousands of “soda straws,” stalactites uniformly thin as straws and impossibly long.

It's a hard life we divers lead sometimes, and as I exchanged glances with the cats down here with me I could see that, just then, we were all comfortable bearing the strain.