A few weeks ago I responded to someone concerned for my safety: ‘Usually I come out of the water more alive than I went in’. I’d like to elaborate on that.
I’m pretty much at the end of my tether. My kidney condition is slowly wrecking me. I’ve been on the transplant waiting list now for 5.5 years and have gone from a rock runner to a trolley walker. 50 meters tire me down to a 5 minute rest and my legs feel like lead. The only place where I still feel comfortable is where I can shed my weight. Ironically there I even have to weigh myself down with 8.5 kg. In the water. Just to give you an idea how it feels to walk the gravity gauntlet from the very last available parking place to the slipway in full metal jacket.
The final kit-up at the slipway takes about 10 minutes, of which the major part goes into getting my feet into the pockets of my monofin. Knowing they have been in there before provides the perseverance to undertake this seemingly hopeless endeavour. I have developed a rich array of wriggles, pulls and pushes to succeed. The fact that often my feet are swollen from fluid retention adds to my irk. My left foot needs a spoon to slip in, which I keep in my sleeve. Then I need a non-slippery patch of slipway to ground my left foot-in-pocket on, so I can start pushing my right foot in. With my right index finger inside the heel and the necessary wriggles, pushes and pulls and a big sigh of relief my heel slips in.
After cap, mask and snorkel I’m ready to swing forward on my arms and butt-wise approach the water. When the water is calm I do my kitting up close to the water line and only have to butt-move a short distance. When the waves wash way up it’s a whole lot further to butt-move in. In that case I choose a spot close to a sea weed covered stretch of slipway, sit on my waterwing and slide down.
Apart from saving my suit-butt this launches me into the magic moment of losing my weight. I like to celebrate this cosmic relief by just lying still and float in the bliss. Slowly I get into a glide, see the seabed move under me, my body undulates with a touch of elegance and harmonises with the waves that carry me to kinetically dissolve in the ocean. With that a new drift of thoughts evolves, as weightless, wild and untethered as my animal presence, but fertile, open and welcoming whatever wanders through my mind.
In the past I have experimented with recording the insights that bubbled up out of my deep, on a voice recorder (DA 2009, ed 26) and to the microfoon on my video camera, but to no avail. It’s like these windfalls of perception are meant to branch like an underground mycelium, the fruits of which I stumble on by memory and association. And then, sometimes all of a sudden, there’s the dolphin.
Dusty, Jane and a little bit of Trevor
Some people think, that after 30 years, I know every nook and cranny of a dolphin. I don’t, I can’t and I would not want to. Dusty and I know each other now for 15 years and she has so often flabbergasted me with the unexpected that I have stopped long time ago to analyse her as a coherent entity, because I see so much more with as open a mind as I can muster. What you don’t know, are not aware of, is so much harder to discern. That’s where my videos come in. They’re not just back-up memories, but treasure troves, little triumphs to be unlocked in comfort and gentle scrutiny.