12 Sep Mozambique — Going Deep in the Indian Ocean

Mozambique was the most war-torn place I’ve ever been, and I was in Saigon in 1968. Once, when Peggy was stuck in a meeting in Maputo, Wes and I decided to head up the coast for some SCUBA diving.

The highway along the Indian Ocean was what you’d expect from a country that didn’t have the money to patch up the bomb craters in the capital city. The pavement was one car wide, where there was pavement, which wasn’t often. People tended to walk down the middle of the highway because who wants to step on a land mine? At the time, there were something like two million land mines left over from decades of proxy wars, civil wars, sectarian violence and revolutions. If you needed to relieve yourself, the guidebooks said, go in the road.

That wasn’t as immodest as it sounds. There were plenty of opportunities for privacy, what with the walk-in potholes. When we came to one, we’d pause on the lip, shift into double low, take a deep breath, toboggan down and across the bottom with nothing but solid dirt visible through the windows then, all four wheels spraying dust and fecal matter, bull our way up and out the far side.

Every now and then we’d happen upon a group of civic-minded young men who’d taken it upon themselves to fill some of the minor potholes. They’d be putting the finishing touches on a stretch of road and grin and wave as we approached. We’d hand them some money through the window, then drive away while they dug the potholes back out, so they could fill them for the next driver.

Don’t stop in Xai-xai, Peggy had warned us. “Xai-xai is a place you do not want to spend the night.” Then, to make sure we understood, “It’s a place you do not want to be at all.” She wasn’t entirely sure why, but the Peace Corps had black-listed Xai-xai, and the Peace Corps knew. “Do not stay in Xai-xai.”

But there wasn’t much way not to. The sun had gone down by the time we arrived, there weren’t any other towns for hours, camping in the road was not something we were inclined to do, camping alongside the road was something we were even less inclined to do and, what the heck? We were already in Xai-xai. And there was a hotel.

“Somewhere.” “Down by the beach.” “Maybe,” a gentleman on a street corner told me. But he told me in Mozambican Portuguese and I listened in high-school Spanish, so there may have been a hotel down by the beach. Somewhere.

The beach was about as dark as a beach in a war-blasted country gets, just a hint of a glimmer of starlight off the Indian Ocean as we descended a steep dirt road to the water. From there we could see lights way out in the distance but it was hard to figure why they were there. A peninsula, maybe. They seemed to be toward the north, so we headed north until the road cut inland, then turned south and back to east until, after a long bumpy drive, we were where we started. This time, we headed south.

The hotel was a leftover from colonial days: big and rambling and as war-torn as everything else in Mozambique. Beat-up concrete walls, bleak interior, an empty dining room lit by a single forty-watt bulb and the most cheerless bar I’d ever been in. And beer, so it wasn’t like the bar was completely cheerless. One thing about Sub-Saharan Africa, you’re never out of range of beer. You might well be out of range of electricity and the bottle will be on the verge of exploding from the heat, but there will be beer inside, and it will be good.

We left before breakfast and, by early afternoon, were on a long, empty stretch of beach lined with those tall, slender coconut palms you see on posters of the South Pacific. There were orange trees and lush tropical flowers. The country must have been paradise, once.

I should have asked for lodging. Instead, I told the owner of the dive hop we’d be needing accommodations and almost got kicked out. He was white and had escaped from Zimbabwe and he was no fool. Americans wanting accommodation? No way. Americans are famous the world over for demanding special treatment. Mentally retarded Americans wanting to be university professors. Blind Americans insisting on renting cars. Paraplegic Americans demanding the right to become lifeguards. “Might work at home, Mate, but not here.”

“Lodging,” I said. “We want a room.”

He gave us an appraising look. Then, having concluded we really were asking for a room, smiled and pulled a key out of a drawer. “No worries, then,” and led us to a concrete bunker kind of thing next to the beach. Inside was pretty much what you’d expect inside a bunker, only gloomier. “You deep-water certified?” he asked as he passed me the key.

“Never wanted to be.”

“You’ll want to be here,” he handed me a book so I could study up on how to dive in deep water.

“Can’t I just . . . ?” I hadn’t driven through all those potholes and past all those land mines to put my nose in a text book.

“Just study the book. We’ll test you in the morning.”

I’d burned out my homework gland back when I was in school and, every time I’ve tried studying since, my eyes wander from the page and I stare off into the middle distance until study time is over and I snap the book shut and go on about whatever I should have been doing in the first place. Which is how I wound up sitting in front of our bunker the next morning gazing dreamily out to sea with a deep-water-certification textbook on my lap.

The sky was beginning to turn light but the sun wasn’t up and I wasn’t thinking about much of anything, just Zenning away on the shores of the Indian Ocean when, all of a sudden, the sun came up. And I do mean, all of a sudden. There was no sun, and no sun, and no sun, just a beautiful tropical sky and, pop, there was the sun,

with no transition at all.

It was like a flashbulb going off. I actually heard a popping sound as the first rays broke over the horizon. I don’t know whether that’s a synesthesia thing, one sense getting so surprised it feeds back to other senses, but that’s what it sounded like to me. POP.

Popping, I imagined, along the Tropic of Capricorn all the way from Madagascar and, before that, for the thousands of miles from Australia. And to Australia from South America. And South America from Angola, and to Angola from where I sat gazing out across the ocean. Pop. Pop. POPPING its way around the world forever.

A couple of hours later I blundered my way through the deep-diving test. It’s a stupid test, and not just because I didn’t know what I was doing. It really is a stupid test. The point is to prove how stupid you are when you get into deep water, that the deeper you go the more nitrogen gets squeezed into your blood, and the stupider you become.

The thing about stupid is, you don’t know you’re stupid. You just feel like yourself, ticking along as usual. But ticking along stupid at a hundred feet down is the kind of thing that will get you in trouble, so the people who certify you to go deep make sure you know ahead of time.

The way they do that is show you a four-by-four grid on the surface where you’re as smart as you’ll ever be. The numbers one through sixteen are scattered about the grid and your job is to point to them in order. One. Then two. Then three and four and so on. It took me eight seconds.

At a hundred feet I took thirty-seven seconds and never did find the six. Finally I just gave up and skipped to seven, and I already knew where the six was. It was the same grid I’d seen a few minutes before, only I couldn’t find the six. I may have been the all-time high achiever in stupid, I did so well at being stupid. It scared the shit out of me, knowing how far in that direction I’d gone without feeling stupid at all.

There ought to be some way to expand that test to other situations. Knowing when you’re stupid would be a useful thing to know and could keep you out of deep water on dry land.

Once I’d proved myself stupid enough to be trusted underwater, we swam to the edge of a bowl formed in the coral and just lay there, watching. There were fish, swarms of lovely, golden fish the size of my thumb. Hundreds of fish swirling and dappling in the sunlight. And a line of manta rays queued politely overhead like alien spaceships in a slow-motion landing pattern.

They were big, some close to twenty feet across with a pair of horns protruding from the front and long, whip-like tails behind, and cast shadows over us as they flew by. And flying was the only word for it. Slow, graceful, sinuous movements of fleshy wings beating up and down with what looked like no effort at all.

One at a time they would glide into the bowl in a languid arc while the lovely, golden fish pirouetted and played and nibbled at them, darting in and out of their gills and their mouths and along their backs and undersides, picking off parasites.

You read about these cleaning stations, you see them on nature shows, you know about Darwin, but the feeling of being there, lying on coral at a hundred feet, light dancing from the cleaner fish while these ancient shadows glide overhead, mantas who’ve traveled long distances to line up and wait their turn, this beauty, this harmony, this must be what all of Mozambique was like before the endless warring people planted land mines and shot up the cities.

On the surface, dolphins were leaping and frolicking, whirling and glistening in the sun, as filled with the joy of life as if it were the Dawn of Creation and they were reveling in their new bodies for the first time.

Down where we were, the tales of childhood came to life. Clouds of fish slipped like coins through our fingers. Anemones

in pastels richer than those that clothed any caliph were there, palaces and mosques carved from delicate corals, sea fans

in every color of the embroideries and silks and taffetas that graced the most sumptuous harems. Beneath the water isn’t just stories of distant lands and jewels and gold you’ll never see. Down there, iridescent fish gleam like magic lamps, if only you knew how to get close enough to rub them. And there were flying carpets.

We were the carpets. Weightless, the current carried us above an enchanted landscape. When we wanted to go higher, we’d inhale a bit more air and soar over a coral head, or to get a better look at some mystical beast, a turtle, perhaps, making its stately way through the water. Then, we’d exhale and the current would take us gently downward and over brightly spotted eagle rays and delicate, lacy shrimp and giant clams in deep, lustrous colors. After a while you don’t even think about it, you just drift up and down with no more effort than it takes to have the thought.

It’s not something you can imagine. It’s not something you can even remember, not really. It’s like the Milky Way from the Kgalagadi on a moonless night. You can think you remember what it felt like, how the sky seemed, but the next time you’re there, the physicality of it hits you all over again. THIS is what it’s like, you think. I will remember THIS. But you can’t. Not really.

Its’s a feeling that would have led our ancestors to religion. Nowadays it’s a feeling that leads to mystery and wonder which, to my mind, is much more wondrous because it doesn’t try to imagine answers. It just leaves you with the questions. And the feelings.