How Many Legs am I Holding Up?
At the Beach – Cara Brookins
The ocean is my eternity. Standing on a beach, a long splintery pier, or the deck of a boat, I shield my eyes and see plainly that it goes on forever. And there is something timeless about the creatures and sunken bits of humanity below. A six-month-old soda can covered with barnacles, home to tiny fish, looks as aged as a brass bell lost in the depths for a hundred years. But, as with most things that captivate me, there is a downside to my fascination.
I suffer from terrible motion sickness. Like my father before me and each of my stricken children, car rides, tilt-a-whirls, and even porch swings make me puke. Despite their beauty, ocean waves are no exception. I’ve had the opportunity to puke off the coasts of Cancun and Cozumel, as well as the Southern and Eastern United States.
In Cozumel, the dive master sliced a fresh pineapple between dives, which did wonders to settle my rolling stomach. In Cancun, it was watermelon; the light salt spray from the ocean seasoned it perfectly. But I recall a dive 25 miles off the coast of Florida where I found no relief.
The captain claimed the swells were six feet tall, but he measured with a shorter stick than I. By the time we anchored over the shipwreck I had emptied my stomach all the way to my toes. I was shaking with weakness. I actually crawled from the side of the boat to my dive gear, where a stranger lifted me and shook me down into my tight wet suit.
As I stood on the dive platform, someone asked, “You know how to throw up through a regulator?”
I gave a testy thumbs-up and fell backward into the blissfully cold water. The wreck, 130 feet below the surface, was truly spectacular. I was miraculously cured––until the minute I climbed back aboard the boat.
The other divers extended special treatment since I was the only woman on a really tough dive. An elderly man¬ actually fed me grapes. I closed my eyes and imagined he was much younger, Italian, and that I wouldn’t be immediately depositing the grapes over the side of the boat. He seemed to have an endless supply, and I was too weak to resist, too weak to consider any escape other than flinging myself overboard. And that sounded like far too much work.
The dive master finally called us to the water for our final dive. I was dehydrated from baking in my wet suit, having lacked the strength to peel it off after the first dive, but I made it to my gear and was strapping on my air tank when the man next to me reached down and pulled firmly on his right thigh. His entire leg detached, and he propped it between us before slipping a neon green fin on his remaining foot.
My face faded from lime green to ghostly pale. I stared blatantly as he hopped backwards to the dive platform. Before falling backward into the frothy wave, he shook his head and, with a crooked grin in my direction, mumbled,
“Damn sharks.”
Dive Boat – Cara Brookins
