Victoria and the kids are away and it’s the last week of term. School has been hectic with leaving ceremonies and the end of term organisation. I took the opportunity with the family away to head into work early and stay late in an effort to try to catch up with myself! In the meantime my sister in law got married in Cyprus, the kids and Victoria are having a great time, it looks wonderful!
However the consolation is that my oldest friend Adam flew out to keep me company! We have known each other since Primary School, in Malaysia. The wife and kids are away… my oldest bud is here and schools out it must be…
BOYS WEEK!
So he arrived Thursday evening. I picked him up from the airport and we headed straight to my Book Club, the British Expatriate Educationalists Reading Society, or B.E.E.R.S. (pure coincidence honest). B.E.E.R. has its home at Grand Old House and the bar staff were ready for us as usual pouring out our drinks as they saw us walking down the drive. It would only be more perfect if they played the cheers tune for our arrival… I might just work on that. In the meantime live jazz will have to do. The head of the bar staff is even called Sam, Samantha.
Here we are discussing our book, obviously, Robert Harris – The Conclave, a light but fast passed political thriller about the selection of a pope. Well we are going into the holidays we wanted something for the beach.
Friday. I had to work but afterwards Adam and I whizzed over to Eden Rock for a dive when I got home. His first in the Caribbean and clear water. It was a bit of a novelty for him not having to wear a dry suit. A stunning first dive, we swam through caves and found huge tarpon hovering in a shoal 30ft down stunning and a bit spooky.
Saturday we went snorkelling at Spotts and saw wild sea turtles, which was nice. We toured the Island and went to Hell. We then made rendang and Clive popped round and joined us to watch the lions game on catch up, which was very nice.
Sunday it was up very early and out the door by 6:45am. One of our friends is leaving the island and heading back to Canada so we, the lads from book club, took him for a two tank dive up at the East End and a spot of lunch.
We jumped of the boat and swam over the ‘Northwall’ and descended to 40ft. At this depth there is less colour, the warm reds and yellows of sunlight filtered out by the water above, the world turns green then to hues of blue. We moved down through a fissure in the coral called Spilt Rock emerging to hover at about 85ft down just hanging in the water above the deepest blue there is.
We could see the wall stretching down for 100ft before it disappeared into the gloom, 4000ft of water the sea just dropping away beneath us darker and darker blue until it faded to black and the near endless crushing depth of the Cayman Trench.
Imagine standing a quarter of the way up Everest and looking down. Just breath taking.
We clung to that cliff face, insignificant ungainly creatures, dangling above the vertigo inducing drop. We took turns to swim out over the fathomless inky depths before swimming, quickly, back to comforting solidness of the cliff face. None of us were brave enough to go more than about 30ft from the Wall, to be out there above the abyss, so we just hung there in awe the void stretching away below.
As we looked down into that deep blue timeless darkness it whispered to us. It sang a silent siren’s song, it beckoned, it called, pulled, wanting to hold us in its dark embrace.
But our imaginations conjured up long forgotten memories of teeth and tentacles. As the dark reached out to us it triggered the primal fear we all have of the dark, the depths and the unknown. A defence mechanism as old as time, a gift from our earliest days. And we recognised the dark for what it really is. Cold lonely death far from the light. Endless starless night.
The Void. The Abyss.
It is the dark we dread and as we looked apon it we could feel it watching us back with millions of unseen eyes, we could feel the pressure, it’s presence.
Today I stared into the face of one of my horrors, a horror we all have inside us and I came away knowing that the thing we fear is real and we are truly, completely justified in being scared of it!
That crushing dark is only 1/4 of a mile from my bed. It’s there every time I go swimming just a few hundred feet away, closer in some places. When diving near the shore it waits, endlessly patient, just beyond sight. It surrounds us here, it’s in the National song, ‘merging to darkest blue’, its very existence evident in the colour of the sea’s surface around the island, a daily reminder.
I’ve seen the real deep and it is amazing terrifying! Truly the stuff of nightmares and oh so beautiful. But I did it and I did it again 45 minutes later!
Brave? No just stipidly currious and dumb stubborn.
Would I do it again? In a heartbeat.
It seemed an appropriate way to send one of the gang off!
Under an Endless Sky 