Arndt Britschgi
Beauty Dive
What makes a dive a beautiful dive? It's not the height (although the height was an important part of it: below ten feet was not a dive in Stacey's eyes, but only a leap). It's not the execution, one by one, of the stages (take-off and swallowing, extension, entry, surfacing -- although that too would play a part). It's not the line of flight you trace -- no, it's the water you dive into. The scenery you feel yourself merge with. There's no comparison between high diving thirty feet into the chlorine broth of any public swimming pool and plunging into the icy clearness of the sea, the swelling waters cutting in between high rocks and forming inlets.
Stacey had learned to know the difference as a boy, when, through the summer, they'd gone hunting for good diving spots along the headland cliffs. It's the sensation you would have, that strong connection you would sense between yourself and the free view over the sea and the slow sweep of craggy coastline where you'd hit the ocean surface -- the waters and the landscape would define the dive for you: if it was good or if it wasn't.
You're sometimes able to find places where the rocks made natural highboards as they rose progressively and in the form of shelves, where you could try out different levels and experiment with the dive; or, there were places very high with a clear path down to the water, which for some instants would allow you that sensation of free flying, before the downward pull would grab you, and you plunged. There were places where you're forced to take big risks -- the depth was uncertain, you had to clear some obstacle in the fall, you had to aim your dive and hit a point you'd sought out in advance, carefully weighing and examining the options. Highest up above the main shelf (or the Cliff, as they called it), a little to its right-hand side, the rockface shrunk into a 30-feet-high perch. The rock at that point didn't drop in a sheer line, but sloped away, shallow water at its base before it reached into the deep; you would stand and watch the seaweed swaying easily with the waves, every detail of the bottom clearly visible to you, aware that diving in too close you'd smash your skull against the stones, your only option was to get out a secure distance from the edge. You'd aim far out, and in the flight you'd have that image in your head of people diving off the cliffs of the Pacific, moving down along the profile of the rockside stage by stage, never opening a gap, but always following its wall (he'd always wished he could have gone and dived in great waters like those -- Acapulco, maybe. Maybe some place cut off from the crowd) and from above the others watched the bubbling white track that you'd leave torpedoing into the swell, and from its line, measured how close you'd come to hitting the bottom.
But the places you would love, where you'd return forever drawn by a hidden, secret force, were usually those conditioned by the scenery -- the water and the view from where you jumped. The Cliff itself -- where they would meet and change into their swimming trunks -- with its sharp focus on the seaweed rocks close to its base; or the rotten wooden frame of the abandoned diving tower, its ruined structure by the flat and clean-ground, whitish skerry rocks with a vast outlook on the endless field of sea bathed in sun, and on the boats along the route out of the sailing club harbor. You'd be sculpturing your dive against the figure of that landscape, unified with the horizon, soaring out above its line (needless to say, the ruined platform wasn't open to the public: every time you had to send somebody down to check the water, to see if it was clear or there were logs or other spoils close to the surface); or the precipice outside the headland gorge, the intense black of unexplored, bottomless water, endless depth, where you would dive with a slight dread into a world of mute and submerged mysteries. He would return to all those spots in later years, alone, driving the long road back in summer for the chance to dive again, until the waters got polluted in those parts, and it all stopped. Stinking algae lined the coast and took that part and any reason to come back away from him.
It's a funny thing about the heights, he'd always thought. For a diver, he himself was strangely scared of high places: not pathologically, of course, but strongly enough for him to recognize the symptoms. On the roof of a high building, though convinced he couldn't fall, he'd have to force himself to move up to the edge where others walked without the faintest indication of concern. When he dived, he felt the fear transform itself into a yearning: not a fear then any longer, but a thrill. And there's that obvious distinction between height and the sensation of a height. In medical school, after a lecture, they would jog down to the straits, from three to four miles through the center of the city; at the concluding traffic bridge he'd tell someone to take his shoes while he himself, insensible to any danger, dived in and swam the final stretch to the strait line, the cars behind him slowing down to watch him climb the iron railing, move his toes to find the balance and let go.
Afterwards, they'd spread out in the sun, lie on the rocks, and watch the cargo ships go by beneath the bridge, and that was about 45 feet up from the water to the rail. 45 feet seen from a highboard or the edge of a steep cliff wouldn't exactly hold him back from doing a dive, but it would definitely have him hang back some. Seen from the bridge, the traffic close, the distance downwards evened out into the setting of the city's two main islands rising high on either side, 45 feet would feel like nothing much to talk of. Or he remembered the old rusty wreck that had lain stranded on the shoals close to the northwards shore where they grew up.
They'd ridden over on their bikes and waded out over the shoreline stones, and started diving from the gunwale facing out towards the bight. Looking over, they could see the swimming-bath diving platform newly built some distance further down the beach, the shapes of people moving on its highest bridge seen in an angle slightly downwards from them. The gunwale of the wreck was clearly over 30 feet, the highest level of the opposite diving tower, but from the bulwark of a ship, the elevation lost the best part of its scope. Then they'd move on from the gunwale onto the deck, and someone found that they could climb the crane control and dive from there into the hull, into that black and echoing stillness of a closed cavernous space, and suddenly there was a powerful effect of sky-scraper diving, where in fact the height was notably reduced.
The last occasion he'd gone back, ten, or maybe fifteen years later, he'd taken Joey's, his big brother's half-grown sons along with him, and driven over to the swimming-bath platform (the only place where you could still get in the water); he'd been surprised to see the wreck still in its place, astern gunwale still sticking out and pointing to the sea -- it seemed the waves would never wash it off the shoals, and no one ever had an interest in salvaging the hulk.
The dive that stayed most vividly with him, though, and the one he'd think of as his best, came at a time when that whole life was far behind him. He'd moved abroad, he'd met Judy. His world had changed in crucial ways. Judy was visiting her mother, she'd be out of town one week, and that same week a heatwave rolled over the city. He was alone in the apartment, behind shutters, trying to write; the hours dragged on painfully and he got nowhere. Nothing worked. Around five he broke it off, took out his trunks and a used towel, got in the car, and drove down to the swimming bath by the river. He found a place up on the boardwalk pier, hooked his key ring in the trunk seam, left his things, and walked the way along the bank, two miles upstream back in the direction of the city, to the footpath bridge into the central park. From there he dived and let himself be driven easily by the flow, first through the upper swimming bath, completely crowded with people, under the railway bridge, and to the power station and its sluice. He got out by climbing the winch rail where, some hundred years before, they'd hauled the boats and light barges across the dike (they'd left a trolley standing on the downward slope of the old track, museum piece in memory of times gone by -- the plant was shut down, but it served to regulate the water level and as a kind of unofficial clearing station: all the debris from the lake and upper run of the river filtered away into its dam, and, as long as you withstood the strong current, made the immediate low run into a beautiful place to swim.)
Stacey circled the old plant building on top of a stone wall, a gravel path that ended in a flight of steps laid out along its upper, roughly cobblestoned surface. At the foot of the stairway, a concrete pier went down the bank; some groups of boys were on the platforms formed around the stairway top, looking for height and showy places to dive in. (Sure: fancy diving!) He recognized the ideal spot within a flash, led by a deeply rooted, long-slumbering instinct: there's a ladder to the power station building roof, he could crawl across from there and get onto the downstream perch, gain ten feet in relation to the boys, and face a fall into the eddies of the sluice which turned the surface of the stream into a pane of shining glass, the water clear and pure and cool-looking like ice. He'd have to dive between protruding lock-gate shafts to reach beyond the shallow banks of bottom sand the sluice had built at the dead point directly under its outlet; there were risks, but it was plainly feasible. It was ideal. The water was clear, as clear as water anywhere could get, and there was that curiously tempting blend of height and risk and expertise in estimating the right line of flight, and the added visual depth the power station building gave, its sheer-drop wall leaving the surface of the stream in a deep shadow. He couldn't see what could have made the boys miss it. He thought it might have been the fact that they had come from down the stream, not seen the building walking by on the stone wall as he had done; but that was unlikely. They must have moved around enough to spot the place.
He took off and felt a weightlessness, unmoving in the air, and then folded out, and there was that moment when he moved out of himself, watching himself as from outside, seeing himself from the plant platform where his childhood friends would stand, looking down, taking in the smallest details of his dive, and at the top of the stone stairs the groups of boys passing short looks as they would see him gliding down between the shafts protruding sharply, dangerously from the lock-gate mechanism, from the sun into the shadow of the wall and the black-crystal glassy pane of the river, the flowing water taking him in its embrace. Worked by the swirls, the water was so clear that from above you couldn't make out a clear line between its surface and the air, seeing straight through it to the silver spots spread over the bottom, and as he hit, he felt a sharp and ripping pain in his left shoulder where he'd missed the precise moment of the entry, waiting just that one last fraction too long tensing his arms. The surface melted with the air and river bed seen from a height.
He floated down and lay and dried in the hot sun on the boardwalk, the pain abating gradually to a mere innocent throbbing. People were swimming below the pier, and he could hear them through the soft veil of his sleep as they were laughing. On his way to get the car, he had a beer at the sun terrace. He watched the power station front, and thought some day maybe he'd capture that great moment in a text.
He'd gone down and walked that way with Judy some weeks afterwards. The day was hazy, the reflections on the water weren't so sharp, and now he could see why the boys had shunned that place. The silver spots he had distinguished on the bottom were dead fish, bellies turned up, bent out of shape, some cut in half, some only heads or tail fins swaying with the swirls. They'd been drawn into the sluice and cut up by the lock-gate blades, floating out by the outlets, and they were kept down deep by the current. There were heaps of them around the dead point of the stream, he saw.
©2005 by Arndt Britschgi
