Dead Bodies in Lakes

When I was little, every time my birthday rolled around, there seemed to be a small tradition that held. After having dinner, I would perch on one of the injured vinyl sofas in the basement, avoiding the gangrenous foam guts from Dorito contamination, plunking myself in front of Arnold, Laverne, or, if very lucky, Julie McCoy. Moments later, usually during a morality lesson, or at the peak of a tragic affair, my mother would bellow for me to come upstairs, just for a second. In the early years I was a bit miffed. I mean, it seemed irreverent to suddenly leave during the flush-burial of Gary Coleman's goldfish. Those that come from the sea, must then return to the sea. Half sulking, I'd trudge up the stairs, opening the door that led to a newly darkened kitchen.

Young Comrade: Ma?

Haaaappyyy Birthdaaaaay to yoooou!!
Yoooou live in a zoooooo!!
Yoooou look like a monkeeeey!!
And you smell like one toooo!!
And many more!!

Upside to having ADD: I was always surprised.

For most of my life I never really knew what to wish for. I was never really want for much. It's not like I had a lot, I just didn't really need a lot. I looked around and thought well, maybe a baby grand piano. I don't know why. We already had a piano, albeit an upright. Why I wanted another piano is still beyond me. When I was a kid, the only time I ever remember wanting something badly was when the Bryants (the Jones' of the street that everyone tried to keep up with), got a brand new Corvette.

It was a very cool looking early prototype Batmobile. Healthy, pragmatic families purchased Volvos because they came with excellent safety ratings. A 2 seater Corvette's body is made of fibreglass. Its allure is made more intense because of its danger. Upon potential impact, the car would shatter into a million pieces. Mix in the possibility of dying - before your time - with hair, no paunch, and with the world still your oyster. Midlife crises was a phrase I hadn't learned yet. I just liked its body and the sound that 400 horsepower made. Being a passenger wasn't the same. I wanted to drive it.

Blowing out the candles that year, I wished for a Corvette.
My father laughed at me.
I learned that year never to speak a wish out loud.

At least I got the cake I wanted. Strawberry shortcake. Yum. Mom and I share the same taste in cakes. Nothing chocolatey or too sweet. For me it was the same while on ice cream expeditions.

In the '70s there were less expectations to uphold pesky seatbelt laws or maximum human cargo capacity restrictions. Like a natural law, smaller bums routinely rode on larger laps. A simultaneous shotgun's call allowed 3 to pile like a laughing totem pole in a bucket seat. All others turned themselves into potato bugs, packed tightly in the back of one of a fleet of rotating station wagons. It was just one of those lucky streets to grow up on. Discomfort didn't last too long. 10 blocks tops. We'd all poured out, half of us landing on asses, hands, anything but feet. Squeezing the quarters our mothers had given us, the ones that had made a big impression on our palms, we ran and pressed our noses against frozen glass casings that held tubs of all the colours of the rainbow, if, of course, man had made that rainbow... and put sprinkles on it. My compatriots unfailingly picked the most obscene, over the top sounding frozen confections each and every time. Half purist, half scientist I'd only order strawberry. By 10 years old, I'd become a strawberry ice cream authority.

But, every now and then, while you're al fresco collectively sucking up the last vestiges of A) summer, B) creamy Irish oysters, and C) Dutch pilseners with your on again off again on again off again I don't know boyfriend, a molten chocolate cake scenario (something I've grown to appreciate) may play itself out in front of you. And if you're very lucky, said molten scenario lands directly under your nose on your birthday. I should have played the lottery that day. On the public patio we were on, I rallied strangers to sing me that song everyone gets directed at them once a year. It took everything in me to keep from partitioning the vocalists into harmonizing sections. Most sang. Some were too cool. They were pointed at and mocked.

Close your eyes.
Count to three.
Make a wish...

I didn't wish for a piano this time. I certainly did not want a Corvette. I didn't actually want anything tangible or physical, though there are manifestations of both of those things in my wish. I can't tell you what I wished for. I can tell you I've been getting it in spades since I asked for it.

My brother, Walter, the one who estranged himself from the family, was always giving generously to himself come birthdays, Christmases, or personal telethons. This year I decided to take a page from Walter.

I was going on a solo trek up to Tobermory.
With a car full of rented scuba gear, I was
Going camping.
By the end of the weekend, my goal was to receive my open water scuba diving certification.

As a kid, in a hider position during hide 'n seek, I remember squatting under a neighbour's backyard pine tree. I was so excited, then nervous about getting caught that my puck would go nuts. At least 50% of the time, I'd have to run home to take a quick poop. I don't play hide 'n seek very often anymore, well, mostly because the same effect still happens. I could never be a private detective. At 38, having been granted by God the wisdom to know the difference between the things I can and cannot do, I've decided to try slower build excitements like driving long distances by myself, camping alone, and scuba diving in lake waters, with perfect strangers, where I'm half expecting to see a dead, bloated body float past me.

Pilot to co-pilot
Oh, right, no co-pilot.
Okay, okay, okay, don't panic.
Just sing Shirley Bassey songs for a while.
Loudly.
Transition into Ethyl Merman singing Nina Simone.
Crack open the snacks cooler.
Crudité? A bit unsatisfying on the road.
Pull over to indulge in a rare early morning guilty pleasure: a McDonald's sausage and egg combo... wretchedly ambrosial.
Seeing fields of wind power generators. Hundreds of them! So beautiful (even if they are killing eagles and hawks).
This isn't so bad.
This is actually really wonderful.
Snap, snap, digi-snap.
Cows... as far as the eye can see,
Consuming everything,
Just like us.
We're cannibals.
Passing cars on 2 lane highways,
I am Maria Andretti.

I got a tiny bit lost at one point. Man, did that make the old puck go. Though I kept it together without making a pit stop, Welcome to Tobermory sprang in front of me, 1/2 hour after I was supposed to meet my new dive buddies. Being the latest, I arrived spilling with apologies.

Random Obnoxious Diver: We thought you'd changed your mind. You know, with the whole dead body thing.

I used to be terrified of seeing a bloated and distended body float past, with a locked expression of horror, as soon as my unseeing eyes cracked the surface of any body of water. Mr. Turtle pools, the only exception.

Nothing that a series of sharp inhales and a mantra of: There's nothing but fish, there's nothing but fish, there's nothing but fish down there won't fix.

If you removed compressed air tank, mask, snorkel, buoyancy control device in the form of a vest, hoses, and fins (Christ, don't call them flippers), my outfit looked like this:



but a little less flattering. Hence, no self portrait. Unless you're built like a guy I knew in high school, Chris Cudmore - the one with the concave chest - everyone has a fat ass in neoprene.

As you can't dive without a buddy, the one assigned to me was Mark. Mark was a double threat: socially awkward with severe halitosis. The wonderful thing about scuba diving is you can spend time with people without all that unnecessary talking. The other wonderful thing about scuba diving, or snorkeling for that matter, is, even above the surface, once you put your mask on, you can't smell a thing.

The Comrade: [while adjusting her face mask] Go on, Mark. Tell me your whole life story. And take you time.

The company I went diving with was Aquasub. The worst thing about them is they will try to sell you everything in the store. Fairly aggressively. They make up for it by having a wonderful, knowledgeable body of instructors and dive masters. Halitosis Mark's and my personal instructor was Dave. At 27, Dave was a gentle, patient, scuba genius.

Prior to my birthday weekend, my limited underwater CV contained A) lake or oceanic snorkeling to a maximum depth of 8', achieved only to examine something shiny for 2 seconds, (again, my cursed ADD) and B) two weekends of controlled SCUBA (self contained underwater breathing apparatus) descents, in a mix of skills building and prolonged examinations of the rec centre's 10' deep tiled pool bottom. Among my scientific discoveries were clumps of hair matted around elastics, flecks of skin and the occasional band aid. The most exciting thing I'd seen was a half a dozen other divers in various states of suspended or actual animation. The thing I liked the least was meeting the eyes of other divers underwater. With masks and regulators donned, everyone bears a creepy expressionlessness.



In the lake, for our first real assignment, Genius Dave asked me and Halitosis to grab a line that was attached to a buoy, go down 25', and wait for him at the bottom.

Let out all the air out of the buoyancy control device (BCD).
Check.
Grab the buoy line.
Check.
Start scaling down while equalizing every couple of feet.
Check.
Adjust buoyancy levels before crashing into the bottom of the silty lake.
Crash.
Sideways.
Unable to control movement.
Fuck!
And then the reality of being and breathing 25' below the surface of the lake set in.
Panicking!
Hyperventilating!
Which causes a diver to go up and down not unlike an aquatic yo-yo. When that happens, enormous pressure builds in little air-trapping crevices. If the pressure isn't released, it feels much like having an ice pick shoved firmly in one's good ear.
My ear's bleeding!!
I'm going to explode!!

I didn't know the hand signal for I can't level out my shit and stay in one place. All I remembered was the signal for I'm out of air!

Dave's masked expressionlessness showed concern, I think, but I'm sure he was still incredulous as I had just hit the bottom of the lake. Strapped to my back was nearly 3,000 psi of compressed air and bubbles, bubbles, as far as the eye could see.

Okay, I'm not out of air, but I need to surface! I said like charades.

Genius followed me up.

Genius Dave: Are you okay?
The Comrade: [pant, pant, pant] Yeah, sorry.
Genius: Don't worry about it.
The Comrade: I just can't level out. I never had that problem in the pool.
Genius: Let me watch you again. Do you want to go back down?
The Comrade: Okay.
Genius: I'll be right behind you.

In an investigation, heralded by the Genius, a 2 lbs weight was discovered tucked into the left pocket of my buoyancy control device. Genius said that even a single disproportionate pound can cause severe balance issues. With great restraint, I shook my fist only once and uttered a single curse to the maternal penetrator who wittingly or unwittingly was the cause of my submerged, skewed sinking for Day 1 of my certification.

On the up side, just in case it happens again, I'll know for next time. Fool me three times...well... um...

Talk of solo camping prior to departure inspired pointers from ever helpful friends:
Ack: Set the tent up on a downward grade, so that water doesn't collect.
Zontar: Hang your food from a tree, so that wild animals don't get to it.
Dirty Diana: Set tealights all around your tent to ward off bears.
Fatty: Sleep with the Leatherman™, blade facing away from you.

All of that advice would have been great if I'd gone Grizzly Adams camping, or at least pitched a tent in a provincial park. I, however, stayed at the Happy Hearts Tent and Trailer Park. It was much like how I would imagine camping in my neighbourhood dog park would be, just a lot less private, and peppered with slack-jawed yokels.

No need to have strung food from a tree, well, for 2 reasons actually. 1) All the trees on Site 100 were planted last year, rendering them strong enough to air out one stinking wetsuit [Reasons for stink to follow]. 2) The only wildlife were local residents of Barrie, Ontario. From my understanding, that species doesn't eat raw vegetables.

Tealights surrounding a tent would only attract drunkards to play flame-soccer until my little blue wigwam turned into my funeral pyre. Besides, the adjacent washrooms, replete with showers, cast both enough light to target any potential prison escapee, and created a glowing orb out of my blue nylon world. I slept well on percale sheets atop of foam mattresses (plural), snuggled in a down duvet; Leatherman™ under my pillow, blade closed.

DIVE DAY 2

Genius Dave brought out his phone to take a picture of me while I was gnawing on broccoli, waiting for my soup to heat up. I'd emptied the contents of a Chunky number into the 18/10 stainless pot, set atop the Mr. Stove butane burner I'd brought from home. Appetizer and entrée were perched upon the upholstered ledge of the VW's rain shielding hatchback. I was accused of being the most prepared diver he'd ever seen.



Dive Master Scott [with a physique like my old school chum, Cudmore]: There are 2 kinds of divers: Those that pee in their wetsuit and those who don't admit to peeing in their wetsuit.

I considered this carte blanche.

A wetsuit is a really tight fitting neoprene jumpsuit that loosens slightly when wet. When submerged, a thin layer of the surrounding water trickles between skin and fabric. This thin layer of water, or by hour 3 - urine, gets distributed from neck to ankles, and everywhere in between, then finally gets heated by one's own body temperature. The design is to keep you nice and toasty warm.

It's made of people!



Luckily, I had the spindly little tree to hang my olfactory horror from overnight. And, as God tends to smile on me, it rained all night. The rest of the group were staying in various hotel/motel scenarios. Though they had the luxury of having taken long, hot showers, they stomached the $125/ night poorly maintained digs, while inhaling the radiating stench from self-commanded incontinence -- a bouquet in a locale somewhere between outhouse and cat box. Keep in mind, this fetid jumper needed to be wrenched back into the following day.

Over the weekend, the skills testing included but was not limited to: non-verbally expressing to my buddy I was out of air, grabbing an auxiliary regulator from his tank, breathing from that to the surface, then repeating the whole process but with roles reversed; pretending my regulator got knocked out of my mouth, then trying to find it and replace it blindly; partially, then fully flooding my mask to then purge it clear again; whipping off the mask entirely, opening my eyes, then putting the mask back on, purging the contents and smiling at my instructor. The hardest bit was swimming to and from markers using only a compass. Thankfully, my buddy with the bad breath was a navigational savant. I would have had us cross Huron, heading straight for Gaylord, Michigan.

By mid-second day we were all feeling really comfortable in the water. There was plenty of time to adapt as we were all waiting our turn to be personally skill tested. I always imagined myself happiest if I was travelling underwater. Surprisingly, I was the happiest when I wasn't moving.



Once, I landed on a bed of algae. I'd never guess, but they give off so much energy they're actually radiating warmth. On my knees, I imagined it the Atlantis version of a dream that began on a virgin flight at 6 years of age -- of one day having a postal code in a cumulus cloud cluster. Otherwise, the usual bottoms where I landed most were sandy. If you don't move too much you can go eye to eye with the goby fish.

The goby is a small, sandy coloured fish native to Japan. It was brought in by man to solve the zebra mussel problem. As welcome as any immigrant to any country these days, these foot shearing creatures, with their propensity to eat everything that falls into its gaping shell, made their way to the Great Lakes via their curious attachment to ship hulls. The solution to control this organism was to bring in a creature higher in the food chain. No one really guessed the goby would have no real predators. And their numbers keep increasing because they're not particularly picky eaters. They are a gluttonous scourge to the freshwater world. When I stayed still, waiting my turn for a skill testing demonstration, there were gobies staring me down, praying to their fish god for my air to run out. I learned over the weekend that Australia did something similar with their cane sugar lovin' beetle population.

The government brought in 3,000 venomous cane toads from the northern crest of South America. They didn't kill many beetles, but they did breed easily and killed off potential predators with their own unique toxicity. Today, these little horny toads run into the millions. Here's how a recent initiative, apparently created to compete with the piggy bank market, dealt with this decades long issue:



Way more portable, easier to access, but thus easier to spend than the perennial porcine repository.

I don't know exactly how I did it, but I shaved an hour off my time on the way home. I actually loved the ride home. For most of the ride I was thinking that the best thing about my birthday weekend was how incredibly lucky I felt.

Not everyone knows how to drive, or has access to a reliable car. Sometimes I beat the hell out of the strong body I have, and it retaliates, but I'm still able to haul heavy gear in and out of trunks or lakes without braining myself, gratefully. Not everyone could or would want to lie on the bottom of a lake watching life sustaining air exit lungs like a rising smack of mercurial jellyfish. Certainly not many would happily lie there until they got the bends. I'm sure a couple of my fellow divers thought I was a bit weird, some were laughing because they thought I'd become the dead body I was so afraid of running into. Surfacing, I caught the eyes of a couple of folk who thought I was kind of special. It's nice to look through the eyes of others for a while, to put their eyes on like a pair of glasses. Sometimes the ones I regularly wear get dirty and they don't see out very well. Sometimes all I see are the things that are wrong.

It's been a long time since I've felt so lucky.
I'm glad I found something good to wish for every year.