July 16, 2000; Sunday Magazine

AT SEA
FACING YOUR FEARS IS ALL WELL AND GOOD.
BUT DOES IT HAVE TO BE IN THE OCEAN?

By Shankar Vedantam

Drowning. The last few days, I have been thinking about what happens to people when they drown. I want to know what might await me at John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park near Miami, where I plan to go snorkeling. The boat that takes visitors out to the reef sometimes casts anchor at depths of 50 feet or more. As I discovered during a visit in January, that is unimaginably deep for someone who doesn’t know how to swim.
I call the National Association of Medical Examiners and ask to speak with a forensic pathologist. I am directed to Michael Bell at (where else?) the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner’s office who, I’m told, has “an interest in drowning.”
As I dial, I wonder whether drowned snorkelers from Pennekamp end up under Bell’s scalpel at autopsy.
“You will try to stop from inhaling, but you can hold off for only so long and you will then inhale,” he explains after I ask how one drowns. “Your airway will constrict to try to prevent more water from getting into the breathing sacs, until you become unconscious. Then the airway opens and the water goes in.”
I ask what techniques a drowning person might employ to stay alive.
“Get out of the water.”
Why do people drown?
“The most common reason is you don’t know how to swim.”
The night before I leave I remind myself that, on the plus side, drowning takes only three or four minutes. Then I ask myself again why I’m going.
It’s in the interest of both science and journalism. For the last four months, I have taken swimming classes to prepare myself to be dropped into the sea. The boundaries of this experiment are clear: Given on the one side, fear, and on the other, practice and preparation, when will the balance tip? Are some fears too great to overcome?
There is another reason I’m going. Pride. The wounded variety. After my fiasco in January, I want to prove that I can do it.

§

It was a clear day in January when I last visited the coral reef park. My wife and I and some friends had spent the previous night prowling the bars of Key West and then camping on a nearby beach at Little Duck Key. To city-bred eyes, the stars strewn above us seemed scattered across the sky by the hand of some careless child. In the dark, we listened to the sea nestling against the shore, the waves turning and sighing like a restless lover. I could not sleep. Dawn arrived. I walked the beach as the sun rose. I felt a little immortal.
It was I who suggested to my sleepy companions that we visit the coral reef park.
I couldn’t swim. But who cared?
When we arrived, the concession stand supplied us with life jackets, snorkels and fins. Since I normally wear glasses, I got a mask with a prescription lens. There were 20 people on board the open boat and many of them had brought snorkels and gear of their own.
The captain was a flinty, ponytailed man with skin the texture of leather. He informed us that we were to report back to the boat when he blew three sharp whistles. He would leave if we were not back within minutes. Cuba, he said, pointing an instructive finger, was 90 miles away.
Everyone laughed. I began to feel queasy.
In order to snorkel, the captain said, we needed to know how to swim. Did everyone know how to swim? He raised his hand.
I looked around for a fellow sinker, but everyone raised a hand. I raised mine, too.
When we came to a stop, the sea surrounded us from horizon to horizon. The waves were a foot high. They rocked and bobbed with ugly menace. I was gripped with a vivid sense of my own lunacy.
The captain asked if anyone had questions. I did.
“Has anyone ever drowned while snorkeling?”
One of those, his eyes said. He told me it was safe.
So far, I added mentally.
Already, like so many otters, people were jumping into the water off a ramp at the rear of the boat. They flippered away toward the reef.
The captain offered a tutorial for beginners. The trick, he said, was to relax.
The sea heaved, blue gray and opaque. My legs felt weak and my heart pounded. But I got to my feet and walked to the ramp. I pulled on my flippers and sat on the edge.
Relax?
I looked at the other snorkelers. Perhaps all I had to do was jump in the water and everything would be all right.
I couldn’t do it. I had to do it. I couldn’t.
I jumped.
Instantly, the waves yanked me out and under. I rolled and thrashed ineffectually. The water tugged me down and I fought it. My snorkel fell out of my mouth. I jostled my mask askew. My vision blurred. I swallowed brine. A rope was attached to the end of the ladder. I lunged for it. I pulled my head above water, eyes crazed, and took a breath.
I adjusted my mask and looked around. I had not traveled 18 inches.
From the deck, the captain looked at me with amazement - in all of maritime history, had 18 inches ever been so hard-won?
“I can’t do it,” I told the captain as I swayed back and forth at the end of the rope and waves lashed me.
“Don’t say can’t. You don’t know that you can’t.”
This was one issue on which I felt a sense of authority: “I know I can’t,” I assured him.
Sometimes, he said, it took a while to get used to the water. He pointed at my life jacket. It was designed to hold up someone who weighs 250 pounds, he said. I weigh 160.
“You can’t drown,” he said. “You can’t drown if you try.”
The logic was impressive. I couldn’t drown. I instructed my hands to let go of the rope. My hands ignored me.
“There’s a new world out there,” the captain said. “Don’t you want to see it?”
Was a reef worth dying for?
Another snorkeler suggested I practice floating on my stomach and get used to breathing with my face in the water. And let go of my rope? The waves would drag me to Cuba, an Elian Gonzalez in reverse.
My fellow snorkeler suggested I hold onto the rope as I practiced. This seemed reasonable. I put my face in the water. I found it difficult not to hyperventilate. The ocean bed seemed 50 feet away, but things appear closer in the water. Maybe it was 70 or 100. My grip on the rope tightened.
A second rope hung about 10 feet below the surface. Its end was shaped into a noose. I thought of the final scenes of the movie The Piano, where Holly Hunter gets dragged to the bottom of the sea, her leg trapped in a noose. Would my life jacket save me if I got tangled in the ropes? Would rescuers get to me in time?
After a few more attempts to quell my fear, I hauled myself on deck. The captain pointedly looked away.
“There are other things I’m good at,” I told him feebly.
My wife had offered to stay with me as I clung to the rope, but I had told her not to miss seeing the reef. Now she climbed aboard, excited at the wonders she had seen.
“There are other things I’m good at,” I told her.
She looked mystified.
Back at shore, I passed the captain: “Maybe the water is not for you,” he said. “There are other sports. . . .”
I smiled - and seethed inside. I swore I’d sign up for swimming lessons.

§

My only requirement from the coaches at the Central YMCA on Arch Street was that they teach me to swim without asking me to put my face in the water.
“Put your face in the water,” said coach Joanne Marshall.
“Do I have to?”
She nodded.
“Isn’t there any other way to learn to swim?”
She shook her head.
Marshall asked me to breathe out in the water through my nose, which keeps water from going in. My regular coach, Brian Kelly, taught me the crawl stroke that went with the breathing technique.
It was difficult: If my stroke came out correct, my breathing would get thrown; when I focused on my breathing, my stroke would go awry; when I got both right, my legs would be trailing beneath the surface. And it was tiring. I resentfully watched swimmers older and less fit than I swim back and forth across the length of the pool. Kelly said I was wasting energy being wound up and lifting my face out of the water, causing my legs to sink.
The coaches at the Y, who seemed trained in psychology as well as aquatics, did not tell me to relax. Telling someone who fears for his life to relax is like asking water to flow uphill. Coach Patrick McElhenney assured me that my fears made complete sense - and said he shared them. For reasons I could not explain, hearing that helped me relax.
At home, I leaned forward and practiced coordinating my stroke with my breathing. The first time my wife caught me pawing the air in our bedroom we were both embarrassed. But it soon became “normal.” When I walked to work, I breathed out through my nose and in through my mouth with my head tilted to the side. I ignored people who stared.
I raced to the pool every chance I got. My wife called me “obsessed.” Yet I barely seemed to progress. Each day I practiced treading water but, with the eight-week course ending, I could stay afloat for barely 30 seconds.
I wondered whether the captain in Florida had been right. Was swimming not for me?
It wasn’t until my last class, with Kelly screaming encouragement and my arms flailing, that I finally swam a lap.

§

Throughout my swimming lessons I assumed that it was my fear of water that was my enemy, but talking with psychologists and fear experts, I learned that I was focusing on the wrong thing.
“If you regard fear as a terrible thing, then you may become more concerned about the emotion than about the danger the emotion is trying to tell you about,” said Kenneth Isaacs, a psychologist in Northbook, Ill., who studies fear and panic.
“Water is a danger to humans,” he said. “We can last three minutes underwater without breathing - that’s a very limited time. We ought to be cautious at the very least.”
Fear, the experts suggest, is our built-in fire alarm. It can be triggered by something trivial - a false alarm. But the solution is not to disable the alarm, but to deal with whatever caused the alarm to go off. When the house is on fire, the fire alarm isn’t the problem.
Our macho culture says fear is a “negative” emotion, but it is only a physiological mechanism, no different from hunger or thirst. It pulls us back from the edges of cliffs and alerts us to every rustle in the grass.
Courage, I learned, is not the same thing as fearlessness. We can learn to keep our fears from overwhelming us, but that is not the same thing as excising fear from our brains. The former is a virtue, the latter a disorder.

§

At the end of a second eight-week swim class at the Y, I was able to swim 10 laps and tread water for several minutes. Was I ready to go back to the coral reef? There was only one way to find out. I scheduled a visit to Miami. One day before I was to leave, I called Kelly and scheduled an emergency class.
“Am I ready?” I asked him.
“I know you’re ready,” my coach replied. “My only question is whether you know you are ready.”
At the airport I asked myself that question. As my wife and I waited in line to check our bags, a thunderstorm broke out. Our flight was canceled. We rescheduled to a later flight and it was canceled, too. We rescheduled again - this time to Fort Lauderdale, only to have the plane ruled unfit. Still stuck in Philadelphia International Airport at midnight - hours after we were supposed to have reached Miami - I wondered whether the weather was a divine sign warning me not to go.

§

Four months to the day of our first visit, my wife and I headed to the coral reef. I considered telling the ponytailed captain I was back. But someone else was in charge of our boat.
“You must know how to swim,” the new captain said as we headed out. “When we dump you in the water, the swimmers will float away and the nonswimmers will sink to the bottom.”
Had all these captains attended the School of Macabre Jokes?
I looked out at the waves. They were about a foot high. A part of me was still wary, but a new part of me wasn’t. I turned to my wife.
“I’m going to do it,” I said.
When the boat halted, I didn’t stay behind for the beginners’ tutorial. I padded to the ramp at the rear of the boat, nonchalantly spat into my mask to keep it from fogging up, and dived.
My wife and I held hands and we flippered away.
Beneath us was the most amazing array of coral imaginable, sheaths of purple that waved in the currents, fingers of white and gray that reached toward us, a circular giant pockmarked like a golf ball.
Some 15 feet ahead of us a barracuda cut through the water, sleek and malevolent. My wife and I exchanged glances underwater, grinned and gave each other the thumbs-up. We swam back to the boat.
A woman was hanging onto the rope that I had clung to in January. Her eyes were wide with fear and her legs thrashed ineffectually.
“Just relax,” the captain called to her from the deck. “Try and relax.”
I rolled my eyes at this advice. When she came up for air, chagrin writ large on her features, I told her, “It’s really scary the first time.”
“Yes, it is!” she exclaimed. Relief flooded her face. It takes a beginner to know a beginner.
I took off again, swam in circles and chased a few fish. Already, like everyone who knows how to swim, I was mystified at why I had been afraid.

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