Berenang... (or swimming, into the wreck)

We race past parched fields, withered palm trees and dusty concrete and palm houses of eastern Bali. The hot sun above me, the turquoise ocean beside me. My scooter is a laugh-riot. After surviving enough close calls with oncoming traffic and tight, decreasing radius corners taken too quickly -- almost immediately after Christine warned us about the hazard -- my scooter and I are like old friends. Flitting along the narrow roads, speeding past slower traffic, all on the left side of the road. We turn off the main road, onto a rough path, downhill. We pull up in front of a dive shack. When they see we already have flippers and masks, they leave us alone.

We walk past a handful of beach-restaurants and tiny hotels, resplendent with pale tourists.

The beach is composed of smoothed black and blood-red rocks that cook under the afternoon sun, and scald toes on the touch. I wait until the last possible minute to discard my flipflops and trot to the water. Typhoons off the Phillipines and the weather has shifted slightly in the last day, still stifling hot, but the tranquil water is now rough to the touch. It heaves upwards in massive piles and mounds. Yet schools of snorkelers flutter on its surface, like dead men discarded from a ship while armies of black, gear-laden divers walk to the water and slowly, slowly, slowly disappear from site.

I flop on flippers and tighten my mask. Sit back and set sail. I love the feeling of flippered feet, moving so swiftly through the water. We’re not sure where it is. The wreck. But like everything else on this trip, we have no doubts we'll find it. We face down and stare for it.

Then I see the divers. They walk on the ground 10, then 15 feet below me. I float tens of feet above them; weightless and curious. Then its there. In front of me. Massive walls and a gaping blue-black hole that is at least three times my height. Metal now blanketed in swaying, colorful coral. It’s the wreck. USS Liberty, a WWII cargo ship torpedoed by the Japanese and pulled to Tulamben, where it sat until 1963 when Mount Agung erupted and the resulting earthquakes pushed her to deeper water, where she lies today as I circle around her. I motion to the girls to join me. Hardly believing that just 30 or 40 feet from the shore, below my toes, is this mammoth structure.

Schools of fish swim around me. I hold my breath as long as I can and dive down as deep as I am able, until my head starts to ache. I trace the lines of the once magnificent ship, something once unliving from my world, now part of something else entirely, at the bottom of the ocean, alive in a completely new way.

Bands of golden sunshine flitter through the clear water. I want to go deeper, I want to see what the divers are seeing, but I know I can’t know this, I can't go there, at least not yet. I just circle the wreck, the words of a poem I’d loved from an almost forgotten summer quarter in college, now finds me in Bali. I can’t remember the exact words then, but I remember the sentiment. Of diving into the wreck, alone, to know the thing itself; and not the story or myth that others tell each other of the wreck. I think sometimes that is what this trip is, a journey to explore, to observe, to understand those things that I only knew of from stories, but had yet to experience and see for myself.

I inspect its sides, the massive proportions--now softened with coral fans and bright blue starfish. I watch the fish that keep it company, dart in and out, of dark corners. I swim with schools of colorful, beautiful, agile creatures. They are not afraid and stare curiously at me. I dive down again and again, deeper and deeper into the quiet blue -- slowly making out the angle it rests on the ocean floor. You have to hit the bottom before you can come back up. Against her massive, solid hull, I feel my overwhelming smallness and human-ness, in comparison. I feel the ages that passed for this wreck to grow so alive and beautiful again. I want to know it, all of it. I want to remember this always: swimming quietly around disaster.

I look up the passage I remember when I get online that night. Sitting in the bamboo chair on the bungalow porch, I read it to myself in the dark as soft waves lap a tired, rocky shore and somewhere, softly in the pitch-black distance, the Balinese hotel boys and their friends laugh and play Bob Marley's "Don't worry about a thing, cuz every little is gonna be alright..." on their four-stringed guitar.

Adrienne Rich’s Diving Into The Wreck

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty


(Underwater pics compliments of the fabulous Christine Estrada.)