Helma Hooker
Waves crashed around me causing a thin, white spray to jet into the air. My father and my brother had already moved out in front of the entire group, leaving us all struggling to keep up. Fraught and out of breath, I labored to move an inch forward with the massive scuba tank strapped to my back and weights bound about my waist. The fact that we were walking with these awkward fins on our feet was insane enough. Not tripping while walking with those things was just about impossible. If the water hadn’t been freezing or if I had not been shaking with fear already, I would have been sweating at this point.
As we made our way from the beach, violent surges of water had attacked us from all angles. Stumbling from the impact of the waves, we found ourselves desperately trying to keep steady in order to avoid the many jagged rocks that made up the shoreline. After all, Bonaire didn’t have any sand. No, this island was made up of solid, toothed rock.
I saw one of our group members fall to his side, clipping a rock on the way down. His yelp of pain was muffled under the regulator that was already in his mouth. Cautiously, his dive buddy moved over to help him up while also making sure that violent current and constant clashing of waves did not bring him down as well.
This was the worst idea we had so far in the trip. We could have taken the boat to the site of the wreck and just flipped over the side of it like all the other dives. But no, we had to drive out to this jagged, dangerous beach, put on heavy, bulky equipment and walk through hell just so we could swim for another ten minutes to the wreck. After all, it just had to be a journey. It just had to be a big, grand adventure.
My legs began to fell wobbly and unbalanced. I felt pain in my lungs as I struggled to keep up my breathing in the constant strain of lugging around the dive equipment and keeping my balance. The distorting sound of waves crashing and exploding against the rocks surrounded me, making everything feel even more off-kilter. The smell of the salt water was already beginning to make its way into my nostrils, giving my stomach a slight, queasy feeling.
I’ve always hated the smell of the ocean. It’s always just smelled like death to me. And it should- after all, that’s what’s waiting for us down there.
I look over to my left to see Lottie, hunched over due to the massive, faded yellow tank on her back. She was just as wobbly and awkward as I was, making her best effort to wind around the rocks surrounding us. For a moment, she looked over at me and made eye contact. All she could do was hold up her index finger and thumb in the form of a circle- the universal sign for “okay” in scuba diving. I lied and flashed her the same.
As I looked ahead, my father and brother were beginning to sink into the ocean slowly, the beach dropping off. Suddenly, I felt my stomach drop as the reality of the situation hit me- I was really going to have to do this. The horror of the getting past the beach entry had managed to stall my mind temporarily, putting away the real problem waiting me. No, my problem was not getting past the jagged, rocky beach. My problem was much larger and sitting at the bottom of the ocean.
It was sitting at the bottom of the ocean and it was waiting for me.
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When I was six years old, my mother bought me a small, children’s picture book based on the sinking of the Titanic. Why in God’s name they made a children’s picture book based on a horrible disaster that resulted in the deaths of one thousand, five hundred and seventeen people is beyond me. All I know is that it exists and my mother bought it just for me.
Immediately, I was fascinated. I cannot tell you why but, for some reason or another, I became captivated with the story of the Titanic. I remember reading the tiny picture book over and over again on the way to and from school. At first, I referred to it as “The Sinking Ship” book. Slowly, the word Titanic became embedded in my mind as time slipped by.
The more I read the book, the sharper the image of the disemboweled Titanic embedded in the bottom of the ocean became etched in my mind. It was the last image of the book: a pale blue, rust covered ship ripped in two and under thousands of feet of thick, heavy water. The rust that caked and preserved the ship made it appear as if it had skin that was slowly rotting and drooping off of its aged body. As I began to see footage of the ship under water in the documentaries about Robert Ballard and his re-discovery of the ship, the image became much more morose and haunting. Now, instead of the pale blue color of my picture book, the ship was surrounded by thick, black emptiness. It was so far under that no light from the sun could ever reach it. Tiny, little creatures the size of my thumb nail crawled over the encrusted surface of the ship. I thought of the bodies still inside, mummified and covered in the same rust and sea preservatives as the rest of the ship. I thought about how the bodies, once guests of the prestigious ship, were now apart of its skin, connected to it in one thick layer. I thought of the grand stairwell in ruins, a sick nightmare version of its former self. I thought of the Titanic as what it was: a ghost ship full of lost lives, dreams and fortunes.
As I began go underwater in my backyard swimming pool, I began to see these images when I would close my eyes. Deep down inside of me, I began to develop this horrible fear: what if I open my eyes again and I’m trapped inside the crumbling walls of the Titanic at the bottom of the thick, black ocean? The thought was ridiculous but, for some reason or another, it haunted me. Slowly, I found myself afraid to open my eyes. It was like the same fear someone has after watching a horror movie and then trying to go to sleep with the lights off. Only this time, instead of being afraid of seeing Michael Myers when I opened my eyes, I was afraid of seeing the cold, lonely ghost ship of the Titanic. I was afraid of joining its guests and crew. I was afraid of becoming part of its crusty, overwhelming, cake-like skin.
Every time I would close my eyes underwater, I felt the fear in the back of my head that maybe, just maybe, this could be the time when I opened them back up to see that colossal monstrosity in front of me.
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I sat on the bottom of the Jackson Courthouse pool, the sound of my breathing echoing in my eardrums. Above me, Austin, my brother, and Lottie, our diving instructor, were beginning their descent. The water was absolutely freezing, goose bumps covering my arm.
It was nine o’clock in the evening. We were missing the MTV Movie Awards. This was around the time when that would have actually mattered to me.
With the Jackson Courthouse Pool closed to the public, we were allowed to bring our scuba diving equipment inside to go for a test dive. For the past week and a half, we had just been using the pool in my backyard. Now, as we got closer and closer to the date of our departure to Bonaire, we were moving to a larger and much deeper pool. After all, once we got to Bonaire, we would be diving in an ocean that was hundreds of feet deep. Sometimes, it was so deep that you couldn’t even see the bottom.
That thought terrified me.
Above me, Lottie and Austin were equalizing their ears. They pinched down on the thin, rubbery layer of mask covering their nose and blew out, shooting excess air from their ears. That’s one of the most important things in diving. My dad’s friend Jay made the mistake of not properly equalizing while scuba diving in a freezing lake one time. For his ignorance and careless nature, he received a busted eardrum and some slight hearing loss. The thought of my eardrum imploding under the stress of the vast ocean around me always filled my brain. There’s just so much that could go wrong.
As I sat on the bottom of the immense Jackson Courthouse Pool, I thought about the upcoming diving trip ahead of me and slightly shivered with dread. I’d known about the trip for two years now. Every year, my dad had expressed more and more interest in Austin and I becoming certified scuba divers. For my dad, it was his only true vice. He worked hard running the Cleaners all year long and then, one week a year, he flew off with his diving buddies to some exotic location in the Earth and hit the ocean running. For him, the more dangerous and extreme, the better. He has been in the thick, black ocean during night dives off of oilrigs near the coast of Japan. He has been surrounded by a thick maze of sharks with nothing but excitement shooting through his veins. He’s done it all without even breaking a sweat.
He’s done all of this and all I could think of is how terrified I was to close my eyes for fear of seeing my ghost ship right in front of me.
Now, the time had come for my brother and I to join my father in his one and only true love in the world. I was absolutely terrified at the thought and I could not even begin to explain why. Still, I had to go through with it. After all, I didn’t want to be a disappointment. No, I could never be that. So there I was, sitting on the bottom of a freezing swimming pool in the beginning of June instead of sitting comfortably in front of a television set, watching the MTV Movie Awards. Instead of enjoying my summer break for those first few weeks, I had been arduously studying a workbook on how to properly scuba dive and other things I didn’t even remotely care about. After all, if I didn’t pass the test that Lottie gave us at the end of training, I couldn’t get my license. Without my license, I couldn’t scuba dive. If I couldn’t scuba dive, my father would be disappointed. And we didn’t want that.
So there I sat. The silence of the water around me in the pool was deafening. For a second I thought about closing my eyes.
Quickly, I decided against it.
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The first time I heard about the Helma Hooker was on the very long plane ride over to Bonaire. My dad was sitting next to my brother and me with a brochure in his hands. In one of the pictures was the image of sunken ship, surrounded by thick, blue water. It was on lying on its side, its insides exposed to the rest of the ocean. It felt so naked and empty. But still, the similarity was overwhelming. This was it. This was my ghost ship.
“So, you boys are gonna dive the Hooker with me, right?” he asked.
My stomach dropped. Quickly, I found myself saying the word “no” over and over again. After all, there was no way in hell I was getting near that thing.
“Oh come on, it’s a sunken ship, man! How many opportunities in life do you get like that?” he exclaimed.
My brother was game. This didn’t really bother him. However, I was horrified. My face was turning white with the thought of that massive, overwhelming ship lying there in front of me, its skin spreading out onto the ocean floor. No, I couldn’t do that. I could never face that first hand.
Lottie was sitting on the other aisle across from us. Already she sensed my nervousness. She was good at this. Through our training, she was always able to sense that I was the most nervous and unsure about all of this diving stuff.
“Don’t worry, Wes. It’ll be fine if you decide to do it. I’ll be right there with you. Plus, it’ll be fun,” she said.
Lottie had blonde, curly hair. It was crazy, scrambled and all over the place. It was about as crazy as her personality. No matter what, she was always upbeat and optimistic about things, perkiness evident in her voice. Now, she looked at me with her face glowing and her eyes bright with enthusiasm.
In a few years time, she would be divorced, maniac depressive and on some serious drugs. Every now and then, I can see her shacking up with one of my shady neighbors as I go on my nightly walk around the block. She always is going to and from the house, walking shakily from her car to get inside as quickly as possible. She’s as thin as a rail and doesn’t even seem real. She’s just another part of the skin of my ship, surrounded by the dense, black ocean and thousands of feet from the surface.
As the plane ride continued, I looked forward as I sat in my seat, music blaring in my ears. I thought about the Helma Hooker waiting for me just off the shore of Bonaire. I thought about it’s massive scope and overwhelming nature.
It was there. Just waiting.
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Slowly, I began to feel the beach drop off below me. The water rose up above my protruding stomach and over my chest. I felt myself take a deep, fearful breath and then release it all.
Then, I was underwater. Quickly, the sound of the clicking and clacking of salt filled my eardrums. That was the thing they never told you about the ocean. Unlike the bottom of a swimming pool, it was never quiet. The constant sound of all the salt clashing together sounded off all around you. It was an eerie, almost grating sound. It just made everything seem slightly off.
Ahead of me, the beach completely dropped off. Suddenly, I found myself looking down what appeared to be a giant hill. It sunk down to the ocean floor some one hundred feet below at a twenty-degree angle. The slope to the ocean floor was covered in the same beautiful coral reef that the rest of the dives in Bonaire had showed us graciously. However, instead of moving along the coral reef and going over the side of the slope, we were going straight ahead into nothingness.
Never, in my entire life, have I been so terrified by an image.
In front of us was absolutely nothing. We were moving down the slope, equalizing our ears as we did so, moving further and further into it. It didn’t feel real. Never have I been so deep into the ocean were, when looking straight ahead, I couldn’t tell where the top of the water began and where the bottom of the ocean floor was located. It was just nothing but a vast, fuzzy blue. And that was the thing- the water wasn’t clear. Although you could see everything about ten feet in front of you, everything else was pretty much a blur.
This must be what being in space feels like. Everywhere around me, I was surrounded by water. No matter where I turned, I could see it and feel it on my body. It was everywhere. I began to feel claustrophobic and overwhelmed. I found myself pressing down on the top of mask and blowing out from my nose. This was what someone would do to clear out the invading water in his or her mask. Although barely any water ever made its way into my mask, I was obsessive about getting any and every bit of it out. The water was already surrounding me on every side- the last thing I ever wanted was it to completely invade my mask and engulf me completely. I couldn’t imagine doing the dive blind, the salt water covering and burning my eyes. No, that would be the end.
The sound of the clicking salt continued to sound in my eardrums. We continued to move into the vast open of nothingness. I was in an alien world, a regulator in my mouth, a giant, heavy tank on my back, mask over my eyes, black fins on my feet and weights lining my ever-expanding waist. To the fish, I must have looked like an idiot. This was not a place for me or anyone else for that matter. We did not belong here. In order to just exist down here, we had to train ourselves, breath with the help of a large tank of air and weight ourselves down. No, this just wasn’t for us. We already had the land and the air. Now, we were just being greedy. We shouldn’t exist down here.
Lottie had been holding my left hand the entire descent and journey into the fuzzy emptiness ahead of us. Like my dad, she had been through this dive before. In fact, they had both even dove it at night with a dense, black ocean around them. I am eternally grateful that I did not have to undergo that kind of experience. If that had been the case, I would have truly been meeting my Titanic first hand.
She constantly looks over to me, making sure that I’m okay. On the beach before our arduous journey to the water, I had tried to explain to her how terrified I was of this dive. She said that it would be fine and that she would be right there for me. Now, underwater, her hand grasped onto mine. And, despite the claustrophobia I was experiencing with the vastness of the thick ocean around us, I was feeling a little better. After all, with her right there, what could happen?
My brother and dad were still way out in front of the group. Austin had slowly taken the lead and was jetting out in front of everyone. Everything was going just fine when, all of a sudden, I saw him fling his body back and straighten up, as if he had just been given a sudden surprise. It was as if something had just appeared right in front of him with no warning at all.
Lottie and I were in the back of the group and moving at a slow pace. As far as I could tell, nothing was in front of Austin and my father. I didn’t understand what was happening. Then, very slowly, something happened in front of me. A tiny, white outline appeared, moving over a giant, invisible space that took up all of the area in my immediate vision. At first, I thought my eyes were playing a trick on me. Then, slowly, I realized what was happening.
My breathing quickened at any enormous pace as I tightened my grip around Lottie’s tiny hand.
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I must have been on my third packet of Starburst by this point.
It was around two in the afternoon and I was still stuffing my face.
There’s a really sick trick to scuba diving. Although it doesn’t really take much energy to do it, it makes you feel absolutely exhausted and incredibly hungry afterwards. I was only required to go on the morning dives at 8 a.m. After these were over, I would come up to the surface, spit up and expel massive amounts of snot out of my head, take an aspirin and then sit around and eat for the rest of the day. No matter what, I always ended up with a massive sinus headache after the dives. They told me that they would eventually go away and that it was just that I wasn’t used to all the pressure changes yet but they never did. And as for the eating, well, that was just me.
On this particular afternoon, a television channel was having a Stephen King movie marathon. I had already watched the terrible The Langoliers and now I was into hour two of the six-hour miniseries based on The Stand. On the table in front of me, a big pile of wrappers and empty chip bags were forming. God, how long had I been eating? This wasn’t even counting the large lunch my mother had fixed for me a few hours back. Still, I just kept on eating. After all, there wasn’t anything else to do in Bonaire- it was just a little, arid desert covered island off the coast of the top of South America in the Atlantic Ocean.
In a few hours, it would be night and I would go to sleep with my stomach full. When I awoke in the morning, my dad would burst into the room, pull my brother and I up to dive the Helma Hooker wreck. Perhaps my fear of this event happening so soon fueled my binge eating. I’m not sure. But one thing is for certain- weight had always been a problem for me. Now, in a foreign country on a trip that was filled with mostly apprehension and dread, it was exploding.
When I returned home from the trip, I was surprised to step on a scale and find myself at two hundred and fifteen pounds. I was only fourteen years old and going into the ninth grade.
Slowly, I began to unwrap a Little Debbie snack cake and forced it into my mouth. The Stand was starting up again. As I stuffed myself, the impending Helma Hooker dive was not the only thing occupying my mind. No, there was something else. Actually, there was someone else.
Diane.
It had been a week since I had last talked to Diane. Ever since leaving home, I found myself missing this aspect of my life. Slowly, I began to come to terms with something completely new in my life- I was in love and for the very first time. As I glided over some of the world’s most beautiful coral reef, I could only find myself thinking only of how nice it would be to just talk to her again and just for one second at that. It felt strange, new and exciting. Here I was, in the middle of the ocean, an alien world, and I was feeling things that were definitely alien to me. It was so overwhelming- almost as overwhelming as the vast, impending water that surrounded me on a daily basis.
Quickly, the light, floating feeling that invaded my stomach upon this realization turned into pain. My need to talk to Diane and be around her was becoming more and more urgent. In fact, it was becoming necessary. I found myself becoming obsessed with the notion of talking to her again, just to experience an everyday, mundane conversation. It was taking up my thought process for the entire day, never letting me relax. In between this and my ongoing, building apprehension of diving the Helma Hooker wreck, I found myself in an extreme state of agitation and depression. The solution? I was going to stuff myself to the point of no return.
I opened up another packet of Starburst as I watched the Captain Trips virus spread through the world on the television in front of me. Only I wasn’t really watching that. No, I was looking farther ahead, at the Helma Hooker, waiting for me in a day’s time. I just had to get through that. I just had to survive that dive and get back home. I just had to get back home to Diane. She was the light at the end of my dark, deep flooded tunnel.
Little did I know what news she had in store for me when I returned home. Little did I know how many things had changed since I had left for Bonaire.
Then, it was all right in front of me.
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The empty space in between the spreading white outline had turned into a dark, ominous black shadow. I felt my hand squeeze Lottie’s almost to the breaking point. I started to shake and hyperventilate.
Oh my god. It was right in front of me. It was right in front of me.
My head spun and my breathing sped up to a ridiculous pace. In the back of my mind, I imagined all of the air in my tank running out and the suffocation that followed. I imagined all the pressure from all the water in the ocean crashing down on me, crushing my body. I imagined all the water rushing into my mask, blinding me. I imagined the creatures of the ocean picking me apart piece-by-piece.
I imagined myself trapped inside the crumbling walls of the Titanic, surrounded by mummified corpses and the cold, black ocean.
Lottie tightened her own grip on my hand to get me to look over to her. She was flashing me the universal okay sign over and over again, almost as if to try and calm me down. But I couldn’t calm down. I felt like everything was just going to fall to pieces at any second and I was going to be swallowed by the ocean. In the back of my mind, the thought of just shooting to the surface entered. The overriding fear of getting the bends quickly shuts that notion out.
We slowed down even more. The rest of the diving group had already reached the ship by this point. At first, I couldn’t even look at it. As we moved closer and closer, it began to morph out of the form of a shadow into what I always feared it was- a rust and sea-life covered sunken ship. It was my ghost ship. It was my Titanic.
The Helma Hooker lay on its side and its bottom half was right in front of us. I couldn’t believe how enormous it was. The size of it was so immense and engulfing. The rest of the group was beginning to go up and over it. As Lottie and I approached the wreck, my fear and apprehension grew greater and greater. I feared the prospect of my eyes blinking and opening again to find the real Titanic right there in front of me. I know the thought was illogical but, under one hundred feet of water with a giant shipwreck hovering over me, anything seemed possible. My stomach was in shambles. I was still breathing too heavy and was shaking uncontrollably. I was constantly in fear of passing out or panicking to the point where I just ripped my mask off and shot to the surface, bubbles forming in my blood stream. Anything felt like it could happen. It felt like it was the end.
Then, something happened.
As we climbed over the ship and joined the rest of our group, it all just went away. It felt like all the pressure and anxiety fuming in my body just exhumed from my pours and floated out into the ocean. My sinus headache lifted. Slowly, I felt my breathing steady and my grip on Lottie’s hand lighten. As time went on, I let her hand go completely, moving over to find my brother and father. Here I was, on top of an enormous sunken ship off the coast of an obscure island near South America. For some irrational reason, it was the worst thing that I could have imagined at the time. However, touching the ship with my bare hands, something just happened. I knew that nothing was going to happen to me. I knew I wasn’t going to be transported into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, inside the walls of the Titanic. No, now it was all real. I could touch it. I could swim around it. If I wanted to, I could even go inside of it. It was all real and I was just fine.
I moved over to my father and brother, flashing Lottie the universal okay sign as I moved away from her. She must have been delighted to see me moving on and no longer crushing her hand. As I reached them, Austin was holding onto the ship’s anchor, which was bigger than his own body. I moved over next to him and my father took a picture of us next to it. Slowly, we moved away from the topside of the ship to the front side. We moved down, we could see the massive mast of the ship that now lay in shambles on the ocean floor. You could see all the insides and guts of the ship and, if you wanted, you could even go inside of it. My anxiety had temporarily lifted but there was no way I was going inside that thing. Sea life and coral grew all over the ship, perverting its image and making it seem like more of a living thing. Still, despite these living aspects, it still felt like a ghost ship. However, I was no longer filled with fear.
As I looked at the whole ship spread out before me in its entire enormity, I felt more alive than I had felt in years. Slowly, my fear had been transformed into a feeling of power and awe. I was alive and nothing could hurt me. Despite being a hundred feet under water, I felt like I was on top of the world. My fear was right in front of me and it couldn’t do a thing to me. It just sat, stuck forever in the skin of the ocean floor with no movement possible. I was there too, floating in the middle of it all, small in comparison but feeling a thousand feet tall. This fear was mine and now it was gone.
I floated there for several minutes, just taking in the incredible sight of the massive ship in front of me. The rest of the group moved all around it, exploring various aspects. I just wanted to take the whole thing in with one look. That’s all I wanted. As I floated there, looking at the ship, I wonder now if I knew all the changes that were to take place in my life. I wonder if I knew that I was going to lose Diane to Alex or that I already had. I would come home dying to talk to her only to find that they had started to date in my absence. I wonder if I knew that I would finally conquer my ongoing weight problem, losing over fifty pounds just that summer. I wonder if I knew of Lottie’s upcoming downfall full of divorce, heartbreak and drugs.
No, I don’t think I knew any of it. I wasn’t supposed to. But I do know this. I know that knew that things were going to change. They had to- I had conquered my fear. Now, anything was possible. It all was possible.
As the group and I moved away from the Helma Hooker, I remember looking back at the ship for a brief moment. For a second, it felt like I left a small part of me back there. In a way, I did. I left the fear and apprehension. I left the inability to change and grow. I left my undying love. I left my addiction. I had survived and now life was waiting for me.
I left it there and it’s still there a hundred feet under the water. It’s there and it’s waiting for someone else to leave some part of themselves and maybe take something from it as well. I know I took something.
I took growth.
