You have to be certified to rent scuba gear. Whether you have to be certifiable -- as in crazy -- to use it in Alaska in the dead of winter remains a matter of opinion. It's morning and the dashboard display on Ben Fernandes' SUV reads minus 15 degrees. Fernandes, an Anchorage resident, is gung-ho to dive. You expect that from a 24-year-old first lieutenant whose job description reads "Airborne Ranger" and whose idea of recreational reading is Foreign Affairs magazine. Just a little break in the action. "I'm ugly," he brags on the drive out. "I know I'm ugly. All good infantrymen are ugly." Fernandes is solid, medium height, low body fat and not ugly enough to brag about. His dive buddy today is Rebecca Bowen, 27, a long-haired blonde whose Nordic cheekbones strain against a taut, lean face. Not at all ugly -- but just as hard-charging as Fernandes. A financial management and accountant major at the University of Alaska Anchorage, she could be just the type that the Board of Accountancy has been counting on to redefine the profession's buttoned-down image. It's a brisk 9 degrees in Whittier, not nearly as cold as in Anchorage, but nobody's doing the hula either. The sky is gray. Snow sprinkles down on the boat ramp. The scene is strictly sci-fi B-movie. Dry-suited, fin-footed, goggle-masked divers trudge backward down the icy boat ramp and into the 39-degree saltwater. At the water, they squat, disappear and trail bubbles into darkness. A half-hour underwater -- about one tank's worth of air -- and they bob back up near the ramp. It takes 15 minutes for Fernandes and Bowen to wrestle out of everything but their dry suits and stash the gear. Back in the car, Bowen rests her aching hands on the heater vents. Her nails gleam a bluish lavender. The first dive, they report, was uneventful, largely a review for Bowen, who hasn't dived in a while. Mostly, she focused on technicalities: buoyancy, equalizing the pressure in her ears, clearing her mask. She saw a few starfish but not nearly as many as in a dive two Decembers ago. Back to Whittier's famous all-in-one-building town -- a bit of an exaggeration since there's a beautiful school building behind the Stalinesque residential building and, below them, a small store, cafe and a few other buildings. We ride the elevator to the hotel on the 15th floor of the residential tower, a landlubber accompanied by two lumpy rubber bipeds. A few Whittierites smile; they've seen dry suits roam the halls before. A quick break and back to the water, where we find Loic Thomas, owner of Frontier Diving, and clients, a gregarious Neptune and his court. All cheerily prepare for a second dive under steady snowfall. Thomas hails from France and when he speaks, it's impossible not to think of Aqua-Lung inventor Jacques Cousteau. "I know. We look crazy," he says. "But it's OK." Bearded mermen rise from the water, doff fins and stride by, icicles instantly dripping from whiskers. Their suits, pressurized by the deep dive, have puckered against their limbs like vacuum-sealed baggies. With a "pfftt!" they bleed off a bit of tank air into their dry suits, which puff like warmed marshmallows. "It's not so cold once you get some air in your suit," the guy with the biggest icicles says. Diana Wilson, 16, of Anchorage, waits at water's edge for a certification dive. Her smooth face, red with cold and framed by the snug dive hood, stands in sharp contrast to the grizzled mermen. She appears solemn as a novice about to commit herself to a coldly rigorous cloister. If so, the entire weekend's her novitiate; to get certified she must make four open-water dives, two today, two more tomorrow. "I was thinking how cold it was going to be," Wilson explains later. "But with all the stuff you have on, you don't really feel the cold, just around your face. The wait (to go in) was the worst. You get bruises on your hips because of the (30-pound) weights." These pains are forgotten when she talks of fish swimming past her and of seeing the wave-lit surface from below. "Like Northern Lights," she says. When her initiation is complete, she will be free to dive with her family during an eagerly anticipated Caribbean Christmas, or to rent dive equipment anywhere in the world. Past the icicled mermen, past the stern-faced mermaid, Bowen and Fernandes cram feet into fins and walk backward toward the water -- a second time. They're not shivering, but their sentences are clipped, their movements deliberate. "Not too bad," Fernandes says. "We'll be warmer in the water." Each is wearing several layers of warm clothing under dry suits that cover everything but the head and hands. An insulated hood and three-fingered mitts cover much of what's left. | | A half-hour later, Fernandes resurfaces. Where's Bowen? "I don't know," he says, cold but collected. "Isn't she in the car?" What? This is what you call a buddy system? Fernandes explains they had parted company at the ramp's edge. Bowen had trouble managing her buoyancy with insufficient weights. He'd gone on with another diver, and Bowen briefly resurfaced and hooked up with Thomas, who outfitted her with additional weight. No one had gone off unaccompanied. Sure enough, Bowen and Thomas surface a few minutes later, safe and sound. Thomas hurries to stow equipment and get his bared head and hands into the car. He opts to leave his dry suit on as he and Bowen are hurrying back to Anchorage for an open house, where apparently everything from evening gowns to dry suits are allowed. Bowen, however, has had a problem with her wrist seals. Cold water streams out of her forearms and mitts. The sleeves of her two sweaters and a "Wooly Bear" suit liner are soaked. Peeling off her wet mitts like taffy, her bared hands have a peculiar red-and-white look as if one could see the muscles and tendons. Mercifully, everything but her sleeves had stayed dry. But she needs help out of her suit, which unzips along the yoke, allowing the diver to pull her head out from a snug rubber turtleneck-style seal. It's a struggle. Chaining up car tires with bare wet hands on a windy pass compares favorably with peeling scuba gear at 15 degrees. The dang suit doesn't want to cooperate. The bunched wet clothes won't either. "Now, I'm cold," Bowen says. It's her only complaint. When handed a warm knit cap to replace her dry hood, she adds brightly, "Thanks!" Once in the car, she peels the wet sweaters and puts on a dry one. Her nails now are distinctly blue, but she doesn't rest them on the heater vents. Instead, she leans into the driver's seat and lets the heat blow over her. Her whole body is chilled. She drives no further than the few miles to the tunnel entrance and swaps seats with Fernandes. Offering up a round of miniature "Krunch" bars, she no sooner polishes off a chocolate -- than she slumps against her shoulder belt fast asleep. Much later, her tales of the deep leave no doubt it was worth it, wet arms and all. She'd seen a playful octopus, a wrecked plane, what appeared to be the cab of a tractor and many starfish. "The octopus was right on the ramp," she recalls. "A guy came up beside me and said, Be careful where you step; there's an octopus right under your feet.' I stuck my head in the water, and there it was, right between my feet. Its head was as big as Ben's head." Cruising left of the ramp, she located the "tractor." Further out, she encountered the shell of an airplane, then, what looked like a wing. "It was creepy and curious both," she says. "I'd recently seen Pearl Harbor,' and it made me think about the people who lost their lives there. How it would have looked underwater." She saw only a rusty hulk long covered with seaweed and starfish. Inside, a kelp-colored seat. The whole thing rests upright among the hills and rocks of the bottom. Others had seen an otter and sea lions. She had not. When her second half-hour beneath the waves was drawing to a close, she had paddled slowly back under a bright, rippled surface that resembled a stained-glass window made entirely of bluish grays, "like an early evening sky." The water, she says, had been too choppy to appreciate the snow, but on another winter dive, the snow had been the main event, draping and redraping the sea with a slowly vanishing lacework. "You can't say this is crazy," Fernandes says. "That wouldn't be fair." |
