God's Aquarium

COZUMEL, Mexico — Twenty feet underwater, the color red disappears, absorbed by the sea. By 35 feet, orange is gone too. Yellow begins to vanish next. Even violets and greens weaken. So down here at 100 feet below the surface, we are enveloped in blue--vivid hues of aquamarine and sapphire, cerulean and cornflower, sun-streaked turquoise and shady hyacinth. Farther below, the blues darken; indigo becomes cobalt. Then somewhere straight beneath, even blue flickers out as the sea swallows all light.

My dive buddy, Liisa, and I are drifting along the face of a cliff, racing along--flying, actually--on a Caribbean current. In front of us: the fantastic architecture of a coral reef, with its caverns and tunnels and buttresses and spires. Behind us, open water. Below, only the deep.

Scuba divers around the world know this as Santa Rosa Wall. It is one of more than 40 named dive sites off the southwest coast of Cozumel Island.

Ashore, people will ask, what did you see down there? By that they mean, what was special among the gulping moray eels, the ballet of eagle rays, scowling groupers, drum fish with their trailing ribbon-like fins, brain corals the size of houses, hawksbill turtles, sponges as big as garbage cans, metallic barracuda with fangs like guitar picks.

But the catalog of what the eyes behold fails by leagues to convey the experience, the feeling, of being submerged in a world where all sensations, even beauty and danger, are altered. Drift diving along the coral reef is where adventure and tranquillity embrace.

At any moment, almost anything can appear, or happen, in the open ocean. You can get no closer to wild, untouched nature than to swim in it. Yet a great weight is lifted from a person. Even with 20 pounds of lead strapped to the waist and the cumbersome apparatus of scuba hoisted on shoulders, one floats more perfectly than a feather on a breeze. Utterly relaxed, arms crossed and fins dangling, aware of each breath, a diver glides weightless with the flow of liquid blue.

We had come to this island off Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula in May to see if diving was for us. A week later we departed devotees, my dive log, I'm afraid, having exceeded a writer's yearly quota of exclamation points.