Dive Buddies: Part Two

Part One, if you missed it.

~

The Mentor - 'You don't must go'

When I was 19, my dad I and went white-water rafting in a small Ecuadorian town called Tena. Once a missionary outpost deep in the Amazonian Andes, Tena was a romantic anachronism. All you saw were grimy jungle khakis and beat-up Jeeps and yellowed labels curling off the whiskey bottles. Our guidebook described Tena as, 'the kind of place you'd half-expect to see Indiana Jones slouching at the bar.'

Keep that image in your head. If Thomas lived in Tena, he'd be the thickly-accented Bavarian roughneck challenging Indy to a drinking contest. Thomas was great.

~

Thomas smoked more than any human being I've ever met. Usually he smoked this foul Filipino brand called Fortunes, though sometimes he'd switch to Winstons if the price was right. Thomas was the Orbitz of Coron's cigarette prices - he knew every shop's rate down to the peso. He never overpaid for his smokes.

Which was wise because, as mentioned before, Thomas smoked a lot. While other divers fiddled with their gear before jumping in the water, Thomas had one last cigarette, his wetsuit half-unzipped to the waist. After a dive, his mask was barely off before he reached for the pack again. It was almost impossible to light a smoke after getting out of the water because your hands were frozen stiff, the wind was usually blowing, and Filipino lighters are absolute junk*. None of this seemed to bother Thomas. He just made the lighter work, as he made other things such as motorbikes and depth gauges and old laptops work, then enjoyed his smoke.

*Quality flames are more valuable than gold in Coron. When the boss' family visited, they brought her a few Bics from Germany. When I made a joke about 'borrowing' it for the afternoon, she gave me a look that made me fear for my liver.

Thomas made everything work. Mornings were chaos - divemasters running all over the shop carrying air tanks and gear boxes and diesel jugs, all half-awake and most severely hungover.  But Thomas managed to make sure everything and everybody made it onto the right boat, a Herculean effort he accomplished while never going more than a minute without a smoke. When the motorbike carts inevitably broke down en route to the pier, Thomas got them running again with a hammer, a brick, or a few well-placed kicks (usually accompanied by loud cursing).

He'd lived in Coron for over a decade; one of the first wreck divers to arrive on the island, and one of the few who stayed. He'd worked at Rocksteady for years, renting dirt bikes on the side for extra cash. Coron wasn't an easy place to make a living, let alone raise a family with a pack of small children, yet he somehow did both. Thomas knew every single person in town, and managed to remain civil with most of them, which was no small feat in such a prickly and stubborn community. I don't know that I ever saw him pay full price for a beer, though I saw him drink a lot of them. He was very popular at the bars.

Thomas was the most competent diver I've ever known. 'Competent' isn't the sexiest way to describe...well, anything really, but it just fit him. After eleventy-billion dives he'd seen everything beneath the sea short of a jaguar shark, and there was literally no way to surprise him underwater.  If you caught him at the bar on the right night, you might hear about the time his instructor got nitrogen narcosis trying to set a deep-dive record, or when his diver lost consciousness deep inside a shipwreck (twice), or some other shiver-inducing tale that always ended in the same boring yet immensely reassuring way (i.e. everybody lives). And you never questioned a word he said because even a Kentucky cave shrimp could see there wasn't an ounce of bullshit in the man.

~

After four weeks in Coron, I still hadn't memorized the routes through the wrecks. I felt like a fraud; here I was pretending to be a wreck dive guide, yet I would be utterly fucked if you dumped me in the Okikawa's brig and told me to find my way out. To make matters worse, everybody I worked with was an expert. They'd made hundreds of dives on these shipwrecks; every wrong turn or befuddled 'where are we?' was another opportunity to be mocked or, worse, patronized. After one particularly bad dive, I was sulking on the roof of the boat when Thomas gingerly lifted himself up, a soggy Fortune clenched between his teeth.

He told me that during his first year as an instructor in Coron, he barely went inside the wrecks at all. 'I was fucking useless,' he explained helpfully. I stared at him in disbelief. Thomas had been put on earth to smoke cigarettes and dive wrecks (when he was all out of cigarettes). This was like finding out that not only did Einstein fail math but was also pretty lousy at checkers. I asked Thomas how he'd dealt with being a wreck diver who didn't go in the wrecks.

'I don't know the way, so I don't go. I don't must go. No rushing, I take some time and I learn. And when I know, I go. When you know the way, you go. But if you don't know, you don't must go. Chillax. Fuck it.'

I bought Thomas six beers at the bar that night, and I still felt like I owed him one.

~

The Other Divemaster - 'Hindi lasing!'

With Jianna after my last dive.

It was monsooning again. Heavy sheets of rain battered the tin roof above Rocksteady's front gate, a deafening crescendo of metallic plinking. As 'shop bitch' for the day, I was relieved. The storm meant no pain-in-the-ass customers wandering in to ask stupid questions and nag me for discounts. It also meant that, since the soft drinks were restocked and the torch batteries were charging, that I had nothing to do until the boats returned. So I did what any reasonable person would do under the circumstances - I went next door to buy a bottle of cheap Tanduay rum and some corn chips. Then I scurried back to the shop and asked my former nemesis if she'd like a drink.
~

Jianna had already been working at Rocksteady for a week or so before I showed up. I was surprised to learn that I wasn't the only Divemaster candidate at the shop - small dive centers in a place like Coron might only do a few DM courses each year. Having two at the same time is a bit unusual. I didn't think it would be much of a problem, though - we made a couple fun dives together on my first day, and we got along just fine.

She was an unusual character - a single Korean woman in her early thirties who'd quit her job and decided to pursue her diving passion full-time. I'd spent a few years teaching in Korea and had never met anyone like her; Korea is a country where 'fitting in' has little of the negative connotation it carries in the West, and 'following your dreams' has none of the glamour. A 30-year old Korean woman is expected to be married, preferably with a kid or two, and a comfortable apartment in one of the country's ubiquitous, interchangeable high-rise complexes. She should be shy, petite, and deferential. Delicacy is prized. It's considered cute to be helpless.

Jianna ticked none of these boxes. She was astoundingly tall for a Korean woman, towering head and shoulders over the locals. She was maniacally enthusiastic about the most backbreaking chores around the dive shop. She gave as much shit as she she got (in fluent English and surprisingly good Tagalog). Jianna was fit and pretty, with plenty of admirers, none of whom would have stood much of a chance if she decided to kick his ass. She was popular and outgoing; I often saw her walking to the bars at night, dressed to kill in long, clingy dresses. She got along well with all the Filipino divemasters and could drink any of them under the table.

You couldn't ask for a better enemy to resent.

~

Jianna was a more experienced diver than I was, but not that much more experienced. She had maybe forty more dives than I did, small beans to established dive pros (who can rack up more than that in two busy weeks), though a considerable gap for 'beginners' like us. We were like siblings born a year apart - at 50 and 51 the difference is almost imperceptible, but at 12 and 13 it feels hugely important.

She'd also spent more time in Coron than I had. She was close friends with many of the Filipino divemasters, who'd accepted her into the Rocksteady 'family' almost immediately. They made inside jokes in Tagalog on the boats, and had legendary drinking bouts back on land. She was really one of the guys. So when I had a falling out with one of 'the guys', Jianna went on the shitlist.

~

I remember sitting on the roof of the boat, scratching at the red paint with my thumbnail while Jianna and the Filipino divemaster sat across from me, trying to figure out how we'd miscommunicated so badly on our first dive. I remember feeling a little resentful as we splashed into the water for our second dive, determined to give them no reason to criticize me in the next debriefing. And then I remember climbing back on the boat after the Filipino divemaster ran out of air inside a shipwreck, shaking with cold and almost uncontrollable rage, and refusing the coat that Jianna offered me.

When we got back to land, I waited by the pier for 45 minutes with a pile of equipment while the others rode back up to the shop for unloading. There was no way the delay was accidental - the Filipino divemaster had clearly told the others to leave me stranded there, a kind of passive-aggressive revenge for my hostility after the dive. When I finally got back to the shop, I hotly told the owner that I wanted to leave Coron as soon as possible, and that I refused to dive with that weasley little motherfucker ever again. Or Jianna. Fuck them both.

~

A month later, when I was making my final dives on the wrecks of Coron, I broke my vow and dove with Jianna again. She'd made an odd request a few days before - she wanted to serve as my personal underwater photographer on the day I officially finished the Divemaster course. It was one of the nicest things anybody has ever done for me.

When I left Coron, I hugged Jianna goodbye. I was sad to leave her; sad to leave a friend whose friendship I didn't deserve and couldn't possibly repay. She told me she'd send me all the pictures from our dives once she returned home to Korea. Every diver has heard this one before; it's our version of 'let's stay in touch!' in your high school yearbook.

Last week I got an email from Jianna with nearly a hundred breathtaking underwater photos. They're the only photos of me taken during the Divemaster course in Coron. I'm not sure if she knows that.

Today our friendship exists entirely due to Jianna's mysterious ability to repeatedly forgive me for behaving like a complete asshole.  During the long weeks where I avoided eye contact and spoke to her only in monosyllables, she somehow managed not to hate me. Or maybe she did hate me for a bit, and managed to smother that rational instinct like a squirmish vole. All I know is that she kept offering me sodas and helping me carry gear boxes and helping with the dishes after lunch. She kept being human long after I turned into a monster.

After all that, she deserved a drink.

' Hindi lasing! Hindi lasing!' - or, 'I'm not drunk!'