Sitting in the dingy, tank on my back, weight belt around my waist, flippers on my feet, a marine knight in full regalia, I felt more awkward than I ever had in my life.  Ray, on the other hand, looked as though he had been born wearing his gear.  He perched on the gunwale, slipped his regulator into his mouth, and fell over backward.  A second later he came up and looked at me.  He plucked out his regulator.

          “Go for it.”

          Like a man just hoisted from traction, I bungled to the side of the boat, realizing that I had put on my flippers too soon.  I found myself confronted with the unexpected problem of how to turn around—which I solved by rotating in tiny clumsy increments like a robot, until I plopped down, banging the side of the boat with the bottom of my tank.  I sat there trying to remember all the instructions, put the regulator in my mouth and breathed the cold sweet air a few times, then, in a reflection of the gesture of trust by which we save our souls, fell back into the sea.

          I exploded in a confusion of bubbles, instinctively righted myself, and bobbed to the surface.  Treading water, I tore the regulator from my mouth and wheezed a few spluttery breaths.  I cleared my mask, looking at the smiling mosquito face of Ray, and felt something like a spear of happiness.

          “You ready?”

          I nodded, and down we went.

          A moment comes when, against all instincts, one must make the muscular effort of taking a breath under water.  That test passed with a surprising and welcome burst of cold air, I was amazed at the ease with which I adapted to this new plane of being.  The unwieldy appurtenances so awkward in the air proved helpmates in the water.

          The world we entered was the same, yet different, in that now I experienced it not in spurts, but steadily, uninterrupted.  A film, not a slideshow.

          A flying dream

          Gently kicking, I descended just to the top of a staghorn coral forest and glided above it like a slow motion eagle.  I held my arms at my sides and rolled, banked, turned with slight thrusts of my amazingly agile and powerful flippers; dove into alluring declivities which the sediment in the water made hazily eerie, cruised through their coolness like a water snake.  Above, the surface of the water glittered, and shafts of light slashed the tops of the coral heads and all the brilliant colors everywhere—beauty so rich it shut down everything and became common.  Outside myself, I glided through the supernal quietness to the intricate and mysterious accompaniment of my own breathing.  For a long while I simply forgot about Ray, but when I remembered, and turned to look for him, found him protectively, attendantly, just off my starboard stern.

          I looked at my meter, having amateurishly gulped away my air, and signaled to Ray that I was getting low.  He had a look, nodded, and we headed back to the sharply angled anchorline of the dingy.  We worked our way up, de-flippered, tossed the now useless appendages into the boat, then scrambled aboard.

          “Well?” said Ray.

          I just shook my head.

          We returned the three or four hundred yards to the mothership, where on board waited food, drink, the air compressor, and an atmosphere thick with secret sin.

* * *

          Ray had pored over charts with Sean and now, after some island-hopping, on our last day we cruised around in the dingy seeking some new hunting ground.  Through the clear green water the coral formations had a distinct dark splotchy look, and at last we found an area rich with them that met with Ray’s approval.  We went back to the boat and got our equipment.

          The water here was deeper—and the minute I fell in, noticeably colder—and as we followed the anchor line down, darker.  Massive coral heads loomed around us in this solemn cathedral, and as we descended I could feel the greater pressure, and breathing somehow seemed more uncertain.  A sliver of uneasiness tingled through me.  Right about then I saw my first shark.

          Big—no—but big enough—cutting along the outer reach of visibility—not slow and lumbering, but quick, athletic, like a nerve.  Ice seized my groin, and I tried to point him out to Ray, but by then he had spurted away.

          The fish here in general were bigger.  A school of huge amberjack swam by right in front of us and I froze.  Something about being in the water with big fish works at the cellular level.  But as they cruised out of view, the excitement at the extraordinary outdid the unease of the primeval, and after a few minutes, unaware of any current, we kicked over to the next head, twenty yards away, and just as we got there, Ray nudged me and pointed into the murky periphery.  At first I didn’t see anything, but then, as I stared, a long silvery shape materialized—and a single alert unblinking eye.

          And then suddenly—another and another and another—and as my eyes adjusted to the distance they took form everywhere—in fact, had us surrounded—exuding a collective sense of curious vigilance.  I knew they were barracuda, and though Ray tried to gesture reassuringly—don’t bother them and they won’t bother you!—and don’t have any fresh meat hanging off your belt (which I had no plans to)—still, I didn’t like our audience a bit—moving with us, as we moved, like a golf gallery.

          But the thing is, so many marvels lurked at every turn:  I fell into a semi-trance as I explored on my own, at one point following a school of queen angels to another head—this one gouged with frightening caverns, one of which seemed to harbor some large—very large—life form.  I excitedly kicked away and looked around for Ray, to show him.

          But I didn’t see him.

          For the first few seconds I didn’t make much of that, swam back to peer, safely distant, at Big Daddy again, trying to make some kind of mental mark of the place—then it did hit me all at once:  I need to find Ray.  I swam away from the head and reconnoitered.  Damn.  Just the surrounding uncertainty, the watchful silvery shapes—and no Ray.  Then I became aware of the current.

          I was, with no exertion of my own, drifting backwards.  And I had a sudden sensation of having wandered farther from the boat than I ought.  Where the hell was Ray?  Suddenly anxious, I began to kick—realizing just as suddenly that I wasn’t moving.  So I lay flat, held my arms at my sides, and began kicking in earnest, looking down at the sea floor.  Astoundingly, surreally, though my kicking became almost frantic, the bottom did not move, change—if anything, receded.

          A terrifying and disorienting feeling swept over me—like a breach of the laws of physics.  To act upon something and have it not respond.  Surely I was seeing wrong—or had someone tied me off somewhere?  Urgently I descended to the very bottom and started kicking as hard as I could, trying to claw myself forward with my arms—but still, the ocean floor, placid and nonchalant, only drifted from me like an impossible hope.

          Now, as I wheezed down my air in desperate gulps, panic flooded in.  I shot to the surface where, as I raised my upper body above the choppy water, I became instantly awkward, sluggish, encumbered in confusion and the suffocating equipment.  The swelling water lapped at my face; only with a great struggle did I hold myself above the surface.  I urgently tore the regulator from my mouth, took several lungsful of air, then swallowed a large mouthful of sea water.  Coughing, I hacked at the water, the gear hanging on me like chains, and had to fight back an urge to rip it all off my body.  I caught my breath and looked around for the boat.  The big one I couldn’t see at all—no, there it was, miles away—and the dingy—astoundingly, comically far away—how had I drifted so far?  Hard to tell—but it looked like no one was in it.  I yelled, but the end of my scream gurgled in the water.  Where was Ray?  The boa constrictor, panic, almost had me now—an eyelash away.  What little rational thought I commanded ran through my mind like the few strands of good tissue left in a rotten wound.  I battled for it, won a draw, put the regulator back into my mouth, and descended again.

          Breathing in rapid gasps, as though I’d just run a sprint, I sank again to the bottom—tried kicking again, but still to the same futile slow motion regression.  Was I even swimming in the right direction?  I looked at my air gauge.  30%.  I shot again to the surface, got my bearings, descended again, held onto a jagged arm of coral, and focused all my energy on mastering the panic, barely successfully.  I badly wanted to tear off my tank, my belt, but fought that urge back.  I must not breathe this water, I knew—but dreaded the confusion of the surface.

          But nobody can see me down here.  If there is anybody.  So I let go the arm of coral, swam upwards again, back to the desperate struggle with the equipment.  I gurgled, I fought, I gulped another large mouthful of salty water, I coughed.  I tried to keep my head up.  I tried to yell again.  And then, in a gap of quiet in the noise, I thought I heard the motor of the dingy, trying to start.  I pivoted toward it, pulled myself up in the water, and yes!—a human figure stood in the boat.  Ray.  I yelled—I waved my arms—I think I heard him yell back.  Why wouldn’t it start?  Again and again—a hundred times, it seemed—the motor ground impotently—or—yes—I could hear it running now.

          A minute after that, I was hanging onto the gunwale, and Ray was unfastening my tank.  I have never seen such a look on anyone’s face.

          The colossal stupidity of it.  Taking me out too far, too soon.  Letting me get away from him, not warning me about the dangers of currents.  Above all, no B.C.  Worse than stupid—beyond stupid.  Forget it, I said, mortified at my  own presumption.  But he didn’t forget it.  And what was left of the trip—the very same water all around us, once again lucid, benign, and brilliantly green—passed largely in bruised silence.

Dear Editor:

Planning. It’s all planning.
And if I may say so, from my perspective, admittedly and unashamedly outside, as it is sometimes put with, shall we say, preposterous anachronicity, the groves of academe, many of the problems currently plaguing not only our beloved college, but the larger institution a few miles to our east, and Higher Education in general, might find themselves well on the path to resolution if only a very little of that—planning, that is—of the most forward-looking and prudent sort, were exercised.
Never mind who I am.
The unfortunate executee dispatched by a severance of the upper from the lower theaters of the body at the neck is said not to be bebodied but beheaded. Why? Because, as everyone knows, various pagan predilections notwithstanding, it is the head—home, within, of the ratiocinative organ and, without, of the features that express or belie it—wherein that distinctive but most elusive essence we call “the human” resides. That is to say, what we most definitively are, provided we are not brutes, emanates from and is directed by the head. That this truth has birthed a thousand metaphors attests to its universality. Any inquiry into the root cause of whatever is good, or bad, in any entity—be it human being, family, sports team, business, or college—must look to the head. And it is in recognition of this ineluctable actuality that I offer, in a spirit not of harangue but of solicitude, the following observations and recommendations.
Yes, for a small school trying bravely to interrupt the otherwise unchallenged pastureland of our, let’s be honest, remote province, the College has a workable, indeed a reasonably competent, Administration. But is it enough? I have made this question the subject not of hours but of years of thoughtful meditation, the fruit of which ruminative gestation has been my conclusion that it is not. Not nearly. The head has lost its sway. And the Planning, for which present circumstances cry out, has failed to take shape.
The President oversees the decision-making of the College, and ushers into substance the abstractions of policy, true, but can one man or woman alone, no matter how capable, be expected to direct such a complex and many-faceted institution and leave no stone unturned? And the Board of Trustees—they serve a vital function, no question, but can such a group, composed as it is of personages for whom the concerns of Higher Education comprise an, at best, secondary, more often triary or tertiary priority, and whose presence among that august council often owes more to some arcane corollary of political machination or quid pro quo than to a competency mated to and an experience derived from the needs of the Academy, live up to their name and be entrusted with a vision so farseeing and a wisdom so rare? I fear not. Which leads to my first proposal: the creation of a Commission of Higher Education to supervise and render advisement to the Board and to the President. I propose twelve Commissioners, appointed to staggered four-year terms—by whom, you ask? I applaud your most reasonable question. To which the only possible answer is the creation of a new office which, since the moniker is happily available, I propose we call Chancellor. And where would the Chancellor come from? Every six years the Board of Trustees would elect from its ranks, subject to confirmation by the Commission, the member it deemed most equal to the demands of the office. The Chancellor would then appoint the five-member College Advisory Board, the principal function of which would be the selection of the twenty-five representatives to the Liberal Arts Congress, a legislative body whose measures would require a two-thirds majority vote for passage. Their dicta, in turn, would naturally be subject to veto by the Chancellor, who himself would be subject to oversight by the Board from which he was drawn, the President breaking the tie in the event the Chancellor’s veto should come to a vote. The office of the Chancellor, with his or her support staff, those of the Commission of Higher Education and its satellite committees, agencies, and staffs, not to mention the quarters of the President and his staff, the Dean and hers, the twenty-three vice presidents and theirs, would require, as I calculate, not only the Randall Building, but Heinz Hall, Lambert Hall, the greater part of Nicholson Dorm, the Burrell Gymnasium, and the ground floor of the Library.
This new administrative structure, I am convinced, would more efficiently provide the College with sound management and reliable operation. It is carefully designed with its own internal system of checks, balances, and appeals, and under ideal internal conditions would function virtually in perpetuum independently of outside influence. As we know, however, ideal conditions rarely prevail, and for the possibility that that most unwelcome element might vacate its former haunt and come to live among us—namely, Discord—and not only prove hard to uproot, but insinuate itself into the avenues of influence, and flourish, we must provide. I therefore further advance the recommendation that a College Judicial Authority, subject to approval by the Chancellor, the Commission of Higher Education, the Board of Trustees, and the President, be created. The three justices would hear cases strictly of vital import to the survival of the College, and issue conditionally final adjudications, the only course of appeal an Appellate Judicial Authority convened in states of emergency by a three-fourths majority vote by a ten-person ad hoc Emergency Appellate Appointment Committee drawn by lots from among the phalanx of Senior Administration. If the College feels moved, as I hope it will be, to approve my plan, the remaining classroom buildings of Marshall, Lovvorn, and Gaither Halls could be converted to house the offices of the bodies aforenamed. And should more space be needed, the building currently under construction and heretofore referred to as the “future Student Activities Building” would be completed in rather ideal time for the officers and their staffs to take possession of it, before the expense of ping-pong tables and the like be incurred.
Now I am not unaware that the reader, if he has been following my proposal attentively, has now felt arise within him a question, and let me hasten to say that this is not at all surprising. Of course a question has arisen: he is wondering where students’ classes will be held, and their bodies housed. Fair enough. But should we not stop at precisely this point and ask ourselves another question? A question germane not only to the fortunes of our own beloved institution but to the fortunes of Higher Education everywhere? Namely: are students really necessary in a college?
Be honest: students take, take, take—but what does this group of ignorant, spoiled, inexperienced, adolescent social parasites really give? Okay, their tuition—a sum that could easily be replaced by a 3% “education tax” on the wage earners of our state. And while you are considering that question, you might also inquire whether that over-trained, half idle, altogether unproductive coterie of intellectually fla(tu)lent persons known as the “faculty” be not likewise dispensable.
Those who do, do.
Those who can’t do, do do.

Respectfully,
Al del Gecko

Dear Editor:
What? Am I dreaming again?
Surreal or not, I cannot say that your recently published letter by Mr. del Gecko surprised me. I am no stranger to—indeed, I’m the survivor of a number of—these hamfisted spasms of anti-intellectualism, though rarely one that treats us, as does this, to such a crimson-throated display of bathos masquerading as logartian wit. Though it is “of all things known most difficult” to suffer, in the secret exultation of silence, these Calibanisms, still I have largely met them in all their predictable regularity here in this “interruption,” as our correspondent, one charitably assumes with considerable but only half-conscious accuracy, styled it, in the pastureland, with the hauteur of one who understands too well that to censure them is, in some perverse sense, to share them. Occasionally, however, an exhibition of vulgarity such as the tirade in question prods me down from the arid tower of disdain where, truth be known, I would rather, but dare not, the stakes what they are, tarry.
As for the burlesque that del Gecko has provided, one presumes for our entertainment, I pass over that with the cold disregard it deserves. No, it is not his buffoonery but his snideness, in full evidence as his hardly terse Jethrotic declamation limps, at last, to its conclusion, that I feel must be dealt with as a cleaver deals with meat. So—no doubt to the thunderous huzzahs of the companionable turnip farmers and pipefitters or whatever they are of this cartoonish boondock—our philosophical scribe pronounces the “intellectually flatulent” faculty of an Institution of Higher Learning “dispensable”? Well now. It is, if I may say, hardly an original complaint—and if one ever heard it from anything other than poultry farmers, plumbers, Republicans, printers, or fools, one might be distressed. No, one is distressed—for like polio this sort of hee-haw bathos must be eradicated, lest the innocent catch it.
Since, for which I presume myself scolded, I don’t exactly have a peanut crop to occupy my thoughts, I can rouse myself from the couch of academic lethargy where, save for the vague exertion of trying to prevent the lives of the children of those who do from blossoming into similar masterpieces of banality, I am able to undertake what I’m afraid would be quite impossible in reverse: an imaginative construct of the mental landscape of those who trivialize my own in all its dalliance with obscurantism. And I can tell you, what I imagine falls rather short of rich.
A life as much inimical to as ignorant of the entire enterprise of inquiry? An existence comprised in large measure by things a week or less old? A mental terrain wherein, within three sentences, will appear, in any polemical discourse, the word “linebacker”? A consciousness in whose depths, in any “half idle” gaze out a window on a rainy afternoon, the exploits of Odysseus might not figure—nor the rich cadences of Shakespeare echo, nor the soulful yearnings of a Shelley or Keats vibrate? A life where one never tastes the strange elixir of darkness of Les Fleurs du Mal? Never soars with Lucifer on Miltonic wings from the depths of Hell? Never explores the sly playgrounds of Donne? Swims in Stevens’ veritable ocean? Shares Holden Caulfield’s hilarious but trenchant indictment of post-war American society? Locks horns with Nabokov or Pynchon, roams about Dublin with Messrs. Dedalus and Bloom, savors the riddles of Borges, never wanders into barren postmodern wastelands such as young Mr. Danielewski’s House of Leaves?
This were no life at all.
If this be don’t do, then I leave to you, Mr. del Gecko, and your friends, the doo-doo.

With regards,
Cord McCord, PhD