Goodbye to Snuba

To some extent everyone has felt this feeling once during their lifetime. It’s that echo in the empty rooms of the house you lived in for years, after you’ve packed all the boxes and you look back at a space that seems different now that you are out of it. Your hand rests on the door knob, you are about to move forward, you won’t come back to this place.  But for a moment you honor all that happened here over the years- the memories, the person you were when you first came in, the way both you and the space graduated, morphed over time. It’s hard to measure, hard to explain to the man walking his dog by as you take that last box to the car and drive away from a space where so much happened, there’s no way to begin to tell the story.

But I’m going to try anyway, because it’s a story worth telling. In my case, it’s not a house, it’s a particular hotel and a profession – Snuba at the Westin KOR. I know the dive site like the back of my hand, the corals, the places the fish hide their babies in a nursery, the cleaning stations where the rainbow wrasse wait to assist others, the pockets of sand, the octopus houses, the big yellow corral dome that the sea turtles have tucked under for a hundred and fifty years.  My time was shorter than theirs here, of course. This was my space for three years, three months. 

Just walking in to work every morning at seven fifteen, was beautiful. I strolled under the banana leaves of the chef’s garden where limes and mint grow abundantly. Past the blooming spider lilies, the wild ginger, the tiny purple orchids. Past the koi that swam beside me as I walked along their winding dark pool. And to my favorite place on property, under an archway of the building where the plumeria trees lean in, framed by the red awapuhi and where I can look up to see the palm trees reaching for the early morning sun and the monarchs drifting sleepily over the five story buildings into the courtyard. As I walked up to my office, occasionally a frond on the Traveler’s palm was down from the storm overnight and I'd wonder instinctively if my geckos were okay. The gold dust geckos are the perfect pets – they spend their lives in the tree and I got to see them every day -happy and wild, kissing the dew off the seams, perching in the breaks between palms. They’re not mine, of course, they never were, but I borrowed them, protected them from teenage boys and the carnivorous Carolina Annul lizards. I believe that we never really own a space, we borrow it, we care take it, we change it, improve it and if we are lucky, it improves us.

When I started here, I was just a dive instructor. Such a baby. I knew how to lead dives, how to teach people to scuba, but I didn’t know yet what it takes to make a four-year old excited to listen to a dive class. I didn’t know how to calm a hyperventilating fifty-five year old who has trauma issues with water in their past.  I laugh at how naively unequipped I was at first, how all I knew to say was, “You’re okay, you can do this.” 

I am grateful to my teachers – to Adam who taught me not to push. When the ocean says no, it doesn’t matter how attached you are to this dive happening, you have to listen and not go out. To Nick who taught me that when you take care of the gear, it takes care of you and taught me site mapping, and what customer service really looks like.  And most of all, I’m grateful to Brian who taught me the power of word choice in a class, taught me the importance of never doing things the same way because my divers’ abilities and ocean conditions are different on every single dive. He taught me a whole new level of thinking ahead, planning ahead and communicating just enough ahead so that I could be a successful guide. I’m grateful also for the ocean, the greatest teacher of all. That first year, I had no idea how to read the water – I couldn’t tell without going in and snorkeling the site before a dive what the visibility was, which way the current was running, how deep the surge was penetrating. Hundreds of snorkel trips to scout the site later, I can now stand in front of the sea and know right away what the dive will be like and what I need to do in these conditions to keep my divers safe.

I’m grateful I had years of experience, and thousands of children in the pool that I held hands with walking backwards with while they swam for the first time breathing thru a regulator, before I met Dorothy. Dorothy was six, a tiny pixie child who barely fit into my smallest fins and wetsuit. It doesn’t help that she came from a family of giants – all over six feet tall standing on the beach, hooked up to the lines of Snuba. She looked like their tiny pet bird rather than their youngest child.

Dorothy was in a life jacket so she could float, and I also put her on the raft for our entry into the water so she wouldn’t feel the waves, would feel more secure. And yet, as we got about 20 feet from shore, Dorothy began to cry. Not just a little, because when you are six you do things completely and with heart, she was flat-out balling. Her parents both tried to calm her down, her grandmother tried, her aunt mostly tried to get her to be quiet as everyone on the beach was now staring open mouthed. And then they let me try. I didn’t tell her to be quiet, instead, I asked what was wrong, told her she was so great at Snuba in the pool. Dorothy yelled at me that she was scared. And I told her that was normal, that lots of kids I took out here were scared too, but that they really loved it after they gave it a try because the fish were so cool. I asked if she had ever seen fish, and she hiccupped and shook her head and asked me to take her back to the beach. I told her I knew her whole family was out here because they wanted to show her these awesome fish - they knew she would love them. And I made her a compromise. I told her that if she would trust me, and come sit with me in the water – she wouldn’t even have to swim- I would hold her hands and we could find two fish. If she saw two fish out here and then told me she still wanted to go in, I would end the dive, swim her in, carry her up on the beach and sit her down on the sand where it was safe and not moving and not wet and she could stay on land if she wanted to. She took a shaky breath and considered this. Then she trusted me and slid off the boat into my arms.  I put up my knees so she could sit on my lap and together, we looked into the water. Immediately, there were surgeonfish around us and Dorothy surprised me, she didn’t put her face up for several breaths.  Then suddenly, her head shot up and she announced, “There’s three of them! And look, a yellow one!” That’s the last I heard from Dorothy for a while because her face was in the water swimming away from me, leading the group out to sea. Her grandma looked at me and shook her head slowly in disbelief and all I could do was smile. It was about this time, that I began to be okay to stand in the fact that I am really good at what I do. Others can do this same thing, but not in the same way, not making the connections that I do. 

I loved being a celebrity at the Westin. I’d come in and as I’d walk around the pool deck, children would yell out from their rooms above, “Hi Sara!” In the summer, I’d meet thirty new kids a day, introduce myself to all of them and then introduce them to this new thing called Snuba and show them what they were capable of. I’d work them through their apprehension, through how odd it is to not be able to breathe through your nose, and those kids knew I knew they could do it. They had me encouraging them all the way across the pool. Never underestimate how powerful it is for children to have someone other than their parents actively believe in them.

Photo Courtesy of Michael Lasmanis

                                                          

With the hugs, the letters and cards, the ones that would come to the pool just to talk to me while other kids took turns doing Snuba, I knew I was doing something right. My goal was to make a solid connection, and if you measure that in Crayola, I feel I achieved what I set out to do.

                                 

                                      

    

                                                               

My last week of Snuba at the Westin, I met Carla. She’s nearing 60, a cancer survivor. When they took out the bits of bone that were affected in her ankles, they took out the bits that would regenerate too – leaving her with permanent mini fractures and a very tentative step. She saw me walk a three-year-old across the pool as he breathed underwater and came up to ask me if that might be possible for her, and would she really have to wear fins? As I understood her situation more, I could see what she would need, how I would want to rearrange the way I put gear on this diver, how I could structure the dive to accommodate her. It wasn’t easy. In fact, it was a really hard dive on my body, but I got her out there and after she worked through her fear, I added her weights and we went down hand in hand. It was so freeing for Carla, after seeing all these things Hawaii had to offer that she could not do – to be weightless and flying underwater following the fish, actually achieving a dream. When we swam over a large sandy patch, I helped her come down - comical, because she was kicking the whole time. But in that moment, when her bare feet touched down in the powdery soft sand, the look in her eyes when I lifted up a handful and it hovered like glitter in the water around us, it was priceless. She was so happy, so amazed, so in love with life and the ocean and that moment. I backed away a few feet and took her photo, allowed her to play like a delighted little girl in the sand.

Carla came back the next day to hug me tight and to share with me that was one of the highlights of her life – the moment that stands out as the greatest experience she has ever had, and she thanked me because she understood it was possible because of me. She said, “I wouldn’t have been able to dive the way the others in our group did, but with you, I could actually do this!” She told me of her plans to enlarge the photo of herself standing barefoot on the bottom of the ocean and to add the caption, “When the water is over your head, just relax and enjoy the view.” I am so grateful that I could be that for her – to make it possible, to take her to a place she never thought she’d go. And boy do I feel it in my back today. The thing about carrying 65 pounds on your back while also hauling 250 pounds, dragging 80 pounds repeatedly up wet sand, is that you feel it the next day, or in my case, with my tiny frame - the entire week after. Snuba is the hardest physical work I have ever done. And I’m capable, I can do it, I’ve been doing it, at a great cost to my health.  Over the last two years I’ve been trying to remedy that without having to give up what I love to do. See, I don’t want to feel Snuba in 20 years.  And I’ve reached the point that no matter how rewarding this is, I find it more important to take good care of myself.

So, yesterday was my last Snuba dive. With a man named Scott, who loved to snorkel but thought he couldn’t go underwater. I was aware it was my last Snuba class as I was teaching him. After the class I asked if he had any questions. “No,” he said, “to be honest, it’s all a little scary.” 
And I got this big grin on my face and said, “I know, and that’s wonderful.”
He looked at me, shocked and I told him, “because that means you are going outside of your comfort zone, you are taking a risk. I’m telling you, it’s worth it, this has a huge reward if you can work beyond your fear. Fear is uncertainty telling you that you are doing something new, and it’s in those new experiences that the rewards in life are – you have to go beyond what you know to get this type of experience.” 

When I explained that to a little girl once, she overcame her fear and explored the sea, then marinated on what was possible for her, on the beauty that was laying right there the whole time, unseen beneath a surface she’d never been brave enough to put a toe in. And afterwards, she wrote me a letter telling me, “You really inspired me and taught me that you can do whatever your heart tells you.” For the last three years, I have been that voice – gently telling them, that if you want to try it, you can do it, and there is something incredible out there waiting for you when you do.  

Scott was blown away. He had to work through hyperventilating, but now I know so many more techniques and deeper explanations, I had more tools to give him than just, “it’s okay, you can do it.” In time, he was able to use mind over matter and calm down and enjoy. When we dropped beneath the surface, the whales were singing loudly. They were close. And over the song was a little chirp – the high pitch of a baby whale talking to it’s mother. I’ve done this once before, and it was so amazing that when the opportunity presented itself again, I had to try. I mimicked the baby and called out in my regulator in the same pitch. Immediately, it responded, copying me and adding two notes. We called back and forth over and over for about fifteen minutes. At points, I was laughing out loud because the baby whale sounded so ecstatic, almost like a dolphin. Once, it's voice sounded like high pitched laughter and I actually had to look around to see if someone was messing with me – for was it really possible that a baby whale could make sounds that complex, could laugh? But there was only Scott looking back at me, smiling in his mask – pointing out into the blue and cupping his ear, asking if I could hear the whales.

As you see, it’s hard to put into words. For example, when someone asks what I did today and I tell them, ‘oh, I had a conversation with a baby whale.’ It’s beyond what most people know. When they ask, ‘what have you been doing the past three years?’ What can I tell them? I’ve been lifting/hauling/carrying/swimming sure, but most of all I’ve been believing in people, becoming a better guide, more intimately connected with the ocean, encouraging kids and showing them what’s possible if they work through their fear. And now? Now I more forward, I leave this place that I have borrowed, protected, and tried to improve with my enthusiasm and kindness. I’m lucky because it has improved me too.

Just as the houses we grew up in are now filled with the lives of others, the Westin and its guests will go on as usual without me there. The Snuba office will fill with something else. The turtles will still be tucking under the yellow coral dome rather I’m there to see them or not. The geckos will be peering out of the tree and I will be going for what’s next – taking a risk, doing something new, going after what my heart knows is possible.