Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

On our honeymoon, John and I traveled to Zanzibar. Our wedding had left him feeling terrifically upbeat because it had been joyful; it left me feeling incredibly down because it was over. Our first night in Zanzibar, he said, “I can’t stop thinking about our wedding,” and I said, “Neither can I.” He said, “I can’t stop thinking what a beautiful, perfect, joyous experience it was, with so many of our incredible friends cheering us on.” I said, “I can’t stop thinking that it would have been better if we’d put Nicky at table five instead of table six.” John decided that I needed some distraction to bring me out of my evident funk, so he suggested we do the weeklong scuba course offered at our hotel. I went along with it because there didn’t seem much else to do in a Zanzibar resort, but all the complicated diving equipment intimidated me profoundly. It had taken me three tries at a road test to get my driver’s license—after which my mother said that the only reason the inspector had passed me was because he was afraid that if he didn’t, he might have to get in a car with me again. I am dyslexic and could not tell my left side from my right until I got the wedding ring. Jacques Cousteau had made it all look so effortlessly graceful. Now I struggled to learn the names of the various pieces of breathing apparatus and safety gear, and to figure out how to assemble them.

Then we had to practice what to do if our air supply failed.

I am good in the face of any crisis that allows me at least a half hour of thought. I can determine a strategy and negotiate my way through complicated situations. I’ve managed to get myself out of police custody in East Berlin, to analyze my way through a bewildering maze of bewildering treatments for unnerving depression, to master the baroque logistics involved in making a family as a gay person. But I am not good at hand-eye coordination or any other split-second instinctual response, and the prospect of having to find my diving buddy and share his air hose when I couldn’t breathe on my own, thirty feet underwater, made me as nauseated as I was at Mindy Silverstein’s bingo night.

Nonetheless, I learned to dive, and in the years that followed, I went diving whenever we were in a place conducive to underwater sightseeing. I had long aspired to see the much-vaunted Great Barrier Reef in the Coral Sea off Australia’s northeast coast. So when I was invited to give the opening speech at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, I brought John and our son, George, and we arranged a reef visit. My dearly beloved Australian friend Sue Macartney-Snape, a brilliant cartoonist who sketches people’s surface oddities to reveal their most hidden depths, had encouraged me to come to the festival in the first place. With her uncanny knack for putting friends together, she had introduced me to new chums in Sydney, organizing multiple celebrations during my visit. I persuaded her to join us at the reef even though she didn’t care to scuba dive, and she generously offered to stay with George, who had just turned five, while we went off on our expedition. Most of the nicer hotels near the reef don’t allow children—which, given that they are essentially beach resorts, verges on obnoxious. Orpheus Island is one of the few that does, so to Orpheus Island we went.

Our first full day at the pleasantly laid-back hotel, John and I selected our equipment—the inflatable buoyancy-control device (BCD), which helps one rise to the surface, the air tanks, the regulators through which we’d be breathing, our extra weights to be strung along a nylon belt, and so on—and hopped on the hotel’s commodious motorboat. Sue and George, already building sand castles, waved us off. We were joined by the divemaster and a soft-spoken man from Maryland traveling with his ebullient college-aged daughter. She announced that diving was her favorite recreational activity; when she was far from the sea, she confessed, “I spend way, way too much time in aquariums.” She and her father had made hundreds of dives together, and she proceeded to describe most of them.

The boat took us first among small islets and then well out into the open sea—far enough from land that we couldn’t see any—before setting anchor so we could descend one by one along the anchor line. The divemaster warned that this area had strong currents and reviewed the dive plan: we’d go down, allow the current to carry us a bit, then be picked up where we surfaced. This arrangement was presented as advantageous on grounds that we’d be able to cover a good distance and see a great deal without exerting too much energy.