Traveling Sprinkler

Seventeen

I WOKE UP VERY EARLY, before it was light, and by the glow of my phone I read a little of Pat Pattison’s ebook on how to write better song lyrics. Pat Pattison teaches at Berklee. One of his students was John Mayer, he is at pains to let us know. At the beginning of his book he thanks Mayer and some of his fellow students “for showing how well all this stuff can work.” Pattison is not a humble man. The mother-of-pearl shell-diving exercise in his first chapter, he says, has over the years “proved to be a mainstay for many successful songwriters, including Grammy winners John Mayer and Gillian Welch.”

Here’s how you do the diving exercise, according to Pat Pattison. You imagine a random object — anything at all, could be a back porch or a puddle — and you dive toward it. You try to understand how it affects all seven of your senses, including your organic sense and your kinesthetic sense. You set a timer and do this for ten minutes first thing in the morning. You take notes. By the sixth minute, things really get going, Pattison says. You’re on your way down, “diving, plunging, heading for the soft pink and blue glow.” Then, ding, time’s up.

That sounded pretty good. I tried it in bed. I started the iPhone timer and began typing notes. What was I diving for? I didn’t want to think about a back porch or a puddle. I was diving down to reach the drain at the swimming pool at summer camp. The drain under the diving boards was twelve feet deep, I knew that. I had tried before and hadn’t been able to do it, but now it was toward the end of camp, and my swimming had gotten stronger. It was a YMCA day camp, and there were swimming certificates. They gave you little cards when you’d progressed to a certain level. This was when I was eight or nine. I’d gotten a Guppy card, and a Minnow card — I was nowhere near a Flying Fish or a Shark — and I took a huge gulp of air and surface-dived toward the drain. I struggled down, kicking so hard my body twisted in the water, till the drain began to come into focus. It was round and black and had a number of large holes in it. I thought I wasn’t going to be able to reach it. I saw—

And then my alarm timer went off, playing its loud marimba tune, with a final plink of syncopation. I turned it off. I reset it for another ten minutes. What I saw on the drain was a pale pink piece of chewing gum, the very same piece of pink baby-Jesus gum I’d seen at the drinking fountain at school. I didn’t touch it. I touched the terrifying drain itself. I looked up and saw somebody’s legs hit the water a mile above me. I pushed off from the bottom and clawed to the surface. I didn’t tell anyone I’d touched the drain that day, but I had.

Four or five years later, my grandparents took us on a cruise. It was a Swan Hellenic Cruise, with a full complement of tanned, elderly, witty classicists from Oxford who gave lectures on-site at Paestum and Pompeii and at the rebuilt ruins of the palace at Knossos. I took a picture of a black cat near one of the columns of the Parthenon that had been reassembled after the Turks stored ammunition there and it blew up. One of the professors, J. V. Luce, had a theory that Plato’s Atlantis was actually Minoan Crete, which had suffered a terrible tidal wave when a nearby island volcano blew and then sank into the sea, forming a caldera. Professor Luce said that there was a core of truth to the Atlantis story, that the sinking island and the tidal destruction of the center of Minoan civilization had merged, and that Plato had gotten the dimensions of Atlantis wrong by a simple factor of ten, which was an easy thing to do because of the cumbersome way in which numbers were notated at the time. I was tremendously excited by this theory. It was definitely true, no question.

The timer’s marimba went off again and I didn’t bother to reset it. There was, I recall, a beautiful long empty beach on Crete with a rusty wrecked ship on its side a few hundred feet from shore. I swam out to it with my new facemask on and saw the ribs of the wreck through the bright blue water. It was entirely covered with pale yellow seaweeds about the size of Lay’s potato chips that moved gently in the currents. I felt a fear of the empty blue water and the yellow weedy wreck and I swam back to shore.

And then we went to a small island — I think it was Mykonos — with many white houses on steep streets that led down to the water. “You need some fins,” my grandmother said. She went into a tourist shop and bought me a pair of black swim fins and a snorkel. The fins were difficult to walk in, but they propelled you through the water with remarkable speed. The beach was in a cove, with high rocks around, and I swam out to the deepest part, breathing through my gurgly new snorkel. It had little rubber flanges you could bite on to hold it in your mouth. I stared down at the green-black weeds and the lumpy rocks. I sucked in air and upended myself and dove, and I got about halfway down and then turned back. The water was deeper than the YMCA pool. It was darker, too. The light angled into it like light coming through venetian blinds. I thought I saw something moving down there, something oddly furry, like a hedgehog. Perhaps it was a sea cucumber. I took a breath and bit down on the now useless snorkel and began my descent, trying to swim like the scuba people in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, with my arms at my sides.

The fins helped me go deep fast. The facemask pushed hard against my upper lip and around my eyes. I kept going. And then the daylight dimmed and I felt currents of cold water touching me like arms.

I reached out toward the mysterious woolly sea cucumber, if that’s what it was, but there were black seaweeds all around it and my fear was growing. I saw a spiny sea urchin next to it. I thought, I’m in an element that doesn’t want me here. Don’t go this deep. I turned and kicked my fins and swam upward. I flailed through into air and light and breathed.

So that is what Pat Pattison helped me remember. Is there a song in all that? I don’t think so. Maybe if I were John Mayer there would be, or Gillian Welch. Who is Gillian Welch? I’ll have to check her out.