I couldn’t be a deep-sea diver
By: Christopher Francis
Tags: Deep Sea Diving, Finding Yourself, Ocean, Comedy, Life

I find it insane that we know more about space than we do the depths of our oceans. Truly, the fact that we know so much about the skies above us to the degree we have multiple chocolate bars named after the contents of our galaxies and not a single one about anything below sea level is intimidating.

There’s one thing about the fear of the unknown, but there’s something more about the fear of what’s hiding in places we sorta know. Like the void socks disappear into every time you do the laundry. We know that the oceans are made of water, we know fish and other life live inside the oceans…but we don’t always know where, and we don’t always know what.

It’s unfathomable the true extent what exists in the fathoms below.

A deep-sea diver, and I mean, a proper deep-sea diver…Those you imagine dressed in those reverse space-suits…is a profession I don’t think I could ever do. If I was sat before the captain of an ocean explorer vessel and I was offered a job — an underwater boss offering me a Poseidon adventure, if you will — I would wonder that a) Why are you offering me this job and 2) Why do you think I could do this job?

Straight off the bat, I can’t swim. I feel like that is a pre-requisite for a job like that. It’s the aquatic equivalent of requiring a driver’s license (a thing I also do not have), and even with the right equipment, surely I also need to know to do a bit more than a doggy paddle and a dead man’s float.

By the way, a “dead man’s float” is such a presumption. It sounds more like a prediction than a valid state of being. And a “doggy paddle” neither looks nor sounds as good as when you first hear the term.

It is through this naivety to the world of waterborne employment I have definitely already fallen at the first aquatic hurdle. I do, however, would like to ponder further.

Hypothetically, I pass the physical, I pass the base requirements, I don’t pass out when travelling deeper and deeper down in the ocean, there’s still the fact that I’m in the ocean. Whether that’s in a pod going deeper and deeper into the dark depths or I’m in a diving suit feeling the pressure of the job and the pressure of the very waters around me.

At a push, I would try to still do the job at the best of my ability. I am getting paid, after all…But there’s just something about the small amount we do know about the dark depths that puts me in kind of unease.

You know what an anglerfish is, right? When you describe it as a fish that has a light hanging off its head like a carrot in front of a donkey, it’s kind of a cute mental image. Then you see an anglerfish and you wonder what fresh water hell that creature came from*

*Anglerfish do not live in fresh water.

Anglerfish live so deep they exist in total darkness. They’re me when I was a teenager. The males cling onto their female mates because they don’t develop enough and without them, they’d die alone.

Again, me when I was a teenager.

The anglerfish is a demon fish made of teeth and false promises. The orthodontic model teased to you before you’re subjected to years of restricted diet and strict oral hygiene. What’s scary is that’s just one example of what’s lurking in the dark depths of the ocean we still don’t have a total grasp of knowledge on.

There’s jellyfish that never die, there’s giant isopods that look like those pill bugs from A Bug’s Life if they were exposed to radiation, there’s a whole range of creatures named clearly for the nightmares the people who discovered them had.

Anglerfish is innocent enough. That light hanging off their head is the light ushering their prey to their untimely death. The fish that are normally hunted by us this far below have become the hunters. It’s cute that we named the fish for their fairground hall of mirrors version of a human angler.

Beyond that, however, we have…the vampire squid. As if bats weren’t bad enough, I now have to deal with vampires in a place that’s without sun 24/7? The frilled shark, which sounds like a true renaissance man of the shark world, except it doesn’t use its 300+ teeth straight away, but instead constricts you like a snake. That’s the problem the deeper you go, the more rules go out the window. And at thousands of meters below sea level, there aren’t any windows.

Did you know that there’s a thing called a goblin shark? Not because its fond of gobbling up your friends and family, purely because it looks like something Tolkien would have written if he truly wanted to take the piss with his world building.

That’s not all, there’s the grenadier, which I am honestly surprised it not just an explosive fish, there’s the black swallower, which is definitely too easy of a target to joke about, and there’s the barreleye, which is completely transparent, can move its eyes completely around, and swallows its prey whole. What. The fuck.

It’s insane to think that this is just a fraction of the fraction we do know about the ocean. The smallest possible slice about the smallest amount of ocean we’ve been able to explore up til now in the history of the world. Let me remind you that our planet is mostly water, just like how we’re mostly water, and yet there’s enough mystery for generations to come. Yet we’re also at the point where we’ve discovered an entire planet lightyears away from us and have since decided, no, actually, it’s not a planet at all.

The ocean is weird, man. I could never bring myself to take a trip below the surface. How can you trust the one place so open for exploration and yet so claustrophobic? So yeah, I couldn’t be a deep-sea diver, however much you might pay me. It’s not worth the trouble, the trauma, nor the effort. Shoot me into space. Let me see the stars.

…Then again…