The Deep of the Deep

The deep sea means anything below two hundred meters. How far down can we go?

The surface is beautiful, as if someone had scattered diamonds across it in the blaze of sunlight. At midday the water is stitched with gold and silver, glowing so fiercely it blinds.

Duck your head under to your waist and the pouring sun still lets you tell color from brightness. You can see water the pale green of weak tea, water clear as glass, water clouded thick with silt, blue waves, and the bottom beneath them. You cannot yet say you have fallen. Under the light, warm-blooded animals take their pleasure in the sea. It is loud. Every kind of sound reaches you, and the brightness dazzles.

Go deeper and it darkens a little. The blue leans toward green, or the water turns wholly murky, or it draws close to teal and indigo. People fill their lungs and come down, then climb back toward the light on the strength of their legs alone.

It is quiet, yet rise only a little and light and noise are easy to find again. Nothing stops you from going up. Come down once more and you can still rise without paying any price. The sea is endlessly merciful to the creatures that rest in its belly, but this is as much of it as anything born on land is allowed to enjoy. Even crocodiles and hippos do not dive past here. Below this line the sea takes back every tolerance it has shown the creatures of the land and leaves only cruelty.

Go farther and you enter a depth that finally deserves the word diving. It is darker still, a deep indigo, or a green so dark it is nearly black. Pitch-dark, silent, and strange, and yet you can still make out shapes ahead of you.

Here the things of the land are permitted to linger underwater only by breathing, from a tank, a breath that is not their own. This is where sea creatures live, and where most of the seafood people eat is found. Noisy, and quiet. A cold sea where the sunlight does not come.

Descend beyond that and you have reached a secret domain. Creatures that refused to live beneath the sun make their homes here. No light enters at all, so what lives in this place is blind, or has no need of sight to survive.

An unbroken, windless dark hides countless wrecks and treasures, countless corpses and secrets. If you mean to say that once you fall you can never climb back, you have no right to say it until the depth is something like this. This is a floor sunk to the very limit: the underground beneath the underground, a geographical abyss.

Ask me how far I have fallen toward the bottom, and this is the place where I can answer that I have gone all the way to the source of the seawater itself, to the point nearest the heart of the stars. A scream loosed here reaches no one. This is the deep of the deep.

Beneath this floor lies black gold. Oil comes out of it.

I had thought mine was a life with nothing to do with oil or natural gas, even though I had spent it using petroleum rather than digging it up.

The twenty-first century around me overflowed with things made from petroleum byproducts, but I never lived by pausing to consider what was plastic resin and what was synthetic fiber. Because of my work I knew only that disposables, and medicines like aspirin, were made from components extracted from oil. I had no need to know more than that.

I ran hot water at home without ever wondering what fueled the boiler or where it had come from. I put gas in the car without ever needing to think which sea it had been drilled from.

I was profoundly ignorant of oil, and just as ignorant of the sea. Aside from eating seafood or going somewhere on a trip, I almost never thought of it. Now and then a scene on television, a Mediterranean beach or some beautiful stretch of underwater, would draw a murmur of admiration out of me, and that was all. To me the sea was one more kind of resort, and nothing but the place where seafood lived.

So when I was suddenly driven into a place where oil came out of the ground, I could not even grasp how enormous a problem that was.

If I had to name the feeling of being shoved into a sunless abyss, it was simply dazed. Not oh, somehow I've ended up stuck down here, but the realization, once I came to, that I was already inside the deep. It is the feeling of dropping into a darkness without measure, with nothing to catch you. Down there, the emptiness and the terror known only to people who have been dragged all the way into the pit can be felt as something physically real. That place is the deep sea.

The creatures that live on land are always longing for the sea. The moment its water closes over them, they cannot go back.