Not Diving But Drowning

It has been said that drowning is the easiest way to buy the farm. This depends. There are two ways to drown. I don’t mean that there are two ways to go about it; I mean there are two ways to physically drown once you are in the wet stuff. You can either close you mouth and your throat fight it until the pressure in your lungs, your cheeks and your gullet becomes so great that you have no choice but to let the water pour in. By all accounts, that’s the painful way if the accounts are to be believed. At this point you are unable to exhale the water in your lungs and replace it with the good stuff and you must at all costs attempt to get to the surface. The second way is perhaps what those who believe drowning to be the easy way out consider to be the easy option. This does has something to with how you go about it. Jumping from a height or entering the water at speed will under most circumstances cause the air to be pushed forcefully from the lungs on impact. The water has no option but to rush into the open channel and fill you up like a jug under a tap leaving you idle away your remaining minute or so whether jumping had been such a good idea after all.

I’m flat on my back in the dust on the opposite bank to which I started my sub-aqua adventure. I know I’m cold, logic dictates that and yet I feel a warmth in my core like I’m lying on the banks of the Nile in the winter sun, my fingers cramped from holding my book open for the afternoon. A feathery breeze occasionally makes a sweep accompanied by a young dark boy who sets down a long drink by my side. I look up into the sun and feel its weak burn. A large cloud passes overhead and it’s as if I’m being winched by a helicopter, prostrate through the air; a messiah without a cross. Without warning I plummet and find myself laid back in he dirt, gripping it with my fingernails, my heart booming like a rubber ball in a cage.

“Come on goddamn you.” A familiar voice.

I feel the back of my head hit the ground and I am startled enough to open my eyes then cough and vomit the two litres of quarry water I had been saving. Kneeling over me and casting a great shadow over me was a vaguely familiar face. I spluttered some more and wiped my eyes. I recognized the voice first.

“You lucky son of a bastard.” It was Pharoah Jones. My response was to hyperventilate for a few minutes. When I stopped, I noticed that he was as wet as I was.

“I guess I have you to thank.”

“Not really. I was doing a little fishing from over here when I spotted your little antics on the other shore. Figured you’d come straight back up again but what do I know? You were down there a long time.”

“It’s a long way down and there were tanks.”

“Tanks?”

“Yes, oxygen tanks.”

“You went to the bottom?”

“That’s not all.” I was talking as quickly as I could. “There were divers, dead ones, weighted down, bloated, ready to explode in their suits.”

“You went to the bottom?”

“Yes like I said.”

“But this is the deepest quarry in Western Europe.” I thought about what he was saying for a full minute before I belched.

“Actually you’re right. Would you do me the honour of calling me an air ambulance immediately? I feel a spot of decompression coming on. Oh and Mr Jones.”

“Yes.”

“You know that there’s no fish in there right?”