Or why I said yes to this assignment, since I am not a photographer by trade, just by passion.
But here I am bouncing up and down on a boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It’s early morning, fog makes it hard to see more than ten feet ahead and the point of the bow is like an arrow icon on a computer screen but pointing seemingly nowhere. I close my eyes and imagine clicking on something, anything on my imaginary screen, so this madness would just stop.
The captain seems to know where he is going and the crew acts like this gut wrenching flip flop of the craft is another day at the office. I have to admit this jostling is affecting me, even after all those years as an open water swimmer, there’s no pleasure in being tossed about in a metal can. I guess I don’t have the sea legs I thought I had for this shoot.
My screen-desire-daydream of clicking to make it stop is happening. The sun is starting to burn off the clouds and like the sound you hear when you start your Mac—-the da-dum heralds me and I can now see where we are headed. Our destination begins to reveal itself, first as a multitude of colors and shapes floating ever so elegantly on the sea’s surface. As the light becomes more intense and directional, highlights glimmer and with all the rocking of the boat and the water, the horizon seems to hold a treasure and a lure. A siren’s call to come closer. The boat slows so I can take it all in and I begin to photograph.
As we get closer, excited to see the richness of this scene, I zoom in and any idyllic illusions are dashed. Trash was the sirens’ visual seduction. The playback screen reveals the contents of the treasure are not jewels of a pirate’s bounty, but humanity’s junk. Plastic water bottles, containers of food, toothbrushes, toys, fishing nets, one use shopping bags—-our discarded debris clustered together so intensely it is like its own land mass. I lean over the starboard side and throw up.
The Pacific Ocean’s Gyre or the Garbage Patch now contains my breakfast. The crew laughs and two of them exchange money. Apparently there was a wager on when I would lose my cookies. I wipe my mouth, shake my head and with all the dignity I can muster I ignore them. Captain asks if I’m ok and I wave him off with a thumbs up. I holler over the laughing and tell him to get me closer.
Once the viewfinder goes to my eye, I am lost in a world of seeing. A trance where anything and everything is worth looking and I capture what is before the lens not only to have it but to see it again as a photograph. This transference from real moments to preserved images—-this magic never disappoints. The laughter, the jokes, the sea faring profanity, the bad music they play on the loud speaker drifts silently away and I am in my own space—-an Alice in Wonderland through a looking glass.
I am awaken in my rabbit hole by a tap on my back. Capitan wants to know if I would like a sandwich. He shoves it up to my face with his oily, nicotine stained hands. Tuna, of course, the one fish meat I cannot eat because it was the go-to diet delicacy of my high school days. No thanks, I say. Ok,you’ll be hungry he mumbles through his open mouth chomping of my sandwich.
As he turns to head up to his crow’s nest, I ask can we go around port side for the better light. He nods with his squirrel filled jowls of tuna and mumbles a storm is coming so make it quick. I will. I change the battery and the card in the camera, lock it into a water housing and put on my wetsuit over my swim suit, all as the beady eye crew watches. I turn to them and say the show is over….heads down they busy themselves navigating the ship to its new location.
With my back to the water, my snorkel and mask tight over my face, clutching the camera, I fall with grace into the water. Quickly, I blow out the fowl sea water, kicking my fins to right myself I surface just enough to breathe. I am not an anxious person in the water, yet surrounded with the hubris of our world, claustrophobia quickly sets in. Thrashing about, clearing my camera and the water in front of my lens I begin to work. As amazing as this space is with hanging, floating, drifting objects, I am repulsed, yet the resulting images on the screen are beautiful. Like a fairy tale, a surreal dream, a suspended animation, what we humans use daily have transformed into new shapes, ragged edges, small sculptures of a consumerism, seemingly continuing forever.
I kick further into the gyrating center, feeling the detritus wrap around my fins and legs. I stop to scrap off of me handfuls of used-only-once remnants. Fish swim in the debris, nibbling at larger forms and some snap up the small micro particles, believing it is food. I scream in my face mask….don’t eat that! My words are muffled and I gulp in water from my snorkel. My angry reaction to something I cannot stop fills my mouth. I spit, gag and surface for air.
The boat seems farther away. I thought it was getting darker, but attributed that to being underneath the surface. I miscalculated. Sky is dark and thunderous and the captain and crew are waving to come back. I signal ok.
Waves are bigger now and what was once rocking is now a hard pitching back and forth. Head up now and swimming with all my strength, I am down in ravine of the wave and then thrust to the crest. Any light we had is gone. Darkness makes it hard to see the boat. Rain begins lightly only to become piercing at it hits the water. The wetsuit is no protection from this bullet storm.
I further wrap the strap of the camera around my wrist and begin randomly shooting with flash to catch the blur of this stuff as it swirls in the gyre’s eddy.
Suddenly an intense dark shadow blots all the available light and I look up to see a jagged half end of a fiberglass kayak barreling down upon me. I drop under the water’s surface but it squarely hits me on the head, knocking me dizzy with an intense pain. The last thing I remember is sinking further underneath seeing the haunting debris illuminated by the repeated firing of the flash. As I pass out, giving in to the pain, my last thought is ironic…it is true…. a drowning victim does see her life flash before her….