Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

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Blue Hole

April 18, 2011 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

That’s a picture of a freediver in Dean’s Blue Hole, a 660-foot deep vertical cavern in the Bahamas.  Yesterday’s Times Sports section has a story about Vertical Blue 2011, the world championship, for which the winning dive was 121 meters (nearly 400 feet) at a time of 4:13 underwater without oxygen.  Some amazing stories of nitrogen narcosis, fear, and the limits of what the body can force itself to do.

I am thinking two thoughts about blue holes.

First, freedivers, amazing as they are, remind us how poorly human bodies manage in the ocean.  Four hundred feet is a long way down, but the average depth of the world ocean is around 12,000 feet.  The opening description of the story, in which a crowd urges a just-returned diver to “Breathe, breathe, breathe!” so that his body could recover from his minutes submerged shows what a shock these immersions are to our systems.

Second, the picture above also reminds us that, no matter how deadly the blue is, we love it — or perhaps we love these deep holes because of their  deathly  quiet and nonhuman embrace.  Are freedivers explorers of a post-sustainable future?  Do they provide images of how to live in an uncompromisingly inhospitable natural world?

Here’s a gorgeous YouTube video of former world champion Guillaume Nery doing a free dive in Blue Hole, filmed in one over-four minute breath.   Might be worth writing about someday.

Filed Under: Blue Humanities, Swimming

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About Steve

Steve Mentz
Professor of English
St. John’s University
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