Writing yesterday about the canoe trip my dad and I took together got me thinking about the other road-trip he and I took, five years later…
The first thing I signed up for, when I hit college, was a course to get certified as a Scuba diver, because I planned to study Marine Biology. I was attending school in the land-locked state of Idaho (because it was a state school and I had a full scholarship), so the plan was a B.S. in zoology from UI, with a Marine Bio minor picked up during summers at University of Hawai’i. First order of business: Scuba diving!
I was still a kid at the start of that semester. Literally—I had to raise my hand and ask, on the first day of class, if I could sign my own liability waiver (being a minor) or if I needed a parent’s signature. (Mortifying moment!) I was also the only girl in the class.
The training sessions took place in the university pool, but the open-water certification dives, just after the semester ended, would take place on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, a frigid body of water near Seattle, six hours away from home. As it turned out, it would be two days before Christmas, in Puget Sound, in a snowstorm—which almost never happens there. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Certification requires five dives, spread over two days. And I didn’t quite know what to do with myself, with regard to the overnight between. The guys in class were bunking up and making it sound like a party, none of which sounded appealing—even if I were included in the plan, which I wasn’t sure I was. My dad was my regular sounding-board for stuff in those days, so I laid out all my nerves (about the dives) and discomfort (about the other divers)—and he responded by asking tentatively if maybe I’d like him to come along. YES! Yes please!
So he did all the grownup things (fueling up the Blazer and making a hotel reservation) and I packed up my ill-fitting university-issue wetsuit, and as soon as my final exams were done, we hit the road. I actually don’t remember a lot from that trip, but the memories I do have are vivid flashes like photos or video-clips.
Eating Ivar’s clam chowder in the dark, waiting for the ferry to Whidbey Island…
A Denver omelette that I could barely swallow in the morning, for nerves… (Food apparently makes an impression on me—even when I don’t eat it.)
The rush of cold seawater into my wetsuit as I waded in to my waist, waiting for everyone to get their shit together and get in the water, and watching snowflakes fall, through my dive mask…
Sitting in the front seat between dives, with the heater blasting and my teeth chattering…
Being told there was a betting pool about how many dives I would get through before I quit… (I’m too stubborn for that. One of the guys quit, after Dive Two.)
The rush of freezing water to my eyes and nose, and the slightly panicky feeling it induced, when I demonstrated that I could take my mask off and put it back on underwater…
And sitting in the back of the Blazer after the final dive, still in my wetsuit, with Dad hightailing it to our hotel so I could jump into the hotel hot tub and peel off my wetsuit in warm water.
Dad wasn’t sure, when he suggested it, if I would want to be seen with a parent. (He knew I’d felt humiliated when I had to take my waiver home for a grownup signature.) But I had quite the most comfortable experience of anyone in the class.
And I’m thinking now that I should have gotten in on that betting pool—I could have bet against myself quitting. I wonder if anyone did.
Kana's Chronicles 
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