Red Right Returning

159 Red Right Returning Emily Moore 9 June, Sitka, Alaska Coming back, diving in—Papa meets me at the Sitka airport and we drive to the Medeia, peer at the small orange submarine, the Delta, lashed to her deck. The Delta sits two people, dives to 1,200 feet on commission. Our dive will be comparatively shallow: a bounce dive, they call it, just a half hour’s drop to ricochet off an underwater ledge. Still, we’re the lucky ones; few guests are invited on this research sub, its dives reserved for the biologists who hire it. I’m glad to be onboard, gladder still to be back in Alaska. Papa slips me a silver packet of Bonine, along with my mother’s instructions to take one tablet an hour before leaving dock. It is a clear day by Southeast Alaskan standards—clouds high up and broken—but the wind is from the northeast and the water is already bumpy. In the wheelhouse, Wade, the Medeia’s skipper, listens to the Coast Guard’s weather advisory: winds to twenty-five knots. “It’ll be bouncy out there,” he says. “Those of you who get seasick may want to lie low until it’s your turn to dive.” I down the Bonine and stake out a place out on deck. The other guests along for the dive—Fish and Game biologists, a geologist from Montana—dump out their coffee and sip water instead. We turn our faces into the wind, fix our eyes on the sturdy slope of Mount Edgecumbe as the Medeia rolls out into Sitka Sound. “You ready for this?” Mason, the first mate, asks me. He stands wide-legged in his Stormy Seas jacket, a coil of rope looped around the crook of his elbow. “You look a little woozy.” “I’ve been traveling,” I say. “Too much. Just got in from Philly this morning.” Mason nods, commiserating. I point to his elbow and ask, “What’s the rope for?” Helooksdownatthecoil,thenbackatmewithasmile.“Youmeanthe line?Comeon,Emily,yougrewuphereandyoudon’tknowyourlingo?” 160 Ecotone: reimagining place I’d argue my case—I’m the black sheep in a family of fishermen— but just then the Medeia lurches violently in a wave. Mason grins at my green face. “The line’s to steady the sub when we hoist her overboard,” he says. “But it looks like we might need it to steady you. Lost your sea legs back east somewhere, did you?” The dive itself: quiet, deep. I crouch on a foam cushion, peering through the portholes in the Delta’s sides. Dave, the pilot, sits on a stool behind me, looking out through the windowed hatch. The Medeia’s crane lowers us into the water and lets go; we bob away, open the ballasts to fill with water. We sink below the waves and switch the lights on, falling through ever darkening blues as Dave ticks off the depth to Wade through the surface communication system: 40 feet, 68 feet, 122 feet, roger that. I watch jellyfish rise past us like tiny ghosts, plankton disappear into the deep. But I’m more aware of weight than sight: my stomach settled, pressed after the churning on the surface; the back of my neck strangely weighted. When I touch my fingers to the window, I find it wet with condensation, as if the ocean is slowly seeping in. We hit rock at 230 feet—thunk!—and Dave welcomes me to the bottom of the ocean. A strange world: lit by our spotlight and fragile laser beams, the place is barren, ghostly. Dave says the visibility is good—it’s fifteen feet—but I see only rocks billowing with sediment and the red beads the laser beams string down their rigid threads. Then a mottled quillback rockfish darts from behind a rock, his sharp row of dorsal spines rising like the ruff of a wary cat. Nearby, there’s a yelloweye— Sebastes ruberrimus—a juvenile, two white stripes running through the red of its body. And an adult yelloweye, maybe one foot long, comes to check us out, swimming beside my window as the Delta putts along. “That fish is probably forty or fifty...