In the long summer months—which in the generally sunny climes where I have lived I regard as May through at least September—I have long made a habit of swimming in as many backyard and club pools as their owners will abide. And since none of the pools are Olympic-sized, I’ve developed a ritual of dipping underwater upon entry, descending to just a few inches from the bottom, and breaststroking from one end to the other, holding my breath for the 15 to 30 seconds various pools might require. It always feels invigorating to pop up to the surface with a nice exhalation at the end, ready to move some more water around in pursuit of just about the finest whole-body exercise humankind has ever devised. Some of these pools can get to a depth of five to eight feet, which seems like small potatoes until, say, you dive down to snag fall leaves or a kid’s unfloatable toy off the bottom. That’s when you notice a pressure in your ears, and some kind of force withstanding easy-peasy descent. And believe you me, she will be descending further, falling, falling, like an elongated sleek stone easing its way to the ocean floor. Granted, it’s not much problem diving down there repeatedly as I sometimes do, but it’s not nothing, either. What the “not nothing” is is the “pounds per square inch” (PSI) pressure your body encounters with each additional inch of diving depth. And when you plunge beyond six feet to 16 feet, 60 feet and much deeper still, the pressure builds and your lungs get thirsty for oxygen and things can go south very quickly. Which is why most people who take up deep diving do so with handy-dandy scuba tanks on their backs and a lot of instruction on how to keep themselves safe, breathing easy all the way. And then there are the “free divers”—tanklessly descending to astonishing ocean depths the length of a football field and beyond in fierce competitive struggles, breathless all the way down and back up. Sometimes, they arrive atop the water with their eyes nearly obscured somewhere behind their foreheads, still breathless, and despite the frantic efforts of a waiting crew floating in the water and offering rapid mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and other revival techniques, the diver’s breath never returns. *** *** Before the credits even roll in Laura McGann’s stirring free diving documentary, “The Deepest Breath,” a backseat camera trains on Italian free diver Alessia Zecchini driving a car in The Bahamas and a voice asking: “Alessia, how do you feel about death?” She answers: “Honestly, I don’t think about it. I think if someone has to die, they will. I’m not afraid of death. I’ve never thought free diving could lead to death.” We then cut to Zecchini bobbing atop the water on her back, surrounded by safety divers, medical personnel and competition officials in a free diving event. A 20-second countdown is underway and as the event official intones “Four…three…two…one…” and Zecchini slips underwater grabbing hold of a guide rope, the announcer states her name followed by: “Four minutes. World record attempt.” And then we descend along with Alessia into an achingly lovely pale blue world as she—methodically, rhythmically, beautifully—reaches one hand down the rope, the other wholly opposite and extended behind her to minimize resistance. She’s in perfect alignment, pulling herself ever deeper, her amplified heartbeat the dominant sound, her wetsuited body like a benevolent torpedo, fluid and straight, intending no harm, exploring a state of being beyond most imaginings. Some 50 seconds and 100 feet or so after beginning her descent, she releases the guide rope, having reached a state of “negative buoyancy” due to the volume of air in her lungs being depleted. The good news in this is that it allows for a “freefall” that requires very little additional strength on her further descent. And believe you me, she will be descending further, falling, falling, like an elongated sleek stone easing its way to the ocean floor. Her and our world go nearly black now, save for the illumination provided by her headlamp. After one minute and forty-seven seconds, she plucks a card from the underwater disk marking the world record and begins her ascent, her heartbeat and her hand grab of the rope notably slower but still rhythmic and true. After three minutes and thirty-one seconds, a mere foot or so from the surface and surrounded by two safety divers watching her every move and breath, she pauses, flounders, and utters a choking noise, whereupon four strong hands waste not a second in lifting her to the surface, one of them grabbing her by the chin and barking, “O.K., look at me!” No response—her eyes unfocused and rolled up, her face slack and zombie-like. The man immediately begins mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as the movie title appears on the screen and the opening credits finally roll. *** *** “Why?” That’s the dominant and nearly immediate question on most people’s lips about other people who put their very lives, their precious lives with so many breaths and joys and challenges still to come, on the line for a mere sport. Sure, it’s their profession, their passion, their ardent, highly charged, perhaps lifelong dream. But there are all kinds of avenues to big fun and extreme challenge in this world that do not involve much if any risk of death, death being a most serious and preferably avoided matter in most people’s lives. And as we saw above, while Zecchini claimed never to think about death, death most certainly thought about her. Whether it claims her or someone else in this tightly wound tale of extreme courage, crisis, bravado, romance, lunacy, and ceaseless striving (take your pick from any or all of those) is something writer and director McGann plays close to her vest for the nearly entire 108-minute running time of her film. There will be tragedy and someone will die is clear from the get-go, but when and to whom can become a kind of guessing game that is nevertheless dwarfed by the raw, spectacular footage of free dives, the romance that blossoms between Zecchini and nomadic Irish safety diver Stephen Keenan, and the spirited competition in which divers use each other for inspiration to set, lose, take back, lose and take back yet again the world record dive, one yard at a time. And this is where the feeling of insanity comes in for viewers less adventuresome than the divers they are beholding (which encompasses pretty much all the rest of the human population). That’s because each successive yard to a new world record depth carries with it an increased chance of death. “So you just set a new world record, Alessia? Guess what? (Japanese champion) Hanako Hirose just went a yard deeper.” Back into the water Alessia goes the next day, setting her sights on that yard deeper, the memory still fresh on just how close she had to come to the edge of life and consciousness on her own record dive. This is what differentiates free divers from say, track sprinters. A sprinter loses her world record by a tenth of a second and she can hardly wait to get back on that track again. But the prospect of her paying for that effort with her very life is next to zero. Ditto for most other athletes and adventurers in most endeavors. Not so with free divers. The closest I ever came to extreme sport was a run across the floor of Death Valley many years ago with my best buddy, each of us running half the 134 miles in a relay format, a half hour at a time. We started at about Happy Hour and ran through the night till late the next morning. The valley floor at 3 a.m., the stars above and my breath and the plop of my shoes the only sounds, felt strange, rhapsodic, surreal and exhilarating. I loved it, though I never entertained a desire to do an extreme run again. But here’s the important point: If someone would have told me that fame and fortune awaited at the end (instead of just a few supportive friends with a VW van and some medical supplies, just in case…), but to win all that might cost me my life, I would have looked at them as if they had three heads. “Risk my life for WHAT? Are you even crazier than I am?” *** In the end, there’s no one reason (and precious few rational ones) for why people gravitate to life-edge extreme sports such as free diving and free solo rock-climbing. (And poetry, for that matter—talk about living on the knife-edge!) Certainly ego and ambition enter into it, but most everyone has ego and ambitions that don’t gravitate to great danger and discomfort. Sometimes, though, all it takes is an image, experience or memory that lodges in a person’s’ brain at a young age, as happened with Zecchini regarding free diving, and it drives her entire life. “I want to achieve my dreams at all costs,” she tell a video camera at maybe 13 years old. “I want to be a famous free diver.” She did become famous—at least in the cloistered world of free diving—when she set the world record that the movie chronicled at 104 meters (341.2 feet) in 2017. But it’s the “at all costs” that jumped off the screen at me. A young teenager stating exactly what she will pay everything for. Should that frighten or inspire us? *** “The Deepest Breath” began streaming on Netflix on July 19. *** Comments? Questions? Suggestions, Objections, Attaboys? Just scroll on down to the Comments section below. No minimum or maximum word counts! Check out this blog’s public page on Facebook for 1-minute snippets of wisdom and other musings from the world’s great thinkers and artists, accompanied always by lovely photography. http://www.facebook.com/andrew.hidas Deep appreciation to the photographers! Unless otherwise stated, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing. Elizabeth Haslam, whose photos (except for the books) grace the rotating banner at top of page. https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/ Library books photo by Larry Rose, Redlands, California, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com Film photos courtesy of Netflix (except “Zecchini, between worlds,” a screenshot from home television)
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