Peter Fuller Memorial Dive

9/1/07
This post comes 4 and a half months late. But at least I can finally share some video.

Labor Day Weekend was hot. Of course, it's always hotter under the sun when you're suited up in black neoprene. It felt good to get underwater and cool off a bit. With Richard and Danica bringing along a DV camera, I joined Randy & Paige Sanders, as well as John "The Tank" Flores and his daughter, and Frank Enos at Catalina Dive Park on a Saturday morning to place a bronze memorial for Peter. It had been almost a year since Peter died.

Randy and Paige came up with the idea to do this and were just forming a dive club at the same time. Several of the members of the newly-formed Kelp Crusaders donated money to make the plaque and came along on the dive to place it.

Sometimes I am reminded of a conversation I had with Eric Grush on the lawn in front of the Butler house. I think both of our heads were filled with memory fragments, the kind of rush of bits and pieces that your mind sifts through like a nervous assistant, waving some forgotten file overhead in the excitement that it might mean something.
"He's not Sid Vicious," Grush laughed.
Meaning, I guess, let's not obsess over details, like fans.
I've tried to keep that in mind, in order to keep things in balance.

Randy and Paige affirmed that they did not want this event to be a somber affair. A service or memorial is for our own benefit anyway. Placing a stone or marker might mean nothing at all. Pictures and dreams might mean nothing.
But the change affected on all of us by one individual is substantial and real.

It's a strange bond that we have with the water, made stranger for me by the fact that diving was an activity that Peter and I often did together. Ultimately, it produces a very solitary feeling. Most of the sensory interference that we are used to is suddenly eliminated, and we are left with an experience that must be very remniscent of the earliest stage of our human existence. Some of the best moments in diving are floating in 10 feet or less, feeling the tide surge up and down, watching the plants and fish around you move in unison with yourself, sunlight easily penetrating the shallow water and giving everything a golden aquatic sparkle. You accept that being motionless means being in motion.

Thinking about Peter's "last dive" throws me into an ambivalent flux, floating suspended in confusing feelings. We listen to our own thoughts, the sound of our own breathing.