Into That World Inverted

Most weekends my partner and I make our way out to the ʻĀhihi-Kīnaʻu Reserve to snorkel. Almost an hour’s drive from where we live on Maui’s North Shore, the preserve sits on the southwest corner of the island. Past the long stretches of Wailea’s beaches lined with luxury hotels, the road narrows significantly until the sky opens again, fringed with lava fields. Jagged ‘a‘ā lava and the smoother flows of pāhoehoe from the last eruption of Haleakalā reach as far as the eye can see. After turning into the small parking lot, we walk through these inhospitable meadows of stone down to the shore.

In Hawaiʻi, you often hear the term “island time,” referring to the slow pace that pervades the culture here. But for me, standing on land just a few hundred years old, island time is a reminder that this is a place in the process of being both made and unmade. Here in ʻĀhihi, there are barely any trees—the soil still thin atop the hardened rivers of basalt and scoria. Not enough time has passed to erode these sharp and porous remnants into dirt. Yet in that short stretch of centuries, between that time and this one, the island has changed irrevocably. When I began snorkeling, I was warned there was little left to see on Maui, most reefs dead and dying—a result of rampant tourism, overfishing, commercial runoff, and warming waters. I wanted to witness them for myself, before it was too late.

On the best days, the water feels soft—the gentle lapping against my belly, a cool beckoning. I wade in, fins in hand, stepping over the checkerboard of bleach-white coral and black rocks cleaved from the molten fields that surround this coast. I settle into my liminal position, turning my back to the earth as I know it: the solid ground under my feet replaced by weightlessness. I trespass into this unknown world—below me, I feel how time itself has turned the stone to sand. At last, I cross the threshold with my entire body. Pressing my masked face against the water, another world opens. What was invisible moments ago, I now can see.

I am held in the veil between these worlds that are each, astonishingly, part of this place that we call Earth. Within minutes, my cells acclimate to the cool buoyancy. I am carried away from everything I know. As I kick out, the mechanisms of my movement grow more and more effortless. Anything heavy or painful drains from me.  In the water, I am held—a child rocked in a mother’s arms. My body moves differently here, swaddled and swept in the cadence of waves, alongside all the creatures who share this space—the electric scatter of butterflyfish and schools of tang darting through the churn of sand. I imagine the stones set upon this beach, pulled by the tide and smoothed for millennia by the water’s steady tumble. It is this same motion that calms the sharper edges of my own human toils: my aching body, my wants, my griefs. A few yards out, the water is no longer turbid. In the clear, deep blue stretches a topography teeming with life.

I am flying now—a wingless bird gazing down, seeing the universe anew. Like Icarus, I feel the warmth of the sun against my back. Between realms, I face an ecosystem nothing like my own. Beneath the inscrutable blue-black mirror of the water’s surface lies this universe in technicolor. All around, corals rise like cities: branching networks of towers, caves, and archways where residents thrive. I marvel at the colors: yellows, purples, blues, turquoise, tans, and rust. My heartbeat quickens as I watch a giant yellow-edged moray eel weaving like a ribbon through a deep crevice until it disappears. I lose count quickly of the pencil urchins perfectly nestled among divots in the living stone. Underwater, light alters: bending and thinning. In the shallows, the reef burns gold and teal; as I move deeper, color drains away until only the light itself remains—silver moving through water, only the memory of red. With depth, all warmth dissolves. As if through a lens, the world is cast in blue.

It is the silence that draws me back here again and again. The sound of human voices, laughter, waves crashing on shore, all dissipate when submerged in water. I swim alongside species whose names I’ve come to know in both ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi and English: Uhu (Parrotfish), Humuhumu (Triggerfish), Nānue (Perch), ʻŌpakapaka (Snapper), Honu (Turtle), and myriad others I cannot identify. I think about the ways their names both mean and don’t mean. How human language gestures toward a world it can never fully hold. I recall a line from “Trees” by W.S. Merwin in which he writes: “their names have never touched them.” I try and fail to look without language.

I surrender to this space of estrangement. I am left with breath—the inhales and exhales expanding in my lungs alongside the reef’s soft percussion and muffled static. Underwater, sound travels 4.5 times faster than on land. The sounds I hear I cannot locate from any single place. Instead, they surround me like a gentle symphony. I take a deep breath in at the surface and dive down to where coral meets sand. At this depth, I linger inside the invisible chorus of humpback song. I watch the parrotfish mouthing the skeletons of coral. They make a clicking sound as they erode the calcified colonies into dust. Time passes imperceptibly. The water warms slowly. One day, all of this will be gone.

It is hard to imagine this is a place already in threat of peril, as I drift alongside coral towers and the myriad individual creatures—spotted, speckled, brilliant—darting and dancing through the expanse. Here, I am alien, yet I too participate in the pulse of this underwater city. I watch a half-hidden white-mouthed eel unhinging its jaw, swaying rhythmically like a choir boy in prayer. An enormous sea turtle slowly cascading past me—fins undulating like ancient wings. Closer to the surface, silver and blue chubs float at my level, occasionally turning toward me with curiosity.

Held together in a rhythm I cannot command or even understand, I am reminded of how little we allow ourselves to perceive. When I step back through the mirror onto land, as I eventually must, my universe inverts once more. I have to find my footing, unstable now as I return to sand and soil, as gravity reasserts its pull upon my reluctant limbs. The sonic landscape shifts back. My body grows heavy again. Language returns to my throat as I gaze up, noticing the large dark wings of a frigate bird silhouetted by the sun. Look! Look! I exclaim. The bird circles once, turning across the wide and cloudless sky, then once more, before catching a current over the coast. I watch the bird grow smaller and smaller before it fades from my view.

The bird does not look back at me.

The title of this piece borrows a line from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Insomnia.”