The Mariana Trench Is Not Blue
By Sean Scanlan
It was October 1994, and I had just left Sapporo, Japan, to crew on a sailboat based in the Mariana Islands for six months. My captain and his first mate decided to take the day off from repairing the boat to go snorkeling at a local beach on the west side of the island. That’s how I found myself up to my waist in warm ocean water with my mask and snorkel in my left hand and a pull-top can of Hormel Vienna Sausages in my right. Captain Kaze was wire—all sinew, eyebrow, and mustache. Gina, on the other hand, was more a long-haired running back.* Our captain was neither sympathetic nor prone to idle talk. Gina was sarcastic and slightly protective. Both had expressive, playful brown eyes, but neither smiled, even when laughing.
They were giving me safety instructions in a mixture of Japanese and English, but I wasn’t paying attention because I was thinking of ways to escape them, their broken boat, and the relentless sun. If possible, I wanted to swim back to St. Louis, Missouri. Clearly impossible as we were snorkeling at Bangi Point, in Guam, a tiny volcanic island in the middle of the south Pacific, over 7,000 miles away.
Gina glared at us. She knew I wasn’t listening to Kaze yammer on about sharp coral, extremely deep water, currents, lionfish, and moray eels. “Open the can of weenies and watch,” she said to me, then she sighed and punched the captain’s skinny arm and said, “chotto, ne,” which meant in this context, “shut it for a second.” She could do that.
We put on our masks, adjusted our snorkels, and went under. I pulled the can’s tab and shook it until it was empty. Gina poked me and pointed to my cargo pocket. I stashed the small can. Like a flash, clouds of technicolored fish surrounded us: flat ones the size of my hand, needle-shaped ones the size of my forearm, and hundreds of fish so small and transparent, they didn’t seem real. Some coiled, some spiraled, some nipped my bare hands. I couldn’t name any of them.
From above, the ocean seemed like clear tap water. But inside it, looking through my mask, junk was everywhere: seagrass, seaweed, clumps of brown stuff, green pods, black spidery clusters, red flowery fists. The briny water mixed with the tang of my rubber snorkel. Our weenies disappeared in seconds, and the fish moved to another group of tourists.
A scuba class of about a dozen walked past us, holding their fins, headed for deeper water, not interested in feeding cute little fish. I cleared my snorkel and went under again. I motioned underwater to my captain that I was going to deeper water, to follow.
The divers stood in a circle, nodding occasionally and adjusting their equipment. As I swam closer, I realized they were standing on a remarkably shallow coral reef, their torsos above the water. Where were they going? I found the same reef, stumbling as I tried to find my footing in my fins, slicing both hands on the razor-like coral. I stood about fifty yards behind them and looked around. Past the divers, the water was utterly different. Near the shore, swimming pool pale; but on the other side of this reef, very dark blue. Slowly, two by two, the divers followed the instructor and disappeared into the ink. I turned around. Kaze and Gina were shockingly far away. I turned back and faced the open ocean.
Before I plunged down, I paused. How did I get here? It started at ¿Qué Pasa?, a Spanish restaurant that I frequented near my apartment in Miyanomori, Sapporo, which catered to foreign English teachers from Australia, New Zealand, and the US. I got along with Terao, the owner, and he set up a meeting with Captain Kaze, who was about to go on a six-month sailing trip from Guam to Florida, from the Pacific, through the Panama Canal, to the Keys. After hanging out with him and Gina for two months, he invited me to crew on his sailboat. Maybe Gina convinced him. She wanted somebody her own age on the boat as Kaze and the two other crew members (both Chamorro Vietnam Vets) were in their fifties. With only one summer working “around” boats in Gloucester, Massachusetts, I had convinced them that I could be useful on an open-ocean voyage on a 50-foot double-masted sailboat. Or maybe it had something to do with Kaze’s tests. In one, he got loaded at this tiny bar in the hotel district and started yelling at everybody; then he took the clock from the wall, threw it on the floor, and stomped on it a few times. He turned to look at me. The others stared. All I could come up with was “nomi mashō,” basically, let’s drink.” The bartender turned around, grabbed another bottle of diaginjo and filled six small wooden cups until they overflowed.
When we arrived in Guam, the sailboat, called Ocean Guy, was in terrible shape. We replaced ropes, cables, corroded bolts, screws, cracked rubber seals, and electronics. We fixed the toilets, sanded and treated the teak deck, replaced the marlin-spiking on the lifelines, patched the leaking dinghy, and made sure the ancient sewing machine worked—which was for sail repairs, not hemming pants. Between tasks, the captain would quiz me on knots and what I learned from Bob Bond’s The Handbook of Sailing. All this work trained me to understand not simply how things worked, but also how to take a command without reacting with too much emotion, something that took me a while to grasp.
Nobody talked about the Ocean Guy’s condition. The tedious repair work, the language barrier, Kaze’s grim silence, and the constant, vibrating heat wore me down. Wore us down. We didn’t have a chance to investigate Guam, so I hardly knew anything about any of the Marianas Islands. In fact, I hardly knew anything about my Captain, Gina, the other two crew members, our boat, or long-distance sailing in general. Each week we went to the grocery store, the laundromat, and Clam Shack, but I could hardly describe them. We visited 7-Eleven every other day. That place I knew. We’d get Slurpies and sit at a concrete picnic table and watch the massive Navy ships and submarines move from left to right, from south to north, toward Apra Harbor, until Kaze said, “Okay, let’s get back to work.”
Now it was mid-November, and I wondered if the boat would ever be ready to sail. My hands were cracked and bleeding, and my shoulders and neck were an angry rust color. At breakfast, we planned; by dinner, we frowned over new problems. Yesterday, I called a local travel agency from the Agat Marina payphone to check prices on flights to St. Louis—and to Bangkok. But right now, I wanted to see what the scuba divers were seeing.
I tightened my mask and went under. At first, I couldn’t see anything, just complete darkness. The blankness was shocking. Suddenly, I was freezing. The water on this side of the reef was at least twenty degrees colder than the shallows. The words oblivion and danger came to mind. Why was it so deep, so dark, so cold? Then I remembered. It was the Mariana Trench. Southeast of the Mariana Islands was the trench—the deepest water on earth. A thousand miles long, forty miles wide, almost seven miles deep. And I was looking into it.
Near the shore, I could see all sorts of tiny fish, sand, rocks, coral, and seaweed, yet here darkness sucked everything downward. From pale blue at the surface to blue-black, with every shade between…blue so incalculably dark that it went beyond what I thought blue meant. The edge of the earth—almost seven miles down—a dark steep slope with hints of blue. It did not seem right to have this dangerous place so close to tropical paradise. My chest tightened. The ledge in front of me was a handle and the sharp coral slope was remarkably straight—like the exterior of a skyscraper, and I was dangling from the top guardrail. The darkness was hollow, and it pulled me in. That time I almost leaned too far over the railing at the Grand Canyon, that time I walked too close to the railing at Niagara Falls. This a set piece for me. I was, again, at the railing.
If somebody had strapped a heavy diving belt around me, I would’ve spiraled downward for miles, until the weight of the water crushed me. My mask started leaking again. There was no movement anywhere; the divers had disappeared. Then, I saw something straight ahead—a dark torpedo shape about midway between the darkest blue black and the ultramarine blue near the surface.
I couldn’t hold my breath any longer, so I let go of the ledge. At the surface, I gasped for breath. Quickly, I cleared my snorkel and put my head under to find that dark shape again. There. It turned and flashed a long flank of silver and gray blue. It couldn’t be, could it? Earlier, at the dive shop, Sam told me that they didn’t bother with the local beaches because the water was too warm and the fish too small. I could not tell how far away it was, but it was big. At least six feet. Bigger than Kaze, maybe the same size as Gina.
I knew, just knew, it was looking at me. It smelled my bleeding hands. My chest was about to explode. A wave smashed into my face when I flailed for breath at the surface. My mask flew off. Another wave hit me. I found it, but there was no time. I swam away from the huge thing as hard as I could, my eyes burning in the salt water. After a minute of pumping my fins, my legs were cramped. Fears cascaded down my back. The coral was alive, a living creature—it cut my hands. It was protecting itself. I stopped swimming and looked up. Kaze and Gina were nowhere. I wasn’t even swimming toward the beach, I was swimming parallel to shore, headed towards the Orote Peninsula.
By the time I corrected my course, put my mask and snorkel into position, and found shallower water, I felt better. Physically anyway. But I could not look behind me. The sight of other tourists meant I was safe. And there, finally, up ahead, Kaze and Gina. I had not looked for the thing since I left the edge. Now I was just fine, and I didn’t have to tell them what I had seen. Maybe it was all a trick of my mask and the distorted light slicing through the blues. We were together again, in warm waist-deep water, close to shore. Kaze frowned and asked, “why’d you go so far?”
Playing it cool, I shrugged and took my snorkel out. “Just looking around.”
Kaze pulled his huge diving knife from his leg strap, tapped my mask with the point, and said, “there’s the big one. Turn around. It’s still there.”
The three of us went under. Kaze grabbed my arm tightly and pointed with his knife at the large thing that was too close. What, ten feet away? It was a strange staring contest. We were close enough to see rows of teeth. Massive underbite. We walked backwards until we were out of the water, Kaze still holding his knife toward it.
As we toweled off, I felt the crumpled Hormel can in the cargo pocket of my trunks. We drove back to the marina in silence.
Kaze told us to eat our yakisoba in the galley kitchen on Ocean Guy instead of on the breezy deck. I couldn’t understand. The sunset would’ve been beautiful, like an explosion of oranges against the blue sky, and it would be cooler. He always told us to eat inside. After cleanup, I went outside and moped in the cockpit. Gina came out and sat next to me. She handed me a beer and we did a quick kanpai. She sighed and punched my arm.
“Baka janai?” she asked, which is a common way to say, “are you stupid?”
“What?” I replied, “why am I stupid?
“Because,” she said, “he doesn’t want attention. Ocean Guy looks like shit.” She shook her head and rolled her eyes. After a minute, she got up and went below.
Even though it was still warm and humid, I felt cold all over, like my internal thermostat was damaged. The ocean made no sense and neither did my reason for being here. I opened the hatch, went down the steep stairs to the sweltering galley, and sat across from Kaze. There was nothing to see through the dark porthole, but I gazed out of it anyway as I peeled the label off my beer. Kaze said something to Gina that was either too advanced or too colloquial for me to grasp. She laughed. Then he switched to English and assigned the next day’s tasks as he usually did—with zero emotion and a lighted cigarette dangling from his lips, eyes nearly closed, smoke curling around his face. I would scrape the teak deck, Gina would get groceries, Vito and Carl would continue patching the dingy, and he would go to the marine supply store. Later, I found myself in my tiny bunk, my head wedged between the pillow and the fiberglass hull. I could hear organic popping noises as the water lapped the crevices around the docks and boats. The ocean and all its things that I couldn’t name were inches away. Delicate, wavy patterns moved back and forth on the ceiling. I shivered until sleep took me under.
Author’s Note: The names have been changed.
Editor’s Note: This month’s lovely cover photo, “Agat Marina, Guam,” was taken by the author of this lovely piece, Sean Scanlan, during the very trip he writes so beautifully about above. Sean graciously submitted this photo for publication along with his nonfiction piece, which we thought would be the perfect cover photo for this month’s issue.
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Author Bio: Sean Scanlan is associate professor of English at City Tech, part of the City University of New York system, where he teaches the personal essay and literature. In addition to editing the online humanities journal NANO: New American Notes Online, he has published essays in Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Style, Modern Language Studies, and American Literary History. And The New Territory will publish his creative non-fiction piece, “The Survival Merit Badge” in 2025.