Life Below The Galapagos, Part 1

Technologist Dan Dubno On Diving Well Below The Ocean's Surface

(CBS)  A note about growing up in Coney Island: if you think of New York City as a centrifuge, with Manhattan whirling in the center, then think of the crazy far-flung stuff at the edges as Coney Island. A freak show may begin near the Amusement Park but it clearly has spilled over to the Boardwalk and beaches: bearded ladies, dwarfs, carnies, and hoodlums. The winter-swimmers in the "Polar Bear" club and the Mermaid Parade join masses of the retired, professional sun tanners, and armies of the unemployed. My memories were of ancient men playing vicious handball or Spanish voices on loudspeakers hawking "Bumpah cahs ... Bumpah cahs ..." late into the night. The night punctuated with the rumble, roar, and screech of elevated F and D trains converging to terminate at the Coney Island train yards. Whimsical melodies of spinning rides and flipping rides repeated endlessly; the rat-a-tat-tat of the rickety Cyclone cars grinding to the top, before the inevitable release on steel rails ... creaking wood and late night screams again and again. Every visitor to Coney Island has those sounds (and more) tattooed in their memory.

But the true musical score, enjoyed by that special breed of Coney Island native, features a more subtle melody: the maw and cry of seagulls, the rhythmic crash of surf, and the bizarre wakeup sound of bellowing sea lions in the aquarium. These sounds, augmenting the spray of the ocean and the faint perfume of fish and tanning oil, baking under the unobstructed sun, synthesize an aroma that lures me again to the ocean. It erodes the logical barrier even the child has contemplating the perilous Bathysphere; transforming fear into an overwhelming need to get in it... calling us to be lowered to ocean depths... to see if we can gaze upon strange fish and stranger life under the sea.