We were three Americans and a German couple on the ferry boat from Palma to Ibiza. It was the summer of 1969 and we were sharing humorous stories and cerveza in the couple’s cabin. Uncharacteristically, the two Germans were not very fluent in English but since i had a couple of beers, i happily butchered both languages as i translated back and forth. I’m certain that i got very little right but it hardly mattered as everything seemed hilariously funny to all present. Everyone shared a little of their life histories and amusing stories deep into the night.
Someone lit up a joint and passed it around. A couple of minutes later, the others waited for me to render the intro to another silly story from German into English. I couldn’t. Giving up on that, one of the Americans started on an anecdote and waited for me to turn it into my atrocious version of German. No dice. The marijuana had shut down my verbal center. What had for hours been a jovial group of people immediately become two separate sets of individuals who could not understand each other. Our togetherness was rent apart leaving only blank looks all around. I apologized profusely but i was just too stoned to help hold us together. We bid our German hosts goodnight and somberly left their cabin.
I snaked my way through the metal corridors to the starboard railing and watched the bright stars slowly fade out as the sky prepared for dawn. The brisk Mediterranean sea air kept me alert for a while, allowing me to appreciate the gradual approach of a new day with the sky’s subtle changes in color and texture. I waited for the sun’s disk to make its celestial entrance with the intense anticipation of a die-hard rock fan. However, a drowsiness crept in uninvited, threatening to force the end to my vigil. Certainly the sun’s disk was on the verge of appearing on the horizon but my eyelids kept slipping closed.
A commotion astern resolved itself to be the preparation of an espresso machine and customers gathering, exchanging greetings, and queuing up. They were all sturdy men who knew one another so i guessed they were crew members starting their day. I considered imbibing a little caffeine but a year earlier i went cold turkey and stopped drinking coffee altogether because being dependent on external chemicals bothered my sense of living fully and naturally self-sufficient. This morning i put welcoming the morning sun at a higher priority. So i walked back to read the list of drinks offered and their prices. Expensive. I had not never before had any kind of espresso drink and had no idea what any of them were. I finally decided to order the cheapest thing on the list. It was a straight shot of espresso. It was perfect. Perhaps too much so.
A few minutes after downing the rather over-strong shot, a serious case of euphoria, alertness, and energy overwhelmed me. I was ripped on caffeine and stoned on weed! I began to consider whether if i vaulted over the railing i could churn my legs fast enough to stay on the water’s surface. It seemed entirely likely but the fact that i had never heard of anyone succeeding in running across water was barely enough to keep me from trying. I had to expend some of the fantastic energy rippling through my mind and muscles. Instead of running across the surface of the Mediterranean, i launched into jogging around the ferry, staying next to the railing. A large man in uniform stopped me after my first lap explaining that running was verboten. Somewhat calmer, i returned to waiting at the railing for the sun to rise.
The azures and the pinks in the sky gave way to brightness, yet the sun’s orb remained below the horizon. I waited impatiently, stifling my urge to once again break into running circuits around the ferry. The sky’s brightness ever so slowly became brilliant, and still no sun. I checked my wristwatch. I had been waiting nearly two hours. My eyes felt over-stimulated by the bright horizon. Then came the pain of seeing a sliver of unrobed sun. All around, the sky was so bright that my eyes hurt and watered profusely. I quickly retreated to the interior of the ferry, wondering why the vigil had once seemed so essential.
I went to the bolted-down rows of seats where i had left my yellow backpack. I dug out the book that was a German translation of a sci-fi story written by an American and resumed reading from where i left off.
As the ferry boat prepared to dock at Ibiza, i looked around for Gregory, the other American guy my age who was traveling alone. I found him in the whirling crowd of people waking up, gathering their children and belongings and preparing to disembark. He readily accepted the idea that we should explore Ibiza together.
We ate well, drank well, and bought lots of sunscreen, bread, cans of pilchards, oranges, a bottle of vino tinto, and a bottle of water.
We spotted a kindred-looking fellow and asked, “Where’s the cave we’ve heard about where folk like us can unroll our sleeping bags and spend the night.”
“The police shut that down a week or so ago.”
“Oh. Well, how about a beach area?”
“You’ll just get busted by the police here on Ibiza. New policy. But you can catch the last ferry to Formentera. There’s a cave near the ferry terminal where people camp out. You can also camp out on just about any beach. ”
We thanked our ad hoc travel agent and hurried over to queue up for the Formentera ferry as the sun was setting.
It was quite dark when we landed at Formentera but with a little help from strangers we found the “cave.” Indeed there was a small shallow cave but only two guys were in there with a boombox and a Coleman lantern, while another dozen or so had tossed their sleeping bags on the rocky surroundings. We found places to lay our bags that were none too level or smooth but given our budget, were acceptable. We drank the last of our bottle of red wine and i must have fallen asleep immediately.
I woke to screaming and loud music. The two guys had cranked up the volume and were screaming in laughter about something.
“Hey,” i called out. “We’re trying to sleep here.”
“Yeah, yeah.” They turned the boombox down a little.
Somewhat disgruntled, i drifted off again.
I woke sometime later with the music volume way up and the two guys shouting over it.
“Hey, i didn’t get any sleep last night. Could you guys keep it down?”
“Fuck you, shit head. Take your ass somewhere else if you don’t like it here.”
I immediately imagined the movie scene where the good guy breaks off the base of a bottle and uses the ragged sharp weapon to hold the bad guys at bay. So i clambered out of my sleeping bag, stark naked, grabbed our nearly empty wine bottle by the neck with my right hand, and bashed the lower end of the bottle against a rock. The pain and the blood flowing out of the palm of my hand was totally unexpected. The bottle had shattered all the way up to near its mouth and, within my grip, opened a nasty gash on my palm.
Idiotic machoism pays no attention to “merely a flesh wound, ma’am,” so i charged toward the two miscreants, growling, “I told you to keep it quiet so shut the fucking music off now!” I stopped about a dozen feet short; close enough for them to see the sharp glass but maybe far enough away that they wouldn’t see the blood in the lamp light.
One of the guys said, “Hey man, yeah, yeah. We’ll let you sleep. Just chill.”
A male voice out of the dark, “Cool it dude.”
Another, “Get the fuck outa here, asshole.”
A female voice, “Get the police. He’s crazy. He’s going to hurt someone.”
I heard Gregory’s voice talking softly right behind me. “C’mon Dave. We gotta get out of here.” It only took a moment to realize that he was dead right. Besides, i needed to stanch the flow of blood. Using my left hand i rummaged in my backpack for my bandana and wrapped it around my bleeding hand. As i struggled to get clothes on, Gregory rolled up my sleeping bag for me.
Soon we were trying to keep from tripping and falling in the dark as we hastily left. There was one last comment from someone, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
Gregory led me up to the nearest road and turned left.
He said, “This road leads to beaches where there’s plenty of room to camp.”
I said, “Sorry about that. I got carried away.”
“Yup,” was all he said.
It was a moonless night but we could see well enough with starlight to stay in the middle of the road. There were no cars coming or going at this hour.
The road turned a bit to the left and then to the right as it rose into the hills behind the port town. After what was probably two miles or so, we reached a level stretch of the road on top of a bluff. For no obvious reason there were several street lights up here. No intersections, no homes, no businesses, no nothing but street lights lining the road. And then i saw a bat swoop past a street lamp. Then another bat. They were chasing big moths that were attracted to the lights. We put down our packs and watched the life and death drama playing out.
After ten minutes, Gregory had to pry me away from this spectacle. In those minutes i must have watched twenty attempts by bats to capture a moth; all unsuccessful. The moths resorted to a uniform strategy in the small fraction of a second before a bat would have captured one. Each moth dove vertically in a corkscrew pattern. Somehow the bats never adequately anticipated this. Were the moths also emitting a sound to fool the bats’ sonar? I imagined that some precocious bat would someday have the brain-power to successfully counter the moths’ tactics, and the ageless evolutionary predator-prey relationship would take a new turn.
After another couple of miles we came to sandy beaches with sandstone battlements. Using our flashlights we illuminated a few groups of sleeping people before we found an open place where we could settle in. Before crawling into my bag i checked my hand. I could tell that it was no longer bleeding since the bandana was drying out. I scooted into my bag and quickly fell asleep.
I woke to laughing voices. The sun was high and i was surrounded by naked families on beach blankets. Babies. Puppy dogs. Hyperactive kids. Beach balls. Fat men and women. Skinny men and women. And i had to pee. I spotted Gregory a short distance away lying on his beach towel. I eased out of my sleeping bag after checking whether i had a hard on. I didn’t. Naked, i walked over to Gregory, who was lying on his blanket with snorkeling gear.
“G’morning. Where’d you get the face mask, snorkel, and swim fins?”
“A couple gave them to me as they left.”
“For free?,” i asked.
“They asked me to give them to someone else when i leave.”
“Cool.”
I then continued down the beach, entered the water and relieved myself. My slashed palm stung sharply in the salt water.
After a meal of pilchards, bread, an orange, and bottled water, I slathered myself with sun block lotion and adjusted the face mask and fins.. At the shoreline, i donned the gear and ventured into the water again. The cut hurt but i had it in my head that the salt water would help the healing process.
The water was very clear but there wasn’t much to see. I had been accustomed to the littoral zone around the University of California facilities at Bodega Bay where sea life was fantastically abundant. Here at Formentera i found a few sea stars and sea urchins and glimpsed a fish or two but the undersea world here was nearly a desert. The water was pleasantly warm compared to the Pacific waters of Northern California and therefore it held less oxygen. Less oxygen generally means fewer marine organisms.
Because the water was so comfortable, i found myself diving deeper and longer. A quarter hour later, i was swimming over an area where the bottom was about 10 meters down and long strands of kelp reached up nearly to the surface. I spotted a corridor of bare sand lined with walls of long kelp strands. I took a couple of breaths through the snorkel and dove to investigate. Ten meters was deeper than i had ever free dove before. With SCUBA i had once been down 20 meters to collect red sea urchins (Strongylocentrotus franciscanus) for research purposes but my deepest without SCUBA was probably only 6 meters.
I descended rapidly as the pressure made my sinuses squeak and my ears hurt. I passed between the walls of kelp strands until i was a couple of meters above the bottom and swam along the corridor of sand.
Oh wow! I spotted what appeared to be a blood worm poking out from its burrow in the sand. Amazing! In my marine invertebrate course, we dissected and studied many phyla including the Echiura, commonly called blood worms or spoon worms. The species in California waters is Urechis caupo. I recalled that Echiura are found in several oceans around the world but none had been found in the Mediterranean. I was certain this was a blood worm but rather than investigate further, i needed to get to the surface for air.
I quickly returned the nearly 10 meters to the surface, blew out the water in my snorkel, and deeply breathed fresh air. I had been down an uncomfortably long time so it took a few seconds before i felt fully oxygenated again.
A blood worm! I recalled sitting in lecture and thinking that it seemed highly unlikely that none lived in the Mediterranean. If i could bring this one to the surface, it would surely be an important specimen and validate my doubts. I decided it was definitely worth the try.
As i floated at the surface, i seriously hyperventilated in order to increase the time i could stay submerged. This is tricky since over-ventilating can cause people to go unconscious. I breathed fast and deeply for half a minute until my ears rang and i felt a little dizzy but short of passing out.
With one last large inhalation, i headed straight down toward the corridor of sand, squeaking sinuses and all. I had drifted a bit while at the surface but i managed to spot and zero in on the creature with little trouble. I was only a meter or so above it when it zipped back down its burrow. My momentum allowed my hands to immediately plunge into the sand on both sides of the burrow. My cut palm screamed with pain but i did my best to ignore the discomfort as i tried to nab the creature. Damn, missed it. I dug deeper. No bloodworm. Apparently its burrow went farther down than i had imagined.
I soon felt the strong need to return to the surface for fresh air. With a feeling of great disappointment, i ceased my frantic digging, planted my fins on the bottom so that i could spring upward, and looked to the surface. Oddly, there wasn’t a surface to be seen. The walls of kelp had closed over me. I was in a dimly lit living greenish-brown cavern with a 3 meter ceiling. Frantically i looked in all directions. The corridor was closed off at both ends. I ascended to the ceiling, hoping to find an angled path between the formerly vertical walls. None existed. I was imprisoned.
I was faced with two choices. I could attempt to penetrate roughly 12 meters of kelp without the help of a knife, which i had always carried while SCUBA diving, or remain in place until the kelp prison opened again. I reasoned that there must be a long-period wave action that closes and opens the corridor but it was longer in time than my entire experience with this area. How long had it been open? I estimated that i first spied the open corridor about three to four minutes earlier.
If i were lucky, it would open again in about three minutes. If i were not so lucky, the corridor might stay closed considerably longer.
I considered how fast i might deplete my remaining oxygen stores while working my way up through the kelp. If i became tangled and had to struggle to free myself, there was little hope i could survive the ascent. I realized, however, that the likelihood of getting tangled was much less with just snorkel gear than if i were wearing a SCUBA tank and regulator with their bulk and projections.
||**
Not only was i free of something that would easily get tangled, the strands of kelp appeared nicely parallel to each other rather than snarled. They might let me easily slide through to the surface and already my body was telling me it urgently wanted to breathe.
I cautiously swam into the strands that defined the ceiling of my cavern. After advancing about two meters, the snorkel was twisted out of my mouth – not a problem. A meter or so farther on i felt the heel of my right swim fin drag. As i shook my leg to dislodge the kelp strand, my face mask came slightly awry and filled with water.
My lungs were screaming and my head was roaring but i managed to free my swim fin and proceed. But which way was up? My gyrations had set the surrounding strands into a jumble. I let a few bubbles of air out of my mouth so i could follow them upwards. The bubbles ran along my cheeks and past my ears. OK, i’m facing down. I stroked and kicked myself until i was upright and then continued.
Damn, i seem to be going at right angles to the strands of kelp. So i turned to move parallel with them. My face mask is caught again. Reluctantly i pull it off and give it to Davy Jones. Ha! From Davy Smith to Davy Jones! My lungs unexpectedly spasmed so forcefully that water was sucked past my lips and down my windpipe. I coughed some of the water back out but it was coughed out with some of my precious supply of air. Shit! I kicked and stroked hard but now both heels were snared. Again my lungs spasmed but i could not tell through the roaring tingling dizziness whether more water was sucked in. I bent over to reach my heels but i couldn’t focus on anything. Strong buzzing. My sleeping bag is too tight. All dark.
**||
A memory presented itself. I was lying on my folks bed after school and practicing holding my breath. I only did it there since their bedroom clock had a second hand which my clock did not. After some days of practice, i found i could go without fresh air for four minutes but only if i lay thoroughly relaxed and then, when i could no longer resist breathing, i ‘fooled’ my brain with pseudo-breathing by exhaling into my mouth – causing my cheeks to puff out – and inhaling from my mouth back into my lungs, out and in, out and in. This usually allowed me to ‘hold my breath’ for another minute or so.
Looking at the formidable barrier above me, i decided to wait for the kelp to open up again. The water pressure here had compressed my chest sufficiently to make me denser than seawater so i calmly sank onto the sand as though it were my folks bed with its white popcorn chenille bedspread. Facing upward, i closed my eyes and relaxed. Every 15 seconds or so, i briefly opened my eyes to see whether there was a clear path to the surface.
A minute passed and my lungs were screaming to breathe. I held off and held off until the urgency was too much to contain. I exhaled into my mouth, puffing out my cheeks, and then sucked that little bit of air back into my lungs. I repeated this with a slow steady rhythm. It occurred to me that this pseudo-breathing might be stirring the air around in my lungs and therefore improving the extraction of oxygen. Tidal breathing is generally inefficient; flow-through breathing that birds enjoy is a far better system.
Perhaps another factor in my favor is the water pressure at this depth. It creates a higher than normal partial pressure of oxygen in my lungs which should allow my hemoglobin to more readily bind to the oxygen in my alveoli. Sorta the opposite effect of oxygen deprivation experienced by mountain climbers at high altitude. Hmmm. On the other hand, the higher partial pressure might decrease the rate that oxygen is released to tissues. Tissues like my brain. If i get out of this predicament, i’ll have to look up what research shows.
More time passed and the kelp showed no signs of releasing me. However, my slow pseudo-breathing was keeping me remarkably comfortable. I realized that any attempt at this stage to penetrate the kelp would surely be folly. I noticed a ringing in my ears.
At what i guessed was three minutes of lying on the sand and nearly four minutes since i was last at the surface, i saw some movement of the kelp strands. Very slowly at first but clearly the shape of my prison was morphing. I turned on my sandy bed and crouched with my fins planted against the bottom. I waited, nearly panicking since the kelp moved so slowly. The ringing in my head became a roar. The demand from my lungs for proper breathing was unbearable and a dizziness was gnawing into my consciousness.
The narrowest of pathways between the walls of kelp appeared. I launched myself off the bottom like an arrow from a bow. Kicking with my swim fins and stroking with my arms toward the surface, i begged my lungs to wait a few seconds longer. Halfway to the surface i could feel my legs cramping but i forced them to keep kicking.
My surroundings were suddenly much brighter as i left the kelp walls behind. Explosively i breached the surface, blew out the mouthpiece as i blasted the spent air from my lungs, and gasped in fresh beautiful sweet warm Mediterranean air. I breathed deeply, noisily, and rapidly for nearly a minute before the dizziness and roaring subsided.
I fit the mouthpiece between my teeth and swam leisurely back to shore. I wasn’t at all physically fatigued. Emotionally i was drained dry. I slipped the fins off my feet in the shallows and removed the mask with its snorkel as i walked naked on the hot sand back to our tiny encampment. I put down the equipment on a sandstone ledge and wiped off the snot draining from my nose and noted that – as expected – it was pink from a little blood mixed in. This happened every time i went SCUBA diving in California. A minor nuisance. I grabbed my towel and as i was drying my head i thought i heard something behind me. I turned.
Facing me with a rapturous smile, a meter away, was a fabulously beautiful young woman about 18 years old; totally and exquisitely naked.
With a French accent, she said, “I think you not hear me. I take your swim things?”
A few minutes ago my brain was close to shutting down and now it was racing out of control with an overabundance of interesting neurochemicals.
“I return they soon,” she said with a slightly worried look.
At last i found my voice. “Uh. You mean these things.” I picked up the fins, mask, and snorkel. “Sure, sure.”
As i handed the ‘swim things’ to this astounding Aphrodite, her face lit up with a smile that could have brought Zeus to his knees.
“Thank you, thank you. I return they soon.”
I was unable to take my eyes off of her as she turned and walked back to her nearby campsite. Wow.
Later that day i tried to relocate the “corridor of sand” that was the blood worm’s home so that i could triangulate the site with features on the shore. After several lengthy traverses snorkeling at the surface that day, i gave up. I could not find it again.
The following morning, we broke camp and hiked to another area on the island. This particular beach had no sandstone features; it was just flat sandy beach. Again, however, every one on the beach was nude. After investigating the offshore fauna with the snorkeling gear (not much to see) i turned over the gear to Gregory and flopped down on my towel to let the Mediterranean sun dry me off.
I happened to look up as an elderly couple arrived from the nearby parking lot. They were taken aback by the scene before them: dozens of people au naturel lying, walking, and playing in the bright sunshine. The couple quickly turned and faced back toward the parking lot. They exchanged words and briefly stole glances back toward the beach with its naked people. Then they broke into laughter, turned back toward the nude people and the warm beach, and gingerly approached to a place to spread their beach blanket. With blushes, smiles, and self-conscious giggles, they stripped every last piece of clothing from their bodies. It was obvious they were proud of their ability to toss off cultural norms and clothes to expose their nakedness in public for the first time.
When Gregory and i arose the following morning, we conferred the snorkeling gear on a young couple and began our trek back to the ferry terminal, back to Ibiza, back to Barcelona, back to another normal.
Thirty-five years later, a paper was published that established that Echiurans do indeed live in the Mediterranean. The blood worms had been collected and pickled in formaldehyde in 1962 by some dufus who had no idea what they were and had insufficient curiosity to find out. Somehow the specimens came to the attention of a competent marine biologist in 2005. He determined they were the species Ochetostoma erythrogrammon which is very similar in size and coloration to the California species, Urechis caupo. However, as of 2016, no specimens have been recovered from the waters of Formentera.
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