LONG TIME NO SEA

A revised second edition of a scuba diver’s memoir.

Certified scuba instructor Denning admits that his first attempt at a diving memoir was inexpert, “like building a house with neither plans nor basic carpentry skills.” That was 2007, and his second attempt exhibits more structure and preparation. By his estimation, he’s dived 1,600-plus times since the 1980s and chose 40-odd anecdotes from experiences in Arizona, Honduras, the Bahamas, and more—arranged here as “dive logs,” “travel journals,” and the occasional poem—to take the reader both underwater and into his mind as he makes sense of life on land. There are some beguiling insights that even the ocean-phobic can find fascinating: “Deep diving entices divers to danger, and the awaiting narcosis saturates the mind, deadening the vital attention to safety. No one escapes the effects of narcosis, that rapture of the deep where the sense of euphoria strips a mind of its sense of time and ability to make good judgments.” Personalities, some more interesting than others, weave in and out. Highlights include a female dive instructor from New York, affectionately dubbed “Bronx,” and the love that got away. Denning’s language is accessible and vaguely philosophical: “When we come into this life, we are given only a small space in time. Our paths overlap with those behind or yet to come. We have neither the past nor the future.” What weakens the work is its length; some of the most compelling stories, like the recognition of sentience in a pair of octopi and rescuing a drowning woman, are lost in less compelling backstory. The dive log structure makes it easy to jump from one country or year to another but also prevents the narrative from conveying a sense of accumulated personal growth or change.

A meandering but sometimes enchanting chronicle of unique life lessons.