Maybe Next Time!

It’s all about paying your dues. I learned many years ago that there was, no such thing as a free lunch, but at $5.95 for a burger, fries and tall draft beer, I’ve gotten pretty close. The winds will not let us dive today. So there I sit, bellied-up to the bar at a local harbor town tavern, my dive team and I toast another round to the sea gods of yesteryear and ask for permission, next time… maybe.

The Great Lakes hold secure the finest treasures a shipwreck diver can seek. These prizes are veiled from the unmasked observer in less than a single fathom of drink to beyond hundreds of feet of plummeting darkness, where the only trace of light is the beam from your HID light saber, cutting through history and marking your place in it. Vast glories abound on these magnificent fresh water seas, full of beauty and allure yet they are balanced with unexpected changes and imaginative mystery.

Aliens to Michigan and the other Great Lakes states and provinces do not understand the cyclopean magnitude of these waters. A lake… and the Great Lakes are of no likeness imaginable, and the power of these giants will test the bravado of many triumphant souls. Ships of the past, both hundreds of feet long and hundreds of tons in weight, lie broken in half on the sandy bottom of these waters. Snapped in two like the kindling for a bonfire, these vessels have experienced imperial storms unparalleled by the vigor from any salt water ocean or sea. It is a vehement force that some have called Poseidon, Davy Jones or Lake Superior.

Anyone who has not paid money for a charter, purchased a select mixture of gas to breathe, traveled daylong to arrive at the dock, spent hours in anticipation, in planning only to have the omnipotent waters laugh in their face, cannot in my opinion truly call themselves a diver. It is almost a rite of passage we accept and embrace. For those whom the great waters have hailed as its chosen ones, we might look to other divers who have not endured this hardship and say to them, that they have not lived, definitely not the life of a Great Lakes diver.

So there we sit, pints of stout and mixtures of rum, paying our dues. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but they always remind you of where you fit into the big scheme of it all… down at the bottom, figuratively or realistically, but definitely whole-heartedly. Together we sit inebriated, paying our dues… underwater or under-the-table we wait until next time.