TRUTH AND ALL OF ITS BIFURCATIONS.

     Truth, it seems, is far more complicated than we have been led to believe. There is no "truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" as admirable as that may sound. Mark Twain is often quoted, saying: there are "lies, damned lies, and statistics".  This may comfort the MAGAts who do not know that he was a satirist who made jokes about their intellectual forefathers, but what would they know of truth? Statistics takes you deeper into the truths than mere lies or damned lies, those often spread by Tucker Carlson. The truth may be, that it's not what you know but how much you know, that delivers us the better truth. Or the bitter truth.

     As a young man in my mid 20's I had the opportunity to learn SCUBA diving and carried both PADI and NAUI certifications. From those lessons I martriculated a little farther thanks to a couple guys whose boat could often be seen in front of the Ala Wai Dive Shop. They were members of the Hawaiian Malacological Society, thus licensed to search for and collect rare saltwater gastropods. There could have been no better divers to open the underwater world to me than those two fellows, in spite of their unmerciful kidding about my newness. They knew my instructor and she had given them a recommendation. I was eager to go out diving with them but they were cautious, caution being a necessary quality for divers who wished to live a long life. For a couple of weeks they sat with me on their boat, after they returned from a dive and made me recite the decompression tables. Not just for one dive, but a second or third dive in the same day. Alcohol was forbidden, not just immediately prior to the dive, but from 10pm the evening before a dive. The decompression tables were what determined how long we needed to pause on our ascent at each atmosphere (about 30 feet). This was not Lloyd Bridges and Seahunt from 60s television fame. We were limited by the quantity of air in our tanks, and the quality of our equipment. Being a newbie, they were kind enough to provide me with the watch and backpack with tank, regulator, and guage. Here was where the ocean revealed its truths.

     For some time before I had taken SCUBA lessons I had been an avid snorkeler. Snorkling opened up the underwater world to this young lad who grew up far enough inland that I had only known tidepools, and near water which was organ-shrinkingly cold. But the truths that were revealed were dependant on the time at depth. Snorkling was good for about one atmosphere and time at depth was measured in seconds before surfacing for a breath. But there was no need for decompression. Once the tank was on, we could spend more time in observation and the depths opened up to us. And here is where time at depth became important. An average 80 cubic foot air tank would allow about 40 minutes of air. There's some emergency air left, but you had better be close to the surface by that time. Decompression stops, if there had been no diving activity the previous 8 hours (or alcohol), and the dive was in the relatively shallow region of one to two atmospheres, were about 3-5 minutes at each atmosphere. The algorithm increases for each 30 feet of descent. In short, the deeper you go, the longer you must make your decompression stops, and the less time you have to observe the area where you are diving. Even more important, the depths reveal more the deeper you go, resulting in a kind of bewilderment, compounded by the nervous calculations you have to make, and the very real possibility of nitrogen narcosis or the bends. A very complex world opens up to you, unseen by most landsmen. The deeper you dive, into the water or into a subject, the more there is to learn and the the more conflicting information needs to be weighed. If you hold your breath and can still your pounding heart, you can hear the very faint chewing of Humu-Humu's and Surgeon fish, eating the algae growng on the coralheads. Part of dive training is learning to control your breathing. Another part of that training is to act deliberately, thinking through all of the possibilities. The last test a new diver takes prior to passing is a harassment test, where the dive partner removes your mask, weightbelt, or turns off your air, and you must replace them without shooting to the surface in panic. This training helps slow your breathing. Some people never survive the truths revealed to them. The careless would be first among them, followed by those who feel no need to deliberate on the various truths competing for our attention. Every plant and fish and bivalve and gastropod that inhabits the depths are necessary for the health of that biome. They, in turn, enrich connecting biomes until it gets to us humans, the destroyer of biomes. Some of them can have toxins dangerous to the unaware, or teeth. The loss of one species results in damage to the rest. As the curious diver examines the coral for the secrets it conceals, he must be careful where he puts his hands or fins. Sometimes because there may be a moray eel, mostly that we don't break off coral pieces which grow mere centimeters in dozens of years. Some of the gastropods my diving companions were seeking were nearly invisible and highly poisonous. And all of the time the diver's internal clock demands he check the dive watch on his wrist to calculate how much time is left before you start your ascent. Try weighing all of the visual stimuli present while controlling your breathing and emotion, looking out for hidden dangers, and while not losing track of your diving buddies. 

     Most of us will never know the whole truth. Unless you are immersed in that truth, you will more likely never know all that we need to know. But there are people who do immerse themselves in those truths. Some are observing  the materials on the beach, identifying it and speculating on how it wound up there, metaphorically-the Foxnews gang. Some people immerse their feet in the tide pools of truth, more often stepping on unseen marine life. Some people snorkel in the mysteries available only to those who immerse themselves in the somewhat deeper mysteries beneath the surface, and then you have those who dive deeper for the truth, constantly weighing their safe time while absorbing the mysteries unavailable to nearly all of us. 

     Knowledge is knowing where to obtain the hidden truths. Do you listen to the people who have braved the depths of knowledge, or to people who splash around in the tidepools of knowing stuff?