Writer’s Block is RVA Magazine’s Sunday series highlighting contemporary writers working in Richmond and across the Commonwealth. We feature original poems, short stories, or essays. Just real voices writing right now.
This week, we’re featuring a new story from Richmond writer Eric Kalata. In his first two pieces for RVA Magazine, Kalata unpacked the scrappy discipline of guerrilla filmmaking and the strange clarity that shows up in the middle of a chaotic night running sound. Here, in his third piece with us, he turns inward, tracing a Boy Scout dive trip to the Bahamas that brushes up against sharks, quicksand, and the kind of brief, electric friendship that never really leaves you.
If you’d like to be featured, send your work to hello@rvamag.com with the subject line “Writer’s Block.”
Waiting in the aseptic, reflective hall of the airport, our Venture Crew gathered slowly as people trickled in, the sun slowly peeking over the horizon, washing us in pink then orange light as it came through the glass walls and ceilings all around, waiting to have our bags weighed and tickets checked so we could go through security, to our gate. We all had to be in uniform, even the adults, standing and sitting by the entrance in our khaki shirts and green pants, adorned with patches to indicate rank, patrol, etc. I was already an Eagle Scout, and so were a few of my fellow scouts. This was for the elders of the troop or, more correctly, crew.
For a stretch of a month and a half, we had trained weekly in a quarry filled with water for the dives on this trip. That water was green, murky, frigid; even through the wetsuit I had to wear, I would shiver on every dive. And now we were southbound, to board a plane and cross the deep waters to the coral shelves of the Bahamas.
Eventually, everyone arrived, we went through the processes mundane to any trip through air travel, and filed in-line onto a plane to carry us away. At the time, the journey felt endless, but now it is just a blip of a memory, a passing thought, to remember I had to leave Richmond to see such things.
I was ready to dive.
The three of us were floating there in the warm Caribbean water, about five feet above a vibrant reef, fish weaving about the biological structures of the coral. Bubbles surrounded us as they came out of our breathing apparatus with every lungful of oxygen from the tanks strapped to our back, rising to break at the surface above us. He was to my right and she was to my left. The fish swam between and beneath us. He and I were rising seniors at the same high school. We’d been friends since the first grade. We took this trip together, with his father and brother and a handful of other older members of our Boy Scout troop, with the plan to be partners on every dive.
But then we met her. She showed up at one of the meetings to plan the trip and subsequently joined our group for the rest of the training. She was a year younger, cute with freckles but with a case of RBF and an intelligence that made her a bit intimidating. She was going to the governor’s school in the city. She was the only female youth on the boat that week. The only other women were in the crew. We agreed to let her pair with us, making us the only diving trio on the boat.
And so there we were, weightless in the tidal shifts that felt like a light breeze, clear water allowing us to spot and observe the sea turtle that was holding our attention. We kept our distance as we watched it float above the sea floor and munch on crustaceans. We’re in trunks and her in a bikini, all of us wearing shirts that felt a bit excessive, a bit too warm for the time of day and shallow depth. The sun filtered through to the sandy floor and over the coral, dancing lights below our flippered feet, cast across the turtle’s back, feet pointed straight down, fluttering to maintain our height.
After some time observing the creature, a few of our fellow divers swam over, noticing our held attention. They joined us in watching. Seven of us ended up in a circle over a technicolor reef, calmly bubbling and watching the turtle together. A serene moment.
Not too long after the other divers had settled around the reef with us, however, one of the other members of our group started to point frantically to something behind me, highly animated. I cocked my head at him and pointed at the turtle. I couldn’t think of anything more important to look at than that little guy. But all the divers across from us started to swim away, clearly in a panic.
My anxiety rose to my throat as it clicked something might be wrong, but, before I could even spin around, two six-foot black tip reef sharks swam between the three of us, one over either of my shoulders, fast as cigar boats, barreling over the reefs on the search for food.
I was frozen. It was all I could do to keep kicking my feet as the two sharks circled above the reef, scoping the scene, showing no interest in us at all. Then I remembered what our instructor, the crew, and others had told us about sharks: the bubbles we were putting out turns the sharks off, that it makes us unappealing as food for them, and I could breathe a little easier and seem to melt back to life in the warm water.
I turned to my right and made eye contact with him first before turning to look at her, the both of them wearing the same expression of shock that I assumed must have been on my face as well. All the other divers having swam off, we were alone with two sharks and a sea turtle. We stayed hovering in place until the sharks swam off.
“How was your dive?” the crew member who pulled me in asked warmly with his thick South African accent.
“It was everything I wanted.”
“Well, you’re going to get even more.”
I couldn’t hold back my smile.
That first night, we laid out on our backs, the three of us, looking up at the stars in the clear night sky of the middle of the sea, miles and miles from any shore with lights or pollution enough to block out the natural, shimmering, burning dots of fiery plasma, lightyears away, ancient as they reached us, and there before us that night to read like our own story we crafted together. She was in the middle and he and I were on either side, skin to skin to skin. She had an app on her phone that used the camera so we could point it up at the sky and the app would overlay a map of all the constellations against the night sky. Over the trip, I thought I had them all ingrained in my mind, but now I can only find Orion. So it goes.
We spent hours lying there, looking up, staying up far too late, catching so many shooting stars, sharing details of our lives in hushed tones so that no one else on the boat could listen in, as I imagined old mariners did. On that boat with over a dozen other people, laying out in the open, we somehow managed to establish our own private evening, learning together, connecting without prying eyes or burning ears. As we all laid there, the stars felt a little less faraway. Something about the endless sky made it seem close enough that if I had just reached out with my hands, I could have scooped out the Milky Way itself.
It was a scuba diving trip. We were there to appreciate nature. We trained months to prepare for it and to get all the proper certifications in order. There were eleven of us under eighteen, five crew members, and four dads. We were all to live together on a thirty or so foot sailboat for a week, going on two or three dives a day, everyday. Sometimes night dives. There was an itinerary written up by the crew that none of us were privy to, not even the dads. The whole trip would be a surprise.
I had taken acid for the first time a few days before the trip. I was seventeen. I thought it had unlocked something in me. I thought it had opened a door to another level of love and acceptance and consciousness that I had never before experienced. I thought I knew something about life. But laid out on my back with the two of them, searching the sky for all the constellations the app could identify, I knew that I knew nothing of the immensity of it all before me. I felt small. I felt connected. I felt my shape beneath the stars. And I felt warmth in that breezy Caribbean night.
Twice, instead of a morning dive, we stopped off at desert islands to explore. The first time, we stopped off at the famed Pig Island, where we fed and pet and hung out with the pigs on the beach and in the water; the second time, we were on an empty island that I don’t believe even had a name. We had the same rules for the islands as during the dives: the classic buddy rule of the Scouts. So for both islands, it was the three of us together still.
The pigs were cute but uneventful. That second island, however, was like a miniature continent. There was a miniature mountain, about as tall as a five story building, with miniature rivers, little creeks that cut across the island. There was brush and grass and there were sandy beaches.
We walked along the beach and found ourselves at a delta where one of the creeks met the sea. We waded into the creek and pushed off the silt of the bed to swim on our stomachs once it was about three feet deep, just deep enough for us to paddle our feet along and look down at all the little sting rays scurrying beneath us.
At the other end, we got out of the creek and found ourselves standing on a much larger, much flatter beach than the other we had walked along. The three of us stood on the bank of the creek and looked across the beach. We figured it was probably getting close to the time to head back, so we decided to cross the sand as it was the most obvious and shortest way back.
The first few steps were normal for wet sand. But then, I was suddenly sucked up to my thigh in the sand, pulled down in one step in the blink of an eye.
I turned to my left and saw that he and she were in the same predicament, also sunk down in the sand. We didn’t have to say it out loud, we all knew immediately what it was: quicksand, from all the cartoons we grew up on. Despite their insistence to show it, though, we all realized silently that not a single one of those shows had properly taught us how to either spot it or, more importantly, how to get out of it. And no one was near enough to save us.
I sunk in a bit deeper. I struggled and struggled as time resumed its steady pace and the reality of it all was sinking in with my trapped thigh. I could hardly breathe or swallow. I could hardly think.
Somehow in the struggle, I loosened the pressure and was able to yank my leg out through some brute force alone, and immediately, without much thought, I sprinted across the rest of the sand, unsure of where it would be solid again on the beach, and sprinted until I reached the brushy edge, where I assumed the earth had to be solid again thanks to the roots of the vegetation.
I made it miraculously without being sucked back in and turned around to see my comrades sprinting as well. She was sprinting like a Jesus lizard. He was going a bit slower and, consequently, his foot got stuck again and he had to stop to yank it out. My heart beat viciously through the whole of my being, shaking my extremities. I wanted to sprint back out to help, but the quicksand could claim me, too, and all the first aid training we’d ever been given, through Scouts and our lifeguarding jobs, told us to never make a second victim but…
But before I could make a move, he got it out. And then she was next to me, out of breath but safe, waiting beside me as he hurried over to our little refuge of brush. We stood there in silence for a stretch of time, breathing heavily, not looking at each other but across the cursed beach, until we finally did all look at each other and broke out in uproarious laughter. We guffawed and made our way through the vegetation, back to the boat, its sails having been raised during our struggle. Time to head back out to sea.
There were more sharks, more turtles, more reefs, plenty of fish, crystalline water, filling food from the galley, a crew in good spirits, the dads never had to raise their voices or put any foot down, the kids got sunburnt but hardly complained, and the three of us were bonded.
On the last night, we docked after the second dive to a dilapidated pier of rotting wood in Freeport, with most of the other boats being much smaller, mostly fishing boats, little things with tiny motors that could never handle the sea proper but could get you through the shallows where they preferred to cast nets and rods anyways. When we docked in the late afternoon/early evening, it was teeming with other people, who looked on as we pulled up in our large sailboat and the crew hopped out to tie it up at the end of the dock. Their expressions were unreadable to me but I sensed some disdain as they surely could tell we were tourists. Yet by night, the dock was fully deserted.
The three of us got off the boat to walk down the street to get sodas from a convenience store down the way. There was no sidewalk for half the journey and the street was falling apart. For a tourist destination, the state of the infrastructure shocked me. The disdain the locals emanated on the dock made more sense now that I was seeing their day-to-day and not behind the veneer of a luxury resort or on a well-kept boat. A reminder of my own suburban, American privilege, I suppose.
The convenience store was small and dingy with lights that hurt my eyes, bright as the sun peaking over the horizon at dawn. I had to squint as I perused the drinks.
I got a bottle of Goombay Punch. She got a bottle of Coke, made with real cane sugar. He got a Fanta but what flavor it was slips my mind. We walked back down the torn up street, sipping our drinks and laughing, enjoying that last night together.
We got back to the boat and laid down again where we had that first night to look up at the stars together, on top of a storage container in the middle of the deck adorned with a giant cushion on top. That night, with the lights of the Caribbean city, we couldn’t see as many constellations beyond the brightest. The boat rocked us gently in the soft waves that reached the dock in the little eddy where we were moored. Far off, we could hear the sounds of some celebration, some party or club blasting music through the night. Close together, though, we could still hear each other’s breath and the slightest words delivered even in a whisper. Again, she was in the middle between him and I.
We laid there for what felt like a tiny eternity before she stood up and announced she was off to bed. That is my last memory of her. I know, logically, that we traveled back home together on the same plane and landed in the same airport, but all that slips my mind. Her silhouette as she slipped down below deck to her bunk is that final image burnt into my mind. And it is melancholic. And there, above deck, he and I laid there talking until deep into the night, eventually falling asleep together and waking up to the blistering, tropical morning sun beating down on our exposed skin.
I still talk to him often, one of my closest companions to this day, but I am not sure if I ever spoke to her again after that trip. Sometimes our connections are just a flash in the pan. Sometimes something means so much, someone means so much, but can still slip away. Yet we cannot hold onto each other too tightly, either. Sometimes we can only go home and remember, careful not to be consumed by nostalgia but still comforted by those familiar thoughts. It’s all warmth, like floating in the Caribbean Sea, when it returns to me.
If she is reading this, I hope she knows: I will cherish this always.
Support RVA Magazine. Support Independent Media in Richmond.
At a time when media ownership is increasingly concentrated among corporations and the wealthy, RVA Magazine has remained one of Richmond’s few independent voices. Since 2005, the magazine has provided grassroots coverage of the city’s artists, musicians, and communities, documenting the culture that defines Richmond beyond the headlines.
But we can’t do this without you. A small donation, even as little as $2, one-time or recurring, helps us continue to produce honest, local coverage free from outside interference. Every dollar makes a difference. Your support keeps us going and keeps RVA’s creative spirit alive. Thank you for standing with independent media. DONATE HERE.
We’ve got merch HERE
Subscribe to the Substack HERE
And Reddit HERE
And YouTube HERE
