Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves

At dusk, I would sneak in with a flashlight and drop bits of food in the water, hoping to coax them to the surface. Most of the time there were no takers. Then one day I tossed in a scrap of hot dog and a great beast of a fish—it had to be four feet long—emerged from under the dock, raised its head, and lunged at the meat before quickly retreating.

The diver himself hears two primary sounds: the hiss of his regulator on his inhalation and the booming gurgles of his bubbles on his exhalation; together they are the metronome of his adventure.

Deep is so un-American now, even radical. We live too often like water skeeters on the surface of the pond, dropping down for a quick bite of insect or e-mail. Deep is the realm of soul.

The freedivers told me they’d previously been “most people.” Their transformation was a matter of training;