My brother, who is full of Finnish folk sayings, sometimes ancient and sometimes newly coined (by him), used to describe jerks with the phrase I’ve titled this post with. What does it say about both of us that we’ve gotten seriously into scuba diving? Not just that, but he got me into scuba diving? Oh well, he did, and it’s the coolest thing I’ve ever done. (Yes, I know I described climbing that way five years ago. I still believe it, too. Sue me.)

Diving along the 600-foot Cedarville in the Straits of Mackinac.

In little less than a year, I’ve gotten a bunch of diving certifications, most recently Rescue Diver, and logged fifty-six dives. None of this is to say I know anything — I hardly do — but that I love the activity. Half of those dives were during the winter at a quarry in Ohio. The winter was mild, sure, but the water was still 37F. That ain’t warm. But it was amazing! The whole thing is amazing.

I recently got back from a diving trip to the Straits of Mackinac, the strait at which Lake Huron and Lake Michigan meet and which Mackinac Bridge spans. The video at the beginning of this post is from that trip. It was my first chance to explore Great Lakes shipwrecks. To use a technical term: OMG! Who wouldn’t want to dive?

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But let’s backtrack a bit. This blog has been silent for three years. I didn’t quit adventures in the outdoors, not at all. Adventure races have kind of dried up (mainly killed by the fake “adventure” races of the Tough Mudder variety), and the few there have been around here have not fit on my calendar. Otherwise, though, there’s been a lot of fun stuff outdoors for me in the last three years. There was a fantastic week-long climbing trip to Yosemite in 2014, although it ended in me taking a bad, near fatal fall. It wasn’t fatal, and it also didn’t stop my climbing. It did offer some perspective I may write about here sometime.

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This is about diving, though. I’m slowly developing an interest in the sunny, warm, clear waters the majority of recreational divers are excited about. But I want to continue this activity even if I never get to Cayman or Bahamas or the Great Barrier Reef. The Great Lakes have about 6,000 known shipwrecks, many of them diveable even by non-technical divers like me. If I could go to college again and pick another major, I’d choose underwater archeology.

Yours truly communing with trout around a sunken truck at Gilboa Quarry in Ohio.

Even without the wrecks, I’d love diving. As a kid, ear troubles (and the lack of equipment) led me to lament the fact I would never have the diving adventures I read about, even though I loved being in the water. I shouldn’t have said never, though: here I now am. Just the experience of being underwater is indescribable. I mean this literally: I know from past attempts that I can’t get you to get excited about it just on my talking about it. Yet I try. Imagine the weightlessness of space. Imagine being in another kind of world, where much that’s familiar is different. You hear in a different way (and you hear nobody talking!). You move in a different way. (It’s like swimming, and also not like swimming.) And your instincts about how things should be and feel are different. (Sure, your one instinct when things go wrong — “Get to the surface!” — is the one thing most likely to kill you. But, statistically, very few things are going to kill you. Certainly a lot fewer than in climbing.) In other words, is the coolest thing I’ve ever done, and I can’t believe I get to do it.

I’m headed to the Straits of Mackinac again in a week or so. Stay tuned for more.