There’s Something in the Water Honorable Mention
People keep asking why I quit, and I say the heat, and that’s half of it.
I had a two-year contract monitoring a sensor array in the Santorini caldera. Four months in when this happened. The job was simple and I was good at it: dive the eastern slope twice a week, swap the sample bottles, scrape the gunk off the hydrophone, send the numbers to Athens. The numbers were getting worse. Not worse like an emergency. Worse like a guy at the next table who won’t stop clearing his throat. Four hundred little earthquakes in May. Water temps creeping. The kind of data that makes the volcanologists on the Zoom call go quiet and then say “interesting” in a tone that means something else.
Stavros ran the boat. He kept the radio on a Cretan station that read out the temperatures every hour like sports scores. Forty-one that day. In June. He told me his grandfather used to say the sea remembers everything and forgives nothing, and then he told me his grandfather was a drunk, and then he helped me into my tank. The deck was too hot to stand on barefoot by nine in the morning. I remember being glad to get in the water. I keep coming back to that. I was glad.
The array sits at thirty-one meters on a shelf of black rubble, and past the shelf the bottom drops out into the deep part of the caldera, three hundred meters, more in spots. You can’t see down there. That’s the thing you have to understand. The caldera is murky — ash, plankton, runoff. On a good day I got maybe fifteen meters of visibility. I’d been down there dozens of times and I never once saw past the shelf edge. You just see the drop and then green-gray nothing.
I had the second sample bottle half unscrewed when the visibility changed.
I’ve tried to describe this to exactly two people and botched it both times, so bear with me. It wasn’t that the water cleared. It was more like the murk stopped mattering. Like the difference between looking through a dirty window and having someone open it. I could suddenly see the whole shelf, and the drop-off, and down.
There was a town down there.
I know how that sounds. I’ve got a master’s degree and a DAN insurance card and I know about nitrogen narcosis, and I was at thirty-one meters, which is right where narcosis starts whispering to some people, and I have gone over this and over this. Narced divers feel drunk. They do dumb things with their gauges. They don’t see streets. I saw streets. Walls in white and ochre with the paint still on them. A long stairway running down between buildings to an open square. Doorways. The works.
Everybody on Santorini knows Akrotiri — the dig on the south end, the Bronze Age town they pulled out of the ash. The famous thing about Akrotiri is that there are no bodies. No people, no jewelry, hardly any valuables. They saw the warning signs and evacuated. That’s what the museum placard says. They got out in time.
The square below me was full of people.
Hundreds, I think. On the steps, in the doorways. Dressed in blues and saffron-yellow, and the cloth moved, and their hair moved, that slow underwater way, and none of them were skeletons or horror-movie anything. They were just people standing in the square of their town looking up at me.
I’ve helped recover three drowning victims in my career. I’m going to be blunt about this because people get sentimental about drowning, and they shouldn’t. The faces are not peaceful. Whatever the body looks like when it comes up, it looks like the argument it lost.
These people had no argument anywhere in them. That was the first thing that scared me, honestly. Before anything else happened. How settled they looked.
A woman came up from the steps. She had a little girl on her hip, three or four years old, thumb in her mouth, and the woman rose through all that water like it was nothing, like an escalator, and stopped maybe a body length from me. Gold ring in her ear. Little scar on her chin. I noticed stupid things. The kid looked at me the way kids look at you in line at the grocery store.
The woman’s mouth never moved, but I heard her fine. I don’t know how else to put it. You know how you can feel a ferry engine through the hull before you hear it? Like that, but it had words in it. Or it had meaning in it and my brain put words on it. I don’t know.
She said: We saw the mountain open. We saw the sky catch fire.
And then I was somewhere else. I was still in the water — my log says I was only at depth nineteen minutes total, I’ve checked it fifty times — but I was also standing in that square in full sun, except the sun was the wrong color, and the mountain across the water was coming apart. There’s no sound I can compare it to so I won’t try. The air coming off the water was already hot. Already wrong. The fig tree in the courtyard had leaves curling on it. And I could feel her doing the math, because I was her, or close enough — fire’s an hour out, maybe less, no boats left, and her daughter kept asking her something and she had decided not to hear it. Everyone in the square doing the same math. Everyone getting the same answer, and the answer was burning.
Then the sea stood up.
I’ve read the tsunami papers for Thera. I’ve seen the models. The models do not show a hand. What came over the harbor wall came the way a hand comes, cupped, deliberate, and the woman turned toward it and started to cry, and I felt the crying from the inside and I need you to believe me that it was not fear. It was relief. She pulled her daughter’s face into her shoulder and the cool came over them both and the last thing in her was Not the fire. Thank you. Thank you. Not the fire.
Then I was back in the square. The regular one. The underwater one. Whatever you want to call it.
He couldn’t stop the fire, the woman said. Fire isn’t his. So he gave us what was his to give.
She looked up past me at the surface, and I swear there was pity in it. That direction, where the boat was, where the island was, where everything I knew was — she looked at it the way you look at a hot parking lot from inside an air-conditioned car.
It’s hot up there, she said. We feel it through the water. It’s getting hotter. We hear your machines counting. The mountain’s filling again. You know. You carry its numbers up there twice a week. The fire is coming back, and not just here.
She held her hand out. The little girl copied her, fingers spread out like a starfish.
The water is cool, she said. He’s kind. He loves you too. Come down before the burning. We’ll hold you. It doesn’t hurt —
And the thing that finally got me moving was not the hand. It was realizing she meant it. There was no hook in it anywhere. She was offering me the best thing that had ever happened to her.
I bolted. Skipped my safety stop, which you should never do, and came up too fast and hit the swim platform crying into my regulator. Stavros hauled me out by the valve and asked what was down there and I said a down-current, vertigo, bad gauge. I have never told him. I’m not going to.
I resigned in July. Told Athens it was the heat. Nobody argued. Everybody on that project was telling each other it was the heat about something.
I came home to Minnesota. About as far from a caldera as you can get, and I sleep with the windows shut, and I don’t dive anymore. My sister thinks I had a near-miss and won’t talk about it, which is close enough that I let her think it.
But the smoke came down from Canada in May this year. Earlier than last year, which was earlier than the year before. On the bad days there’s a taste to the air, way at the back of your throat, a kind of gray bitterness, and the first time I caught it standing in my own driveway my whole body knew it from somewhere, and it took me a second to remember where, and then I had to go sit down in the car. It’s the taste from the vision. The wind coming across the water ahead of the glow. Same taste. I’d swear to it.
The lake here never warms up. Superior holds its cold all summer, four degrees down deep, doesn’t matter what the air does. I’ve started walking down to the shore in the evenings. The smoke makes the sunsets this thick orange that everybody photographs and posts like it’s pretty.
Last week the grid shed our neighborhood again during the heat advisory and it was thirty-four degrees in my bedroom at two in the morning, and I broke the rule I’d made and looked up the monitoring bulletins for the caldera. Six hundred events in June. Uplift on the eastern slope, right where my array is. Somebody else’s array now. The bulletin said “elevated unrest,” which is what you write when you’re not allowed to write anything scarier.
The mountain’s filling again. Not just here, she said. I used to think she meant other volcanoes. Standing on those rocks with the air tasting like somebody else’s forest, I don’t think she was being that specific.
I want to be clear that I don’t go in. I stand on the shore and the water is dark and cold and I do not go in.
But I don’t step back from the edge like I used to. And the other night I caught myself holding my breath out there — just counting, just seeing how long — and her words came up in me on their own, already in order, like a bubble that was always going to surface:
Not the fire.
I’m not praying. I want to be clear about that too.
I’m just telling you it stopped sounding like a threat a while ago, and I don’t remember exactly when.
Published 8/7/26