When I meet Kirk Etherton, he greets me by dropping a 25 pound boulder at my feet. He dove to the bottom of Walden Pond to excavate it. He tells me looking at the massive stone makes him think, “Did I really bring this up? It’s not like I was rescuing a stone baby! I mean this took a long time. This took three attempts to bring to the surface.”
Etherton is a poet. But on hot summer days, the Somervillian takes up another art form: diving for rocks in Walden Pond. He excavates them, cleans them, and ties white cord around them. The cord is the length of how deep he dove for the rock.
I go with him to Walden to watch him dive. Etherton launch his body away from the shore and swims out to the middle to free dive. A white plastic canister with twenty feet of string tied around it floats behind him, rippling over his wake. He’ll unravel the string from the canister as swims to the bottom. The deepest he’s ever gone was 28 feet. Before the plunge he explains, “I’ll just take a deep breath. Dive down. Maybe I’ll see some fish. I’ll find a rock and then when I’m tired I’ll just swim around and do some other stuff.”
Each rock is selected with care. Through goggles he looks for layered sediment and speckled fractures on a stone’s surface, a natural sculpture. He looks for the most interesting rock he can find. But sometimes, even with goggles it can be hard to see. He tells me, “Something might appear to be a good rock but because of distortion you have to move on and get something else.”
I hear a sinking splash. A few minutes pass. Suddenly, he pops up to the surface, gasping for air. He is pleased with his choice.
In the waters of Walden, Etherton feels truly comfortable. He says, “I feel as though I am largely a water creature. I feel more comfortable in the water than on land.” He tells me that the bottom of Walden is like the surface of the moon. Just a thirty minute drive away from home to escape the world. He’s even written a poem about it - called Dark Side of the Pond:
Prepare for a launch
from the surface,
rippling and reflecting.
The countdown, inaudible, comes
from the diaphragm: three...two...one:
one last deep breath to last
the length of this journey
beginning now with toes
pointing, disappearing from the view
of a horizontal lap-swimmer,
appearing soon to the
unblinking eyes of brown trout
ten feet down, passed by on
this simple trip progressing into cool
blue, blue-green, dark grey,
darkness.
The scene through goggles
15 feet below and still
descending is a journey through
deep space: reference points gone,
velocity uncertain, countless luminous
particles suspended passing
as a film of distant stars
bending time.
Keep the trajectory with kicks
and palm-thrusts—
this soaring, climbing down
now a feeling
of leaving the earth,
inverted ascent a working
against buoyancy, not gravity.
At 18 feet below, the destination—
the stark, silent bottom of Walden Pond—
looms into dim-lit view; at
20 feet, the ice-water line of the thermocline
offers its full-body embrace. The mission:
find one fine rock to bring up from this
lunar-like landscape, pulling it
from the slow-motion swirling
silt, where it's been half-buried, glacier-
dropped, waiting in time since before
time was given a name.
(Hours or years later this rock will become
a sculpture, a precious stone, a talisman.)
Now stand to survey this peaceful land.
Now push off from 22 feet down to
make the return trip, swimming
toward widening light above with
one free, non-stone-cradling hand.
Now splash-up into the world
of trains, trees, voices and air.
Breath held must be released,
but the rock retrieved can be held always,
itself now held with a length of twine
(equal to the depth where it was found)
wrapped around it securely—reminder
of another, other-worldly realm:
that aquatic, imperturbable,
almost-dark-side-of-the-moon.
Like any exploration, free diving comes with risks. He explains, “People who do this in a competitive way sometimes perish.” Etherton isn’t the only deep diver in Walden. Some other divers have suggested he use tricks to dive deeper like flippers or even hyperventilation. He opts to do things, as Thoreau would have it, more simply. He reaches the bottom with just swim trunks and his lungs.
Etherton’s rocks are elegant and unembellished. He says, “I like to do things that involve real things. You can’t get much more simple than taking an interesting rock and wrapping it with a string equal to the length at which you found it. One thing lead to another. I guess that’s how creation or creativity works for me.”
Before I leave, he tells me “I always wonder what Thoreau would think of this...Would he think it to be in the realm of living more simply? Or would he just think it was bazaar? I guess we’ll never know.”
Why Walden? We may never know, but Etherton can’t help but think about Thoreau while he dives for his rocks
