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Who will be Oregon’s next governor?
Lost in space
Anita Floyd
Anita Floyd finds a brave new world under the sea
by
M elissa S ayler
I ill you ever know what it feels like to walk in
space?” Anita Floyd asks. For those who want to
experience floating weightlessly and meet fascinat
ing creatures in a strange, new world, scuba diving
is the next best thing.
“When you’re diving it’s the closest you’ll ever come to visiting
another world. You are not in your environment, you’re in the
fish’s environment,” Floyd asserts.
She goes on to describe her experiences interfacing with curi
ous octopi and 6-foot-long wolf eels as well as green, firefly-like
phosphorescents encountered in night diving—not to mention
the eerie memorials of old shipwrecks.
In one trip off the Canadian coast on the way up to Alaska,
Floyd swam through a cruise liner that sunk in the 1940s. “It was
different diving on that particular vessel because it was a memor
ial site,” she remembers. “There were 300 people who died right
there. It gives you a different feeling. You don’t want to touch it.
It’s like walking through a graveyard.”
loyd started diving in 1996 at the coaxing of a friend. At first
she was a little apprehensive.
F
“I grew up on the Oregon coast, and a smart person
doesn’t even put their big toe in the water, let alone think
about swimming in it. I never even thought about learning to
scuba dive,” she remarks.
But she figured if her friend, who’d been certified a year before,
was up to the challenge then she could be, too.
“Being 4 5 ,1 had a mind-set of all those things that could go
I
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