Diving into the great unknown

By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist  |  June 1, 2010

A YEAR AGO, Jane Nguyen, 18, was following her mother’s no-questions-asked plan for her to be a lawyer. Evan Cooke, 19, was trying to escape the “wrong element.’’ Isaiah Willis, 16, always found himself belittled because he was short. Nick Toscano, 17, never liked being in water. “My one fear was drowning,’’ Toscano said.

What a few drops of water will do. They were four of 10 teenagers who this spring completed a first-time program at the New England Aquarium. Aquarium volunteers or former interns, they won an essay competition for scuba diving certification scholarships. A five-month program of scuba skills and marine biology lectures ended in April with a dive expedition in the Bahamas.

Fear is no longer an operative word.

“I’m the only English speaker in my family so I do all the tax forms,’’ said Nguyen, a senior at Boston Latin Academy. “When I told my mother I wanted to learn to dive, it blew her mind. It didn’t fit her idea of a perfect little girl. I went to Catholic elementary school and I never felt comfortable speaking in public and I lacked confidence to speak up about things I wanted to do. The first thing she said was ‘Don’t get eaten by a shark.’ But now that I’ve learned to dive, I learned to keep my head up and say what I believe.’’

Willis, who lives in Mattapan and is a junior at Trinity Catholic in Newton, said, “I once thought if I ever got in the water, I would get eaten up. I never had a whole lot of direction. Now I want to be a marine biologist. The saddest thing in the Bahamas was the last dive, when I realized I was coming out of the water for the last time, for awhile. Now, I want to jump in right now and I don’t care what’s in there.’’

That is much more than what teen dive program organizers Jenna Sigman, Jo Blasi, Barbara Bailey, and Sarah Taylor hoped for. For years, aquarium staff talked about how teenagers would work in the presence of the aquarium’s giant ocean tank, but not make that final giant leap into the actual ocean. They finally made it happen and Sigman, 32, the aquarium’s supervisor of teen and community programs said, “Every night in the Bahamas we debriefed on our experiences and the way they described what they were seeing was so inspiring, well, Evan and Nick have seen me cry more than my husband has.’’

Toscano, a senior at Boston College High, originally wanted to work at the zoo, applying only to the aquarium because zoo jobs were filled. Now he talks dreamily about the night dive where a pufferfish floated alongside him, and a wreck dive when Jane tried to draw his attention to a large lump inside the rotting vessel. “I thought she was nuts,’’ Toscano said. “I thought she was just pointing at a boulder. It was a loggerhead turtle.’’

Cooke, a senior at Farr Academy in Cambridge, a therapeutic high school, said the triumph of scuba certification put him in an alternative universe, away from past troubles. It is such a different universe that the aquarium will hopefully continue this program. Not only are these teens excited about possible careers in science, the program has created 10 more everyday environmentalists who tell friends to recycle because they now know that today’s trash chokes tomorrow’s turtles, birds, and fish.

“Before, I wasn’t hanging out with the right people,’’ Cooke said. “When I came back from the Bahamas and showed my uncle a picture, he said, ‘This is you.’ My mom calls me ‘Scuba Steve.’ It’s weird. I feel so different now from my friends. It’s weird because when I told them what I was doing in the Bahamas they said, ‘What? You’re going to be stuck on a boat?’ I said, ‘No I am going to be on a research vessel.’

“It feels a little lonely, but now I have new friends. It’s like we went to see the Wizard. Jane got her wisdom, Isaiah got his courage, and I got a heart.’’

Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com.  

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