Underwater to Get Out of the Rain: A Love Affair with the Sea
by Trevor Norton. DaCapo, $25, 400 pages.
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The Cleveland Plain Dealer

June 4, 2006

Taking us underwater and into a fantastic world

By PHILLIP MANNING

Trevor Norton has had a solid but not spectacular career as a British professor of marine biology. Why, then, should one read his memoir, "Underwater to Get Out of the Rain"?

The answer can be found in the book's first three sentences: "I grew up beside a sullen sea rimmed with coal dust, and that was where I first felt the tug of the tide. But the whisper in the shells was of bluer oceans beyond the horizon, salt-scented and transparent, alive with strange creatures. So I searched for their shores and this is the story of my journey."

Norton, you see, is a spectacularly good writer, capable of capturing the wet, colorful world beneath the sea on the dry, printed page.

His was an unlikely beginning in Northumberland County, England. An unruly child and terrible student, young Trevor was a sullen 14-year-old when a television show caught his fancy and turned him onto the sea. He ventured into the freezing water in his trunks. He experimented with homemade gear. He marveled that both he and the world were seven-tenths saltwater, that in the womb he had gills.

Readers see the author find his passion, played out in scuba diving and marine biology, disciplines that grew up with him. Along the way, he includes several fine sketches of his scientific colleagues as they ply their trade from Yemen to Ireland and Sweden.

Norton's journeys have left him with a gimlet, Anglo-centric eye. He soon learns that corrupt police officers in the Philippines are "the nicest people money can buy." After a lengthy wait to see a pompous Egyptian bureaucrat, Norton writes that the "notion of an appointment at a stated time was considered a quaint Western idiosyncrasy."

Once Norton dreamed of finding fantastic creatures in the depths. But as so often happens in science, grandiose notions surrender to less glamorous reality - to research that will earn a degree and attract funding. Norton ends up specializing in the most prosaic of underwater organisms: seaweed.

He wisely steers clear of detailed descriptions of this work, which focuses on distribution of seaweeds on the ocean floor. Instead, he entertains us with tales of diving and the creatures he does encounter.

His most frightening experience occurred snorkeling inside a pitch-black, underwater cavern. Suddenly a cacophony of barks, growls and loud splashes shattered the silence. "Then they were all around me in the darkness," he writes, "big black shapes in the water sliding past." The shapes turned out to be sea lions, big territorial males intent on keeping out intruders. "They were trying to intimidate me, and they were succeeding" he writes.

Norton is merry as he debunks seagoing misconceptions. The giant octopus populates many a lurid tale, growing to a length of 20 feet. But, in truth, "a farmer is more likely to be attacked by a pumpkin than a swimmer by an octopus."

This summer, readers will enjoy a dip into Norton's nature memoir, a love affair with the sea.
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