The Scrubber and the Stinging

The rhythmic, dull thwack of the scrubber against the 88-millimeter acrylic is the only thing keeping me from focusing on the stinging in my left cornea. It is a specific kind of penance, I suppose, for being an aquarium maintenance diver who still hasn’t learned how to shower without getting peppermint shampoo in their eyes 18 minutes before a four-hour shift. Most people look at this 108,000-gallon tank and see a portal to the infinite, a silent world of grace and mystery. I see a giant glass box that requires exactly 48 hours of manual labor per week to keep from looking like a neglected swimming pool in a foreclosed suburban backyard. My arm is burning, the salt water is doing no favors for my irritated eye, and I am currently engaged in a staring contest with a grouper that has seen better days and clearly has no intention of moving so I can reach the corner.

The Demand for Depth

There is a peculiar exhaustion that comes with living a life people assume is profound. Everyone I meet at parties-the ones I actually bother to attend-asks me if I feel a ‘spiritual connection’ to the ocean while I’m down here. They want me to tell them about the wisdom of the sharks or the ancient silence of the deep. They are looking for depth. They are hungry for it. They live in a world of 8-second soundbites and fleeting digital connections, so they project this grand, performative significance onto my job. They think I’m down here meditating in the blue. In reality, I am usually just thinking about whether I left the stove on or why the 28 cownose rays in this exhibit are particularly obsessed with nipping at my fins today. The frustration lies in this gap: the world demands that everything be ‘deep’ while the actual work of maintaining that depth is incredibly, beautifully shallow.

The Necessary Shallowness

We have fetishized the idea of the abyss to the point where we’ve forgotten that the only reason you can see into it is because someone like me spent 58 minutes removing calcium deposits from the viewing window. It’s the same in art, in relationships, in everything we value. We want the epiphany, the soul-shattering moment of clarity, but we recoil at the repetitive, mundane maintenance required to sustain the conditions for that moment to exist. We want a ‘deep’ connection with a partner, but we don’t want to do the 88 small things every day-the dishes, the check-ins, the boring logistical coordination-that actually build the glass we’re looking through. I find that people who talk the most about ‘depth’ are usually the ones least willing to get their hands dirty with the shallow stuff.

Take the private gala we hosted here last month. The air was thick with expensive perfume and the kind of high-level networking that makes my skin crawl. I was assigned to stay in the tank for an extra hour just to ‘provide atmosphere.’ I watched a woman standing right in front of my section of the glass; she was wearing a stunning piece from the Wedding Guest Dresses that probably cost more than my entire dive kit. She looked like a painting, silhouetted against the dark water, her posture screaming of someone who understands the aesthetics of importance. She was crying. Not a messy, shampoo-in-the-eye kind of cry, but a single, elegant tear. She thought she was having a moment with a tiger shark. I, on the other hand, was currently trying to ignore the fact that my regulator was tasting slightly of old rubber and that I really, really needed to pee.

Clarity: The Ultimate Surface Concern

I’ve spent 8 years doing this, and I’ve come to realize that the most sacred thing about this environment isn’t the predators or the scale of the water-it’s the clarity. And clarity is a surface-level concern. If I don’t do my job, the depth becomes invisible. It becomes a murky, green soup where nothing can be understood or appreciated. We spend our lives trying to dive deeper into our own psyches, our own problems, our own ‘meanings,’ but we rarely stop to clean the lens through which we’re looking.

What if the point of the 1,208 daily repetitions of a task isn’t to reach a destination, but to ensure that the view remains unobstructed?

The Uncomplicated Gaze

There was a moment about 28 minutes ago when a small child pressed his face against the glass. He wasn’t looking for a spiritual connection. He wasn’t looking for a metaphor for his existential dread. He was just looking at a yellow tang. He was thrilled because he could see the scales, the eye, the tiny movements of the fins. He was thrilled by the clarity. I realized then that my frustration with ‘performative depth’ is really just a defense mechanism for my own pride. I want my work to be seen as more than just cleaning. But I’m just a guy with a scrub brush and a chemical burn on his eyelid. And that has to be enough. In fact, it’s better than enough. It’s honest.

I’ve dropped my weights. I’ve even, in a moment of supreme idiocity, tried to pet a moray eel (don’t). These errors remind me that I am not part of the ‘deep’ world; I am a guest who is there to facilitate the viewing of it. We are all just maintenance workers for the things we love. If you love your career, you scrub the glass.

As my oxygen gauge ticks down to the 18-minute mark, signaling the end of this particular session, I take one last look at the corner I’ve been working on. It’s perfect. It’s so clear it looks like it isn’t even there. That’s the ultimate goal of my profession: to work so hard that your work becomes invisible. If people come to the aquarium and talk about the ‘amazing glass,’ I’ve failed. If they come and talk about the ‘infinite beauty of the ocean,’ I’ve succeeded. I am the architect of a lie that allows them to see the truth.