The real story, though, arrived in a cardboard box.

I finally bought a scooter.

More formally, a DPV — diver propulsion vehicle — but “scooter” feels more honest about what it actually is. It’s a Seacraft GO!, which I’ve taken to calling the baby Seacraft, mostly because saying what it actually cost would require me to sit down first. And possibly pour something.

Seacraft builds some of the most refined DPVs available — quiet, efficient, beautifully balanced in the water. The GO! is their smallest model, but carries the same DNA as their larger machines. Their flagship, the Ghost, is essentially a torpedo with a price tag north of ten thousand dollars. The GO! feels almost polite by comparison. Still very capable, though.

I had considered the more economical Dive Xtras BlackTip. Clever design, modular batteries compatible with common power tool packs, substantially lower cost of entry. But the internet had opinions — enough chatter about leaks and reliability to plant a small, persistent seed of doubt. The kind that flowers into an expensive decision at two in the morning.

Heather, being more pragmatic, went the BlackTip route. She already had compatible batteries, which made the decision easy. Sitting side by side in a parking lot, the two scooters look almost comically mismatched — the GO! compact and tidy, the BlackTip considerably larger, the kind of machine that announces itself. And yet the specs quietly tell a different story: the GO! cruises just over six miles on a charge; the BlackTip runs dry after three and a half. Sometimes the small thing is simply better organized.

Both, as it turns out, are an absolute blast.

There is more to dialing one in than it looks from the surface. Trim, harness position, tow line length — each one a small negotiation with physics that seemed straightforward until you were actually moving through water at a speed that doesn’t leave much room for getting it wrong. And then there’s the subtler problem: a DPV at full trigger will quietly compensate for all manner of buoyancy sins. Release it and whatever you’ve been ignoring becomes immediately, urgently apparent. The challenge is that when you’re having this much fun, you’re not thinking about buoyancy.

We headed to Gooseberry that Tuesday. The previous week’s weather had churned the lake near the river mouth into something resembling chocolate milk — visibility at the entry maybe two or three feet. The kind of conditions that would normally end a dive before it began.

But we had scooters.

A couple hundred yards out, past the point, we knew the water would clear. That’s a long, cold surface swim in 33° water — tedious at best, miserable at worst. With scooters, we cruised along the surface and crossed the murk in almost no time. Dropped down, got sorted, and then the dive changed completely.

We followed the shoreline southwest, and within minutes we were well past anything we’d explored before. The bottom unfolded below us — structure we’d never noticed because we’d never moved through it fast enough to notice it had structure. And then it became something else entirely.

Weaving between boulders. Rolling over ledges. Dipping in and out of the contours in the rock. There’s a moment somewhere in the middle of it where you stop feeling like a diver navigating terrain and start feeling like something that simply belongs in it.

I kept thinking of Anakin Skywalker threading his pod racer through the canyon formations of Tatooine — the rock opening just enough to let you through, the sensation of moving inside a landscape rather than across it. The slight, glorious irresponsibility of the whole enterprise.

I was grinning so much my mask started leaking.

The return trip brought us back into the murk near the river mouth. Visibility dropped to five, maybe ten feet. The bottom disappeared. The surface disappeared. Heather signaled to ascend. Before I could suggest we follow the bottom towards shore and come up there, she was already ascending.

I tried to hold a safety stop at fifteen feet. Midwater, nothing to reference, no bottom, no surface, just a number on my computer ticking away. I slowed around fifteen feet, overshot, dumped gas, sank past it, added gas, drifted up through it again, corrected, and eventually surfaced somewhere in the general vicinity of where I’d intended to be. A stop, technically. In the same way that a series of stumbles in a general direction is technically walking.

Heather was already up, smiling, replaying the good parts of the dive in her head.

I was replaying a different part.

The stop itself I can forgive — midwater in low visibility is genuinely hard and not something I’ve practiced enough. What’s been sitting with me is the moment before it. The right call was obvious: signal Heather to wait, point to ascent towards shore following the bottom for easy visual reference. I knew it. I said nothing. And then I spent a couple minutes fighting a stop I’d set myself up to fail.

Seven hundred dives, and I’m acutely aware of the many ways I could improve.

That’s the part nobody tells you about scooters. They make everything faster — the good decisions and the deferred ones. Distance that used to constrain you evaporates. You cover ground that used to take multiple dives in a single afternoon. And somewhere out there, farther than you’ve ever been, is a situation you haven’t thought through yet. Judgment has to fill the space that fatigue used to occupy.

We’ll keep going back.

What I keep thinking about now are the mine pits.

Crosby. Tioga. St. James.

Warmer water, dramatically better visibility, and vertical walls that drop away into the deep blue. I’ve visited them before — descended to a hundred feet, hovered long enough to remember that the wall kept going, then turned around feeling like I’d glimpsed something larger than I could properly see. With a scooter, that changes. You can tour these places rather than sample them. Cruise a wall at whatever pace the light suggests. Stop when the rock is worth stopping for.

There are probably twenty dives between here and actually knowing what we’re doing.

That’s not a complaint.

It’s been a good couple of weeks — a little wild above the surface, a lot of fun below it, and the particular pleasure of being near the beginning of something. Not every piece of gear you buy opens a door.

This one did.

The pits are waiting. The walls aren’t going anywhere.

And I still have a full battery.