## What It Means to Nearly Miss the Diver
The near-miss with the rescue diver — the moment when Okene saw a light, tried to reach it, and arrived at the door too late before returning to his air pocket — deserves sustained attention as more than a dramatic detail. It is the closest the story comes to having a different ending.
Okene had been in the air pocket for approximately sixty hours when the divers arrived. The CO2 was presumably rising. The oxygen was presumably diminishing. The food and water he had consumed were days behind him. He was cold, hungry, exhausted, and in the dark.
He heard activity. He saw a light. He went toward it.
He was too slow.
He returned to the air pocket and waited again.
The specific physical and cognitive state he was in at that point — after sixty hours of cold, dark, dehydration, and CO2-elevated air — is worth considering in terms of what it meant for his reaction time, his coordination, and his ability to navigate the dark water from the air pocket to the diver’s location. None of these capacities would have been at their best. The sixty hours had taken a physical toll. The body and mind that were trying to reach the diver were not the body and mind of a man who had been on shore.
His account of the second attempt — tapping the diver on the back of the neck rather than reaching for the hand directly, so as not to frighten him — suggests some deliberate cognition about the situation. He had missed the first diver by trying to reach him before the diver registered his presence. He adjusted: instead of grabbing, he tapped. Instead of reaching from in front, he approached from behind. The adjustment produced the reaction he needed — the startle, the realization, the “He’s alive!” — rather than another near-miss.