X. THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
BLVR: Do you think if you hadn’t written, hadn’t been a writer, could there have been some completely other—
JD: Oh, I wonder. I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. And when I was out of school and living in New York and working for a magazine, I actually went out to the Scripps Institute, which is now UC San Diego, but then it was just the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, run by the University of California, and I asked them what I would have to do to become an oceanographer. And basically they said I would have to go back to high school, you know. I hadn’t taken any of the science courses that would enable me to take the science courses that I would need to take in order to go to… any place. So I abandoned the idea of being an oceanographer, but I can see myself still as an oceanographer, if I could get to that point.
BLVR: Does it seem like a happier life?
JD: A happier life? I don’t know. I’ve liked being a writer.
BLVR: It’s a different way of going underwater.
JD: It’s a way of going underwater, yes. Well, I’ve always been interested in how deep it was, you know.
