We had a summer home in Jersey.  A place called Elberon, New Jersey, on the North Jersey shore, where if you were lucky you could see your flippers.  That’s how bad the visibility was on a good day. I had a pair of green flippers that looked like lily pads — they came from a company called Frankie the Frog Man, I remember that well — and my blue mask and a snorkel.  I went underwater and it was an escape.  Cousteau wrote about this in a book called The Silent World. When I was ten I read it constantly, over and over again, almost like a bible.  And he wrote about the first time.  So Jacques Cousteau, the inventor of the aqualung, he wrote about the first time he put his head underwater.  He was in a little tiny beach in the South of France, and he looked up and he could see a trolley car going past on the other side of the beach, he could see people screaming and yelling on the beach.  He could see clouds and birds.  He put his head underwater and he said this wonderful line:  “I put my head underwater and civilization vanished with one last bow.”  This is the world we live in. It is a planet of water.