The dive was primarily for Angela’s benefit, to give her more practical experience photographing undersea life. For Ben it was almost purely recreational, although he was shooting as well. He began with a Hermissenda crassicornis nudibranch he discovered feeding along the edge of a sponge. Looking through the view screen on the back of his camera, he zoomed in on the creature until he could see the distinctive yellow stripe, edged in orange, that bisected its body. On either side of this line, the gorgeous brown cerata, tipped in yellow and white, formed a dense forest covering the nudibranch’s back.

He was trying to get a good shot of its rhinophores, the rings that circled them like bracelets on the slimmest of wrists so different from those of most nudibranchs. But he was having trouble with the zoom, and the Hermissenda’s head kept going in and out of focus as he fumbled with the controls through his thick gloves. It, of course, was the perfect model, holding its pose beautifully while he ineptly attempted to capture its beauty.

Finally he got a shot that looked halfway decent. He pressed the button, was rewarded with a burst of light, and moved on. The pinnacle was, quite literally, crawling with life, and mostly he chose his subjects not by any scientific criteria but by how lovely they were to look at. When he framed a sea star within his window, it wasn’t because it was at all unusual (it was a common Dermasterias imbricata, he remembered, testing his knowledge) but because the blue-ring top snail crawling along across one leathery arm (Was it Caliostoma annula-tum or ligatum? He could never remember.) made it appear that the sea star was wearing a beautiful brooch.

He snapped a number of pictures—a tiny kelp crab that waved its half-inch-long pincers menacingly; a corraline sculpin perched on a small outcropping, where it blended seamlessly with the purple and gray rock; a colony of translucent thumblike tunicates. These were the familiar occupants of the pinnacle, often seen yet still, to Ben, awe-inspiring. He looked upon them as he might a UFO, filled with wonder that things so alien and so beautiful could coexist with him, a great clumsy animal who had to strap a tank of air to his back to enter their world.

They were working their way up, first to seventy feet, then to sixty. As they circled the pinnacle, moving clockwise up the spire, Ben looked at Angela, her fins fluttering as she attempted to stay still long enough to photograph a tiny pincushion-like Cockerell’s Dorid (Lima-cia cockerelli he recited automatically) and thought suddenly of Caddie. They weren’t that far apart in years. The girl swimming beside him could easily have been his daughter. But she wasn’t, and his actual daughter was on dry land some sixty feet above him.