Doppler Doodles

Text and doodles by Steve Lewis.

🎶🎶 Predive Clicklist: Black Coffee by Humble Pie

There are so many ways to conjugate the present, and with it, the prose and fictions one followed to arrive here. All in all, a huge mass of tangled experiences like a ball of string ready to pick at and unravel when one’s asked: “Hey, how did this start?” and “What on earth lead from point A to now?”

Let’s pull on one of these hanging treads and see what comes loose.

Lanny and Claire Vogel have a little six-room boutique resort sitting on the sponge-toffee slab of karst that is Tulum’s cap rock. They host something called Cave Camp. The event has changed from when it started. It has evolved as good things do, but what remains are a small cadre of the like-minded gathered together as a community for a couple of weeks every autumn. The object: to cave dive, to exchange ideas, to have fun, to be safe. It works immaculately.

And I have had the occasional honour to be part of it.

Early on the first morning of the first event, nothing in the palapa except a clean whiteboard and a couple of dry-erase markers. And most definitely with nobody watching, I drew a REM (a type of cave diver’s navigational aid) with a speech bubble spreading a welcome message. There was no plan, no continuum to consider. Just a silly doodle. A one-off.

And so it goes. Behaviourists tell us that we seat habits after a week or two of repetition. It took about that. And now, always when in Mexico, mornings begin with a line marker cartoon. They belong there if they belong anywhere. If they work—and perhaps they do—Mexico is the only place that they are possible, the only place they appear.

There is also the medium. Pencil and paper, art crayon, and certainly not paintbrush and canvas, none of that seems to work. It has to be transitory. A whiteboard and dry erase marker are the perfect combination. Someone asked if that’s because these cartoons are a type of mandala: impermanent and ephemeral. Good lord, nothing as grand and cosmic or as serious and self-conscious. These are just doodling nonsense whose sole purpose is to make us smile before we go and look at wet rocks; or at best something to help us find our way home in the dark.

Enjoy.

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For the record, Steve Lewis (AKA Doppler) is an author, retired cave instructor—but active cave diver. He is also an artist with a penchant for painting impasto oil landscapes when the mood hits. As well, he is the VP of Marketing for RAID based in the UK, although he lives in a converted 19th-century schoolhouse hidden someplace deep in the Canadian bush.