Submerged: Adventures of America's Most Elite Underwater Archeology Team

by Daniel Lenihan

  Even after short periods of immersion, the occupants of the vehicles were in varying states of serious disrepair by the time the rangers got to them, often dead. It didn’t seem that such an accident should have such a high fatality rate, and we were going to find out why. How? By going down in cars ourselves to see what was happening to those people—under controlled circumstances, of course. Anyway, it seemed logical at the time.

  After the splash, I felt a giddy fishtailing effect for a while. Due to my momentum on impact, I actually was still making forward progress into the lake. What was most surprising, however, was the noise; it sounded like a couple of scuba tanks had had their valves knocked open around my feet. I glanced down several times at my safety tank and it was fine. The air was rushing in from below my feet, around the foot pedals and from under the seats. Dirty water forced its way through the engine compartment. The weight of the lake compressed the air around me as it rose.

  The car was still floating, although more of it was now under the surface. As the water reached my lap I pulled the tank up into the seat next to me and held the regulator mouthpiece in my hand. There were face masks peering in the windows. As we had suspected, it was not possible to open the doors at this point because of greater external pressure, but they were trying anyway. Then, came the water, up around my neck and over my face. Ugly, brown, and opaque, it was much grungier than normal lake water. I surmised that the reason victims seemed to be so inclined to panic in these situations was they were scared silly. For the first couple minutes, they could have exited easily enough by opening the windows, but the natural impulse is to stay put.

  Here I had the cavalry at the door and a full scuba tank in the seat next to me, yet the quivery feeling in my innards told me none of the victims ever died of constipation. Okay, observation 1: Occupants who have not left car at this point, besides not being able to hear much from the outside because of all the infernal air hissing around them and grungy water climbing up their bodies, are petrified with fear. It explained some of the anecdotes rangers told me of victims just staring at them wide-eyed, not responding to their instructions to climb out the window.

  I determined not to resort to scuba until the last moment. Instead I would try to breathe from the air pocket that forms at the highest point inside the car. As I strained to stretch my neck to the remaining puddle of air in the roof, it occurred to me that I was paralyzed. No, my seat belt was still on. On and jammed. Glurch! I put the regulator in my mouth and cleared it—forget the air pocket drill.

  Then my ears started to hurt: I was on my way down. There was a light bounce on the pavement of the ramp, then the car leveled out on the bottom, probably less than twenty feet deep. No sign of my safety divers. The thought occurred that the reason there is no sign of the cavalry is that I was once again moving. Great. Okay, observation 2: When conducting such experiments, secure the frickin’ car to something on the surface before riding it into the lake. On a reservoir ramp, it takes off again once it hits bottom.

  I began hugging my tank like a long-lost lover, sucking deep on the regulator, suffering an episode of what one might characterize as self doubt. Well, at least that alarmist Murphy was wrong, I was still right-side up. Okay, guys, anytime now; I had to clear my ears again, which meant I was still descending and we’d taken the exercise about far enough.

  Scrabble, scrabble, thunk. I heard the bugles blowing, the ranger corps had found me. I still couldn’t see out the windows though, because the water in the car was filled with years of grime of human habitation. Then a squeaking sound as the door opened and light and visibility suddenly poured in from the left, a second later from the right. “Hey fellas.”

  I saw Mike Smith. Mike is big, strong, and . . . “Mike I know you can’t hear me but I can’t impress upon you how important it is that you help me out of this seat belt before you yank . . .” Too late. Mike had a hold of me and was going to pull me out of that car.

  Somebody (Cal Myers?) had come in the passenger side and couldn’t see a thing but was going to make sure my regulator stayed in place in my mouth. Rare are the rangers I have seen who can be faulted for lack of courage, but their zeal in rescue situations sometimes could be tempered by a moment’s contemplation. Whatever happened, I knew the regulator wouldn’t fall out of my mouth because it was being held in with an iron grip. The problem was no longer not being removed from the car, which I learned later was still slowly moving deeper into the lake. The new concern was being pulled apart by my rescuers.

  I’m not really sure of the sequence of events after that—it’s all a blur. Several moments later, however, I was being escorted by my rescuers to the surface.

  By the end of the day we had learned a lot about getting people out of sinking and sunken cars, and everybody had a turn as driver or passenger. We found that cars could not be considered stable because they were on the bottom. Air pockets made them unpredictable; we had one ranger become trapped when the car settled on his foot after his partner bashed a hole in the rear window allowing air to escape that had been trapped in the roof. We found ways to secure a body in the car after inspecting the scene and have everything, victim and all, brought up as one. We learned that the electronic features, including lights and windows, still worked under fresh water and many other things that came in handy during real incidents.

  Years later, I saw a videotape of a similar but much more comprehensive experiment conducted by the Michigan State Police. Perhaps the most shocking results of the study involved school buses. As in our tests, cars spent enough time floating (usually around three minutes) that there was plenty of time for someone to bail out of the windows if they had their act together. School buses, however, have safety devices built into their large windshields designed to permit firemen easy access in the event of a traffic accident. This same structural improvement ensures that they sink somewhere on the order of thirteen seconds after they hit the water.

  There were other reasons it had become important to improve our recovery time of victims of drowning accidents. Classic studies of cold-water drowning emerged during this time that indicated individuals who stopped breathing in an underwater environment under about seventy degrees in temperature might be revived without brain damage, even after periods of immersion approaching an hour.

  This put a great deal of pressure on search-and-rescue agencies to improve recovery times. If you believe a victim will suffer brain death and probably cannot be revived after four minutes, you tend to think mobilizing scuba divers for rescue is not a viable option. They can just take their time and just do a methodical body recovery. Almost an hour, however, is a whole new ballgame. The element of urgency sky-rocketed.

  We ran many drills during our diving workshops, trying different methods for locating and entering vehicles underwater or finding individuals who had fallen off dam structures or boats and drowned. This resulted in dramatic stopwatch trials with a team of rangers racing down the highway in the back of a van, red lights flashing and divers madly suiting up while support personnel readied climbing ropes. We videotaped one of these exercises, and years later I felt the adrenaline coursing in my blood just watching it. The van screeched to a stop at the supposed scene of an accident where someone had fallen off the Amistad Dam (a realistic possibility). The doors flew open, one ranger secured a rope over the railing, and within seconds two rangers in full dive-gear were rappelling down to the water. We were amazed to find we were able to effect this operation, from simulated call to actual diver-in-water at the scene in a little more than sixteen minutes. One of the rappellers was Ron Kerbo who became widely known in caving circles in the United States and internationally. Ron became a good friend of mine and Larry’s, and he trained us in climbing techniques and supplied us with invaluable advice over the years on caves.

  Although these types of experiments conducted during the reservoir inundation study had little to do with underwater archeology, they had a great deal to do with what would eventually become SCR
U. The yearly diving workshops our team ran for park rangers emphasized staying in the forefront of rescue and recovery techniques, not just refreshing our people in basic dive-survival skills. These same rangers went on to become chief rangers and superintendents, and they were people with whom we had developed a lasting credibility. They worked with us in hazardous and life-threatening situations. When the time came to speak of subjects such as submerged sites preservation, the first reaction wasn’t to think of us as ivory tower researchers with thick glasses from the outside. We were part of the fraternity, and protecting historic shipwrecks and other underwater resources was our problem, not the eggheads’. This intertwining of the NRIS predecessor of SCRU with the mainstream of NPS thinking was to prove invaluable. No budget increase, no dictum from on high could have had the same effect.

  In another sense, our close association with field rangers and superintendents taught us a great deal. These people kept us grounded and honest about our work and affected the core of our research approach. If what we did in our research didn’t make sense to these folks, there was probably something wrong with it. Scientists and historians tend to become enamored of their own jargon—we had the basics of our thinking challenged and honed by our gray-green appareled associates who demanded explanations in clear English. Beyond all that, it simply was a morale boost to be doing this work in the context of an agency we could really feel a part of.

  The written products of the inundation study provided us credibility in the academic community that underwater archeology sometimes lacks. Four years of close association with field rangers in dozens of park areas secured the small team of underwater archeologists a sense of acceptance and belonging in the mainstream of the NPS ranger ranks.

  The time was right at the conclusion of the study to form a permanent NPS entity devoted to underwater archeology. In the spring of 1980, the personnel and assets of the National Reservoir Inundation Study became the NPS Submerged Cultural Resources Unit. We were to provide on-site assistance to all units of the national park system with underwater archeological needs. As the only team of underwater archeologists in the federal government, our services would be available to other agencies or nations at the pleasure of the director of the National Park Service.

  I spent my thirty-fifth birthday fingering through the “Role and Function Statement” that would inextricably meld my destiny with that of the Park Service’s underwater world for the next twenty years. Blindfolded figures marched in front of me on the TV, then broken helicopters in a desert after an attempt to rescue hostages from someone named Ayatollah Khomeini.

  Larry Murphy, who had been working for me on loan for various assignments from the state of Florida had hired on full time in 1979 to the park service, and he and Toni were immediately phased into the newly formed SCRU in 1980. Larry Nordby and Jerry Livingston from another division were indefinitely assigned part-time to SCRU, Jerry, short, muscular, from a Nebraska farm family, was interested in drawing and hunting, and he became our underwater illustrator. Jim Bradford, another excellent NPS Southwestern dirt archeologist, had finished his dive training and was just beginning what would be two decades of distinguished seasonal service with the team.

  Our first major assignments would include conducting underwater documentation of a shipwreck under litigation in Biscayne and the ten major shipwrecks of Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior. However, before I jumped from the reservoir-inundation study headlong into running SCRU, the program that would be my life for the next twenty years, I needed something, a revitalization, a pilgrimage of sorts.

  As if in answer to my inner voice, I answered a long-distance phone call and heard in a familiar Southern twang: “Lenihanski, whatcha been up to, man? Wanna stop fooling around in them old lakes and do some serious diving for a change?” Lenihanski indeed. There was only one person who thought it necessary to condense my Irish/Polish heritage in one name.

  “Yeah, Sheck, I think that might be just what the doctor ordered.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A RETURN TO XANADU

  Heading south from Matamoros you’re in honest-to-goodness Mexico real quick. At least that was the case in 1979, when I headed down there to explore the underground waterworld of Tamaulipas. My associates were primarily sons of the Confederacy; South Georgia and North Florida “boys,” who comprised the hard core of American cave divers at the time. One female participant helped keep the testosterone level from bursting into the red zone.

  Two of the group, Sheck Exley and Paul DeLoach, I had known well from my years in Florida. They were willing to forgive my indiscretion in moving to New Mexico and invite me along. They reasoned that if they could accept my being a Yankee (New Yorker, no less) when I first arrived in North Florida a decade earlier, anything else was comparatively easy to swallow. Sheck had ventured chez moi in 1975 to do a few dives in New Mexico caves, and didn’t even ask if he needed a visa—a serious concern expressed by other cave-diving friends. Other expedition members included Frank Fogarty, Dale Sweete, Jamie Stone, Carol Velice, Steve Forman, and Ken Fulghum.

  I suspected that there was a real possibility for some archeological discoveries in Mexico, but that was far from the prime motivation for my taking part in this expedition. I needed a break from the responsibility of running research projects. I wanted to dive with people I enjoyed in an environment I loved . . . for the pure hell of it. No scientifically redeeming factors, just exploration for exploration’s sake. At least that’s what I had in mind when we started. Sometimes the most stunning archeological finds occur when you’re only half looking for them.

  An unexplored cave has the attraction of unpursued romance. Both have the potential to hurt you or transport you to levels of experience that make life truly worth living. For me, the risk of doing usually doesn’t carry as much dread as the fear of missing out. After a quarter century running underwater research projects, I have come to find that I need this type of revitalization on a fairly regular basis.

  We rendezvoused in Corpus Christi. Knowing most of my associates were strongly inclined to keep firearms in their vehicles—understandable when one considers how much time they spent camping beside sinkholes in the cypress swamps of north and central Florida—I thought it best to warn them it would not be wise to have them in Mexico. Their proclivity for guns was partly pragmatic, partly cultural. Backwoods Florida had its share of poisonous reptiles, both of the slithering and two-footed persuasion.

  I once stood beside a cluster of cave-diving vans trading lies with my comrades, when we were all startled by the sudden hiss and rattle of a large snake coiled about ten feet away. Before I could form an opinion as to how threatened we were by the animal, a female cave diver, sitting in the side door of her van donning double tanks, produced a .38 revolver from nowhere and shot the snake twice. The approving comments of the men indicated her decisiveness and accuracy were expected in a “standup gal.” Yes, it’s partly a cultural thing—Southern, Southwestern; just not something you would expect from a Vassar girl.

  I offered to stash their arms at a friend’s house in Corpus for the duration of our time over the border. After grudging compliance (by most, I think), I squeezed myself into Paul’s van and we trundled on toward the border.

  The van was seriously overloaded, as were the three other vehicles in our caravan. We were carrying, among other things, eighty-seven diving cylinders. Most were hooked in double tank configurations; some carrying oxygen instead of air, for use at decompression. This created more than a little consternation with officials on the Mexican side of the border.

  The border guards looked for their customary bribe while they questioned us about various items in our vehicles. My friends were not thrilled about the shakedown and the easygoing, good-ole-boy smiles started to fade as the process continued. I negotiated with the increasingly irritable and pushy guards in my broken Spanish as the level of tension became tangible.

  The Mexicans told me the unusual number of tanks re
quired a greater financial blessing because only someone planning to illegally sell them in Mexico would carry such a quantity. We were not impressed with this line of reasoning and especially didn’t like the manner in which the guards were poking through our life-support equipment.

  The southern cave-diving fraternity of the 1970s was known for being fairly volatile when provoked. A cross-cultural incident of an ugly sort was brewing, so I moved quickly to secure a generous donation for the Border Guards’ Ball. Hopefully, we could get on with the trip.

  About the time I had collected what seemed from prior experience, a more-than-reasonable gratuity, one impatient guard grabbed a set of cave-diving cylinders and shoved it roughly aside. The double tank manifold banged loudly against the side of the vehicle. This was somewhat akin to driving a truck over a climber’s rope. The failure of a manifold in cave diving approaches a worst-case scenario, much as failure of a rope in climbing. The owner of the tanks shoved past the official, examined the valve, and with the veins standing out on his forehead explained what would happen if another hand was laid onto his equipment. There seemed to be no language barrier in getting his point across.

  Now, truly alarmed, I shoved the money I had collected into the hands of the lead Federale, bid him a series of muchas gracias, and helped Sheck herd our group back to their vehicles. Sheck was our nominal expedition leader and actually had a better command of Spanish than I did. He knew his associates well—they weren’t the young, unsure-of-themselves-in-a-new-country college kids on holiday that the guards were used to dealing with. He was poised to insert himself if a melee broke out, and I was grateful for his calm, but assertive, demeanor. I had been feeling mellow, not psychologically prepared for the unpleasantness, and was more than a little rattled as we left the border behind.