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

by Daniel Lenihan

  The Amistad Dam is just a few miles from Del Rio, Texas, not far from Langtry, of Judge Roy Bean fame. The dam had backed up the waters of the Rio Grande, the Pecos, and the Devil’s River to form a large reservoir. In so doing, it had covered tens of thousands of acres of west Texas mesquite-covered badlands, and along with it, hundreds of prehistoric archeological sites, historic structures like ranch houses, and even old reservoirs upstream of the present lake. Cannibalistic by nature, as are all dams, the Amistad Reservoir had swallowed an earlier impoundment built decades before on the Devil’s Arm of the lake.

  Nordby, having been sponsored to a NAUI instructor institute by SCRU was newly serving in 1982 as the NPS Southwest Region diving officer, a position I had vacated due to time constraints after a five-year appointment. He had been handed a doozy of a first body recovery to manage. He was an accomplished southwestern archeologist, from another division in our Santa Fe office; Nordby had been trained to dive by us, and we regularly liberated him from chores in the desert to join our projects in the Pacific isles and Great Lakes. The mapping skills he had honed drawing three-dimensional Anasazi structures translated nicely to shipwreck sites. Now a diving instructor and veteran of several NRIS expeditions, he was getting a taste of the grim side of park service diving.

  The man we had been interviewing had a military diving background. Along with his friend, he had just finished an intensive training program in commercial salvage diving, including hardhat, surface-supplied, and the like. They had picked the marina area in Rough Canyon for their “celebration dive” because they thought it would be exciting to find the remains of the old dam structure reputed to be there.

  They asked a park maintenance man where they could dive to the powerhouse of the old dam. He told them it was at the bottom of the buoy he was servicing but recommended they keep clear of it because diving conditions were lousy this far uplake. The water near the Rough Canyon marina was still in the zone where the moving river slowed to a halt as it hit the man-made lake and dropped its sediment load. The preferred diving locations are much farther downstream and have been duly marked by the park service for easy access by recreational divers. These fellows felt they could handle the adverse conditions because they weren’t trained as sport divers but professionals. They were half right; two went in and one came out.

  The water was cold but clearer than we expected for the first forty or fifty feet. As we approached the structure to which the down-line was attached, the clarity degraded, and we found the park’s divers were accurate in their visibility assessment. We wore wet suits that didn’t afford as much thermal protection as the dry suits we usually opted for in water this cold. Wet suits, however, are less bulky and more streamlined for swimming through confined spaces. We had jettisoned our snorkels because they snag on things under ceilings, and we eliminated any other unessential gear that might catch on projections. For air, we carried a set of twin hundred-cubic foot cylinders. We also carried backup lights and a cave reel. Essentially we were diving in a man-made cave.

  Murphy’s 230-pound form loomed next to me in the dim glow of the powerhouse window. My depth gauge read ninety-two feet, and it was supposedly compensated to read correctly at altitude. As long as rivers keep flowing downhill to oceans, dams will be found at some elevation above sea level. This altitude factor has certain implications for divers’ physiology and instruments, less so here in West Texas than in the higher-altitude lakes of the Rockies. Given the length and seriousness of the dive in which we were about to engage, however, we were taking no chances. As we checked decompression charts and bottom-timers before entering the building, Nordby and two rangers from the park brushed by us, giving a cursory salute. Their job was to check the outside of the structure along the bottom in case the victim had made it out and drowned before being able to ascend.

  I let the butterflies find some place to rest in my innards and focused my dive light on an okay sign formed by my thumb and forefinger. It was a query that Larry immediately returned. Yeah, I’m okay, you’re okay, let’s get it on. Not having any good excuse for further delay I undid the drag-button on the line reel and played out several feet of #18 braided. It was standard cave-diving line, one-sixteenth-inch diameter, stronger than the garden-variety twisted nylon, yet compact and stretchy when necessary. “Necessary” is when you get fouled in it and need your buddy to untangle you without having to cut it.

  I looped the line over a concrete projection in the outer wall, adjusted my buoyancy compensator to neutral and started to walk on my fingers into the room. My knees were bent and my fins were up away from the silt. They would receive little use during this dive. Due to the stillness of the interior, visibility actually picked up some as I inched forward. I could probably see three plus feet; enough to note rebar and wires sticking from the ceiling. I shuddered, only partly from the cold.

  It was clear to me now what had been the first mistake of the unfortunate young men. As they had penetrated they mistook the slightly clearer dead spaces for some indication of what they would encounter during the whole dive. I did not need to look back to know that Larry was probably encountering less than eighteen inches of visibility because of my bubbles percolating silt off the ceiling. On our return I also knew that we would be lucky to find six to eight inches of visibility in front of our face masks. I had no way to communicate it but I wished I could ask Larry if he was in his glory yet.

  I felt Larry’s presence through the nylon line as we started a pendulum-like sweep from where the line was fixed, feeling ahead of us in the gloom for obstructions and some mother’s son. I had dived with Larry often enough in tight situations that just his finger tension on the line and the movement I occasionally caught through the silt of the glow of his light told me all I needed to know of his mental state and how well he was progressing through the concrete maze. A familiar contradiction in desires overcame me: partly wanting to find the victim and partly hoping like hell somebody else would. After sweeping the first room I reeled in the slack and felt my way to the doorway we had encountered almost opposite our point of entry through the window. Finger pressure and gentle nudges from his elbow told me Larry had guessed my intention and was positioning directly behind me instead of side by side to negotiate the narrow opening.

  I checked my air gauge, which still read comfortably high, and could tell that Larry was doing the same. Through the cloud of silt behind me, I could see his light reflecting off something shiny. It took about thirty seconds for him to make out the numbers in the brown soup. He tapped twice on my leg—we were go for room two.

  I slipped through the opening and brushed by what seemed to be a wall of iron mesh like a small-gauge cyclone fence to my right—a switch cage. My light could only penetrate a short way in the gloom, but I could see no sign of a diver behind the mesh. I did pass a man-sized opening into the cage, however, and knew it was possible for someone to have gone in there.

  Hoping Larry would understand, I continued past the opening where I found enough room to turn around so I could come back and kneel face to face with him. As usual, he anticipated the move and was waiting for me when I inched back. He had his left hand on the line and his right was probing the entry through the mesh wall. We put our face masks together, and I shined my light down over our heads. Thus, even in the thick haze, we could make momentary eye contact. I pointed my finger into his face plate and then toward the cage opening. You go in there; that was the message.

  Without hesitation, he pushed the line away to make sure he didn’t entangle himself and backed his legs through the opening. Then he clanged and scratched his tanks and torso through. I pulled tight the line, which now extended past him to the window we had originally entered someplace back there in the world. I wrapped the string twice around my right palm and wrist and passed the reel to his hand, which now extended back into the hallway. Using my wrist for a convenient tie-off he turned and felt his way through the mesh chamber until he was absolutely satisfied no diver
could be crammed in any corner. He made sure there wasn’t even a nook in which a body without tanks could fit. We both knew from our experiences in Florida caves that it was not unusual for panicked divers to ditch their equipment in some last desperate attempt at escape.

  In less than a minute he had reeled back to my hand which still extended from my kneeling form. He handed me the reel and grabbed the line with his left hand, chucking his right thumb in front of my mask to urge me to keep on penetrating. My Larry-sixth-sense was telling me that his brusque motion meant “Let’s finish this, I’m getting to seriously dislike this place.”

  As I turned to continue, I ran into a wall that forced me left and down. Down? I was already on the damn floor! It was a staircase. I found the top of the banister, took a loop, and started headfirst feeling my way down the flight of stairs. Behind me I thought I could hear curses gurgle through a regulator mouthpiece when Larry found the wrap and realized he was heading down to a lower level. Probably just my imagination, because it’s hard to hear something said underwater from several yards away.

  At least the stairway was fast going, and I was at the lower level in a few seconds. I turned to reposition the reel and banged my head into the edge of some container or closet. I know I took the Lord’s name in vain in the midst of a number of four-letter words. No one’s imagination this time. I was pissed and getting a bit stressed; I too wanted this dive over.

  As I progressed, the wall on my left turned out to be a closet door of some sort. When it opened to my touch, I reached in, looking for our victim. Instead I found a porcelain bowl. “That’s it, goddamn it! I’m somewhere here in surreal hell and I’m hugging a commode. Murphy, we’re in the goddamn bathroom.” Of course, he couldn’t hear a word I was saying. I turned and put my fist in his face, meaning stop, freeze. He held tight to the line and watched my fins for the next several minutes as I inspected, felt through, and otherwise spiritually connected with three drowned toilet stalls.

  The room dead-ended. It contained no deceased diver or any sign of him—no dive light, piece of equipment, or anything. I managed to turn and was again face to face with my partner. We once again spent the better part of a minute examining our instrument gauges before we could decipher them in the thick murk. I found I could only read mine if I pressed the gauge against my faceplate and held my light over my right ear. Enough light filtered through a side panel in the mask to illuminate the dials.

  We noted that we were still reasonably okay on air in our double hundreds. Also, we were slightly below a hundred feet deep, and our timers indicated we had left the surface almost thirty minutes ago. We were bone-cold, knew we would have to spend extra time in the water decompressing, and were thoroughly disenchanted with our cozy new dive site. We were by no means in our glory.

  The trip out was ugly and slower than coming in. It seemed that long ago, idiots had extended iron bars from the ceiling in such a manner that they hung up on every piece of equipment we owned during our slow crawl back upstairs and out of the building. As we emerged from the glass window, unwrapped our reel, and headed up the rope to the surface buoy, we both dearly hoped that Larry Nordby and the other team had found the victim. As we approached the twenty-foot decompression stop, we could see the other team hanging there—they had no deceased diver in tow.

  As the thirty-one foot Bertram pounded its way back through a wind chop, we lay on the back deck discussing what we hadn’t found. “Well, he ain’t in the building and he ain’t outside the building near the old dam outlets,” remarked Nordby.

  Murphy added that we had learned something else.

  “What?”

  “That fella didn’t go back in there lookin’ for his buddy.”

  “How do ya know?”

  “He’s alive.”

  I nodded my agreement. He might have gone in once and stumbled out by luck, but there is no way in hell he could have survived going in after the silt was up.

  “The damnedest thing is we can’t even comfort the kid without contradicting his story. He would have been insane to return to the interior—we’d just be after two bodies but we’re going to have to let him beat himself up over it.” The irony of the situation was that the fate of the drowned diver had been sealed when he took the lead in penetrating the building without a line; what anyone did afterwards was irrelevant. But the survivor clutched his attempted-rescue fantasy like it was his last chance at self respect.

  We did have some good news when we got back to the ranger station. An enterprising park employee had traced down a copy of the plans of the old powerhouse from God knows where.

  “There, that wire mesh . . . that was the switch cage,” Murphy noted. The drawings were actually quite helpful as we mentally retraced our dive. Nordby asked us every way he knew how, without offending us, if we were absolutely sure we covered the entire structure.

  We were stumped and irritable. Frankly, purported experts at diving under ceilings or not, we had no desire to go back in that building. “I’m telling you we felt through every miserable corner of that dump,” muttered Larry. “Unless that dumbass flushed himself down the commode he ain’t in there.”

  It is easy for divers to identify with drowned compatriots and the degrading of the lost diver’s status from victim to “dumbass” was a sign I had noted before in recovery operations. We were reaching a temporary point in our personal psychology where devaluing the victim helped us suppress our own risk-taking proclivities. We could justify not taking actions that might result in our own demise. He would regain the status of “unfortunate young man” to us once we found him but, at this point, Larry’s assessment seemed right-on.

  Nordby knew we weren’t going to plumb that building again unless they could give us an ironclad guarantee that he hadn’t fallen to the old riverbed. The next day Murphy and I watched the “outside team” led by Nordby descend for a final sweep of the base of the dam. If they found no sign of the man, we would repeat our examination of the powerhouse.

  After they disappeared from view, I sat in the boat cabin absently staring at the plans of the building. It was just not that complicated a place: a first room with a grated hole in the floor for some engineering purpose, a long wall with internal glass windows separating it from the back room, and the staircase that led to the lower level. We had seen, or rather felt, all of this and we had inspected from floor to ceiling knowing the body could be buoyant. Suddenly, a chill went up my spine.

  “Larry, c’mere, look at this.” He was on the back deck already suiting up while engaging in some of the gallows humor with the other rangers that typify most high-stress recoveries once out of the public’s sight.

  “Find ’im, did ya? Great, we don’t have to go down now. We could get some beer, have a service on the boat, put the fun back in funeral. We . . . ”

  “I know where he is.” Silence from everybody. I definitely had the floor.

  “Remember we kept running into these windows at the end of our passes in the first room?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When did we see the back of them in the second room?”

  “What? The damn switch cage is right there and I felt all through it . . . the glass is probably right beyond it.” As his second remark trailed off he sat down heavily, staring at the drawing; he no longer was certain. “Damn, look at the cross-hatching they drew between the cage and the glass . . . could that be indicating a manway? Hell, the damn space isn’t twenty inches wide.”

  I just stared at him, as did the others. Murphy turned, kept pulling on his wet suit jacket and grumbled resignedly as he stepped back into the sunlight, “may as well get ready partner, he’s in there. That’s the only place he can be.”

  Armed with our new insight, we plunged back in. Larry stood back and tended the line as I swam with my face pressed against the long panels of glass in the first room, my dive light held even with my faceplate. I dearly hoped I would not find an agonized face pressed up to mine on the other side of a quarter-inc
h glass panel. I didn’t. As I passed back and forth, peering through the glass working from the top down, the first visual contact came with his fin.

  His dark wet suit was invisible even inches away through the murk, but I noted a piece of blue reflective tape on one of my lower passes. As I stared at it, I gradually was able to discern the shape of a diver’s fin with a foot buckled inside. Why in God’s name he had wedged himself into that narrow confine only a panicked mind could surmise, but he was there.

  Knowing where he was, I had only one option for extricating him. I handed the reel to Larry and, double tanks and all, forced myself into the manway. I didn’t need the reel because there was no way in hell I could get lost; it was getting stuck that was the concern now. Suddenly I was on him, upright in front of me. I had the unsettling feeling that I was standing behind him in line.

  Dutifully, I ran my light down his torso, gathering information we needed for the report. Regulator hanging free, face mask on, eyes open . . . eyes open, good Lord, I wished the still compartment wasn’t affording such good visibility. I had a good two and a half feet of seeing room, enough to emblazon the scene in some compartment of my brain I don’t like to visit.

  Enough, forget the paperwork. I grabbed the corpse by his tank valve and lurched backward. I felt my own tanks break free of the confinement with a degree of relief that informed me how much I must have been worrying about being able to back out. My hand was still extended into the slot; with a final wrench I pulled him out. Rigor mortis was still evident (lasts longer underwater) so it was a mannequin I handed to Larry. He wrapped his right arm around the diver’s waist and, looping a finger over the guideline, made his way back to our entrance window. Ambient light was coming through from the outside; we could switch off our lights, slow our breathing, and collect ourselves.