by Tim Cahill
Then there was the phenomenon called “shallow-water blackout.” Divers hyperventilate or “pack” on the surface. They take three half-breaths, exhale three times, then take a full breath, piping in the last air through pursed lips until the lungs actually hurt. The arms are held out to the side, so the rib cage has room to expand. A full stomach takes up room that the lungs can use, and no diver eats before a competition. Some don’t even eat the night before.
At sixty feet, the expansive pain in the lungs is gone. Divers are usually down for a minimum of two minutes. When they rise to the surface, they sometimes black out at about thirty feet. Kids I knew in grade school used to play “knockout” with the same gas laws—the physics of water pressure on empty lungs. Out on the playground at St. Mary’s, I might empty my lungs; then someone else—maybe Armand Bruni, who was a strong kid—would squeeze my chest in a bear hug. Ten or twenty seconds later, I’d wake up on the ground, looking up into a sea of inquisitive faces. Knockout!
In shallow-water blackouts during spearfishing, upward momentum and the buoyancy of the wet suit commonly carry divers to the surface, where they pop awake, likely wondering: Is that what death feels like?
Which is an experience not generally offered in everyday adult life. Knowing one’s own limitations is a form of self-knowledge. Playing around at the edge of those limitations, when the penalty for exceeding them is catastrophic if not fatal, is a form of active meditation. Forget about wall gazing: Shallow-water blackout is a flat-out real-world demonstration of the Zen dictum that only consciousness is reality. And these guys, these self-contained, semi-enlightened athletes—these spearfishermen—they were the Monks of Apnea.
So, naw, I couldn’t dive with the American team. I didn’t have the skill, the maturity, the spirituality. Besides, it was illegal.
Another day, another parade: bass drums and trumpets, bedraggled floats, and a dispirited band of angels trudging along in their crumpled and seriously parade-worn wings. The first day’s diving had begun at nine.
The sky had cleared a bit, but there was a stiff wind driving heavy surf into the pinnacles just offshore. I could see one nearby competitor working the rocky surf-side promontory of a nearby islet. His boat—each competitor was assigned a boat—bobbed nearby. The black fins rose above the surface of the sea, then sank. Rose and sank.
It was a dangerous place to be. The diver was timing his descents to the waves that were exploding off the rocks to his back. He dove a few seconds before a ten-foot wall of water rolled over him, then likely wedged himself into a crevice in the rock wall as the underwater surge battered him. As the wave receded, the surge pulled him—and all the nearby fish—back out into the ocean. And that was when he’d do his hunting.
In spearfishing, fish are taken from a foot to ten feet away. The sport isn’t about marksmanship. It’s about knowing where your prey will be. The diver I was watching passed a speared fish to his boatman, and it was put in a numbered sack. His fins rose and sank as a wave powered over him.
Bill Ernst was working a kelp bed some miles from shore, in one of the three large competition areas assigned for this day. The kelp was strange: It didn’t reach to the surface. You had to come shooting down through a thick canopy of leaves at thirty feet, then move rapidly, pulling yourself hand over hand through the stalks. Catch a fish, and you had to drag it up through the tangling canopy. There were about twenty species of fish it was legal to spear, and they weren’t a whole hell of a lot different from fish Bill had seen in the U.S. It was tougher to avoid undersize fish: Peru had a weight limit, rather than the length limit U.S. divers are used to.
Visibility was poor: five to thirty feet. Bill told me later that he didn’t see another diver. At least under water. Sometimes in these competitions, two divers will come upon a school of fish. There are two ways to handle the situation. You power into the center of the school, scatter the fish, and hope you are faster and more skillful than the other guy. Either that, or you separate and work the fringes of the school, both of you taking a lot of fish, the faster and more skillful man taking the most.
These Peruvian fish weren’t particularly wary. They hadn’t been hunted much. It’s a lot different in places that see a lot of spearfishing pressure, like Hawaii. There you dive down into a school of fish, and when you get to where they are, they’ve all moved uniformly out of range. Everywhere you look, on all sides, there are fish calmly feeding twenty-five feet away. Move, and the fishless hole moves with you. From the surface, it looks like theater in the round and you’re Hamlet.
Late that afternoon, people gathered at a huge stone amphitheater that was set on the beach and accommodated about three thousand people. The proud citizens of Ilo, along with small groups of international visitors—Japanese, Spanish, Greek—sat on stone benches as men with wheelbarrows rolled bags of fish along the esplanade from the docks to the beach. The bags were numbered and placed on woven mats on the sand below the flags for various countries.
The competition ended at three o’clock. Most of us in the audience had found seats at about four. It wasn’t until six or so that all the fish were assembled and officials began counting them. People sat patiently watching. No one left. In fact, you couldn’t leave the amphitheater—someone else would take your place. The upper deck was ringed with another two thousand people who couldn’t find seats. There was polite applause for everyone: Turkey—hey, lotta nice fish, you guys—Greece, Tahiti, Brazil, Portugal, Croatia.
I reflected on the Latin American temperament. The folks sitting on these rock benches were the very same people who drove 250 miles an hour through town in pickup trucks, and in new Japanese cars and taxicabs and buses. It was, apparently, considered courteous and mannerly to honk loudly and often. People who didn’t lean on the horn at least once a block simply weren’t paying attention. The city was, after all, full of annoying, sometimes slow-moving pedestrians. You’d see well-dressed businessmen driving late-model cars bearing down on some ancient woman hobbling painfully across the street, and they’d blast her with the horn.
“Yo, I’m driving here, Grandma.”
And yet these same people could sit patiently, breathlessly, watching men count fish for eight hours.
The Americans did okay the first day—112 fish. We were number 11, out of twenty-four countries, way ahead of Russia (30), Argentina (20), Japan (37), Belgium (47), Greece (22), and Venezuela (61). Spain was the leader with 225 fish, and France was right behind with 224 fish. Points were added for poundage, but the standings didn’t change on the first day.
Back at my hotel, the French consular official was livid. France, it seems, had been disqualified. “Our captain,” Philippe Lavarelo, explained, “just got into another boat. He wasn’t even diving, and they disqualified the whole team. This whole thing is political. They don’t like us.” He was writing a letter of protest.
Jon Bergren, captain of the American team, laid it out for me. Each diver will have a list of perhaps five sites that he thinks will be productive. It may take an hour to fish out the first place. He then goes on to the next site on his list. The problem is that someone from another country may have already worked that area, and there was no way to know.
Every diver was assigned a boat, and to level the playing field, all the boats were the same size and powered by the same type of engine. The captain of each team was required to pick one of his country’s three divers and stay with him and his boat.
The French had asked permission to use one of their fast Zodiacs, to accommodate their video team. The French captain, it appears, had transferred into the Zodiac and had checked various areas so as to advise his team in the matter of which sites were being fished. When Peruvian observers stopped the Zodiac, the French captain was found hiding under a tarp. Or so the competition rumor had it. (The press office would neither confirm nor deny the allegation.)
It was, Bill Ernst said, a breach of the rules, but he thought the Peruvian officials were going a little hard on the F
rench. They should be disqualified for that day’s diving, but not for the entire competition.
A Chilean diver I talked to later was all for the disqualification. If the French were allowed to compete tomorrow, on the last day of the competition, they could conceivably register a protest with the international organization, get reinstated, and have their first day’s catch counted. The only way to teach them a lesson was to tell them they couldn’t compete the next day.
It would also, I noted, move Peru up from eighth place to seventh, and Chile up from fourth to third. There was that, the Chilean said. But, damnit, the French were always doing questionable stuff. A few weeks ago, the Chilean said, he was scouting, diving on an underwater pinnacle. The French came by in a Zodiac and kept circling above him.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because they’re French.”
“You mean,” I said, “you think they’re arrogant.”
Yes, that’s what he meant. Exactly.
Actually, I’d had some contact with the French divers the day before. They had been uniformly pleasant, and, in fact, I owed my basement living accommodations, such as they were, to Philippe of the French embassy. It occurred to me that calling the French arrogant is a little like saying Romans speak Italian. French folks have the most euphonious language on earth, their scholars commit the most esoteric theoretics, their food is superb, their athletes are more courageous and better trained than those of any other country. They are culturally superior and can pronounce the word ennui in a way that lets the rest of us know how much they suffer in our presence. Arrogance is a French cultural trait, as delicious, in its way, as any bouillabaisse.
The next morning, early, my hotel lobby was in chaos. The French contingent was leaving Ilo in protest and en masse. Hey, au revoir, guys. I transferred from my basement hovel to a top-floor oceanfront room that had previously contained culturally superior Frenchmen.
“There is a man you could talk to,” the bright young people at the press center told me the next day, “but he is very busy right now.”
“What’s he doing?”
“He is giving away the fish.”
“But you told me I could watch him do this thing.”
“Of course.” Indeed, I could talk to the fish man later. He could tell me precisely how he’d given away yesterday’s catch.
“Can I watch now?” I was becoming frustrated.
“Come back in an hour, please.”
It occurred to me that I was being sandbagged. There might be a story here: FISH ROT WHILE POOR GO HUNGRY. Something like that. I wanted to see them give away the fish. It was either that or another parade.
I had lunch in a downtown restaurant and read the Tacna paper. The Campeonato was front-page news. Aside from the French situation, two divers had been injured in the first day’s competition, one seriously. Slovenian Boris Truhacen shattered his kneecap when he rose from a dive into a fifteen-foot swell that dashed him onto a rocky islet. A single fifteen-foot wave can drop a thousand tons of water on the bow of a boat. It is a force entirely beyond human control. There was a picture of the poor guy in the Tacna paper. He was lying on a bed, his leg in a cast, looking profoundly drugged, and hooked up to what appeared to be an automatic morphine pump.
In the distance, I could hear the dismal thump of the day’s first parade moving my way. A familiar-looking truck passed by outside. It was, in fact, the refrigerated truck I’d seen last night at the fish-counting ceremony.
I threw a few bills on the table and sprinted out to my car. The truck hadn’t gotten very far on the narrow cobblestone street, and I managed to get up within a car or two of his bumper. When the driver cleared the downtown area—most of which was blocked off for the parade and full of pedestrians—he cranked it up to 250 miles an hour, and we went screaming into the outskirts of town, blasting our horns at children and puppies and people in wheelchairs.
Here I was chasing a refrigerated truck through a remote town in southern Peru and convinced, in my own mind, that I was the Woodward and Bernstein of fish. The truck stopped at the farmers’ market on the main road into town. Two men got out, roiled up the back gate, and started giving away fish to shabbily dressed shoppers.
I stood there watching for some time, chatting with folks, and from what I was able to piece together, the Peruvians had been extremely clever in their fish-distribution scheme. The city government was to give away the first day’s catch, and the state would be in charge of the second and last day’s. Since there was some tension between the two entities, each would struggle to distribute the fish in a way that would enhance its standing among the organized poor.
It was a maddening development. What kind of story was this, anyway? I couldn’t dive with the competitors or even go out in a boat to watch them. This left a six-hour hole in every day, an era’s worth of wall gazing, followed by eight excruciating hours of public fish-counting. I had plenty of time to poke around in the cracks and crevices of the competition, but everywhere I looked there was a dismal lack of scandal. The contest was ecologically sound and would have no lasting impact on the fishery in the area. The Peruvian organizers were, well, they were parade-crazed, yes, but they were also extremely efficient and well prepared. And now … now the sons of bitches were giving away food to hungry people.
Spain won the Campeonato. Chile was second, Italy was third, and Peru was fourth. The U.S. was tenth, out of twenty-four countries, not a bad showing considering the team had only been able to put in a scant week of scouting. José Vina of Spain speared the most fish and was the individual winner. Renzo Mazzari was sixth, which was considered a good showing. Frane Zanki of Croatia caught the biggest fish: 19.294 pounds.
Bill Ernst found me in the hotel bar late that night. I asked if he had any complaints.
None at all. The event had gone very smoothly.
Was it the best-organized competition ever?
Bill thought for a moment and said that he supposed it was.
I finished my beer. “Otra vez,” I said to the barman: another time.
Bill and I chatted about the contest for a time, then he said he had to turn in. There was a big good-bye ceremony the next day. He expected a lot of speeches. International goodwill. That sort of thing.
“And a parade,” I muttered darkly.
“Yeah,” Bill agreed. “I think they’re going to have a parade.”
“Otra vez” I said.
It occurred to me that this event was something like softball—more fun to play than to watch. I told myself I’d like to do a lot more spearfishing in the future. Get good at it. The languid physicality of the sport appealed to me. There was something in the Zen of apnea I liked, something that was akin to meditation. It’s probably a good thing to know your limitations, to be able to control your autonomic systems, to flirt with nirvana through apnea. An unconsecrated spearfisherman like myself could stop gazing at the walls and, instead, listen for the sound of one hand clapping in the immense wonder of the world’s oceans. Dinner, after a few hours of spiritual questing, might be Bermuda chub, sautéed in lemon butter. I liked the idea of enlightenment on a plate.
The next world championship, Bill reminded me, the twentieth, would be held in two years.
“I’ll hold my breath,” I said.
Search and Rescue
Park Country Search and Rescue called me out just before midnight on a cold November evening. The hunter had been missing for forty hours. He’d been working Tom Miner Basin, in the mountains adjacent to Yellowstone Park, tracking elk, his partner said. It was now about two in the morning, and the temperature had plunged to almost 30 degrees below zero. A local outfitter had volunteered his cabin near the trailhead, and that’s where we were, poring over topographical maps, matching the terrain with what we knew of the hunter.
He was from out of state and didn’t know the Montana mountains, his partner said, but he’d done some snow camping on the West Coast—Mount Rainier, I think. The guy went up alone, just t
o test himself in the snow. He was a highly trained security guard at the sort of facility terrorists target, and he kept himself in shape. We knew that while he didn’t have a tent or sleeping bag, he did have matches, good boots, warm gloves and a good hat, and had dressed in woolen layers.
His partner said he was the type of guy who pushed himself, who didn’t give up. They’d come across some elk tracks in the snow two days ago, and our lost hunter thought he could run the animals down. His partner waited at the trailhead until long after dark. Then he drove down into town and notified the sheriff.
Our team called the man’s wife. You hate to do that—wake them up at two in the morning to tell them a loved one is missing in bitterly cold weather. And yet you have to know as much as you can. You have to figure out what your man is likely to do. The hunter had told his wife there was no way he could get lost. “All you have to do,” he had said, “is walk downhill to the river.” Near Tom Miner Basin, there are lots of ways to go downhill into places that lead straight back up into the spine of the Gallatin Mountains.
So that’s what we had to work with: tough guy, in shape, no quitter, some experience in the snow. I had a good feeling about this one. Mostly, after forty hours in 30-degrees-below-zero weather, they don’t make it.
Our team was working from what we call the PLS—place last seen. Usually, after a day and a half, we’ll find lost folks within a radius of about three miles of the PLS. For this hunter, we’d stretch the radius out to five miles. We figured our man must have followed the elk until it got dark on him that first night. The animals were moving south and west. We eliminated unlikely elk habitat, and established two or three areas where the man might have stood as the darkness fell on him. If he was disoriented and tried moving downhill, he could have ended up in only a few places.
In the morning, we’d send snowmobilers out into the areas where we least expected to find our man. It’s tough searching for someone on a snow machine, and we don’t put much faith in them. A horseback team would ride the search area diagonally, looking to cut tracks. A fixed-wing aircraft would overfly the basin.
