Submerged

by Daniel Lenihan

  I soon emerged from the side door of the van, slipped through the well-house door, and plunged into the crystal-clear pool. We were of the opinion that, in this case, asking forgiveness would be a more hopeful route than asking permission. I couldn’t understand why I was always so lucky when it came to this short-straw thing and wondered whether being apprehended diving a well-house in Mexico was a felony. Paul assured me it didn’t matter; they probably shot you for misdemeanors anyway.

  The dive was brief but surprisingly interesting. There was no penetrable cave, but I spent awhile making sure, because it was real, real close. I could extend my light through the fissure at the bottom of the fault and see wide-open going, it was just not quite big enough to get through even with my tanks off. The group was intrigued with my report after they had safely closed the van doors around me on my return. They would do a night assault if there was any question in my mind, but there wasn’t.

  As I dried off, I could see that Paul and Sheck were still in buoyant moods, unusual after a negative report about a cave. “The key, you got it?” The smiles answered my question, and we were off down the road to Río Choy. The only downside was a sore throat—for some reason, that air from the planta didn’t seem to have any other physiological effect on us except to leave several of us with whopping sore throats for several hours.

  The hydrology involved in creating a place like Nacimiento Río Choy is understandable intellectually but hard to comprehend in its reality. The water is artesian, powered by gravity as it emerges fountain-like from the top of a mound of rocks several meters above the level of the surrounding land where it cascades down to become a small river. We could drive right up to the site but had to then clamber up and over fifteen feet of steep rocks to get to the surface of the sinkhole, while carrying approximately 120 pounds of tanks and lights.

  This climb occasioned the second time on this trip that I would be placed in a life-threatening situation, by far the most bizarre in my diving career. About midway up the waterfall slope my foot wedged between two of the large rocks. In trying to extricate myself I lost my balance and was pushed over on my side by the force of the water and the double 100s on my back. My extended arm was the only thing preventing me from going face-down, and it was holding a good portion of my upper body weight. Paul and Sheck at first thought this amusing until they realized that once my hand gave way, my face would be underwater.

  I was in serious danger of drowning in water twenty inches deep. The gibes we usually shot at each other, in lieu of sympathy for minor injuries, stopped; both started quickly divesting themselves of their own gear so they would be able to reach me. They were suddenly in a high-stakes race against time. No words were exchanged, nor were they necessary.

  I stared at them intently as I developed a case of “sewing-machine arm,” an expression climbers and cavers use when an overstressed limb starts to go into spasmodic shaking before finally giving way. Paul reached me first, grabbed the tank straps where they crossed my chest, but by now I couldn’t help push and he was only delaying the inevitable. Sheck then maneuvered to my right and somehow got a firm grasp on another strap. Between them, they were able to pull me forward. Once that happened, the crisis was over. I couldn’t use my arm, but I was able to extract my foot and continue up the last few feet and roll into the pool of water at the top of the cascade.

  Gasping for breath, we gathered at the top of the falls. My wrist was swollen to twice its normal size but I was okay otherwise. I was also the only one still fully dressed, equipment in place for the dive. I broke the silence with a question: “What the hell has been keeping you guys?” We lay in the pool on top of that silly Mexican waterfall and laughed insanely until our nervousness was discharged and my wrist had reattained some semblance of normalcy before we started our dive.

  Río Choy was a hummer of a cave. Sheck ran the reel as we proceeded through this cavern that had a very irregular ceiling about 130 to 140 feet deep. We couldn’t see the bottom most of the time, so we hovered high and ran our line between the lower ceiling projections. We decided to check one of the irregularities in the overhead and swam up a steep limestone projection.

  We soon came to the surface inside the cave. We were in air, but the ceiling pocketed out a little way above us. The next projection resulted in the same finding; having dropped down to 130 again, we watched our depth gauges return to zero as we headed up to the next air-filled room chamber. There were portions of this cave above the water table, a very rare occurrence in the Florida caves. None of us had ever seen a formation like this—a series of what Sheck dubbed for lack of a better name “surge chambers,” imagining a process of roiling surface water that might have formed them in eons past.

  We couldn’t keep ascending to check out the different overhead leads due to decompression complications, so we just continued at the 130-foot depth. At this point we had what might be termed a little quarrel in mime among friends. Sheck didn’t want to loop the lines on the ceiling projections because it would complicate the mapping process on the way back out. We usually mapped our way on the return, noting depths, distances, and compass azimuths from the safety line, which was knotted every ten feet for this purpose. Paul and I were keen to map the place also but were even more keen to come out alive.

  We kept visualizing what would happen if that line were to snap and recoil with no bottom reference. Sheck indicated considerable irritation when he noted Paul had looped the line behind him, ceremoniously undoing it and waving him off. We thought about that for a while and silently overruled his objection. At appropriate points Paul would pull some tension on the line emanating from the reel in Sheck’s hand so he wouldn’t feel the tugs, as I stretched the nylon cord over convenient limestone projections.

  After about a quarter mile of penetration the cave suddenly dipped deeper, met a floor at about 160 feet, and became siltier. We had pushed about as far as we could anyway on this dive and it was a good time to call it. On our return to the entrance, Sheck accepted the discovery of our “wraps” with a resigned shake of his head.

  On exiting Río Choy after a lengthy decompression stop, we clambered back down the mini-waterfall in which I had almost met my demise and trekked wearily but happily back to Paul’s van. The adrenaline was keeping us on a nervous high. Thinking that the day’s adventures were over, we weren’t prepared for the nature of our reception at the vehicle. Two jeeps were parked behind it, and five men were standing there eyeing us with what seemed a mix of curiosity and amusement. What struck me immediately about their apparel, aside from the fact that it looked decidedly more expensive than that worn by most Mexican field laborers we had been rubbing shoulders with, was the belt accouterments. They sported exceptionally large 45 automatic pistols. The desk clerk from the Hotel Tanunil was sitting in the back of one of the jeeps with a sheepish look on his face—so much for honor among conspirators.

  “Hey, so, uh, buenas tardes,” from me.

  “Bonj . . . , uh, hi y’all,” from Paul.

  “Good afternoon,” from the apparent leader of the Mexicans in pretty decent English.

  “You know you are diving on property that is private to our boss, Señor Santos.” This was not a question.

  Sheck took over at this point and nodded. “Si.” Then he gave them that Exley grin and offered his hand. I’ve never seen anyone turn down that offer from Sheck. His eyes conveyed a double-edged intensity that crossed language barriers. They seemed to say, “I’m a friendly fella, and I’m really enjoying meetin’ ya, and you really wouldn’t want to deal with me when I’m not feeling friendly no matter how big those pistolas are, and nice evening, eh?” It’s true, Sheck really could say all that with a handshake and a grin.

  “Mr. Santos wants to meet you.”

  Paul’s eyes rolled in a circle as he glanced at me, and we both listened intently as Sheck responded, “Gee, that would be nice, figger we could drop by tomorrow?”

  “No, he wants to see you now.” This was no
t said with belligerence but firmness. The man then followed with a line that should rank in the top few I’ve heard in my life. “Mr. Santos wants you and your friends who were at the Tanunil [hotel] to join him for dinner . . . he said to tell you,” the man paused here and his lips curved into the beginnings of a shy smile, “uh, . . . that he insists on meeting you because he is glad to have finally found someone who may be as crazy as he is.”

  For a long moment we stood silent, mouths open and eyes dazed, reflecting our astonishment. Sheck, after glancing at Paul and me (no help there), turned back to the men and said, “Well, okay, sure we’ll just get changed and . . .”

  “And you will follow us.” He then extended his own hand and added, “and I take the key from you now, okay?”

  Sheck pulled the key to the gate from his pocket and handed it to them. We dressed quickly and our chastened little caravan of vehicles meekly followed the jeep full of private guards to Mr. Santos’s hacienda.

  Within moments we were ushered into an outdoor seating area, a very miniature amphitheater of sorts, and hesitantly took our seats. We had hardly settled onto the benches when ladies in colorful finery appeared and began serving us coffee and sweet rolls from platters they deftly balanced against their shoulders. These were well-trained servants, and some quite attractive. “Uncle Paul” was still not sure about the extraordinary developments of the last hour, and I saw him eye his sweet roll warily. More trusting, I was convinced something more was going on here than ritual preliminaries to an execution for trespassing. I downed my sweet roll with gusto.

  Then we met Mr. Santos. He rode into the midst of what I realized was a private bull ring, in the full regalia of a matador. Mr. Santos’s name, we learned later, carried about the same anonymity south of the Río Grande, as did John Wayne in the U.S.A. It was only our cultural ethnocentrism that left us in ignorance of the name of the most famous Portuguese-style bullfighter in all of Mexico.

  This style of bullfighting is done from horseback, and Mr. Santos’s name and face were plastered over walls surrounding bullrings throughout Mexico. He had apparently kept up on our antics at the Tanunil and other caves in the immediate area because he owned the hotel and most of the land one could drive to in ten minutes in any direction.

  He entered the ring looking neither right nor left and proceeded to perform a series of extraordinarily deft maneuvers striking at and retreating from an imaginary bull. The fine nuances of technique were lost on us gringos, but we were thrilled to see the performance and bask in what was now the firm conviction that we were truly guests and not prisoners.

  There followed a fascinating evening of banter and storytelling. At the hacienda, we sat down to a lavishly prepared and served meal. A highly educated man, Santos rivaled us in both our command of English (somewhat surprising) and our ability to shamelessly embroider tales (very surprising).

  When he told the story of his brush with death in Río Choy, however, I could sense he was sharing something that had deeply touched him. We were quiet as he recounted the episode in which he had, true to the nature of a bold man, decided to procure scuba equipment and dive in the mysterious water source located on his property. In the basin, or open part, he located and removed a mastodon tusk and then decided to experiment exploring the cave that led away from the basin.

  It was a story, variations of which we had heard from other lips a hundred times. People take away memories from fearful experiences and close calls in various degrees of vividness—there is something about almost drowning in a cave, however, that causes the strongest soul to shudder and leaves an impression that doesn’t dull with the passing of time. The nature of the incident was straightforward: He swam in through clear water, staying in sight of light, the silt came up, and, presto—his world shrank to within eighteen inches of his face. No matter how many times we hear stories like that, it hits home. All of us, at some point early in our association with caves, had dabbled at the brink of disaster. As he spoke, each of us seemed to quietly withdraw inside and consider our own early brushes with mortality. He saw in our eyes an empathy for the trauma he suffered that he probably would never find in anyone else.

  Mr. Santos concluded the evening by touring us through his huge trophy collection: Exotic animals of every description, including a polar bear, were mounted in the hallways and antechambers of his home. As we departed, late that night, he insisted we take the tusk he had removed from Río Choy as a gift. After trying to refuse it many times, Jamie and Carol put it in their van. As we drove away from the rancho I wondered if Mr. Santos had insisted on us taking that memento of his dive because in some strange way, he felt we were the only ones who could also take away the demon that lived within it . . . and within him.

  This experience just added to the tempo and spirit of the expedition—we had been making one exciting discovery after another—some within the earth and, like Mr. Santos, some within ourselves. My revitalizing holiday had turned into an orgy of exploration. The archeological finds we had to report to Mexican authorities were, in themselves, stunning. We became tired and took even greater risks.

  In the cow pasture of a field near the town of Mante, we found a spring that emerged from a shallow indentation in the side of a hill. Within hours we had dived the place to the limits of any semi-sane air diving. On the first dive, I watched my depth gauge edge over the mark at 270 feet when Jamie Stone, my partner, found a good tie-off point for our line. Before we had finished our decompression stops, Sheck and Paul passed by us on their way to extending our line. By the time we emerged from the water, it had been extended to a depth of 330 feet. Our dives at Mante brought our expedition to an end. We had fittingly ended with a spring that seemed to be going on forever.

  Exhausted and sated with adventure, we made our way back to the border, and to Corpus. There I rearmed my friends, shook hands, and pointed my Volkswagen van back toward Santa Fe. We all returned to our respective lives, taking with us memories that could never be purchased by the richest of millionaires.

  In later years, Sheck would return to Mante several times to further extend our exploration line to incredible depths that constituted consecutive world records for deep diving. Using gas mixtures that included helium to reduce narcosis, he achieved a depth of 680 feet. He then broke his own record when he took the line in Mante to 860 feet deep. I was preparing to visit him in Florida in the spring of 1994 with my family and some members of the SCRU team, when news reached us of the results of his latest and boldest attempt at securing the record.

  He had mentioned weeks earlier that he was going to put an end to his deep-diving obsession. He told me that he wanted to tie a knot at 1,000 feet. “You know how I am about round numbers,” he chuck-led over the phone. I was a bit bothered because, in his most recent depth record in a sinkhole in South Africa, he had run into visual-distortion problems that made him terminate the dive at 860 feet. The fact that it happened to be where he chose to terminate in Mante made me uneasy.

  There are no guidelines for diving to a 1,000 foot depth without use of sophisticated and expensive facilities and huge commercial or military commitment to support the dive. I hoped Sheck’s own body wasn’t trying to tell him something that gas laws and decompression theory could only suggest from studies with rats.

  Sheck made his way back to Mexico and, with an associate from Austin, tried to execute the dive that would again break his own world deep diving record and allow him to quit at a “round number.” It didn’t work out that way. When Sheck surfaced, it was many days later and only because his body was entangled in the descent line. His gauge indicated he had been to 905 feet.

  Sheck’s book Caverns Measureless to Man was published posthumously . The title came from the lines in Coleridge’s poem that he felt epitomized cave diving:In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

  A stately pleasure-dome decree:

  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

  Through caverns measureless to man

  Down to a sunless se
a.

  I have never been able to think of Sheck, and the sunless seas we shared, or cave-diving without Xanadu popping into my mind. I hope he’s there now, laughing that slow infectious laugh at Kubla Khan’s jokes, laying line that never needs to be wrapped and setting records in perfectly round numbers.

  In 1999, while representing the United States on an international committee related to UNESCO, I visited the Palacio de Bellas Artes, in Mexico City, where the Mexican Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) had a display of underwater archeological finds from their excavations. In one corner there was a fascinating array of ceramic figurines and alabaster serpents that had been scientifically removed from Media Luna. Sheck would have been happy to see that the artifacts he had treated with deference were twenty years later being enjoyed by the people of Mexico.

  PART II

  THE SCRU TEAM

  The new team tackles the most difficult shipwreck studies in the nation, embodies an aggressive preservation ethic, discovers and documents historic shipwrecks from Florida to Alaska, and the Great Lakes, maps the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor, and studies the haunts of pirates and prehistoric cultures in Micronesia.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BISCAYNE: BAPTISM OF FIRE

  Larry Murphy is on fire. I am very tired, and full comprehension of his predicament is slow to form in my bleary mind. His, too. He casts a puzzled look at me from his position on the bouncing bow of the twenty five-foot patrol boat as if waiting for orders. Flames emerging from a small generator lashed to the deck lick up his gasoline-spattered trousers and shirt, over the funnel in his hand, and on up to his uniform baseball cap. I say, “Jump,” and he steps backwards into the ocean, disappearing from view with a sharp sizzle.