One Breath

by Adam Skolnick

  By then it had become apparent to his new friends that there were two Nicks. The one out of the water lived free and easy. He was generous and kind, but something about being strapped into a competitive environment turned a key, and opened a door to his soul.

  As a child Nick had spent hours on the curb wondering if his father would pick him up that day, and when his dad skipped visits it was only human for Nick to wonder if his father even cared about him at all, if he loved him, if he was worth a damn. Nick never went to therapy and rarely talked about those days, but when he dove with the Bonzo crew, soared on his BMX bike, took the stage, or suited up to freedive with records on the line, he had a place to put all that darkness, like so many athletes, performers, and adventurers before him. Each athletic success became proof that he did matter. That he was worth something. The trouble was, the feeling always faded. For Nick, self-worth was ephemeral.

  Still, having an outlet enabled him to channel his fury and live with generosity and warmth. In the Caymans Nick hosted dinners and made coffee for all comers. He was a social vortex who didn’t have to speak to own a room. That’s the guy who intrigued both Ashley and Iru, who made friends with anyone and everyone. Of course, although Nick was a remarkable athlete, he didn’t land every jump, grab every lobster, or rock every dive. Nobody could, and whenever that happened to Nick, some reptilian part of his brain took over, and he’d snap into a self-directed tirade. The storm would soon pass and he would land back in his body with a smile on his face, but that didn’t make it healthy. Or sustainable.

  “Seeing him hit 91 was absolutely amazing, and he was a fantastic person,” said Kirk Krack. “I really liked Nick, but I didn’t like him as a competitor. He was exorcising demons from his past and using freediving to do that. Out of the water he was an amazing heartfelt soul, but he was Jekyll and Hyde.”

  Nick went for another record on day four of the competition, this time in Free Immersion. He’d announced a depth of 88 meters. The way Nick rationalized it, he’d just hit 91 meters, and since Free Immersion is considered the easiest discipline, 88 meters seemed like a safe bet. Never mind that he had never pulled down to a depth below 40 meters in his life. Not everyone was optimistic about the outcome. Furious, Ted found Nick and told him he was dangerous, that his ego was getting the better of him, and that he’d hurt himself, but Nick was tired of listening to Ted moan and groan. When he went for 85 meters on the first day, Nick could see the conflict of interest plain as day.

  Ted insists his intentions were always pure, and it wasn’t just Ted who was worried. All of the experienced competitors were concerned. They thought Nick wasn’t respecting the sport or the sea enough. “Don’t do that,” Ashley told him that night, “that’s stupid.” He wasn’t hearing it, and she didn’t have time to try and convince him. The next morning she’d be back in the water, too, hoping to extend her world record.

  Kirk didn’t hear about Nick’s announcement until the morning of his dive. The biggest problem was that Nick had no idea how long it would take for him to complete it. Although Free Immersion is considered an easier way to get to depth, it also takes longer than Constant Weight dives. Kirk took Nick aside, along with Dr. Shedd, the head of safety. “We don’t think you’re looking at this in the proper light,” Kirk told him. “Just because you went to 91 meters kicking, doesn’t mean you can do 88 in Free Immersion. They are completely different disciplines.”

  Nick held his ground, and there was nothing in the AIDA rules preventing him from making a leap from 40 meters to 88 in any discipline. Kirk and Shedd devised a special safety plan. Shedd would drop to 35 meters to act as a spotter, and alert the rest of the safety divers of Nick’s condition so they could be prepared should he need assistance. Kirk would kick down too, shoot the dive with his GoPro, and be on hand in case of an emergency.

  If the mercurial run-up to his dive wore on Nick, it didn’t affect his warm-up. He pulled down to 25 meters and walked the tightrope just as he’d done on the dives before, surfacing in time to watch Ashley extend her world record, to 65 meters. This time around she was far less nervous, and her dive was rock solid. Her lips weren’t blue and there was no hesitation when she surfaced. She did her three hook breaths and went through the protocol with ease, holding the tag high. When the white card came she pumped her fist three times while her Water Tribe went wild. Ashley would have won the overall competition if she’d gone for it, but she had come to Cayman for one purpose, to grab a world record and then spend the rest of the week putting as much distance between herself and Natalia as she could. After her second white card, she had four meters on the Russian and planned to add two more with a 67-meter dive on the last day.

  Natalia had enjoyed a dominant career, but Ashley was twenty-eight and coming into her own. She and Ren figured that after a strong week at Deja Blue, the record would be hers for a long time. They didn’t know that in a few hours, Natalia would hit the water in Dahab’s Blue Hole in Egypt. She and Alexey were hosting the Russian championships in their preferred training ground. Natalia had been watching Ashley’s progress the whole time. It was her fiftieth birthday, and she knew exactly what she wanted.

  Ashley was still on oxygen, replenishing her supply, like a running back might after a long touchdown run, while Nick was breathing up on the line. He’d gotten to 91 meters with questionable mechanics, and what got him there was letting go and trusting in his innate ability to dive, to do what came natural to him. This time it didn’t work out nearly as well. It took only four pulls to get to 10 meters, and another three before he was at 20 meters, where he tucked his chin, placed his arms at his sides, and became streamlined for the sink phase; 88 meters was still a long way down.

  Freedivers don’t breathe underwater, so they don’t succumb to nitrogen narcosis as often as scuba divers. But just as the partial pressure of oxygen rises in a diver’s bloodstream to keep him conscious, so does the nitrogen percentage, and that can feel downright psychedelic. If an athlete maintains focus, he may not notice, or might relax into the high. If he has any doubt, however, that narcosis can reverberate in the brain and turn negative thoughts into a tidal wave, which can sap oxygen stores and turn a peaceful dive into a bad trip. That’s exactly what happened to Nick. He wrote about it in his post for Freediveblog.com:

  I felt extremely vulnerable [at 88 meters] without anything on my feet. My mind got the better of my body and my emotions took over. I panicked and raced to the surface instead of relaxing and accepting the vulnerability. I burned through all my reserves…

  If only he’d let the thoughts pass and pulled up slowly and confidently, he might have made it. Instead, he rushed, and with each stressful pull and panicked thought, oxygen burned. Three minutes into the dive, as he approached Shedd, he signaled that he was in distress, but Shedd didn’t recognize the signal. Kirk did, and quickly relayed it to the next safety down, Robert Lee. Lee swam to Nick, who blacked out in his arms at 30 meters. “It was the most horrible blackout I’d ever seen,” said Shedd.

  Lee secured Nick’s airway by placing one hand over his nose and the other under the chin and began kicking up. Two more safeties, including Ren, kicked down to 20 meters and helped Lee swim Nick to the surface. At the surface Nick remained out for fifteen seconds, while the safeties called his name, blew across his eyes, and tapped his cheek. No luck.

  “He didn’t come around right away so we started doing ventilations,” Shedd said. “I did two or three ventilations and he woke up with this dead, thousand-mile stare, and then blood just started spewing.”

  Deep-water blackouts are uncommon in freediving and they are almost always accompanied by pulmonary edema, and sometimes pulmonary hemorrhage. When Nick came to, he coughed up pink froth. The blood and plasma, which was shunted to his core and engorged his alveolar capillaries (blood vessels in his lungs) thanks to the mammalian dive reflex, had leaked into his air sacs, like water from leaky pipes. Shedd placed an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth, and that positive press
ure helped move the fluid from his lungs back into the bloodstream. He recovered quickly, occasionally removing the mask to spit globs of red blood into the rippling blue.

  There was a fifteen-minute delay in the competition while the safety team took care of Nick, and another fifteen to give them time to rest, but a whole day of diving lay ahead, and the competition went on. Kerry was next on the line and had been in the water preparing to dive when this happened. “There was a lot of blood,” she said, and it shook her up. Her dive was stressful. Fear had crept in and followed her deep. The stress sapped her oxygen stores and she blacked out at the surface. So did the next diver. The one after that turned early.

  Shedd disqualified Nick for the remainder of the depth competition. But that didn’t stop him from going back to the doctor every day, professing how much better he felt, and asking for one more open-water dive. Shedd wouldn’t budge. Nick also approached Kerry for her opinion. “I told him to take a break, but he wanted an exact time [when his lungs would be healed], and I couldn’t give it to him. There was no data, but I kept pushing that bleeding from your lungs is serious.”

  “He had something driving him,” Steve said.

  “He saw what he could do and he wanted to be the best,” added Kerry.

  Ted felt terrible about the incident. “I should have jumped up and down and said, ‘No, no, no! He’s not doing that dive,” he told Ashley after Nick died, but in the immediate aftermath, part of him also thought it would humble Nick. Perhaps he wouldn’t feel so invincible and be more inclined to listen. Still, nobody thought Nick was in mortal danger.

  “We just thought he was young and aggressive and didn’t know any better,” said Ren. “We never thought death was a possibility. It had never happened in twenty-two years of competitions. That’s why we have a doctor there, that’s why we have a medic there, that’s why there’s a whole team of safety divers.”

  “You can’t lie to the water,” Grant Graves told him in the aftermath. “Whatever you are going through in your life, whatever issues you are dealing with will come out in the water.” Nick hinted that he’d learned something from his ordeal in his blog post, and wrote about his conversation with Grant.

  I was really angry with myself for being so reckless and arrogant…You can’t lie to water, a hard lesson to learn.

  Later that afternoon, Ashley was in celebration mode. She’d had a dream, set a goal, and acheived it; now she wanted to share it with her family. She called home to spread the word. “This record has been around since 2008,” she told her father. “And guess what? I broke it twice.” She told him the whole story, while her mom and sister chimed in with questions. Afterward she strolled out to the pool, feeling fulfilled. She spotted Ren, Ted, and a few other divers sitting under a gazebo in the shade looking glum, so she walked over to spread her cheer.

  “Natalia broke your record,” Ren said flatly.

  “No she didn’t,” Ashley said, smiling, thinking he was joking, but their expressions hadn’t changed.

  “Ashley, Natalia broke your record. She’s competing in Dahab right now,” Ren said. Natalia had held the record for four years and Ashley held it for just over seventy-two hours. Ted logged on to find out the depth.

  “She hit 66 meters,” he said. Fine. It was true, but there was still hope. The competition in Dahab was scheduled to end on the same day as Deja Blue, so Ashley and Ren decided to wait and watch Natalia’s announcements. If Ashley could beat her on the last dive of the comp, her record would last longer than three days.

  Though Shedd benched Nick from the depth competition, he was still allowed in the pool, and competed in Static the night after his injury. “Since he wouldn’t be exposing his lungs to pressure in the pool, theoretically it should have been safe to compete in Static,” Kerry reasoned. “But there was no data to back that up.” Such was the medical wilderness in the freediving world.

  Nick’s Static dives mattered because he needed to hit at least five minutes to make the US national team. He came up with plenty left in the tank at 5:36. Despite his injury, on balance it had been a splendid first competition for him. He’d earned an American record and a spot on the US team bound for Nice later that summer, along with Ashley and Ted Harty.

  Steve Benson got his national record too, with an astounding static of 7:43, but the competition didn’t end happily for Ashley. She’d originally planned to dive three times and push the depth two meters at a time, but the day before her final dive she checked Natalia’s announcement, and noticed Natalia was planning a dive to 68 meters. Ashley announced 69 meters. “Instead of sticking to my plan,” she said, “I played her game and blacked out.” It wasn’t a scary episode. She was only out for a few seconds, but that was enough. Natalia never did dive that day. Once she knew Ashley red carded, there was no need.

  All freediving competitions end with a blowout party, and Deja Blue was no exception. After eating mindfully and going to sleep early for weeks, the athletes stayed up all night long. Nick started it off by mixing a round of drinks for Ashley and Iru by the pool. While he was in the kitchen, Ashley teased Iru. “He’s cute. Don’t you think he’s cute?” she asked.

  “Of course he’s cute. Come on, Ash.” Iru had enjoyed Nick right away. She’d come to his dinners, cooking Venezuelan specialties like tostones and arepas, which Nick loved. And she’d do yoga with him some mornings, too. She’d just gotten out of a long-term relationship and allowed her mind to wander in Nick’s direction, especially when he flirted with her in the kitchen.

  “You guys should hook up,” Ashley said. “I’m serious.”

  “We’ll see,” Iru said, giggling.

  Nick enjoyed Iru’s beautiful smile, thick brown hair, and curves. She didn’t think he was classically good looking, but she found him sexy, and funny too. She’d laugh hardest when he tried to speak Spanish because he sounded closer to a telenovela actor than a native speaker. Still, he was charming, and though he wasn’t an especially good dancer, he tried very hard.

  Drinks flowed, they got tipsy, salsa music blared, and eventually the party stormed the pool. Everybody was wet when Iru breathed up and swam underwater among the bare naked legs. One length became two, which became three, and Nick was worried, so he stopped her, and lifted her into his arms. They made eye contact and he kissed her sweetly. “Kiss me more,” she said. Iru enjoyed his sweet kisses but she wanted passion. She wanted a magic carpet ride.

  While the Water Tribe partied on, Logan’s images posted to CNN.com. Included among them were photos of Ashley’s and Nick’s triumphs, his tightrope walk, and his underwater blackout. Although Nick had checked in with his mother and sister, so they knew he was safe, he never told them how to track the competition. He didn’t want them to know when he was diving or how deep, and he certainly never told them what had happened on the day he went to 88 meters, but it didn’t take long for someone to bring it to their attention. Fred, Belinda, Jen, Kristine, and Katie all saw the images in a matter of hours.

  “It concerned us all,” Kristine said. “That’s the first time I realized that something bad could happen.”

  Nila Girl carved the water and the Caribbean trade winds filled her sails. Nick stood on the bow, his eyes closed, the sun on his face, the wind billowing his long hair. Ren was at the helm smiling and laughing, Ashley’s arm around him. The day after Deja Blue wrapped, Ashley asked Iru and Nick to join them on their cruise to Florida. Iru couldn’t make it. Besides, her would-be-romance with Nick had ended with a thud. He was too passive, and when she tried to get aggressive, he became uncomfortable and she felt rejected.

  “He’s too much like a woman,” she told Ashley, jilted, which made Ashley even more curious about her strange new friend. She’d known him for only a few weeks and she’d seen so many sides. He was part brooding intellect, part petulant bad boy, part elite athlete, and part nurturing host; she was stoked when he trashed his return ticket from Grand Cayman to come along.

  It took two days to sail from
Grand Cayman to Cuba. When the sun was up, the sea was that perfect deep blue. They were visited by dolphin pods and trolled for skipjack tuna, and at night they took shifts at the helm so everyone could sleep. It wasn’t long before Ashley and Nick began taking their shifts together. Nick told her about his broken-home childhood and Ashley told him about her alcoholic father. How she’d get nervous on her walk home from school, wondering if he’d been drinking again, if he’d be slurring his words, especially if she was bringing a friend home to play.

  “Once when I was eleven, he made me ride with him to the dump,” she said. “He was wasted. Slurry, glassy-eyed, the whole thing. To get to the landfill we had to drive up a big hill, with a little black wall to keep you from running over the side, and he kept hitting it.” Scared, Ashley cried until she was bawling, and instead of being sensitive he lashed out at her to grow up. Nick listened intensely as the sea sloshed the side of the boat, a stray line clanked the mast, and stars blanketed the sky. He knew that brand of disappointment well.

  Lucky for Ashley, she had a superstar mom who never failed to tell her how beautiful and intelligent she was. By the time she got to college she felt she could do anything. Ashley wondered if Nick’s mother filled the void the same way when his father drifted away. “Did your mom ever do that for you?” she asked. “Tell you how handsome and smart you were? Make you feel more special than the other kids?” He turned to her, lingering on her eyes, enjoying their closeness for a long beat.

  “No,” he said, and turned away.

  It was after dark by the time they saw the Cuban shore twinkle on the horizon at Cabo San Antonio. It was late, so they anchored for the night without checking in. The wind had dwindled to doldrums, it was 95 degrees and steaming, and they dove in to cool off. Still dripping, Ren and Nick grabbed guitars and started jamming, while Ashley drummed along on an empty five-gallon water bottle. Nick lit a joint, took two drags, and passed it along. Ren and Nick had scored before shoving off from Grand Cayman, and Nick had insisted on tying their stash at the top of the mast to beat Cuban customs. After the joint had made the rounds a couple of times, Nick was high enough for paranoia to set in. When a bright light bobbing offshore caught his eye, he stopped playing guitar, stood up, and pointed.