Even in the relatively calm spring water, nature had other plans for Stone’s habitat. The engineer in Bill Stone labored over pages of calculations to figure how the habitat could be safely anchored at each depth. Because it would be gas-filled, the habitat would be buoyant and would seek to shoot to the surface like a balloon. Even chains and cables fixing the habitat to the bottom would be inadequate against the vast forces of lift, and they would snap like string. Cables could prevent the habitat from floating away in the spring’s current, but Stone believed that nothing less than lead weight would take strain off the cables and keep the habitat at the desired depth. According to his calculations, it would take almost 19,000 pounds of weight to counteract the lifting force of the gas inside the habitat. As it turned out, he would need 2,000 pounds more.
Bill Stone’s ambitious Wakulla Springs project was the manifestation of his vision—many would say obsession—to build a self-contained life-support breathing apparatus that would allow a twenty-four-hour dive on a single breathing unit, including multiple gas switches. Usually, a diver had to carry at least one scuba tank with an attached regulator for each gas required, and he had to replace the regulator in his mouth with the one attached to the gas supply he wanted to breathe next. This required concentration at depth and also meticulously labeling the gas content of each tank before the dive, and then placing those tanks properly either on the diver’s person or in the cave. Even then, mistakes were still made, and divers sometimes accidentally switched to the wrong regulator, breathed a gas toxic at that depth, and drowned. A rebreather could help prevent such accidents. The rebreather was a unit that could take the diver’s expelled gas and feed it back into the breathing system to extend the time the breathing gas could be safely used. The standard scuba device vents exhaled gas—including carbon dioxide, the deadly by-product of human respiration—into the water, and the amount of time the diver could remain underwater was limited to the number of scuba tanks he could carry. A rebreather would use chemical pellets to absorb, or “scrub,” the exhaled gas. Stone’s idea was not new. Rebreathers had been around since the 1880s, when the Englishman Henry Fleuss invented the tool to rescue trapped miners. Soon, rebreathers were used in underwater exploration, and then by various militaries around the world. What was new was Stone’s plan to build backup systems into all critical components of his rebreather and to use microchip technology to computerize his unit.
The first rebreathers used only one gas, oxygen, which had the advantage of being simple to scrub of carbon dioxide and allowed the largest margin of error; breathable oxygen did not have to have all of the carbon dioxide scrubbed from it in order to sustain human life. But the use of pure oxygen meant that divers were limited to depths of 60 feet for very short times; if they stayed too long or went deeper they risked suffering the toxic consequences of oxygen at depth, and drowning. Air, on the other hand, with only 21 percent oxygen, allowed deeper dives but did not provide enough of a margin for error during the scrubbing process.
Stone’s vision of a unit that would allow multiple breathing gases relied on computer processors and sensors that would measure the percentage of each gas in the breathing mix and adjust the mix according to programmed instructions. For example, as the diver went deeper, the percentage of oxygen in his breathing gas would be reduced to prevent oxygen toxicity. Ironically, although the oxygen percentage in the mixture was lowered, the pressure on the diver—and therefore on the gas breathed by the diver—meant that the pressure exerted by the individual gas components being breathed, including oxygen, increased with depth, essentially making the gas a higher-strength, concentrated version of what it was on the surface.
Bill Stone dubbed his rebreather the Cis-Lunar MK-1. He usually awoke at 5 A.M. to work on it before going off to his full-time engineering job. When he returned home he went back to it, stopping long enough only to eat and shower. When exhaustion overcame him, around midnight, he would go to bed and dream about it. The long hours Stone spent obsessing over the MK-1 took a toll on his marriage: His wife left him, taking their children with her. Stone persisted until he had a prototype MK-1 ready for testing during the Wakulla Springs project. Although the bulky 160-pound unit resembled a science-fiction concoction from a fifties B movie—two large cylindrical scrubber canisters and several scuba tanks were mounted on the diver’s back while two large, waterproof computer and sensor displays and pressure gauges protruded in front of the diver—it worked. Both underwater and in the decompression habitat, Stone breathed from the unit for twenty-four hours straight.
The Wakulla Springs project lasted several months, including the construction and then dismantling of the habitat. Participating divers, including Sheck Exley, penetrated thousands of feet into the system, to create extensive maps of the vast tunnels and rooms that they flew through on their scooters. In the process of mapping the system they went to depths of 360 feet. Although one of the habitat’s internal telephones was used extensively for divers to call in their dinner order—which support divers delivered—the second, an emergency phone, which would be used in the event a diver suffered the bends, was never touched. But Stone was prepared for this eventuality. With the radical dive times and breathing gases, it would take consultation with many decompression experts—including Dr. Bill Hamilton, who was on call—to come up with an in-water method of treating the victim. A severely bent diver who returned to the surface from 360 feet would almost certainly die before reaching the surface.
Michael Menduno liked to call the Wakulla expedition the “Big Bang” of sport diving. With a perfect safety record and—thanks to Hamilton’s and his colleagues’ diving tables—no incidence of the bends, cave divers everywhere felt proud that Stone’s elite divers could accomplish a pioneering endeavor worthy of any commercial or military operation. At Wakulla Springs, Bill Stone and his divers mapped a path to further, deeper cave explorations than ever before accomplished. Stories about the successful Wakulla expedition were confined at first mostly to cave divers themselves, and divers on the project were celebrated as superstars in a quiet, cave-diving way. They were even being given diving equipment by manufacturers so that other divers would see that the sport’s best wore Brand X.
Two years later, when the Rouses heard of Stone’s legendary exploits, they were fascinated, envious, and determined to win renown for themselves by diving deep.
In the caves, a diver could be Theseus, could dive the labyrinth, master the beast, and emerge victorious. But beneath the open seas, he could penetrate a mythic underworld and, like Aeneas or Ulysses, return to the sunlit realm a hero—trophied, wiser.
Talking to divers who had explored the shipwrecks in the northeastern United States since the 1950s, Chris heard grand tales of ghostly hulls, their cargo and accoutrements—such as portholes, the ship’s bell, china plates, and silverware—spilled around them as if from an opened treasure chest. He studied some of the artifacts recovered over the years that were displayed at various dive shops. A few shops even had massive local lobsters, plucked from the ocean complete with their two gigantic claws, mounted as trophies. Chris met veteran divers who would hold out a gnarled finger or thumb and tell him about their underwater battle with the huge crustacean that had mercilessly crushed a finger of the hand that tried to grab them. With a smug, conspiratorial tone, the veteran would warn Chris, “It hurts when the bug grabs ya, but imagine how much worse it’d be if they grab one of your hoses!” Chris thought that it would surely be an adventure to capture one of these delicacies. There were plenty of dive boats that went out regularly all along the East Coast. The ocean seemed to Chris a treasure chest waiting to be relieved of its valuable contents.
With stories of artifacts and lobsters ringing in their ears, the Rouses loaded their several hundred pounds of diving equipment into their van and left Revere, Pennsylvania, at 2 A.M. on June 11, 1989, in order to get their equipment on Bob Burns’s charter dive boat Dina Dee before its 6 A.M. departure time from Brielle, New Jer
sey. They headed out to the Mohawk, a passenger steamship that sank after a collision in 1935. Because she sank in relatively shallow water—the sand bottom was only 80 feet down—the wreck rose close enough to the surface that she posed a hazard to navigation and had been blown up by the Coast Guard; the explosion had scattered the wreck’s hull plates in a haphazard jumble along the ocean bottom. On the ride out to the wreck, many of the passengers were seasick and emitted pained grunts as they vomited over the boat’s side. The Rouses’ stomachs churned with nausea and nervous anticipation; it was all they could do to prevent themselves from joining their fellow divers at the rail and vomiting.
When they descended 20 feet into the choppy Atlantic waters, the churning sensation in their guts stopped, and they could concentrate on what they saw underwater. As they neared the bottom, an underwater junkyard came into view before them; the wreck’s steel hull plates lay mangled and twisted into bizarre shapes, scattered as far as the eye could see, which on this particular day was only 20 feet at best. The dark-green water made the scene more surreal. Their underwater lights, powered by the equivalent of motorcycle batteries, projected a searchlight intensity toward the hazy shapes spread before them. Anything that lay beyond 20 feet faded into a dark blanket. Marine life was everywhere; fish seemed to dance into and out of the spotlight, choreographed by an unseen, underwater playwright. Whenever Chris or Chrissy approached a lobster lurking under a steel hull plate, it would defiantly move out from the plate, holding its open claws toward them, ready to crush the bubble-blowing invaders. Whenever Chris or Chrissy got close and shone his light directly on it, the bug elusively retreated backward into the wreckage and tightly wedged itself into its den, claws open and menacing. Catching a lobster by hand was not easy. With their forty minutes of dive time almost over, they swam back to the dive boat’s anchor line and ascended. They were elated. It was a new world, and they had barely touched it. Their underwater experience and postdive emotions were a stark contrast to the wretched feeling in their stomachs prior to their descent. Pavlov himself could not have designed a better positive-stimulus machine.
After several weekends spent diving wrecks off the New Jersey coast Chris proposed over dinner that all three of them go on a Caribbean dive trip to the island of Saba being offered by Underwater World. Because they would be living on a luxury dive boat, they could conduct many easy dives in a short period of time without a lot of effort, in brand-new waters where they would be unconfined by cave or quarry walls.
In the Caribbean’s warm, calm water, the dive boat’s crew members not only helped the divers get into their equipment before each dive but also replaced the spent scuba tanks between dives, attaching full tanks to their jacket-style harnesses. Instead of having to spend the time to replace their tanks, the Rouses were free to eat and drink the plentiful bounty laid out for the divers by the ship’s chef. They felt like diving royalty.
“This sure beats the rockin’ and rollin’ boat rides to get to the Jersey wrecks,” Chrissy said to his parents. “God, I never imagined a boat where people aren’t getting seasick!”
As Chris flew in his small airplane above the Pennsylvania landscape, he could allow himself to marvel at his good fortune: He was his own boss, he had a loving wife and son, and almost as important, he had the time and money to spend scuba diving with his family and to witness landscapes and experience adventures most other people couldn’t even imagine. The Rouses had invested heavily in working hard. Chris’s successful excavation business had yielded a nice, modest-size house and a private, peaceful parcel of woodland, a plane, a garageful of diving gear, and the heavy machinery he required to stay in business. But Chris could not escape the laws of gravity, and he had to come down eventually.
As the nation’s economic engine sputtered in the aftermath of the stock market crash of 1987, the recession glided into Chris’s world. By 1990 his customers felt less inclined to install a new swimming pool, fix their driveway, or engage in expensive property upkeep they could delay until more certain economic times. Chris found that demand for his services dropped dramatically, and he struggled financially. He had dreamed of having an excavation business ever since his childhood, when he pushed toy trucks around in the dirt and declared to his older brother, “Wouldn’t it be great to have our own real construction company? We’ll call it Rouse Brothers Construction!” His brother had long ago traded that dream for the supposed security of a salaried desk position—“a real job,” as their parents always reminded Chris—and now Chris wondered whether he had made the right choice. Though he and Sue had some savings, he never knew when the next paying job was coming in. And when would they arrive at a steady enough pace to pay all of the bills, maintain his heavy machinery, and buy all of the expensive diving equipment they craved? Soon, Chris had to make difficult choices. For lack of money, he grounded his airplane. It sat strapped down on the airfield, stranded for lack of cash.
With excavating jobs becoming scarcer, Chris kept himself busy during the day by replacing worn brakes, clutches, and tires, changing oil and hydraulic fluid, and tuning up the powerful engines of the bulldozer and dump truck. To Sue, he confided that things looked grim. How were they going to keep living if things remained at this slow pace? “Chris, don’t worry,” Sue reassured him. “Things will get better. We’ve always worked hard together, and things have always worked out for us.”
Chris wasn’t sure. “Maybe it’s time to think about something besides the excavation business,” he told her.
He sold the airplane. “It really hurts,” he told John Reekie. “Well, at least I’ll be able to pay the bills and keep diving!”
Struggling with his roofing business himself, Reekie understood just how difficult things were for Chris. “Well, at least you got some money for your plane, Chris. But what are you going to do for money once that runs out?”
“I think I’m going to go into the diving business,” Chris told him, his voice edged with eagerness. “I love diving. There’s got to be a way I can make a living at it. I’m gonna start fixing scooters and making a few pieces of diving equipment to sell.”
Chris had faced difficult circumstances before—and he had surmounted them through grit and physical determination. One afternoon back in 1980, when the Rouses were still building their excavation business and living in a trailer home, Chris had gone out to his repair shop, a barn on his property not far from their home, and started to heat a fitting on his bulldozer’s hydraulic cylinder so that he could remove and repair the unit. He knew that he had to be careful because the hydraulic fluid and the grease surrounding the fitting were combustible, yet there was no way around it: The fitting was on so tight that the only way to loosen it was by applying high-intensity heat from his welding torch. At first, things went routinely. Then, without warning, the cylinder exploded, sending machinery, tools, and debris in every direction. Chris was hurled across the workshop and slammed into the wall with such force he lost consciousness. The explosion was muffled by the dense woods.
Chris awoke to searing agony on his face and in both hands. Through a haze of pain, he gritted his teeth and inched his way to his home. When he opened the door, ten-year-old Chrissy looked in frozen fear at the apparition coming into the house. His father’s face and hands were a mass of black, crumpled skin, and from his body emanated the strange, sickly smell of burned hair and flesh. “Dad, what happened?” he cried out.
“I had an accident, son. Call Henry, next door,” his father said between pained grunts. He stumbled into the doorway and collapsed on the floor with an anguished cry. “Please, hurry, Chrissy! It hurts!”
Chrissy ran to the phone and called the neighbor, who arrived a few minutes later, took one look at Chris’s face, and spirited both Rouses into his pickup truck. As the three blasted at top speed down the Rouses’ dirt road toward Henry’s house, Chris groaned in pain at every bump the truck bounced over.
Henry’s wife met the trio. She immediately comforted Chrissy. Her youn
g children looked on with wide eyes and open mouths as Chris was rushed into the bathroom. As Henry helped cut the layers of clothing away from Chris’s body, his wife, their children, and Chrissy brought in as much ice from the refrigerator as they could carry. Henry filled the bathtub with cold water, and everybody dumped the ice into the tub. Chris was eased into the tub. The water and ice cooled his overheated body and face, and he screamed at the extreme temperature. His hands were now bloody, blackened clumps of flesh. His eyebrows and eyelashes had been seared away, and his mop of hair was singed.
Henry’s wife phoned Sue, who was waitressing to help the family pay its bills, and told her what had happened to Chris, and that they were taking him to the emergency room, and to meet them there. In his hospital room, Chris looked at his concerned wife through a thickly bandaged skull. He could not touch her through the layers of gauze bandages on his hands and arms.
When Sue got back home that night after retrieving Chrissy from Henry’s house, both mother and son were shaken. “Is Dad going to be okay?” Chrissy asked, crying.
The Last Dive Page 12
