Chrissy’s casual outlook on life carried over onto land—from diving to driving. Though he did follow his mother’s admonition and did not drink and drive, his fast driving sometimes caused him to lose control on Pennsylvania’s often wet, winding country roads, and scrape a guardrail or slide into a tree. Although they were not major accidents, the damage to his parents’ cars still had to be paid for, and Chrissy did not have a lot of money. The second real accident broke his bank account, and after only two months with Tim he had to move back in with his parents. The accidents and his son’s uncertain future did not make either Chris or Sue Rouse very happy. But what could they do with their only child except to lend him the money to fix the damaged vehicle, and let him move back in until he got himself back on his feet financially? Isn’t that what good parents do—look out for their son, ease his way?
In July 1992, I was ready to take the plunge again. Nine months after my diving accident, I accepted Chris Rouse’s offer to stay with him and dive at the quarry. No matter that the doctor had said during my recompression chamber treatment that my diving career was over. I’d never believed him. I knew that if I could learn to walk properly, I would have to dive. For me, not to dive was too great a loss even to imagine for very long. I felt too strongly identified with the world of divers like Steve Berman and Marc Eyring at Ginnie Springs; the Rouses in Pennsylvania; Steve Bielenda, Hank Garvin, and the crew of the Wahoo; my dive club in Manhattan; and the many other divers I had met over the years. The underwater world had given me so much more reward than anything I’d received on land, except from my wife and son. To lose my place and position as a diver would be like being uprooted again, just as I had been in my childhood, when my family moved from country to country, and right when I would get comfortable with the local customs and dialect, we’d move again. This time, I was determined to remain a fully accredited citizen of the underwater realm of divers. I wasn’t about to stay stuck on the surface.
My wife saw how restless I was now that I had not gone diving for so many months. When I told her I would be returning to the water she simply said, “Well, go blow bubbles and be happy. I know that diving makes you happy. You know what you’re doing. Just be careful.”
“Yeah, diving can be a cruel mistress,” I joked. Diana replied with a half smile and a quick “Hmm.”
When Gil saw me packing my diving bags, he asked in a puzzled tone, “You’re going diving, Daddy?” He seemed to be preparing himself for another loss of his father. Maybe he thought that this time the loss would be permanent. I hugged him. “Yes, Daddy’s going diving. But I’ll be really careful and I’ll be back at the end of the weekend, in one piece. Okay?”
I had trained diligently for my return to diving and was comfortable that I was giving my body the best chance to function properly underwater. What I did not know was whether my severe decompression sickness would predispose me to another case of the bends, even if I did everything by the book. My philosophy had long been that I had to train my body to “in-gas” and “off-gas” the excess nitrogen it absorbed in the course of a dive—that is, to properly absorb and eliminate the gas so that I did not get bent. I figured that I would now have to recondition my body to diving and would need to give my body training slowly. It was the diving equivalent of learning to crawl before I walked. And now that I could walk again on land, I was again ready to crawl underwater.
For my first dive, I planned to breathe a 50 percent oxygen mixture and dive for twenty minutes to less than 30 feet in the freshwater quarry, which would put just under one additional atmosphere of pressure on my body. When I came up, I would stop for at least fifteen minutes at 15 feet and continue to breathe the high-oxygen mixture to help my body eliminate the excess nitrogen. I knew that this was probably so overly cautious that it would serve only to cut my risk factor of the bends to an absurdly low level, yet psychologically the plan was something I could deal with.
As Chris had suspected, my real challenge was to surmount the terror involved in coming back to diving after nearly being killed by the bends. There were too many unknown factors when it came to how the body dealt with the bends in a diver who had never suffered the malady, and far more uncertainties involving someone like me who had been bent. I needed the support of friends. Kevin O’Brien—who had been on the Seeker and seen the result of my accident—said he would dive with me and be there along with Chris and Chrissy to make sure that I didn’t get bent or freak out—and that if I did, I’d get medical treatment fast. And if the underwater pressure jammed my nerves and spurred paralysis, my friends could drag me out before I drowned.
At the quarry, I piled all of my diving gear conveniently within reach next to a picnic table, just as I had done on a visit here with the Rouses a year earlier. As Kevin got dressed in his diving equipment and the Rouses looked on—they were already clad in their drysuits—I methodically donned all of my gear in my usual ritualistic fashion. I had found that getting into my dive gear in a specific, unhurried order helped me to remember everything and not omit something small but important like my ankle weights, which helped me keep my feet in position underwater by counteracting the air that would work its way into my drysuit’s foot pockets. Today, the step-by-step discipline felt like a meditative insurance effort. Even though my dive would be extremely shallow, I strapped on the double tank setup that I had worn on all of my previous dives during the past several years. I didn’t want to cut corners and use only a single tank because I felt like that would be cheating: If I wasn’t strong enough to carry my double tanks on my back while I walked back and forth between the picnic bench and the water, or if I had difficulty swimming with the two tanks underwater, then I would know that I had failed to get my body ready to dive again.
Kevin was dressed before I was, but he sat patiently next to me and watched me finish putting my gear on. The Rouses had gone down to the water, where they waited for Kevin and me. I lumbered toward them, looking forward to getting into the water to buoy the weight I carried on my back. I was excited, but I also felt as though I were walking the plank.
Kevin and I waded into the water and put our fins on. Chris and Chrissy Rouse, Kevin O’Brien, and I stood in a circle, waist-high in water, like participants in a total-immersion baptism. Kevin looked at me. “Ready?”
I took a deep breath as I finished adjusting my mask. Grasping the regulator in my hand, I nodded, put the regulator in my mouth, and ducked under the water. At first, I stayed still, just savoring the feeling of breathing underwater again. The Rouses and Kevin looked on. Chrissy flashed me an “OK?” sign, which I returned. He pointed into the murky water, indicating the direction to swim. I checked my compass and signaled “OK.” I swam slowly, deliberately. My muscles had been away from diving for a long time and I knew that I could not possess the grace and fluidity of motion that I saw in Chrissy. This dive was so different from the last one Chrissy and I had done together in this quarry, when we were practicing various techniques to employ on our Andrea Doria expedition. During that last dive, Chrissy and I each held on to a diver-propulsion vehicle that Chris had modified; both of us jetted through the water, to a far corner of the quarry and a now-submerged building that had once served as the pumping station when the quarry had been worked for material used to make cement. Now, we would not venture anywhere near the underwater forest that Chrissy and I had scootered through at high speed, swiftly contorting our bodies to avoid tree limbs that appeared suddenly from the water’s murky haze. Our destination today was far more mundane than an underwater building: We would be going to the shallowest of the many underwater platforms where instructors had students demonstrate their proficiency at various diving skills. Although I was not a student in the strict sense of the word, Chris, Chrissy, and Kevin were all acting like watchful instructors, making me practice the diver’s equivalent of musical scales, checking to see how limber I was.
When we reached the underwater platform and swam around it for a few minutes, Chrissy signaled
to ask if I was okay. I signaled back that I was fine. Chrissy pointed to himself and his father, then toward the water’s haze. He made a question mark with his finger, then an “OK” sign. Chrissy was checking up on me, making sure that I was comfortable and then asking if it was okay for him and his father to go swimming off on their own, which would still leave me with Kevin to watch over me. I signaled back “OK” and then watched as Chris and Chrissy swam off with what seemed like total absence of effort, just as we had done together on some long cave dives in Florida, where they were leading.
I checked my dive computers; twenty minutes had already passed. I signaled to Kevin that I was going to ascend the line that went up from the platform to a surface ball buoy. Kevin signaled in agreement. As we ascended, I remembered my last ascent, and the pain from my missed decompression ghosted through my mind even as my body bobbed easily through the murk toward light. Although my short, shallow quarry dive with Kevin technically required no decompression, I still stopped at 15 feet, as I had planned, to start retraining my body to eliminate the excess nitrogen it had absorbed even during this training-wheels dive. The minutes passed slowly as I worriedly tuned in to my body for any signs of oncoming bends. Nothing. I could have been in an especially dirty bathtub. Kevin and I exchanged “OK” signals several times while we waited at 15 feet. I knew that I was being paranoid, but I also knew from what Dr. Mendagurin had told me that I had no extra neural pathways and that if I again suffered a bad case of the bends I would be permanently crippled.
When I surfaced, everything felt fine. After swimming back to shore, and then ambling like a drunken bear to the picnic table, I took off my diving equipment and felt relief wash over me with the cool summer air. As I slid out of my double-tank harness, I felt that more than just the weight of my tanks had been lifted from my back and shoulders.
When Chris and Chrissy returned from their dive, we sat at the picnic table, eating, joking, and basking in the warm summer sun as we exchanged diving stories. My fears about returning to diving, and about the increased risk of the bends I faced, had been partially overcome. I could now move on to a slightly deeper depth as my next step in returning to diving. In some way, I think that Kevin and the Rouses were also relieved: If I could come back from such a bad case of the bends, so could they, if decompression sickness ever ambushed them. Divers and others who participate in sports that carry with them a risk of being crippled or killed always like to think that nothing bad will happen to them. Psychotherapists like Dr. Hunt call it a defense mechanism, one that allows the sport’s participant to get on with the game. However, it is also dangerous if it leads to unnecessarily high risk taking. In practical terms, the trick to successful participation in a high-risk sport is to acknowledge that bad things can happen, make every effort to prevent those things from happening, and be prepared to confront accidents when they do occur.
When we went back to the Rouses’ house, Chris showed Kevin and me the new diving equipment he was making in his basement. His business, Black Cloud Scuba, was expanding by word of mouth, just as years before his excavation business had grown. Although Chris was making more equipment sales, he also had to reinvest the money to buy other tools, or even molds to make equipment such as metal scooter blades. He knew it would take time to build Black Cloud Scuba to the point where he and his family could pay all the bills, eat, and live well from its earnings. Right now, he was selling off his excavating equipment one piece at a time—a truck here, a bulldozer there—to cover the mortgage and put food on the table.
Chris had his massive collection of comic books neatly stored in easily accessible boxes on long tables in his basement, which Kevin had first noticed when we visited more than a year earlier. When Kevin asked about the collection, Chris remarked, “Yep, those super-heroes are neat. You know, what the comics need now is a full-time diving superhero—not those guys who dive only when they have to save the world.” I could see a new scheme germinating behind Chris’s brow. Maybe DC Comics would never buy the Rouses’ story, but Chris and Chrissy could use these heroic fighters of evil as their role models, be the Batman and Robin of the deep.
Chris, seeing Kevin’s intense interest in the comics, remarked, “You can read any of the comics you want. Just be careful with them, and make sure you put them back in the exact spot you got them from.”
“Thanks, but I don’t want to mess up your collection,” Kevin replied, as he examined the stacks of comic books, which were in perfect condition, more than a thousand of them, stored sequentially and in special, heavy plastic envelopes to prevent them from getting spoiled.
Right now, Robin was back home living in the Bat Cave, and when we sat down to eat, Chris pointed his fork at Chrissy and grumbled good-naturedly, “I thought I got rid of this guy when he moved out, but he’s back, like herpes. I’ll never get rid of this freeloader!” He smiled but he also meant it.
Chrissy groaned and shot back, “Yeah? You never complain when I bring up the lobsters!”
“Aw, you eat most of them with your buddies over at Tim’s house, anyway. You’d have to bring us way more lobsters to pay your rent here!”
“I brought some lobsters home just the other day!”
Chris started to retort, but then abruptly stopped. His son looked embarrassed.
Sue cut in. “Now, now, boys, play nice. Bernie and Kevin are here. Let’s eat in peace.”
Almost immediately, stripped of the crutch of father-son contentiousness, all three Rouses grew morose, which I thought was odd, until a little later when I heard what images Chrissy’s reference to his recent lobster catch had brought back for the family. Chris probably hadn’t wanted to tell me any bad diving news before I’d dipped my toe back into diving, but now his bad news raced to the surface.
One week before I visited the Rouses, parents and son had dived the Arundo, a 412-foot Dutch freighter torpedoed during the Second World War by U-136. The Arundo rests on the bottom at 130 feet, twenty-five miles off the New Jersey coast. The Coast Guard wire-dragged the Arundo after it sank. Wire-dragging is done to clear a hazard to navigation: Two ships drag a huge wire cable over the wreck to flatten it so other ships cannot scrape or crash into the unseen hulk below. The wire-dragging spread the Arundo across the sea floor in a jumble of steel plates and debris, but two locomotives that the freighter was transporting to Egypt remained intact. The steel plates are perfect dens for lobsters, and Chrissy caught three of them.
Ed Sollner, one of the divers on the Arundo trip, had hung out regularly with Chrissy at Tim Stumpf’s house. The three young divers’ penchant for more extreme diving forged an instant bond among them. The trio stood in contrast to most of the other divers at Underwater World, who engaged in far easier diving than Chrissy, Ed, and Tim. Most divers would not even consider undertaking cave penetrations or dives so deep they required breathing gas mixtures other than air. Even though most divers could appreciate Chrissy’s grace underwater, they thought that the trio’s cavalier Top Gun attitude about diving, their long, deep dives, and their exotic gas mixes would lead them into serious trouble.
Ed fueled other divers’ fears with his fierce tirades against some of the U.S. Navy’s diving recommendations. They were for wimps, he declared. Ed was very knowledgeable about mixed-gas diving theory, although he had never taken a formal mixed-gas course. The U.S. Navy had steadily revised downward its recommendations for oxygen toxicity limits—the level of concentrated oxygen that a diver could breathe without encountering oxygen-induced seizures—but what did it know? Sollner had frequently violated the U.S. Navy’s dive tables, omitting mandatory decompression stops, and he had never gotten bent, so what could the Navy know about oxygen limits, if it was so wrong about the dive tables? The Navy was now being too conservative, he told everyone who asked and even those who didn’t. He regularly dived with a higher percentage of oxygen in his breathing gas than the Navy considered safe. Many divers thought that Ed was playing Russian roulette, and that one day he would suffer se
izures and die during a dive. As casual as Chrissy was in his life—including in his diving—he did not believe Ed’s theory; Chrissy dived with oxygen percentages in his breathing mix that followed the Navy guidelines.
On the Arundo, Chrissy was diving alone, looking for lobsters. At one point, he came across Ed; both divers were methodically sweeping their dive lights under the wreck’s hull plates, trying to ambush the dark-brown crustaceans before they could scamper away. Chrissy and Ed quickly parted company as they continued their hunting. When Chrissy surfaced, he was greeted with the news that Ed Sollner had died.
Someone had come across Ed’s lifeless body, floating facedown just above some wreckage, his mouth open, his regulator dangling in the sand. There appeared to have been no struggle. When the body was brought back on the boat and hoisted aboard, the three Rouses were stunned. Chrissy had seen Ed on the dive, and he had been fine. What had happened? They immediately suspected the high oxygen percentage in the gas that Ed himself had mixed: He had probably had an oxygen seizure and drowned.
The Last Dive Page 29
