Deep

by James Nestor

  THAT NIGHT, NITSCH’S HEART STOPPED. Doctors resuscitated him and put him in an induced coma. The hospital staff shuttled him back and forth from a hospital bed to a recompression chamber, but their efforts came too late. Nitrogen bubbles entered his brain and cut off the blood supply to areas that controlled motor functions. He suffered half a dozen strokes. When he regained consciousness, days later, Nitsch could not walk, speak, or recognize his friends and family.

  Later, I learn that the sled plummeted past its target depth, to 830 feet. He blacked out before he touched down, woke up during the ascent, and blacked out again at 330 feet. He was still in the sled, unconscious underwater, when the safety divers grabbed him at 30 feet and brought him to the surface. If they hadn’t, Nitsch would have drowned. But as a result of the quick ascent, Nitsch suffered a debilitating case of decompression sickness because he didn’t have time to purge the nitrogen that had built up in his bloodstream.

  Six months later he hadn’t touched the ocean.

  After the horrors of Nitsch’s dive in Santorini, David King’s near drowning, and Michal Rišian almost getting lost at sea, I swore off watching any more competitive freediving. Sure, the human body could dive deeper than scientists thought possible, but it also had limits. We all saw those limits. And I had gotten tired of seeing the bloody and blue faces of those who went beyond them.

  In freediving, the ego is a deadly goad. It’s also something of a blinder. Most of the competitive divers I met seemed to have little interest in exploring the deep ocean that they had painstakingly trained their bodies to enter. They dived with their eyes closed; nitrogen narcosis struck them dumb; they forgot where they were and why they were there. The deepest divers lolled themselves into a catatonic state that removed any sense of actually being in the water. The aim: Hitting a number on a rope. Beating your opponents. Winning a medal. Bragging rights.

  Yes, they were swimming where no human had been before. But this struck me as maddening, like an explorer arriving in previously undiscovered wilderness and focusing only on his GPS coordinates.

  This disconnect between athlete and ocean had me replaying the scenes in Santorini and Kalamata months after I’d returned home. My nightmares featured bloated necks and dead eyes. But my waking visions were more aspirational: I had seen Fred Buyle communing with sharks. His freediving took him to previously unknowable places, allowed him to see previously unseeable sights, and unlock hidden abilities. I too could access this world. The “doorway to the deep,” he said, was open to everybody.

  Those who’d reached the doorway described it in quasireligious terms—transcendent, life-changing, purifying. A new and shimmering universe. Getting there didn’t require rupturing lungs or tearing a larynx. All you needed was a little training. All you needed was faith. All you needed was a certain level of comfort with voluntary asphyxiation.

  And so, despite what I had seen, the more I thought about those freedivers, the more I wanted in. I wanted to flip the Master Switch.

  NOBODY KNOWS THE MASTER SWITCH better than the ama, an ancient culture of Japanese diving women who once numbered in the thousands. For more than twenty-five hundred years, ama used the same freediving techniques, passed down from mother to daughter, to gather food from the ocean floor. In all written accounts of ama culture I found, there was never any mention of blackouts, bloodied faces, or drowning. Although they could dive up to a hundred and fifty feet down and stay under for about three minutes at a time, the ama never competed. Freediving for them was a tool, a means of survival. It was also a spiritual practice. The ama believed that when they approached the sea in their natural human form, they were returning balance to the world. “[Underwater] I hear the water coming into my body, I hear the sunlight penetrating the water,” wrote one ama. They weren’t visitors to the ocean; they were part of it.

  Their story dates to 500 B.C., when shipwrecked nomads from central Asia found themselves stranded on the rocky shores of the Noto Peninsula, where there was very little vegetation and few land animals to hunt. The nomads turned to the sea, where they quickly adapted their bodies to harvest the bounty of life on the ocean floor. The women of the nomadic tribe—for unknown reasons, only the women—took over the daily diving and were later called the ama, which means “sea women.” The ama didn’t just survive their new aquatic lifestyle, they flourished, and soon spread along the Japanese coast and into Korea. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of ama once lined the east coasts of the Pacific and the Sea of Japan. By the 1800s they had become, in a sense, the world’s largest commercial fishing fleet. European sailors who were lucky enough to see these half-naked diving women reported that they plummeted hundreds of feet on a single breath. Some claimed the ama could stay underwater for fifteen minutes at a time.

  As fishing technology evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the ama’s numbers dwindled. Their villages disappeared. The daughters of the ama, who were to carry on the freediving tradition, left for more comfortable lives in the city. As of 2013, estimates of the total number of working ama ranged anywhere from a few hundred to zero.

  According to the director of a short documentary film I saw online, a small group of ama were still working the waters outside of Nishina, a town 120 miles southeast of Tokyo in the rural Izu Prefecture. I wrote to various Japanese historians and tourist organizations but failed to find confirmation that the Nishina ama were still around. Nobody reported having seen them there for years. Nobody knew if they were still diving, or if they even existed.

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, I fly to Tokyo, take a train to the Izu Prefecture, and rent a car in a beachside town called Shimoda. The locals in Shimoda repeat what my other sources told me, that I’m chasing a fantasy. They say the Nishina ama, who were supposed to live just ten miles up the coast, died off years ago. Or that the ama get in the water only a few times a year, mostly on holidays. Or that they are too old, frail, and tired to be visited. These anti-guides look at me with pity and point me down wet, dead-end streets. I follow their fingers for two days but come up empty. And then, on my third day driving the coast of Nishina, I come upon Sawada, a grungy little port full of broken boats and acrid smells. And I catch a break.

  My guide is a lanky man named Takayan whom I found at the Nishina tourist office. He stands beside me on a breakwater, peering at a half a dozen divers bobbing up and down in the lead-gray water—what could be the last living link to one of the world’s oldest surviving freediving cultures.

  “Ama?” I ask Takayan again. I want to make sure we’ve found them. “Hai,” says Takayan. “Yes. Ama.”

  I turn and jog off along a gravel path to grab my recorder and camera from the rental car. When I return a few minutes later, the ama are dragging nets filled with their daily catch up the boulders of the breakwater and then stuffing them into duct-taped Styrofoam coolers.

  “They are done for today,” says Takayan. “They been diving all morning. We came too late.” Behind Takayan, one ama, the shortest of the group, strips off her wetsuit pants and stands naked a few feet from me. When I walk away to give her some privacy, she chuckles and says something in Japanese to the three other ama standing nearby. They all laugh, then strip off their wetsuits.

  Japanese society revolves around a tangled web of confusing customs. I figure I’m breaking a few dozen cardinal rules by approaching the ama without an invitation (or without offering a gift, or without speaking Japanese, or simply by being male). But I’ve traveled seven thousand miles on a whim, based on a home movie I’d seen on the Internet. After many false starts, I’d found them. And there was a good chance I’d never find or speak to them again.

  I walk to the water’s edge and cringe for a few minutes, waiting for the ama to change into their sweatpants and tattered rain jackets. Then I reapproach, smiling. The ama don’t smile back.

  “They are too tired,” Takayan says, stopping me. “They don’t want to talk now.” He says I’ll have a better chance if we come back tomorrow at dawn,
before their morning dive. What he’s really saying, I think, is that the ama want to see how dedicated I am. Returning early tomorrow will show them I’m truly interested in their culture, that I’m not just a tourist wanting a quick look.

  I walk to my car and watch through a dirty windshield as the ama pack their gear into rusting shopping carts. I am still watching, minutes later, as they file slowly past the broken boats and empty lots of Sawada and then vanish into white fog.

  THE AMA MIGHT HAVE BEEN the largest group of freedivers in history, but they weren’t the first. Archaeological evidence of ancient freediving cultures goes back as far as ten thousand years. Written accounts of freedivers date to 2500 B.C. and span the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans.

  Around 700 B.C., Homer wrote of divers who latched themselves to heavy rocks and plunged below one hundred feet to cut sponges from the seafloor. In the first century B.C., trade between the Mediterranean coast and Asia exploded, in part because of red coral, a favorite cure-all in Chinese and Indian medicine. Most red coral grew at depths below a hundred feet and could be collected only by freediving. By the eighth century, Vikings in the North Sea were freediving beneath enemy ships and boring holes in their hulls to sink them.

  Then there were the pearl divers, who flourished in the Caribbean, South Pacific, Persian Gulf, and Asia for more than three thousand years. When Marco Polo visited Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in the late fourteenth century, he witnessed pearl divers plummeting more than a hundred and twenty feet on dives that lasted from three to four minutes.

  In 1534, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, a Spanish historian visiting Margarita Island in the Caribbean, observed indigenous Lucayan Indians descend to more than a hundred feet on dives that, according to his notes, lasted fifteen minutes.*

  These weren’t just champion divers, either. According to Oviedo, hundreds of Lucayan shared this incredible breath-holding ability, which they used to dive deep from sunrise to sunset, seven days a week, without ever appearing to tire.

  Within a few years, the entire population of freediving Lucayan had died of disease or been enslaved and shipped off to gather pearls on other islands. The Spanish brought in African slaves to take their place. The Africans took to freediving almost immediately and, according to reports, were soon diving to a hundred feet, holding their breath underwater for as long as fifteen minutes.

  Halfway around the world, in Indonesia, Sir Philiberto Vernatti, a field scientist who worked with one of Britain’s esteemed scientific organizations, the Royal Society, reported in 1669 that he saw pearl divers stay underwater for “about a quarter of an hour.” Similar accounts of fifteen-minute dives came in from Japan, Java, and elsewhere.

  Which wasn’t to say these long dives were easy. According to the same reports, once at the surface, many divers suffered from violent seizures: water and blood poured from their mouths, ears, nostrils, and eyes. They’d sit and recover for a few minutes, take a deep breath, and do it all over again. Some dove forty to fifty times a day.

  All told, there were a dozen accounts from unrelated travelers to different locations over the course of centuries that described the same thing: dives to one hundred feet, with divers lasting up to fifteen minutes on a single breath. And there was never a mention of air tubes, special diets, or metabolism-depressing drugs to assist these freedivers. In fact, most of the Caribbean divers lived under lock and key in deplorable conditions and would puff pipes or cigarettes between dives, sometimes in the water just before heading down.

  And then, poof. Gone. By the twentieth century, pearl farming and new fishing technologies had made freediving obsolete. The human body’s amazing diving abilities and human knowledge of freediving began to disappear. A person like me, who has spent decades swimming in the ocean, wouldn’t think of holding his breath for more than thirty seconds on purpose.

  Today, modern competitive divers are rediscovering the ability, but they aren’t as good at holding their breath, if historical reports can be trusted. Did these long-ago cultures know something ours doesn’t? Are there some ancient Japanese secrets to breath-hold diving that could help me hold my breath longer and dive deeper? Are we just now rediscovering our true potential in water?

  If anyone could tell me, it would be the ama.

  AT DAWN THE NEXT DAY, Takayan and I return to Sawada to find four ama sitting in a circle on a patch of concrete above the breakwater. They are drinking green tea and eating dried seaweed and yogurt, joking with one another, sometimes laughing so hard that they spit up their food. Hardly a moment goes by without one of them throwing her head back and cackling into the air.

  The ama are the opposite of the demure, meticulously styled women I had seen elsewhere in Japan, and nothing like the fairy-tale ama advertised in movies, old woodcuts, and turn-of-the-century daguerreotypes.

  This group is bawdy, brazen, and gruff; their skin is tawny and wrinkled from decades of salt water and sun. They have unkempt hair and wear ripped clothes. In short, they are a refreshingly motley crew who don’t really seem to give a damn what I or anyone else thinks of them.

  Takayan exchanges a few words of Japanese with them, the ama nod, and then he introduces me to the group.

  Yoshiko, who is tall with reddish hair and a long face, is sixty and has been diving since she was eighteen. The other two ama are at least ten years older and have been diving since they were fifteen. Although these three women aren’t related, they share the same last name (Suzuki) and claim to be descended from a centuries-long lineage of freedivers. Another, smaller woman, with frizzy hair like a Chia pet, says she is eighty-two. Her name is Fukuyo Manusanke and she’s been diving since she was in her thirties. She’s the loudest of the bunch.

  With Takayan translating, I ask Manusanke some questions. I’m told that the ama have always been made up of women—not because they were subservient to the men, as many historical books claimed, but because only women understood the rhythms of the sea. Manusanke points to the commercial fishing trawlers motoring out to sea from the Sawada port. These boats, with enormous nets tied to their sides, indiscriminately pull up whatever is nearby. Many of the fish, jellyfish, and other animals the trawlers catch are unusable; their corpses will be thrown back as trash. Manusanke says the fishermen on these boats destroy the environment and ruin the natural balance of the ocean.

  “When a man comes to the ocean, he exploits it and strips it,” she says. When a woman puts her hands in the ocean, that balance is restored. Manusanke explains that the ocean can always provide for humans if they gather from it in their natural forms. A person should take what he or she can carry, but no more. Otherwise, she says, eventually, there will be nothing left.

  Until just sixty years ago, the ama didn’t even wear swim goggles, fearing that this would allow them to see too much and give them an unfair advantage over other creatures in the sea. They didn’t use wetsuits until the 1980s. Some ama still dive topless.

  There were once sixty ama around Nishina. Manusanke says in the past twenty years or so, the number has dwindled to twenty-five. The few ama left don’t dive often. The twenty-five-hundred-year-old line of ama tradition is about to be broken. “We are the last ones left,” she says.

  The ama excuse themselves and walk over to the beat-up shopping carts holding their wetsuits and dive gear. The interview is over, they tell me. It’s time to go diving.

  I brought my gear from San Francisco, hoping to make a dive and see the ama’s ancient breath-hold techniques in action. The ama don’t seem thrilled about the prospect, but they agree to bring me along for a few hours. I run back to my car, grab my stuff, and join Manusanke and the others near water’s edge.

  While the ama pull on faded, torn scuba-diving suits, I slip into a four-hundred-dollar freediving suit I’d just had custom-made in Italy. As they defog antique masks with local yogumi leaves, I squirt chemical-packed liquid defogger on my new low-volume goggles. While they slip on castoff bright yellow boogie-board fins, I wiggle my feet into
state-of-the-art, three-foot-long, super-efficient camouflage freediving fins.

  Manusanke points at my fins and guffaws. Yoshiko taps on the glass of my mask and shakes her head. An ama named Toshie Suzuki, who sports an unruly nimbus of curly hair, touches my suit, and then takes her finger away quickly and shakes it, as if she has just come into contact with something contaminated. I feel like an idiot.

  And then I begin to see why the ama have kept the ocean to themselves all those centuries, and why they’re apprehensive about sharing their secrets with outsiders, especially men. There I am, the typical male, exploiting the latest technology to find a shortcut into a world I only dimly understand. In some ways, I’m no different than the fishermen on the trawlers sailing out behind us. I am disrupting the balance of the ocean that the ama have spent the last twenty-five hundred years trying to protect.

  Manusanke and the rest of the ama hobble down over the boulders of the breakwater and splash into the water. They are laughing, yelling at one another, and making squeaking sounds like dolphins. I follow and we swim out together toward the horizon, until the Sawada port fades into the fog. The Suzukis head east, just outside the rocky cliffs of the bay, while Manusanke and I stay put. I watch as she adjusts her mask, takes a deep breath, makes a whistle that announces to the other ama that she’s diving, then flips upside down and goes. She kicks her eighty-two-year-old body down past five feet, then ten feet, then twenty feet, and deeper, until her movements soften, she stops kicking entirely, and she descends effortlessly, dissolving into the black water below.

  I take a breath and try to join Manusanke on her dives, but even with all my state-of-the-art equipment, I’m buoyed to the surface. My deepest dives are about twelve feet; my longest last twenty seconds. Any more, and I start getting claustrophobic and panicky, and the ache in my ears and head becomes excruciating. The harder I try, the more painful the dives become. I eventually give up.