Buoyancy, I discovered, is both the crux of a successful dive and a challenging thing to master. If you’re breathing too rapidly (because you’re nervous), your overinflated lungs will prevent you from sinking to your desired depth, no matter how much extra weight you have strapped to your hips—I wore mine low: “Like a gunslinger,” Tom said—or how vigorously you flap your fins. Of course, there is comedy in this: as your fellow divers drift gently to the bottom, you will hover approximately ten inches below the surface of the water, humiliated and alone, like a pimply teenager pinned to his own locker via wedgie. Scuba, then, becomes a kind of Buddhist ideal—to properly fall, you need to relax your whole body and mind, exhale deeply (and if there is anything more counterintuitive than inhaling underwater, it’s emptying your lungs), and submit to the weight of the water. Submission is a thing I am working on, but eventually, I got there. By the end of the third night, I had somehow completed all the necessary tasks to pass—including the particularly insane bit where someone rips your mask from your face and you flail around in the water, blind and panicked, trying to find it, strap it back on, and clear it of liquid without accidentally inhaling through your nose, choking, and perishing in three feet of chlorinated water.
Our class started with four students, but it finished with three (Bill, a skydiver who worked in finance and consumed an impressive number of PowerBars, couldn’t equalize his ears underwater, which divers attempt to do by holding their noses and blowing until the pressure in their ear canal stops), and at the end of the final night, after we had taken a comprehensive written exam, completed all five confined water dives, and congratulated our classmate Alexia, Bret and I splurged on a cab ride home, threw our flippers into a closet, and consumed an entire bottle of champagne. I’m positive that we deserved it. I passed out in a damp bikini. I still don’t know what happened to my textbook.
We decided to complete our open water dives a few weeks later in Beaufort, North Carolina, a sleepy three-hundred-year-old seaside town where Bret’s parents keep a vacation home. At the Raleigh-Durham airport, I barely recognized the person plucking a bulky bag of brightly colored scuba equipment off the luggage carousel.
Historically, the southern coast of North Carolina is an especially treacherous stretch of water for boats—it’s nicknamed the Graveyard of the Atlantic—and there are an ungodly number of shipwrecks for intrepid divers to explore. I balked at this particular prospect, which seemed karmically incongruous, like laughing at an alcoholic while chugging a scotch. Instead, we booked a private session for Monday morning; we would be diving off Radio Island, between Beaufort and Morehead City, and we’d be looking mostly for soft and hard corals, crabs, urchins, and something called a sea squirt. I was relieved to discover it would be a walk-in dive, which meant we would be waddling into the water straight from the beach, rather than stepping or rolling in off a chartered boat. I convinced myself that walk-in dives were relatively tame, as far as maritime adventures go—really, it was practically snorkeling.
Beaufort, incidentally, is something of a beacon for treasure hunters. The pirate Edward “Blackbeard” Teach ran his ship (a captured French slave vessel he rechristened the Queen Anne’s Revenge) aground here in 1718, lodging it in a sandbar and cracking its primary mast. The wreck was first discovered in 1996 in relatively shallow water off nearby Atlantic Beach; a few weeks before we arrived, marine archaeologists had helped raise one of the ship’s 3,000-pound anchors for the very first time. For hundreds of years, rumors that Blackbeard had buried part of his fortune somewhere in or around Beaufort persisted, and the city still draws bounty hunters with vivid, Goonies-inspired dreams of gold doubloons. I felt a certain kinship with these oddball entrepreneurs, who seemed both delusional and pleasantly optimistic—really, in terms of effort to financial reward, record collectors are a far loonier breed—and I convinced myself that Beaufort was an appropriate place to kick off my own underwater treasure-hunting pursuits.
I figured a little sea-level digging couldn’t hurt, either. All weekend, Bret and his parents waited patiently while I pawed through every antique and junk shop in the general area. I smiled apologetically—my now-patented shame grin—while they stood outside, holding their two golden retrievers and likely discussing my lunacy. Luckily, I’d started to develop a pretty sensitive radar for old shellac: I could scan an overstuffed room and locate the lone box of records almost instantaneously. First, as Chris King had taught me, I looked for any old home-audio equipment, like a portable Victrola or a full-size phonograph—78s are frequently tucked into the speaker cabinet, a doored cubby that most people mistake for a storage area.
If a phonograph sweep didn’t produce any results, I would start staring directly at the floor, searching for sagging, untended cardboard boxes. Because 78s are so heavy when stacked (and, subsequently, difficult to lift), they’re typically tossed into small containers and left low, crammed in a cobwebbed corner or shoved under a piece of furniture. Somewhat counterintuitively, asking an employee for help is often a dead end. Cashiers might point you toward a rack of overpriced Beatles LPs, or—and this is more often the case—just shrug, wholly unaware that there are any 78s in stock at all. To the uninitiated, they are uniquely innocuous things.
In nearby Morehead City, I found a hatbox stuffed with 78s—carefully layered in the pages of a local newspaper from 1951—in the back corner of an SPCA rummage store, and in downtown Beaufort I found a Victor record album (a book, similar to a picture album, that holds 78s in paper sleeves) full of old Hawaiian guitar records sitting on the floor of a consignment shop a block from the waterfront. It contained twenty songs I’d never heard before, including six sides by Pale K. Lua and David Kaili, a Hawaiian guitar duet who performed for Victor in the mid-1910s. According to the Library of Congress, they recorded mostly in the winters of 1914 and 1915 in Camden, New Jersey, a fact that exists in marked contrast to the songs themselves, which blow and bend like Hawaiian palms—intoxicating, warm, and forgiving. I bought the whole book for two dollars.
At an antique shop on Front Street, I found a curious assortment—including a record titled Folk Songs Accompanied by Nightingales and Canaries from Karl Reich’s Aviary, a Columbia musical-comedy album by Van and Schneck, and a copy of “Black Bottom,” a high-charting foxtrot from 1926 performed by Johnny Hamp’s Kentucky Serenaders—under an oil painting in a half-empty room on the second floor. The Black Bottom was a wildly popular dance (an iteration of the Charleston) in the 1920s, although it supposedly originated in New Orleans closer to the turn of the twentieth century. According to instructions printed on the 1919 sheet music, it required you to “Hop down front then Doodle back, Mooch to your left then Mooch to the right, Hands on your hips and do the Mess Around, Break a Leg until you’re near the ground.” I surveyed my new purchases with novice pride.
As anyone who’s lugged a suitcase full of shellac through a crowded airport terminal knows, 78s are not very fun to travel with. In fact, most serious collectors, all of whom have their own particular methods for packing and shipping, would scoff at the notion of ever stuffing them inside a piece of luggage. But I’d remembered to leave a good portion of my suitcase empty for new acquisitions, and later that night, I wrapped each individual record in bubble wrap and carefully layered them in my bag, folding my softest T-shirts in between. I hadn’t found anything rare or of historical consequence, but I still liked the way the records looked, tucked amid my things.
On Monday morning I woke up nervous. I put on my bathing suit and choked down a bowl of Raisin Bran, glugging a bit of coffee from a giant novelty mug in the shape of a pirate’s boot. We had one day to dive, which meant two trips to the bottom and back, per PADI (the Professional Association of Diving Instructors) rules. The high-pressure breathing gas in a scuba cylinder is essentially the same air we breathe every day: roughly 80 percent nitrogen and 20 percent oxygen. But because that air is so compressed underwater—at thirty feet, you’re breathing air that’s been condensed
twofold—the excess nitrogen that gathers in your tissues and is released, during and after ascension, into your bloodstream can cause decompression sickness if you don’t allow the body enough time to recover between dives.
Bret and I packed up our gear, walked to Discovery Diving, and signed a stack of papers absolving our instructors of all liability should we somehow fail to return. Because the current in Beaufort can be strong, tugging swimmers away from the shore and into the channel, divers are required to wait until slack tide, a fleeting window between high and low tides when the current is reversing and the water is relatively still; if you’re lucky, you get thirty or forty minutes of calm surf. After floating a pair of red-and-white dive flags—little buoys to alert passing boats that divers are down, so we don’t accidentally surface and get decapitated by a skiff full of dudes chugging Coors Light—we strapped on our equipment and ran through a few drills (clearing our masks of water, towing each other’s fake-lifeless bodies to shore, checking our compass bearings, sweeping for lost regulators) in shallow water before swimming out past a rock jetty (home to stone crabs, flounder, black bass, urchins, sea spiders, and a terrifying, toothy thing called an oyster toadfish) and powering down to thirty-five feet. There, we sat on the sandy bottom, equalizing our ears and checking our gauges.
One thing I hadn’t expected about scuba diving in an actual body of water is how peaceful it is, particularly for someone so accustomed to the high, incessant drone of New York: you are granted access to an entire portion of the globe that was previously forbidden to you, and it turns out that it’s also the softest, quietest part. Despite all my anxiety about diving, I felt like I could sit there forever, weightless and lost in the rhythm of my own breath, watching schools of blennies dodge in and out of dark crevices in the rock. My neurotic, city-dweller fears about being “touched by fish” dissipated, and for the first time in weeks—or at least since I’d gotten grand ideas about recovering Paramount 78s from a river in Wisconsin—I felt calm. I stopped thinking about regulators and air tanks and the adverse effects of increased pressure on the human body. I stopped thinking about records.
We swam to the surface together, ran a few more drills, and went back down, again following the wide angle of the jetty. I paid a little more attention this time, noting that the more sand we accidentally displaced on the bottom, the harder it was to see anything at all—meaning that purposefully digging in river silt was going to pose even more challenges than I’d anticipated (and really, I’d anticipated a lot). Our instructor for the day, a veteran diver named Debbie, suggested that I look into an underwater metal detector, which might at least help with locating any lost masters. (After I learned how much that might cost to buy—anywhere from $400 to $1,000—I crossed my fingers that we could rent or borrow one.) Still, I was worried about getting lost in some abysslike blackness, blind and disoriented, bested by wet dirt. Unlike the clear, sparkling water surrounding most Caribbean islands—like the pictures in my scuba textbook—the Milwaukee River appeared brown and nearly opaque in photographs. I imagined it would be like floating in a Yoo-hoo chocolate-flavored drink, but with pulp.
We surfaced again, practiced swimming using only our compasses for orientation, and then it was done. I squirmed out of my wet suit and disassembled and washed my gear. It was barely past noon. Debbie signed our diver logs and shook our hands.
Walking back down the beach to our borrowed Jeep, I felt almost like a champion.
A few weeks before our scheduled departure, Lenny stopped answering his cell phone. I found this disconcerting. Aside from the fact that we needed a guide and a watchdog, I’d been told that diving in the river might require a special license. He had one. I did not. After a day or two, I began wondering how many pretending-to-be-calm voicemails I could theoretically leave him; I hadn’t experienced this particular concern since I was maniacally phoning up fourteen-year-old boys in 1995.
When I finally got Lenny on the phone, I was sitting in my living room, eating Swedish Fish and staring at the wall. It was a Wednesday afternoon, and I had dialed without actually expecting him to pick up. I gagged down a wad of candy and started speed-talking. He had a slew of legitimate concerns—Grafton was thirty miles north of his base in Milwaukee, the river was shallow up there (“You can walk across it!”), and anyway, what if I needed permission from the city or county to dive? In addition, planning the dive would require some sense of where the deepest pockets are, which, logically, would be where these records would have gotten stuck (a pit full of records! I felt giddy just thinking about it: an endless chasm, deep in the earth, where dead voices gathered!), and neither he nor I knew how to acquire that kind of map.
Lenny was letting me down easy. I could tell he thought I should find someone local with a working knowledge of that section of the river and maybe a contact or two in the Grafton Fire Department. He politely told me to keep him posted—but I knew it was a let’s-be-friends type of farewell.
Miraculously, I didn’t fall apart. Earlier that day, I’d serendipitously Googled my way to Steve Sand, a guy who owned a scuba shop called Sea n’ Sand Scuba in Thiensville, about six miles south of Grafton. Given that suburban Wisconsin is not a beacon for scuba specialists, this felt like a gift. It hadn’t previously occurred to me to even look for a dive shop outside of the Milwaukee city limits. I filled out the automated “Contact Us” form on the shop’s vaguely outdated-looking website and tried not to think about whether it would yield a reply. Two hours later, an e-mail appeared in my inbox. I held my breath and clicked: “Yes, I am sure that I can assist you with your project. Please call me and we will chat.”
If you are in something of a desperate state—because, say, you need someone to accompany you on a bizarre underwater adventure in suburban Wisconsin on relatively short notice—it turns out there is no better person to call than Steve Sand. Steve worked as a sign-language interpreter for thirty years before opening a dive shop in 2006, and he remains a remarkable listener. Like Lenny, he had concerns about visibility—“You stir up the muck and you cannot see anything—even on a bright, sunny day, nothing,” he warned—and about the legality of hopping into the river, but he was game. Steve worked part-time rescuing golf balls from the bottoms of nearby lakes; he knew a little about blindly digging around in mud. He did warn me about the claustrophobia and disorientation of so-called dark dives, uttering what might be the most terrifying words I have ever heard regarding scuba diving: “I keep a tablespoon of water in my mask so that I can tell which way is up.” I gulped. Diving in a river requires negative buoyancy—usually scuba divers aspire to neutral buoyancy, which means you float at around eye level at the surface—and divers are weighted to sink. Add zero visibility, and you’ve got something resembling a sensory deprivation tank. Only with fish. And snakes. Oh.
Steve promised to look around and to check in with local authorities. We agreed to meet at his shop early on the morning of the dive. In the meantime, I contacted Jim Brunnquell, the Grafton village president. He told me he didn’t believe there were any special requirements for diving in the river and recommended looking north of Falls Road, because the water in the area directly to the south had been dramatically reduced due to the recent removal of a dam. “You may get lucky there as it is still fairly unexplored,” he wrote. “Good luck.”
/ / Seven / /
I Like to Get into the Field and Hunt Them Down in the Wild, So to Speak
John Tefteller, King Solomon Hill, Angela Mack, Grafton, Orange Drink, “Shakin’ Down That Town”
Grafton, Wisconsin, is mild and bucolic in the manner of most Midwestern suburbs: the streets are clean and wide, the houses are modest and well maintained, and an American flag always blows high and proud above the high school parking lot. The first time I drove into Grafton from my hotel in downtown Milwaukee, I tried to imagine which parts of the landscape might look familiar to a blues singer trekking north from the Mississippi Delta in 1929. Central Wisconsin being atmospherically cool, cu
lturally stoic, and overwhelmingly white, here’s what I came up with: both places are pretty flat. Mostly, it’s hard to think of another American city less cosmically suited to the creation of country blues, or less recognizable to its progenitors.
Angela Mack had agreed to meet me on the corner of Falls Road and Twelfth Avenue at eleven A.M., a few hours before she was due at the North Shore Academy of the Arts, the community arts center where she gave private music lessons. I’d been duly warned—by John Tefteller and others—that there wasn’t much of Paramount left to see in Grafton, but when I parked my rented Toyota Corolla near the Falls Road bridge, climbed out, and carried a cup of hotel coffee over to the pressing plant’s crumbling foundation, I felt disembodied, spooked. I sat on a cold concrete slab and pulled my bare legs to my chest. I am not always susceptible to the magnetism of sacred ground—I generally find monuments exhausting—but I was entranced by the hard, gray remnants of this place, by its concrete platforms and half-brick, half-stone half walls. The pressing plant was razed in the 1940s, and a private home was built on the north end of the lot; on the south side, flora had intervened, and weeds poked up through every crack in the remaining foundation. I stared at their tiny green leaves, trying to conceive of all the records manufactured here, all the songs that had inextricably altered the course of my life nine hundred miles east. I sniffed the air for the scent of shellac: no trace.
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