Sue took a deep breath and hugged her child. “We need to help Dad when he gets home. He can’t use his hands to do anything, and everything hurts him.”
Chrissy looked up at his mother with his saddened brown eyes. “I want to help, Mom. I want Dad to be okay again.”
When Chris was released from the hospital two days later, he came home an invalid requiring constant care. His pain was blunted only with regular doses of powerful painkillers that numbed both body and mind. He also needed antibiotics to prevent his first-, second-, and third-degree burns from turning into massive infections. Chrissy was old enough to tell time, and Sue drew a large clock on a piece of paper, indicating which pills Chris needed to take and at what time. She arranged her waitressing schedule so that either she or Chrissy was with Chris at all times. The elder Rouse lay in bed, obediently swallowing the medicine his wife or son put on his tongue. Chris also had to be assisted with every bodily function, and his family helped with that. At ten years old, Chrissy Rouse saw that even his father could need help and that he wasn’t always strong. His father had always helped him, but now the child was father to the man. Chrissy’s world had altered dramatically. It confused and frightened him.
When Chris Rouse recovered, two months later, he returned to work and went on to build his house three years later. As Chrissy helped his parents with the building project he saw his father as strong again. Things were back the way they should be.
As a young man pushing twenty, a high school graduate who hadn’t gone to college, Chrissy appeared casual, laid-back, happy-go-lucky. But inwardly, he knew how fragile his world was, and how easily it could change in an instant. Just as his father had once needed him, so now he maintained a reliance on his father and a reluctance to become truly independent. For a long time he lived at home. A series of minor car crashes left him in debt to his parents, who always chided him for his driving accidents, but who nonetheless lent him money to pay for another vehicle and the resulting steep insurance increases.
Both Chris and Sue had driven with Chrissy enough to know that his attention would easily drift from the road. One time, with Sue as Chrissy’s passenger, he completely turned his head to look at her and talk. She noticed that his full attention was now on her, and instead of just glancing in her direction, Chrissy seemed to have forgotten about the winding country road they were on. “Chrissy, keep your eyes on the road!” Sue screamed in alarm. She also noticed that her son’s attention would completely turn to the radio or the tape deck when he wanted to change the music. Although frightened, she hoped that Chrissy’s behavior was just a sign of an inexperienced new driver, not a young man who still had the symptoms of attention deficit disorder. After his car crashes, both parents hoped that their son had been shaken enough to pay greater heed to the necessity to focus on his driving.
Chrissy just shook off his crashes as freak accidents that could have happened to anyone. His blasé attitude and air of entitlement grated on his father. When he was Chrissy’s age he already had a two-year-old, and now here was his shaggy son enjoying a freedom Chris had been denied.
Even Chrissy’s choice of friends reflected both his carefree attitude and his dependence on older father figures. Two of Chrissy’s pals, Tim Stumpf and Paul Curtin, were both about ten years older than he was. Stumpf was already divorced, and Curtin’s marriage was in the midst of dissolving. Both older men lived in Tim’s house, not far from Underwater World, where they all worked. Tim and Paul were aggressively making up for time they felt they had lost to the responsibilities of marriage. Tim’s house was like a college fraternity, with people coming and going at all hours, and raucous parties long into Friday and Saturday nights.
Tim and Paul liked Chrissy’s easygoing nature and were amused by his innocence. Both men arranged to get Chrissy some fake IDs, so that he could join them at the local bars, where the legal entrance age was twenty-one. Chrissy, feeling comfortable with his diving buddies, eagerly flashed his fake ID and joined in the beer drinking. One night early in their friendship, after Chrissy had swallowed several beers, Tim and Paul looked smugly at each other and suggested that it was time for Chrissy to meet some girls. “Sure, I’m up for that!” said a happy, grinning Chrissy. He eagerly went up to a girl they all agreed was attractive. From a distance, Tim and Paul watched Chrissy in animated conversation.
“Well, he sure has the right spirit,” Tim said.
“Yeah, he’s not shy, that’s for sure,” Paul agreed.
Soon Chrissy rejoined his friends. “Well, what happened?” Tim asked. “Did you get her number?”
“No. She has a boyfriend,” Chrissy told him.
Both Tim and Paul agreed that it was just bad luck. They immediately pointed Chrissy toward another woman, and off Chrissy went to dive into the unknown. But over the course of the evening, Chrissy never seemed to get anywhere with the women he tried to meet. “Chrissy, not every one of these girls can have a boyfriend!” Paul exclaimed. “Tim and I have seen these girls in here a lot, and most of the time they’re not with guys at all. What are you saying to them, anyway?”
“Well, I don’t know. They don’t seem to be too interested in diving,” replied Chrissy.
“Diving?” Tim blurted out.
“You’re talking to them about diving?” Paul asked.
“Yeah, what else is there to talk about?”
Tim and Paul both agreed that some coaching was in order. With the help of the older men, and thanks to his natural charm, Chrissy was soon meeting women successfully.
Because Tim’s house was conveniently located not far from Underwater World, Chrissy started spending more time there, staying over after parties or after ventures to the local bars. Even though Chrissy tried to broaden his conversations with women beyond diving, it was still his main focus. And there were plenty of women to be met through the dive shop and the classes he assisted with. Most of the women who regularly showed up at Tim’s parties were divers, and most of the time Tim, Paul, and Chrissy met those women through Underwater World. In spite of Chrissy’s beer-induced eagerness to meet women at the bars, he had far more success when his passion for diving and women were combined.
“Bernie, I’d kill to do the Doria the way you guys did,” Chris Rouse said to me when I called him in the summer of 1990 at Steve Berman’s suggestion. Anyone who dives the North Atlantic has to be intrigued by the wreck that stands out above all others: the Italian luxury liner Andrea Doria, a magnificent and perilous carcass of a ship that has been proclaimed “the Mount Everest of scuba diving” since it went down in 1956, approximately eighty-five miles off Nantucket.
The Doria was not the fastest of ocean liners, but it was a floating monument to Italian artistry. The works of art commissioned specially for the vessel and its sleek lines earned it the nickname “Grande Dame of the Sea.” Aesthetically, the Doria is to today’s bulky, boxlike cruise ships what a Ferrari is to a garbage truck. On the night of July 25, 1956, on its one hundredth crossing of the Atlantic, it collided with another ocean liner, the Stockholm. Both vessels had seen each other on radar while they were over seventeen miles apart, and they had acknowledged each other in radio messages. But in the fog that lay off the Nantucket coast as the Doria made its way to New York City, the Stockholm, which had a reinforced bow, sliced through the side of the Italian liner. Fifty-six people lost their lives in the collision. As the Stockholm reversed its engines, tons of water rushed into the gaping hole in the Doria’s side and the luxury ship immediately began to list heavily. The captain gave the order to abandon ship. Other vessels came to the stricken liner’s aid and rescued most of the passengers and crew. The Stockholm itself saved many passengers of the ship it had rammed.
The Doria’s demise was slow enough for photographers and television crews to hire planes and circle the mortally stricken vessel, capturing every moment of its death as it rolled over onto its side and sank. So great was the air traffic over the site that the Federal Aviation Administration had to se
t up a special zone around the Doria, and air traffic controllers slotted times when the various news agencies could have access to it. Never before had such a prominent ship been captured on film while it sank. Still and moving images captivated the public worldwide. Harry Trask of the Boston Herald captured a series of photos of the Doria in its very last moments, and his shot of the ship with only one propeller visible won him the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for news photography.
The legend of the Doria as a diving destination began just hours after its sinking when Peter Gimbel, on assignment to get photos for Life magazine, became the first diver to visit the wreck. The Doria represented the envelope of what divers could reach with relative safety because of its depth at 240 feet, water temperatures in the low forties, sharks, the currents around the site, and the unpredictable, rapidly changing conditions above, on the ocean’s surface. Gimbel, the heir to a department store fortune, became obsessed with the wreck. He would eventually spend a great deal of money over the years in his quest to bring up the purser’s safe and the treasure it was rumored to contain. He eventually hired a commercial diving company to cut a hole into the Doria’s side and bring up the safe, one of seventeen aboard the vessel. The expedition proved difficult and the safe was elusive, even to some of the world’s most experienced divers with their elaborate support team and equipment. When the safe was finally retrieved and then opened during a live national television broadcast, most people were disappointed: Instead of fabulous jewels, the safe contained only clumps of sodden paper currency.
Sport divers view a wreck—especially one as large and prestigious as the Doria—as a treasure trove, even if it does not promise jewels and gold. At first, starting in about 1965, only a boat or two would occasionally go to the wreck. In 1970, Captain Steve Bielenda, the self-professed “King of the Deep,” first began taking sport divers to the Doria on his boat, the Wahoo. By 1975, Bielenda on the Wahoo and then Bill Nagel on the Seeker—Nagel was the alcoholic captain who would later take Chatterton and then the Rouses to the U-Who—were going to the site regularly, twice a season each. In those days, a diver had to be invited by the boat captain to pay his money to go on the trip. Simply having the money to go was not enough to get on the boat. Usually, a captain watched divers as they dived progressively more challenging wrecks on the coastline, over a period of several years. If the diver was well liked and exhibited good skills and judgment, he’d get an invite. To dive the Doria was to enter an elite league.
The Doria offered not only bragging rights but trophies. Skilled divers brought up brass-framed windows from the promenade deck, or dishes bearing the crest of the company that had had the liner built, the word ITALIA with a crown over it. Chinaware from the first-class section were prized; the plates had a gold band running around the edge and an elaborate Chinese scene painted in the center.
There are many dangers in diving the Doria, some more obvious than others. Getting to the Doria in the first place is half the challenge. Blue sharks used to be common but today are rarely seen during dives. The larger sharks were cautious toward the newcomers blowing bubbles, but the smaller, younger ones were fearless, frequently bumping divers and charging them, seeking to establish a pecking order among themselves and the divers. Sometimes a diver has to press his back-mounted tanks against his buddy’s, so that they were back-to-back and could use their heavy mallets or crowbars to fend off the most aggressive of the circling sharks. It would take a well-timed, well-placed blow on the shark’s nose to stop the harassment. Luckily, no divers have ever been bitten while diving the Doria.
The dangers were such that over the years only a small group regularly dived the wreck, though many others were lured by both the challenge and the prestige among divers that would be granted after successfully visiting the ocean liner. For some, the lure proved too much, and they paid with their lives. This only lent the wreck more mystique.
Depth is one factor that makes the Doria challenging, just as height is for Everest. The shallowest part of the Doria rests in 165 feet, over three martinis. The deepest part, at 240 feet, is like having just under five martinis. The depth combines with the cold and the limited visibility to increase the narcosis effect; warm-water dives with clear visibility are much easier for the diver mentally and physically. Even the most experienced divers succumb to the effects of the Martini Law, and an individual diver may be affected to a greater or lesser degree from one day to the next.
Current is another danger, one far less obvious than depth. There is no way to know what the current will be like below the surface, or how it will change on the surface during the course of a dive. Divers have experienced currents on the Doria at different intensities—and even angles—at various depths during a single dive. Conditions can change within minutes. A diver struggling while fighting the current risks deadly levels of carbon dioxide buildup in his system, if he does not inhale and exhale deeply enough to purge the toxic gas from his body. At least one Doria diver has been swept off the anchor line, fought to get back, passed out, and drowned.
The Doria also has a way of inducing artifact fever, an obsession with retrieving a trophy from the wreck that leads a diver to take excessive risks. This is especially dangerous when diving deep. Yet the Doria does not give up its treasure easily. When John Ormsby came aboard the Wahoo with Billy Deans in 1985, he was a highly skilled warm-water wreck diver with many dives to 250 feet behind him. The experienced northeast-wreck-diving crew warned him to modify his equipment. He had lots of clips on his harness, which he used for all his backup equipment. He was told that with those clips all over his harness, he would get caught on a cable or on the fishermen’s nets that were by now draped all over the wreck. Ormsby snapped back that he was an experienced wreck diver and liked the way his gear was configured. During his dive, even though he had not planned to penetrate the wreck, he swam inside the first-class section; when he did not reappear at the anchor line on time, the other divers there feared the worst. When word was relayed topside, a search team went down. Ormsby was found at a depth of just over 200 feet, and about 30 feet inside the wreck. Apparently, a large cable caught on one of his harness clips, and when he turned to find where he was caught, the cable tightened around him like a boa constrictor. He ran out of air and drowned while hopelessly entangled in the cable.
The Rouses were especially intrigued by the stories Steve Berman and I told about our experiences on the Andrea Doria. When I first dived the Doria, in the summer of 1990, I had been full cave certified for a year and had been applying cave-diving techniques to northeast wreck diving for the previous two years. Steve Berman and I decided that we would treat the Doria as a giant steel cave, and use cave-diving techniques to penetrate deep inside the wreck. We dived from Bielenda’s Wahoo. Gary Gentile was one of the crew members. Gentile had made over 100 dives to the wreck, and had written a book on this site, Andrea Doria: Dive to an Era. Berman and I had each read the book scrupulously and were excited that Gary was on board because we could double-team him with questions.
Berman and I jumped from the Wahoo and descended to the wreck. The strong current quickly wore me out, and although the intact vessel looked magnificently tempting resting on its side, I aborted the dive almost as soon as I reached the wreck. Berman seemed to have all his energy, but he ascended with me without question. When we were back aboard the Wahoo, I apologized to him. “Shoot, don’t worry about that,” he told me. “The first thing is safety. If anyone ever says anything negative to me when I abort a dive, I’ll never dive with him again. Let’s just focus on having a good second dive.” I was relieved, and my respect for Berman increased.
On the second dive, we went inside the wreck, swimming horizontally at 202 feet. The wooden walls between cabins had disintegrated, allowing us to swim among the remaining oval steel cabin supports through what was once a row of adjoining passenger cabins. Lying everywhere was light-brown silt and debris—all that remained of cabin paneling and bed mattresses, sheets, and blankets. El
ectrical cables dangled in our way. Because the ship rested on its side, everything was skewed at a 90-degree angle. Bathroom sinks and bathtubs were attached to the wall on my left, which had once been the floor of this deck. In the distance, I saw a faint light and what looked like another diver. My heart beat faster. We were 50 feet inside the wreck, and I wondered who else would be this far in—and coming at me from the other direction. As I swam closer I saw my reflection in a mirror, and had to laugh. I turned to Berman and signaled our retreat. On the return, Steve picked up three dishes; since he had no “goodie bag,” he deposited them in the all-purpose bag clipped to my harness. Back on the Wahoo, one experienced Doria diver looked at us, shocked. “Wow, you guys got some artifacts. Not bad for rookies!”
Bolstered by our initial success, Steve and I planned a more challenging third dive. We decided to drop straight down a passageway we had passed previously about 30 feet inside the wreck. The vertical passageway was huge, and our powerful dive lights did not penetrate the blackness to the bottom. Our descent took us to 238 feet—almost five martinis—and we then swam along a horizontal passageway, with Steve leading and paying out guideline from the reel, just as we would in cave diving. We were about 150 feet inside the wreck when I spotted glass and crystal trays and dishes scattered in the fine silt on the floor. Rather than signal Steve before reaching for any goodies, the way I was supposed to, I allowed artifact fever to get the better of me. I kneeled on the bottom and in a frenzy proceeded to stack a number of trays and dishes, then put a wineglass on top of the stack for good measure.
As soon as I settled into the bottom, and then again when I grabbed the artifacts, the fine silt on the passageway floor billowed around me like a brown, atomic mushroom cloud. I was working by feel. I unclipped my goodie bag and prepared to put the entire artifact stack into it. Just then, I felt a furious pull on my calf, which almost knocked me facedown into the silt. Turning, I moved into the direction of the tugging and when my mask came within inches of Berman’s I could see him, and I heard him yelling, “Let’s get the hell outta here!” I turned to try and grab a dish, to show him what I was doing, but he quickly grabbed my leg again, more insistent this time, and repeated the command. I gave up on both the artifact stack and my open goodie bag lying next to it. And then I noticed Berman swimming around me, frantically removing white guideline wrapped around my body. Apparently, when I had dropped down to grab the artifacts, one of the tank valves behind my head had gotten caught on the line, and as I moved around for the best spot to land on the bottom, I wrapped the line around myself.
The Last Dive Page 13