My parents lived not very far from the hospital, but they did not come and visit me, although we spoke on the phone. My father knew enough about loss to try to keep a cordial distance from it. I suspected that he had to deny the seriousness of my accident because it posed too great a potential disaster to him. His late childhood had brought a great deal of loss, including the death of his father, a medical doctor with a prosperous pharmaceutical business in India, and, according to my father, the subsequent mismanagement of the family business by his older brothers. My father could only watch as his future was squandered by his brothers. He left India when he was seventeen years old to find a new life in Europe and North America, where he would eventually start his own materials-analysis laboratory. During a phone conversation while I was at the Pennsylvania hospital, my father asked whether I could get a friend to drive me home. He knew that my wife did not have a driver’s license. In the end, Dave Dannenberg, the instructor who had attended to me on the Seeker, made the four-hour drive from his home in Connecticut to Philadelphia and drove me home to Manhattan. I could spare my father the direct pain of my brush with death.
As I would find out later, Diana also could not accept the seriousness of my accident. During her one brief hospital visit, the only physical sign of injury she saw was my fluid-bloated face and my difficulty walking. The bloated face was, she knew, from the intravenous fluids I had been given, and she knew that would go away quickly with the use of diuretics that the doctors prescribed. She convinced herself that I had trouble walking mainly because I had been bedridden for a few days and my muscles were stiff. Diana would have been more sympathetic if I had dropped a bowling ball on my foot. It was all part of her denial of the risk I faced when I went diving.
Five weeks after my accident, Dr. Hunt came over to my apartment to interview me. My son, Gil, said hello to her with unusual shyness. Perhaps he had become overly suspicious of strangers: The day I returned from the hospital in Philadelphia, I had suffered what I thought was a collapsed lung, which made it excruciatingly painful to breathe, and I had been attended to by paramedics as Gil looked on. He had seen me taken away by ambulance to the local hospital by strangers. His three-year-old mind was probably haunted that his father might yet again be taken away from him.
Dr. Hunt was a tall, slim woman, with short, blond hair, fair features, and a businesslike demeanor. I judged her about five years older than I was, but found out later that she was a decade my senior. Dr. Hunt smiled warmly at Gil, and said hello in a very gentle, nonthreatening way. After Gil said hello, he turned and walked back to be with Diana, his mother, the parent in his life who didn’t get sick and disappear.
Dr. Hunt turned to me with a warm smile. “He’s adorable. He’s probably wondering what I’m doing here.” She pulled out a small tape recorder and placed it between us on the couch. “Has he been worried about you because of the accident?”
Her interview had already started. We discussed Gil and his worries. She briefed me about what she was doing and in what framework she wanted to work with me. She was informally gathering data about the world of diving, about how divers perceive themselves and the diving world. She was fascinated by people in high-risk environments. “My previous research was about police violence—what notions the police have of what constitutes violence, what they feel is reasonable and not reasonable, and why,” she told me.
It seemed that Dr. Hunt’s work encompassed more than gender issues in adventure sport, and that would be useful to me. “That’s interesting,” I told her. “I have a degree in criminal justice. Among other things. I’d like to read your police studies.”
Jennifer, as Dr. Hunt insisted I call her, agreed, and promised to give me copies of her papers during our next interview. We went on to talk about my diving, the social dynamics of the technical aspects of the sport, and especially the resistance that new techniques and technologies had always encountered in the diving community at large. I filled her in on a lot of the history, and on how I had gotten increasingly fascinated, even obsessed, with the sport. We stopped the interview late in the evening and scheduled another meeting in three weeks’ time. I knew that my interest in her work was in no sense academic. For my own sanity and safety I needed to be her guinea pig.
I was still homebound and had not returned to work; I was staying out on the disability leave my doctor had given me. Diana nagged me almost continuously to go back to work, even though my benefits paid my full salary. She could not understand that my hearing, vision, and walking were still compromised, and thought that I was just slacking. The nagging made my home life miserable, which probably did not help my recovery. Only many years later did Diana fully understand and accept the gravity of my condition, and she apologized for how she’d treated me.
At our second interview, Jennifer gave me copies of her published academic papers about the police research she had conducted in the seventies, which clarified for me her primary interest: the normalization of risk in the lives of her high-risk subjects. Her police research involved direct observation in the field, combined with unstructured interviews of police, just as she was now doing with divers. As part of her previous study, she had attended the Philadelphia Police Academy as a researcher and had graduated with the first one hundred women recruits. Although she was trained to shoot a gun, she did not have a badge. But she rode in patrol cars, taking regular shifts, and participated in police work and the social world of law enforcement professionals. She was able to establish how police justify the use of force to themselves and to their colleagues. Dr. Hunt’s approach was as novel as it was controversial. Instead of applying only traditional sociological theories to explain social behavior, she also employed her training in psychoanalytic theory and what she had learned while treating patients in psychodynamic psychotherapy.
Her psychoanalytic training led her to conclude that there was an unconscious level of motivation within each of us. According to Dr. Hunt’s training and beliefs, unconscious memory, thoughts, and feelings stem from earlier parts of life, including childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. These unconscious recollections, notions, and emotions affect what we think, what we say, and how we act. Unresolved conflicts from earlier life experiences may be hidden in the unconscious and influence behavior, which is especially important to people such as divers, who engage in high-risk activities.
Even though I fully accepted my individual responsibility for the accident, I was intrigued that things of which I was not consciously aware influenced my safety—or lack of safety—on a dive. If this was true, then divers, and others in high-risk activities, could be safer if they looked deeper and examined their own motivations and their unresolved inner conflicts. I began a journey that continues today: to understand the siren call that lured me, Chris and Chrissy Rouse, and thousands of other divers to master deep and murderous water.
On an entirely conscious level, Chris Rouse had been motivated to take up diving when the other sport-flying pilots in his social group started planning a flight to Bermuda for a scuba-diving vacation. Chris thought that becoming a diver not only would be fun but would help him maintain the close friendship that he and Sue enjoyed with the other members in the flying group; diving would be something that eighteen-year-old Chrissy would be excited about; and Chris believed that it would strengthen the family bonds to share the same adventure among father, son, and wife. Teen fatherhood had curtailed Chris’s natural youthful escapades; now, at thirty-five, Chris could experience some of the manly challenges he’d once had to forgo.
The social, even tribal, aspects of diving combined in Chris with his natural competitiveness, evident in the intensity of his diving. Chris welcomed underwater challenges from the outset of his diving—early on he took to cave diving, which was far beyond the skills and aspirations of most divers—and he pitted himself against the water itself as much as against any one person in particular. Underwater, he was free to be his own man, just as he was as a business owner. And underw
ater, the experience of adventure gave a new meaning to his life and made him feel very special because he knew he was doing something unusual.
Two years before my accident and only eleven months after Chris and Chrissy had begun their first class, the Rouse family had an adventure that went beyond what most divers experience—an exercise that manufactured challenge and risk in a way that arguably was foolhardy. The three Rouses took the “Advanced Diving” course given by Bob Burns. During that course, Burns taught the Rouses underwater navigation, as well as search and recovery of objects underwater. At Pennsylvania’s Willow Springs quarry, Burns conducted an exercise to find a sunken Volkswagen in the cold, murky water. Using a rope, the divers swam a pattern until they found the vehicle. The search portion of their class proved easy enough.
Their next exercise proved far more challenging. Burns set forth an entirely constructed task involving real and completely optional risks: to raise the car without getting trapped, crushed, or drowned. The trophy offered by this endeavor was not a treasure that the world might venerate, like a porthole, or a Doria dish. Instead, the artifact to retrieve was a rusted Beetle, and the challenge was to survive.
Chris and Chrissy Rouse were delighted at the challenge. Bob Burns had instructed Chris Rouse to send up a lift bag attached to a rope, and then tie off the rope to the Volkswagen so that the bag did not float around the quarry. The bright-yellow lift bag floating on the water’s surface clearly marked the location of the car, and the bag could easily be seen from shore while everyone took a break and ate lunch between dives. Burns announced to the class that on their next dive they would raise the Volkswagen they had just found. Chris and Chrissy were very excited and eager to get started right away. Sue and some of the other students thought the task was too risky and they were skeptical about trying to raise a car to the surface. What was the point? Chris and Chrissy wanted to do it, if only to experience something new and to say they had done it. Getting the rust bucket up from the bottom would give them some bragging rights.
Raising a sunken car carries risk usually taken on only by commercial divers like Glenn Butler, who get paid, or for police and fire rescue squads, which sometimes have to raise sunken vehicles as crime scene evidence, or to extract people who had the misfortune of driving into the water. Police and fire divers use underwater communications gear to coordinate their activities, so that when they raise a car it won’t strike a diver as it comes off the bottom, or ascend to the surface improperly tethered, then break free of its bonds and plummet onto the unsuspecting divers. Without communications gear, the Rouses and their buddies felt more pressure to execute their plan so perfectly that no one got injured or killed.
In spite of the inherent risks, Chris and Chrissy Rouse welcomed the challenge of getting a car to the surface. From earning his private pilot license to starting his own excavation business to building his own house, Chris had always shouldered aside any obstacles, a trait that his son, Chrissy, imitated. Chris saw the raising of a car from the bottom of a mud-lined quarry as a mechanical problem, the kind he was very good at solving. It helped tremendously that, along with having the right attitude, the men had no idea how risky or dangerous underwater salvage can be.
Diving has a long history partly because of our ignorance of the risks involved underwater combined with our determination to bring something up. Some of us have welcomed the pure challenge of overcoming the risks of the unknown, but undoubtedly, many divers have been motivated to accept the risks of the deep out of greed: For millennia the driving force behind diving has been the lure of salvaging sunken cargo and treasure and obtaining natural resources.
One of diving’s most remarkable examples of ignorance colluding with greed to expose divers to tremendous risks occurred in the 1920s, when the wealthy English businessman Ernest Cox was motivated to buy from the British Admiralty the entire sunken German World War I Navy as scrap metal, which rested underwater in the protected anchorage of Scapa Flow, in Scotland’s Orkney Islands. To him it was a sunken treasure. He was undeterred that a previous salvage attempt by a commercial company had yielded only scrap metal from four lightweight destroyers, already dragged into shallow water and beached by the British Royal Navy. Marine salvage experts around the world were unanimous that the undertaking of raising completely sunken ships as long as 700 feet, as wide as 96 feet, and weighing as much as 26,180 tons was folly. They were convinced that no one—especially not Ernest Cox, who had no experience whatsoever in underwater salvage—could raise the great German battle fleet. Nothing on this scale had ever before been attempted.
During the Versailles peace negotiations, the German fleet had been interned at Scapa Flow under the watchful eyes of the British, who had stipulated that treaty negotiations could not begin until the Germans disarmed their navy and allowed it to be kept in an Allied port. The Allies reasoned that if the Germans knew they would not be able to use their navy in the event the negotiations failed, they would be less willing to risk such a failure and more willing to sign the peace treaty.
On June 21, 1919, eight months after the armistice that ended the First World War, it looked as though the Germans would not accept the harsh terms of the proposed Versailles Treaty and the war would resume. Admiral von Reuter, the commander of the German fleet at Scapa Flow, ordered his officers to sink their own ships so that they would not be captured by the British and turned against Germany. All seventy-four German warships went to the bottom—the very morning a group of Scottish schoolchildren was touring around them aboard a tugboat. Some of the younger children were delighted to see the massive ships sinking, and thought that it was a show put on for their benefit. The older children and adults present knew that the sinking warships could strike the tugboat and sink it, and they were understandably terrified. Luckily, the tugboat and its human cargo made it safely back to shore. What the children had witnessed on their school outing was the single greatest act of naval suicide in world history.
Unfortunately for the Allies, the scuttling of the German fleet proved a huge embarrassment: They had wanted to divide the ships–some of which were among the most powerful in the world—among themselves as prizes of war. When the British Admiralty had divers and salvage experts assess the situation, it was judged most economical to sell the ships where they lay for scrap.
Cox had perceived a business opportunity in raising the German fleet for scrap metal and was nearly killed when a chain underneath a sunken ship snapped and lashed the deck of the wooden floating dock where Cox was standing. Luckily, everyone escaped unscathed. The incident served only to warn Cox and his workers that they should find a more suitable way of raising the vessels, which they did, using heavy wire cables combined with compressed air pumped into the warships, which divers had welded closed. Cox’s enthusiasm and refusal to bow to the risks of the deep were rewarded with the salvage of most of the fleet, including the 26,180-ton Hindenburg, the largest ship ever raised intact. Unfortunately for Cox, the salvage was not successful from a business standpoint and he suffered losses of over ten thousand pounds sterling. Greed spurred technical innovation, but greed did not win out.
On its own scale, what the Rouses faced in raising the Volkswagen at the quarry was almost as daunting as Ernest Cox’s earlier undertaking at Scapa Flow, although it would have been practically pointless if greed, or even usefulness, had been their motive. But unlike Cox, the Rouses had a body of experience and a teacher in Bob Burns who had done this before. Burns outlined the plan: They would take down a heavy, reinforced nylon strap to put underneath the car, and then they would attach each end of the strap to a lift bag with a 1,000-pound capability. Unlike the small lift bag that floated on the surface marking the car’s location, the 1,000-pound bag that Burns wanted his students to use to raise the car was completely sealed. A special valve would be used to connect the bag to scuba tanks so that the bag could be inflated, and an overpressure relief vent would let out excess air as it expanded when the bag floated toward the s
urface. They would fill the bag with air from extra scuba tanks they brought down just for this purpose. The air trapped in the lift bag would carry the car to the surface.
The Rouses worked hard to get the strap underneath the car. They had to do a lot of digging to make a tunnel through which they could snake the strap, just as the divers at Scapa Flow had done years earlier to raise the German warships. Chris and Chrissy Rouse were not bothered by working in the zero-visibility conditions they created by digging, and they successfully got the Volkswagen to the surface. Nobody died. Proud that they had accomplished such a major task so early in their diving careers, they had further confirmation that they could do underwater whatever they set out to accomplish, as long as they planned everything properly—no matter how daunting the risk or dubious the rewards.
During my second interview with Dr. Hunt, she started to ask me questions about my childhood, especially as it related to my developing fascination with diving.
Chrissy Rouse, Billy Deans, Glenn Butler, and a host of other divers who engaged in the more extreme aspects of the sport were spurred by their fathers. In my case, it was my grandmother, whom we all affectionately called Omi, the German term of endearment for a grandmother, who started my fascination with diving. I was seven years old and living in London, England, where I had been born, when I visited Omi in West Berlin for the summer. Although Berlin is seen as a big, cosmopolitan city—one that has played a critical ongoing role in modern politics—most people would be surprised at the city’s many lakes and forests, which lend it a charm that a place such as New York can only wish for.
The Last Dive Page 27