On board the dive boat, Ed could not be revived with heart massage and artificial respiration. The Coast Guard came and took his body from the vessel. The dive boat chugged back to port, its occupants solemn, numb with grief, and many disbelieving that a diver with Ed Sollner’s experience could die while diving. After the boat docked, the Rouses went to the hospital, where Ed had already been pronounced dead. Chris called Cathie Cush—Chrissy’s instructor friend about whom Chrissy had harbored his older-woman fantasy—and told her the news. Though Cathie had long ago broken up with Ed, the two had lived together until Cathie had moved out; it had become apparent to her that Ed was taking too many risks with his diving. She had not wanted to be hurt when he died underwater, a death she felt was inevitable. But now that Ed was dead, Cathie felt the pain anyway.
Cathie asked Chris to analyze Ed’s breathing gas, to help determine the cause of death. The analysis indicated that Ed’s breathing gas consisted of 39 percent oxygen, a gas mixture the Navy recommended be breathed to a maximum depth of 102 feet. Deeper than that, less oxygen should be breathed. Ed was found dead at 135 feet. He had proved his theory wrong.
Chris knew that pushing diving limits as Ed had done was folly. And to do so in what they all considered shallow water, on a wreck that was fun to dive but otherwise had no glamour to it, was tempting fate unnecessarily.
For the Rouses and many other people, Ed’s death served to underscore the need for formal training and standards in the use of breathing gases other than air. Military and commercial divers pointed to Sollner as proof positive that sport divers were not disciplined enough to handle the restrictions imposed by the use of gas mixtures; equipment used to breathe high-oxygen-content gases had to be specially cleaned to prevent combustion, the gases had to be mixed properly and then analyzed to ensure the correct mixture, depth limits had to be adhered to so that a diver did not die of oxygen seizure, and the gear had to be properly marked so that a diver did not inadvertently die from breathing the wrong gas mixture at depth. Recreational divers—those who did not breathe gases other than air, who stayed above 130 feet depth, and who did not engage in stage decompression diving—wondered why anybody would want to go through all of the critical preparations required for a gas dive when the underwater experience was supposed to be relaxing and fun, and they did not understand someone like Ed, who thought that diving with gases other than air was fun.
Ed Sollner’s death was used by both sides of the argument to prove their point. Those in favor of amateur divers using gases other than air said it proved that sanctioned training for sport divers was needed to prevent other divers from dying as Ed had; everybody against changing the status quo said that Ed’s death just proved that sport divers could not be trusted to properly use any gas other than compressed air. Above all, divers like Chris and Chrissy Rouse, Steve Berman, and me worried that deaths like Ed Sollner’s would cause the U.S. government to step in and pass laws regulating the sport and banning amateur divers from using any gas other than compressed air. We all knew that if that happened, our activities would officially make us underwater outlaws, which none of us wanted to be.
Around the time of Sollner’s death, the sport-diving establishment’s attitude toward mixed-gas use veered from negative to prohibitive. The organization that represented sport diving, DEMA (then called the Diving Equipment and Manufacturing Association; now called the Diving Equipment and Marketing Association), sponsored the industry’s largest trade show, which had grown steadily over the years as diving became more popular, thanks to television specials, better marketing, and easier training standards allowed by newer, more reliable equipment. With a market and an image to protect, for its January 1992 trade show DEMA tried to ban any company from exhibiting or distributing any material related to the use of gas mixtures. The most common of these mixtures went by several names, including nitrox, oxygen-enriched air, and safe air.
The proposed ban outraged a number of people in the diving industry, most notably those whose companies were training divers to use nitrox. Dick Rutkowski was one of those men; he had served in the U.S. Navy, where he developed expertise in hyperbaric medicine, mixed gas, and life support systems, and then went on to a distinguished career with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a U.S. government organization. Rutkowski helped develop nitrox for use by scientists who were conducting research for NOAA, as well as the nitrox-specific dive tables published by the U.S government in NOAA’s diving manual, which the Navy had adopted (this was the manual that Ed Sollner had ranted against).
After Rutkowski retired from NOAA, he set up a hyperbaric training facility in Key Largo, Florida, where he taught people how to treat injured divers, burn victims, and puncture wounds in a recompression chamber. By the time I took Rutkowski’s nitrox course in 1988, he had already been teaching the general public about the safe use of this gas for two years. But gas use was catching on slowly, partly because of negative reporting in the diving press—I was only the 177th person Rutkowski had officially trained in nitrox. And even after a person had been trained in their use, nitrox mixtures could be obtained only at a few shops in the world, including Billy Deans’s facility in Key West. Rutkowski taught the use of nitrox as the preferred gas for dives to 130 feet and shallower—standard nitrox 32 percent oxygen mixtures were toxic beyond 130 feet. But Billy Deans, in addition, saw the use of various nitrox mixtures as efficient gases to use for decompression after deep helium dives, like the ones he conducted regularly to the Wilkes-Barre, which rested in 250 feet of water not far from his dive shop and training facility. The higher oxygen content of the nitrox gases he created could be used to accelerate his decompression and get him out of the water faster than if he breathed only compressed air. He also knew that he felt much better physically after a deep dive when he decompressed using various nitrox mixtures and then switched to pure oxygen at his 20-and 10-foot decompression stops.
If DEMA thought nitrox gas mixtures unsafe for divers, then helium was completely unthinkable. DEMA’s nitrox ban stirred Michael Menduno—the maverick founder of the magazine Aqua-Corps, who reported on subjects like solo diving, which the large training organizations thought of as heresy—and brought his fledgling magazine into the spotlight. Just in time for the DEMA show prohibition, AquaCorps’s fourth issue—titled “Mix” and dealing with both nitrox and helium gas mixtures—was released in January 1992. Menduno organized a conference in conjunction with the 1992 DEMA show to educate the industry about nitrox. Participants were seen going back and forth between the conference and the DEMA show, as if sneaking out of a Prohibition-era speakeasy to a respectable club where the party couldn’t quite sizzle because they didn’t serve alcohol. Anyone who wanted to know about nitrox—or other gas mixes—circumvented the DEMA ban by going to Men-duno’s conference and getting educated. And much like the United States’ 1920s attempt to prohibit alcohol, DEMA’s ban on nitrox only caused more people to know about it, and to want to experience it. The official proceedings of Menduno’s nitrox conference were released in June 1992, just one month before Ed Sollner’s death.
Divers as savvy as the Rouses could stand back from the battle over mixed-gas use; they could go their own way and concoct their own gases, without waiting around for commercially marketed gases to be approved. Chris, Chrissy, and Sue thought that nitrox and helium gases might be useful tools; they were among the first sport divers to become trained in nitrox and helium-gas mixtures when they had taken Sheck Exley’s mixed-gas course in October 1990. The Rouses did not let the unavailability of gas mixtures prevent them from using these tools: When business was good enough so that they could afford to buy the ingredients, they bought the equipment to mix their own gases—which they did following Navy standards.
Ed’s death did not keep the Rouses from diving each weekend, in preparation for their August Andrea Doria expedition, which they had spent much of the previous year organizing. In their view, Ed had not just bent the rules but ha
d broken them, and thus the Rouses could separate their own presumably sensible behavior from Sollner’s extravagant riskiness, thereby cordoning off their friend’s fate from their own prospective future. As both Jennifer Hunt’s research and common sense show, this is how risk takers, from mountaineers to skydivers, push past fear and paralysis to persevere. Chrissy was now diving on wrecks every weekend, usually accompanied by his friends instead of his father as he struck out on his own more and more. He regularly caught lobsters weighing several pounds and also brought up all manner of artifacts. Sometimes he dived alone, at other times he dived with a buddy.
It was only two weeks after Sollner died that Chrissy’s rescue of an unknown diver took place. Diving solo on a wreck in 170 feet of water, Chrissy saw another diver on the bottom, in the sand next to the wreck, signaling to him. Chrissy swam over and was surprised when he read the diver’s gas pressure gauge and found the man’s tanks to be dangerously low on air. The diver seemed confused, Chrissy thought, and he knew the man was in trouble. Chrissy immediately deployed his spare regulator, which was attached to a cave-diving-style six-foot-long hose, and gave the diver the regulator, which provided him breathing gas from Chrissy’s ample supply. Next, Chrissy removed from behind his own tanks the large upline reel that his father had constructed, took his regulator out of his mouth, placed it underneath the lift bag, pressed the regulator’s purge button to release air into the lift bag and inflate it, and watched as the bag shot to the surface. He put the regulator back into his mouth and tied off his end of the line to a steel hull plate that lay nearby. He signaled the diver to ascend with him, and they swam up together, like two aquatic Jacks in the children’s beanstalk story. The two divers decompressed successfully, while breathing from Chrissy’s tanks, and the man gradually grew clear-eyed and grateful.
Chrissy did not know the diver, but his own rescue response was automatic. In coming to the stranger’s aid, Chrissy risked his own life without hesitation: There have been several cases where an experienced diver aided another, only to have the other diver panic and fight the would-be rescuer for possession of their life-giving regulator, with the result that both divers perished. Chrissy’s logbook entry is succinct, in its stream-of-consciousness writing style: “Dived solo 19 min found diver on bottom signaling me found him low on air & confused, shot bag & decoed with him.” Chrissy never bothered to write down the man’s name, even though he had saved the victim’s life and risked his own. For Chrissy, coming to somebody’s aid when he needed help was all part of the sport, and the young man was sure that others would do the same for him if he ever needed it. Of course, he knew things would never come to that. If only he could have come upon Ed Sollner when he was in trouble, he could have saved Ed’s life too.
Chrissy dived without his father from several boats, including the Wahoo, the boat we had used for our mixed-gas expedition to the Andrea Doria in 1991. He would choose a boat based on the scheduled wreck destination, and he meticulously planned his dives so that he experienced increasingly deeper and more challenging sites as he prepared for his return to the Doria. On the Wahoo, Chrissy’s manner and helpfulness endeared the personable young man to the crew. The Wahoo’s owner, Steve Bielenda, had seen many divers over the course of a diving career that dated back to 1959. A diving instructor since 1962, Bielenda had developed a sixth sense about how comfortable someone was in the basic practice of diving, and the ability to make such an assessment was a critical skill for someone teaching the sport. He noted that Chrissy was much more relaxed and carefree when his father was not around.
Bielenda had raised three children to adulthood and knew the challenges fatherhood carried. Every man, he knew, had a slightly different notion about how to raise his son, and he doubted that in the history of the world there had ever been a boy who had been perfectly raised. Yet he was impressed with how polite Chrissy was, and how much concern for others the young man exhibited. It was clear that Chrissy’s parents had made the effort to raise Chrissy to be a sociable and responsible young man.
What struck Bielenda most was the interaction he had witnessed between Chris and Chrissy Rouse during the several days they had spent together on the Wahoo while diving the Doria in ’91. Chris had been very critical of Chrissy at every turn; the elder Rouse chastised his son for the way he set up their equipment, how he tied their tanks to the railing, the way he stored his gear bags, even how he ate. Bielenda knew it was not his place to step in and say something to Chris Rouse about how he dealt with his son. Yet Bielenda could not help but notice how much the persistent, petty critique put Chrissy on edge. Now, without his father around, Chrissy seemed to Bielenda to blossom into a different person, a man who was assured of his own skills to the point of being at ease in the world. And Chrissy’s dives were without incident, unlike both of the dives with his father on the Andrea Doria in the summer of ’91—no bickering, no stumbles or minor trauma that could cloud the atmosphere for all the crew.
Chrissy was without a doubt his father’s son, for better and for worse. He was influenced as much by his father’s perfectionist, swaggering stance as he was by Chris’s courage and generosity. My continued interviews with Dr. Hunt were giving me insight into both my own upbringing—my father had brought me up in the same overly critical fashion as Chris had raised Chrissy—and the Rouses’ interactions. I could relate to both of the Rouses: to Chris from my growing experience as Gil’s father, and to Chrissy from my experience as my father’s son. I also knew that Chrissy had been given a deep appreciation for and curiosity about the world from his father because of their shared cave and wreck explorations; my father had given me that same appreciation and curiosity through family vacations in different countries, and by moving from one continent to another. But as I reflected on my own conditioning, I began to work to revise my emotional reflexes and seek a more encouraging, supportive way of raising my son. If the apple of the next generation could fall farther from the tree, and get less shade from its parent, then the new tree might grow taller and healthier.
For their expedition to the Andrea Doria that August, all three Rouses boarded the dive boat Seeker—which Chrissy liked to refer to as “the Seeker of death.” It was his casual way of acknowledging that his deep diving was dangerous, and that he knew the stakes involved. Chrissy’s joking about the possibility of dying while diving was his way of taking the edge off his danger-induced anxiety. Just before a dive, some people get more sullen, some become rapt in concentration, and others talk a lot. Both Chris and Chrissy were on the extreme end of talking a lot before their dives; bickering was their way of relieving their anxiety in the face of danger. Although others perceived the Rouses’ interactions as hostile, Sue always maintained that they “were just communicating.” It was a big gap in perceptions. Was Sue in denial over the bickering? Or was it all really just communicating, in a particularly contentious way?
Sue Rouse had done most of the work required to put the expedition together, sending out confirmation letters when she received a diver’s deposit, following up with legal waivers of liability, and then making sure that all the expedition participants had filled in the forms properly and signed them, and finally making sure all of the money was collected and paid to the Seeker so that nothing would derail their departure. Not just chief petty officer but chief cook and bottle washer, Sue also prepared the food for all three Rouses, while Chris and Chrissy busied themselves with the equipment logistics for the family. Although Sue was going to the Doria, she didn’t know whether she was going to dive on the wreck, telling everyone that she would wait and see if the conditions were calm and she felt comfortable enough. She liked dives to be mellow and steady, not jagged with adventure.
Chris and Chrissy filled the expedition with their friends and with divers who came highly recommended to them from others in the deep-water fraternity, especially those who, like the Rouses and me, were advocates of using cave-diving techniques to explore ocean shipwrecks. In a way, the Rouses’ Doria
foray would be a follow-up to my venture a year before: It would employ some of the same strategies but without the researchers’ study and, ideally, without the seasickness and severe weather. Steve Berman and John Reekie participated, as did my friends John Harding and Dennis Anacker from the Sea Gypsies dive club. The Seeker crew members Steve Gatto and Tom Packer had looked forward to the expedition with the Rouse gang; both Gatto and Packer had met the Rouses on earlier diving trips, and they knew that the Rouses would liven up the boat with their antics, as well as bring an interesting group of divers with them.
Even though I was invited, I had to decline because I was not yet confident that my body—or my mind—was in condition to meet the Doria’s challenges. I was envious of the Rouses and annoyed that I could not go, but my solace was the fact that I was both alive and not in a wheelchair. As a consolation prize, I had the Doria artifacts that Steve Berman and I had recovered two years earlier, as well as some of the many dishes, cups, and hand-painted vases that John Griffith and I had recovered in the summer of ’91.
The question that hung in the air like the thunderstorm logo depicted on their diving business cards was whether the black cloud stigma would continue to haunt the Rouses on their Doria expedition. It turned out that the trip participants were pleasantly surprised: The weather over the Doria was excellent, unlike the conditions for our expedition the year before. Chris and Chrissy plunged in four times during their expedition, recovering glassware from the same area where John Griffith and I had found artifacts with which we filled our bags repeatedly. They knew that the folks back at the dive shop, whose idea of risky diving was pretty much limited to the deeper parts of the quarry, with its cold, murky conditions, would turn sea-green with envy at their hoard. Chris and Chrissy would emerge from the underworld with relics enough to share.
The Last Dive Page 30