The Rouses died on Columbus Day weekend—the same national holiday weekend when I had nearly died a year earlier. I found out about the Rouses’ deaths at work, where I was taking a computer networking class to upgrade my skills. During a break, I called Ginnie Springs to speak to Steve Berman about some equipment I needed repaired. The woman who answered the phone was distraught. When I asked her what had happened, she said tearfully, “You don’t know? We’ve lost Chris and Chrissy.” Her statement didn’t register until she gave me a vague description of the Rouses’ accident.
Why did I live through my accident and they did not? Although they had been deeper by 80 feet, I had been down longer. Did they remember our many discussions about the choice I had to make—either a direct ascent to the surface without any decompression, or drowning—when I had foolishly pushed my dive beyond my mental and physical capacity? I remembered Chris’s words to me when I told him the choices that had gone through my mind underwater and that I assumed I would surface, go to the chamber, and everything would be all right. Chris had replied, “I’d rather take my chances in the chamber than drown.” The words came ringing back to me. I was overwhelmed, and wanted to know why I should have lived when they did not. It seemed to me that my survival was entirely arbitrary, and there was no reason that they also should not have survived. One man lives, then two men die. It was a painful example of the world’s unfairness.
The parking lot of the Shelly Funeral Home was full, and cars were parked all along the rural road in Warrington, Pennsylvania. As Kevin O’Brien parked his car, he turned to me and asked, “Are you ready? You have any notes or anything?”
“Ready? How can you ever be ready for something like this?” I retorted. “You read about people dying during a dive, or you hear about it, but it’s never anyone you know real well, is it? It’s always somebody else, somebody you vaguely knew, or dove with a few times but aren’t real good friends with. Your friends aren’t supposed to die,” I said, and the emotion thickening in my throat made me wonder how I was going to be able to eulogize them at all.
“You need more time?”
“Naw. That’ll only make it worse. I know what I’m going to say. Let’s get this over with.”
As Kevin, Diana, and I walked into the funeral chapel, I felt as if I were in a dream, entering some wreck I’d stumbled upon entirely by accident. Were those really the remains of my friends in the two urns that stood on the table next to their pictures? Some of their shipwreck artifacts were displayed on the table, alongside their diving certificates and logbooks, which all now looked curiously like artifacts in a museum. The home was filled to overflowing, and those who did not get there early enough had to stand squeezed next to one another.
Cathie Cush had helped Sue organize the service, and she had asked a number of people to give eulogies. Besides many of the local divers, Marc Eyring had driven up from Florida, and John Reekie had come down from Canada to pay their last respects. Steve Berman was conspicuously absent. I wondered why. I knew that Berman disliked large social gatherings, but surely he could pay his last respects to people he was such good friends with. Steve’s no-show disappointed me; the reasons for his absence was something that I would not understand until many years later. His grief over the loss of Chris and Chrissy was so great that he could not bear to attend their memorial. That same day, in his home at Ginnie Springs in Florida, Berman could only numbly recollect the many times that the Rouses had visited and the antics that defined them. Between tears of sorrow at the loss of his friends, and laughter over the memory of their antics, Steve Berman grieved privately and profoundly.
Berman could still see the three Rouses barreling into the Ginnie Springs dive shop in the evening after a long late-afternoon dive. Chris was completely disheveled, unshaven after a week of camping at Ginnie and totally unconcerned with what he looked like above water. He wore only a pair of tattered sneakers and his unwashed drysuit underwear, which looked like a ski suit. He was as oblivious as always of the unique odor the suit took on after he had been in it almost continuously for a week. Chrissy looked uncannily similar to his father, unshaven and dressed in his drysuit underwear, the sidekick to the superhero, both men ragged in their superhero costumes. Chrissy paced around the dive shop like a caged young lion, urging his father to finish their business so that they could do another dive that day. It looked to Steve as though Sue was exhausted, ready to fall asleep on her feet, and the thought of another dive draining her completely.
Chris turned to his worn-out wife and said, “I’m taking you guys out to dinner tonight.” Sue perked up, obviously delighted that she would eat some decent food. Whenever they stayed at Ginnie Springs, she did not cook. As she told Chris and Chrissy, it was her vacation, too. But the two eager divers did not mind, and they both loved the packaged, premade sandwiches on offer at Ginnie Springs. Chris continued, “My treat. I’ll spare no expense.” He walked over to the store’s large cooler, slid open one of the glass doors, reached inside, and grabbed a sandwich that he tossed to Chrissy. “Here, Chrissy, catch. Have a ham and cheese sandwich. It’s on me. Yes sir! No expense spared. Put it on my tab, Steve!”
Steve Berman and the other staff at Ginnie Springs laughed in amusement. It was clear that Chris and Chrissy wanted to eat as quickly as possible so that they could get into the water again for a dive that would probably end sometime after midnight. Sue could only groan at the thought of another dive.
Chris turned to his wife. “What are you having, Sue?”
“Veal parmigiana,” she said.
It was her way to nudge Chris, to get back for the disappointment he had given her. The couple had met in high school when they were both working in a diner, she as a waitress, he as a short-order cook. Every day after school, Chris was entitled to eat a meal as part of his wages, but he was limited to choosing from a certain section of the menu. The only thing he liked in that section was veal parmigiana, and he ate it every day. Soon, he became bored with the meal and would never eat it again after he stopped working at the diner. Sue knew that she could always tell him that she would make veal parmigiana whenever he complained about her cooking—or if he didn’t take her out to eat as he promised.
Inside the funeral home, Denny McLaughlin had a churning feeling in his stomach, and he dreaded having to talk to Sue. McLaughlin had been Chris and Chrissy’s first diving instructor and now he felt responsible for their deaths, even though the Rouses had clearly—and very consciously—gone well beyond the recreational diving limits that McLaughlin taught all his students of 130 feet in depth, no decompression diving, and no penetrations into caves and shipwrecks. Denny McLaughlin knew that the Rouses had taken far greater risks than recreational divers take, and he knew from his many conversations with them over the past four years that they were well aware that their diving was beyond what the recreational training agencies advocated as safe. He also knew from seeing the Rouses in the quarry that their skills were outstanding; he prided himself that he had given Chris and Chrissy the solid initial training that enabled them to develop in the sport and far exceed his own skills and limitations. It was a classic example of students excelling their teacher. All that, however, did not make it any easier for him to talk to Sue.
McLaughlin constantly wondered if there was anything that he, as an instructor and good friend, could have done or said that would have helped the Rouses avoid their tragedy. He knew that it was not in his power to save the Rouses, yet he still somehow felt as if he had failed in his duty to his former students. He walked up to Sue with his head held low, looking at her feet, and offered his condolences. He could not look Sue in the eye.
Sue could see that her friend was distraught and she gently nudged his shoulder. “Buck up, Denny,” she commanded.
Denny looked up into the eyes of the woman who had lost her husband and son. Instead of the angry or accusatory glare he expected to find, he saw a composed friend. Denny felt as if she were saying, “It’s not your fault. Get o
ver it.” The weight of the guilt he felt was instantly lifted from his shoulders.
Word was passed that the services would begin and the crowd assembled in the main room. A priest said a prayer for the Rouses and then Cathie Cush got up to speak.
“A few years ago, people started coming up to me and saying, ‘Have you met the Rouses? You have to meet the Rouses. They dive like you do. You’ll love the Rouses.’ Well, I met them,” Cathy continued. “And they didn’t dive like me. The truth is that all three of them could dive circles around me with both fins tied behind their backs. And when we think of the awful thing that happened Monday, we should be humbled—because most of us don’t have the skill, the discipline, or the composure that Chris and Junior had.
“When people said I would love the Rouses, they were absolutely right. Not because of their diving abilities, but because the Rouses were some of the most loving, giving people I’ve ever known. Whether you needed a spare O-ring or a shoulder to cry on, they were always there. I know I leaned on them a lot, especially in the last few months. And now it’s time to give some of that back to Sue, because she really needs all the support we can muster.
“The world is just a little too silent today,” Cathy went on, “and that’s a tragedy. But it would have been an even worse tragedy if we had never heard all those stories and theories, never shared the laughter, never been a part of that wonderful energy that Chris and Junior generated. I know I’ll miss them both more than words can say, but my life is richer for having known them.”
As Cathie walked away from the podium, Steve Gatto, who had been on the dive boat when the Rouses made their last dive, stood in the back of the room, thinking about the immense number of dives the Rouses had performed in their four years, and the level of experience they achieved in that short time. While many others—nondiver and diver alike—thought that the Rouses had gone too far, too fast, Gatto knew that they earned their spots on the top expeditions. He knew from his own experience that what counted was not how many years a diver had been diving, but what he did in the time that he did dive. And then he shuddered when he thought about what other people might have said if he himself had died in a freak accident—and that was how he classified the Rouses’ deaths—when he had first dived the Andrea Doria, during his third season of diving. Wouldn’t those people have smugly said that he had pushed it too hard, too fast, and that his death was destined to happen, just what so many people were now murmuring about the Rouses? Gatto tried to shake the thought, but it clung like lint.
John Reekie sat in the midst of the mourners, his face even more glum than usual, his self-protective scowl even more pronounced. Reekie wished that he and Chris could be at Ginnie Springs again, with Chris energetically cramming his van with dive gear, hurling good-natured insults at Reekie to prod him to move faster so that they could go diving together sooner rather than later. Sometimes, Chris’s bristly bombast got on Reekie’s nerves, just as brothers get on each other’s nerves and yet still love each other. Reekie had always felt that Chris and Chrissy Rouse were his brothers. Already he missed their clowning around, joking, underwater bumper-scooter games, and their long dives together.
Now that Chris and Chrissy Rouse were gone, there were two fewer of the precious number of people in the world whom Reekie trusted with his life underwater—especially inside a cave.
John Chatterton stood not far from John Reekie and Steve Gatto in the back of the room. His face was grim and his feelings were mixed, his grief grappling with his frustration. Chatterton felt that the Rouses died because they were breathing air when they should have been using trimix. On all of their previous very deep dives that Chatterton had witnessed, Chris and Chrissy used trimix. Chatterton knew that they had been among the first sport divers to use mixed gases during wreck diving and then decompress using oxygen. And only two weeks before their fatal dive they were experimenting in the quarry with a breathing mixture of argon and oxygen to see if that might be an efficient gas to use at some stage of a dive. It was ironic, thought Chatterton, that the Rouses, who were on the sport’s cutting edge, died because they chose to turn their back on cutting-edge technology, for one expedition. He knew it just showed that you couldn’t let your guard down for one moment.
As Chatterton replayed the accident in his mind, he pictured Chris Rouse standing on the Seeker’s ladder after the dive. Even though the elder Rouse got to the ladder before his son—and in spite of the excruciating pain he must have been in—Chris had insisted that Chrissy be taken up first. Chatterton, a battle-hardened Vietnam War veteran, had been so impressed with Chris’s unselfish, even noble, action that he would forever remember that moment whenever he thought about the Rouses.
Barb Lander, who worked as a nurse when she wasn’t diving and had attended to Chrissy on the dive boat, stood among the mourners. When Chrissy had been evacuated from the dive boat, Lander thought that he was going to survive; she had been distraught ever since hearing that he died in the hyperbaric chamber. She was haunted by the question: Was there something else that she could have done to help save him? Lander spoke to as many experts as she could, searching for a different answer from the one everybody gave her, which was that she had done all she could. She would eventually take a course to become a hyperbaric technician qualified in operating a recompression chamber. By her estimation, it would take her three years to even remotely get over the trauma of losing a diving colleague who she thought would survive the ordeal of the bends.
I walked numbly to the podium to deliver my eulogy. None of the other divers I knew who had died in the sport had been close friends, and I had never delivered a eulogy before. How can you possibly do justice to two such people in a thousand words? I knew how great an impact the Rouses’ deaths had had on the diving community, both locally in Pennsylvania and throughout the Northeast, and also in Florida cave country, especially at Ginnie Springs. If there was any doubt about that, all I had to do was look at the packed room.
I once came across something that the writer and political and social commentator Jack London wrote early in the century, which struck me so forcefully that I wrote it down and pinned it to my bulletin board at work. I told the audience that besides being good friends and very generous to everyone, the Rouses burned a bright picture on the skies of our lives. As London had said, “I would rather be a meteor than a sleepy and permanent planet. For man’s true purpose in life is to live, not to waste time merely sustaining himself.” Although the Rouses died young, they were doing what they loved to do, and that meant more to them than just trying to live out their lives.
Chris’s flight instructor, Ken Reinhart, stood in the back of the room, listening to me. Reinhart was the one who had convinced Chris that diving was a fun, safe activity, and for Reinhart—as for millions of other divers—it was. But Chris had always wanted to push further. When Reinhart and Chris went down to Ginnie Springs for the first time, Chris was immediately captivated by cave diving, whereas Reinhart was apprehensive. The cautious flight instructor was deeply disturbed by the warning sign placed in the water near a cave entrance that depicted the Grim Reaper with skeletons in diving gear lying at his feet and the bold title PREVENT YOUR DEATH! Later on that same trip, Reinhart tried to warn Chris about the danger of cave diving, but the other man would not be deterred; he went ahead to become enchanted with diving into caves and into shipwrecks. Although shipwrecks did not have warning signs posted around them the way caves did, Reinhart knew they were just as challenging when you ventured inside, as the Rouses did, seeking trophies for their mantel—and Ken’s—and doing what they loved to do.
As Reinhart looked around the room, he saw that the vast majority of people were divers, and he did not know them. Although Reinhart was a diver, he was primarily a pilot, and his social circle consisted mostly of flying friends. After I left the podium and diver after diver delivered his or her eulogy, Reinhart could not help but realize that he had known the Rouses far longer than most people in the room. Y
et all that was spoken of about the Rouses was their diving activity. Reinhart knew that diving was something that the thirty-nine-year-old Chris had done for only four years; there was so much more to Chris’s life than diving, thought Reinhart. He felt like a stranger at his friends’ wake. Reinhart knew Chris to be curious about the world in a way that bordered on childlike fascination. That curiosity had propelled Chris to fly, and it had plunged him into diving. Chris’s abundant energy and generosity allowed him to work hard not only building his own house, but helping Reinhart to build a house at the same time. How could others appreciate the true depth of Chris Rouse from only a few years of diving? he wondered.
Sue sat in the front row. If there was a God, she thought, why would He let such a terrible thing happen to her men? She did not believe that everything had a reason, or that divine justice determined human fate. To her, the devastation she felt only tipped the scales heavily in favor of her doubt that there was a God. She remembered when Chris had blown himself up while welding in his workshop, and how badly burned he had been. Chris told her later that he had overheard their priest declaring that the accident would not have happened if Chris had attended church regularly. For Chris, the priest’s belief was such an insult he did not enter a church again except to attend weddings or funerals. From that moment on, in Chris’s mind, there was no God. And now Sue agreed with him.
Marc Eyring stepped up to the podium. He had always seemed a bit uncomfortable out of the water, and now, at a wake for his friends, he seemed even more so. Eyring set his jaw and tried to place his lanky six-foot, four-inch frame in a comfortable position. But once he started talking, he moved with nervous energy, pacing behind the podium. “I taught Chris and Chrissy cave diving several years ago, and then also taught Sue,” Eyring began. “Right from the beginning, they stood out. Father and son were both so eager to learn and they didn’t have any of the attitude that a lot of wreck divers from the Northeast have: They changed their equipment for cave diving without making any fuss, and that was my first clue that they were different from most people. The other thing was, the family always did things together, at least they were always diving together, and that struck me because it’s very rare to see a family where everyone goes cave diving.
The Last Dive Page 37