“All of us at Ginnie Springs looked forward to the Rouses’ coming down to visit, like it was family coming—the part of your family that you really like. And they had such a unique style that all anyone who knew them had to do to see if they were at Ginnie was look for the big, green oxygen bottles that they always roped between trees around the outside of their campsite. I remember one time—it was Christmas—and we were all looking forward to the Rouses’ coming down so that we could have a big celebration dinner with them.
“Well, it was snowing in Florida and it was like a freak snowstorm and all the highways were closed. So, we were all depressed because you just don’t expect to get snowed in when you live in Florida, and also because we didn’t think the Rouses were going to get through. And then, out of the snowstorm comes Chris Rouse, driving his van, with Sue. They were towing their camper trailer and everything, and they just barreled right through the snow. Heck, I don’t think they could have gotten off the highway if they wanted to, so I think Chris drove straight down from Pennsylvania. Chris’s attitude was ‘I’m not going to let a little snow on the side of the road stop me from seeing my friends at Ginnie, or from cave diving.’ I think the Florida state cops were so surprised to see anyone on the road, they let ’em through, even though the highways were officially closed. And once they got to Ginnie, everybody was so happy, and we had a great dinner and party. The Rouses were like that: They’d make you happy just by being around. Boy, am I sure gonna miss ’em!”
Chris’s and Chrissy’s ashes were not scattered immediately. Sue decided to wait until after another memorial service could be held in December at an annual cave-diving workshop in Florida that the Rouses had attended for the past few years. And after that memorial, another service would be performed a week later at Ginnie Springs, and here the Rouses’ ashes would be scattered underwater, in the Devil’s Cave System. Marc Eyring had proposed that a restriction 3,200 feet into the Devil’s Cave System named the Hinkel be renamed the Rouse. A plaque in the Rouses’ honor would also be placed in the cave. The discoverer of the Hinkel graciously agreed, though the name has never been officially changed.
Three months went by after the Rouses died until their ashes were scattered. Although Sue does not say it, it would be understandable if she had not yet been ready to let go of her husband and son.
John Reekie would carry Chris Rouse’s ashes underwater, while Marc Eyring would bear Chrissy’s. Several other divers joined the somber ceremony, including Tim Stumpf and Evie Dudas, who had lost her husband underwater many years earlier. Two divers who had planned to participate were emotionally overwhelmed and could not conduct the dive. Denny Willis was an instructor and close friend who had been introduced to cave diving by the Rouses and who would eventually go on to become the training director of the NSS-CDS, one of the two Florida-based cave-diving organizations. He was completely suited up and standing in the water not far from the entrance to the Devil’s Cave System when he became so uneasy with the dive that he aborted before descending.
It was undoubtedly a wise decision, because if you don’t feel well, either physically or emotionally, you are far more likely to get into an accident. For example, years later, inside a deep cave system during the filming of a memorial documentary for another diver, the deceased diver’s best friend died in a bizarre accident because his rubber fin straps gave way, and he overexerted himself trying to get out of the cave system, passed out, and drowned. Sue did not make plans to be on the dive, and decided to wait on the riverbank while the ashes were scattered below.
To get to the restriction, the procession used scooters, the diver-propulsion vehicles that Chris Rouse had repaired and upgraded so well that he made a name for himself and his Black Cloud Scuba business among the small, hard-core diving community scattered throughout North America. When the procession had all squeezed through the restriction, Reekie opened the Tupperware container that held Chris’s ashes, and let his friend’s remains billow in the timeless flow of water throughout the cave.
When Marc Eyring uncapped Chrissy’s container, he discovered that there had been a leak. Chrissy’s ashes were a paste that clung to the inside of the plastic container. Even after death, the Rouses’ black cloud followed them. Eyring was taken aback. No one close to him had ever been cremated, so it had been a new experience for him not to be able to view the body at the wake; now, he had to deal with getting his friend’s ashes out of the container. There was only one way to do that. Eyring reached into the container with his hand and scooped out the paste that had once been Chrissy Rouse. It clung to Eyring’s fingers and hand, as if Chrissy did not want to leave his friends.
Gradually, Eyring was able to release all of the clay that had been Chrissy into the outflowing water of the Devil’s Cave System. Some of Chris’s and Chrissy’s ashes would permeate different parts of the cave, likely clinging to crevices of the limestone rock. Father and son thus became part of the cave system they had loved to dive so much. Symbolically, at least, they would always be cave diving.
On the riverbank, Sue Rouse watched as the water from the Devil’s Cave System spilled gin-clear into the Santa Fe River in a smooth, steady flow, just as it had for tens of thousands of years before and as it probably will for innumerable years to come.
12
Ever Deeper
JUNE 27, 1999. THE WRECK ANDREA DORIA.
THE ANDREA DORIA appeared below me in the water’s green haze as I dropped down the anchor line for my fourteenth dive to the famous ocean liner. My German buddy, Wolfgang Kanig, who swam just above me, was descending on his second dive to the wreck. I had met Wolfgang at Ginnie Springs ten years before, when he and his German contingent had come over and cave-dived with Steve Berman, Chrissy Rouse, and me. Over the past ten years, Wolfgang, who had been diving since 1966, and I had been on diving expeditions together in Mexico and Scotland.
The previous day we had encountered numerous problems with our equipment as we prepared our foray to the Doria. We had to peel ourselves out of our drysuits to prevent heatstroke while we switched Wolfgang’s tanks, which had released the expensive helium-based mixed gas into the sea air as the result of a bad O-ring seal at the tank valve. Then, when we were both suiting up again, I saw that the oral-nasal pocket inside my full-face mask was not properly held in place. I thought that might cause increased gas consumption because the entire mask would fill with gas on each inhalation, instead of just the oral-nasal pocket filling.
Even though I was fully rigged to dive and had only to put my mask on before jumping in the water, I knew that these gear problems were a bad sign. My nearly fatal dive in 1991, when I swaggered past my flu symptoms to dive, flashed back like a bad dream. So did the Rouses’ ill-fated dive to the U-Who nearly seven years before, when father and son plunged into the belligerent sea and returned to the surface as dying men. Now, I had the nagging feeling that I should not be diving after all of the problems I had just encountered. Tomorrow would be another day, I had learned to tell myself, and I planned on living long enough to enjoy it. I had aborted the dive before I even got wet.
But Wolfgang had gone ahead and dived. He had come a long way to dive the Doria, and he was not going to let equipment problems thwart him. Because he was a cautious diver, I was surprised when he told me that he would dive without me. It was the other way around on one expedition in Scotland, when he encountered equipment problems on the dive boat and aborted a dive to H.M.S. Hampshire, off the Orkney Islands. It is an intriguing wreck that remains mired in political controversy because it took the British secretary of war, Lord Kitchener, to his grave at the height of World War I, amid rumors of assassination or sabotage. While Wolfgang stayed on the boat, I dived alone and went down a little over 200 feet to the Hampshire, which had then been visited by only ten or eleven sport divers before me.
When Wolfgang got back onto the boat after his solo dive to the Doria, he told me that he should have stayed on the boat the way I had elected to do. “I only had
one problem after another.” One of his regulators began leaking gas, then one of his pressure gauges gave false readings, and finally one of his hoses had gotten twisted between some of his equipment. Overall, the dive had made him feel uncomfortable. Fortunately, he was able to make it back onto the boat without getting bent.
Would the bad luck from my last dive to the wreck, only a year earlier, again prevail? Though I am not overly superstitious, maybe there was something to the fact that my previous foray to the Doria had been my thirteenth dive on the wreck. Mark Haas, my buddy on that dive, had found a nice silver serving tray at a depth of 240 feet. Mark and I were both clearheaded as a result of the helium in the trimix we breathed, and we worked easily as a team, relaying the tray into my goodie bag, along with silverware both of us found. After we followed our guideline and exited the wreck, we began our decompression. When we reached the 15-foot stop, other divers saw the goodie bag and peered at its contents with curiosity. I was proud. We’d retrieved some truly distinctive booty this time. After hours of decompression, Mark and I followed the thick white rope that ran underwater from the anchor line toward the dive boat’s stern, where its in-water oxygen lines with attached regulators (for the 20-and 10-foot stages of decompression) dangled in the water. I swam over the rope and got jostled by the waves and current. The bag’s clip caught on the rope and snapped open, but somehow Mark snatched the bag before it could plummet even a few feet down. He clipped the bag back onto my harness and we both checked to make sure that it was secure. Ten minutes later, while I finished my decompression next to the boat’s in-water oxygen line, I looked down and noticed that the bag was gone; the clip had come undone yet again and our prized artifacts were now nestled in the sand 240 feet below us.
“Where’s your goodie bag?” Steve Berman asked when we finished our two-hour decompression and climbed back onto the boat. Everyone groaned when they heard the story. As Mark and I packed our gear away and prepared for the long trip back to port, several fellow expedition members came over to us in turn and offered us one of the artifacts that they had recovered. After the third diver had given Mark an artifact, he looked at me and joked, “I feel like we’re the boat orphans!”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “But it’s a nice gesture. We’ll have something to remember the trip by—even if we didn’t recover it.” Artifact fever could still run rampant among some divers, but the hoarding instinct had diminished since the days when divers would recover a hundred dishes and not give even one to somebody who had either not gotten anything, or who had lost his stuff.
Now, a year later, on my fourteenth dive to the Doria, I entered the wreck with Wolfgang, and I was again encountering equipment problems. This time it was a bit more serious than losing artifacts or wrestling with Wolfgang’s leaking tanks as we’d done on the dive boat the day before. I could not feel the gas-switching block that I needed to turn to access the other half of my gas supply. One of my stage bottles hung in the way of the switch: Just before this expedition, I had discovered a leak when I tested the integrity of the unit in a water bucket, so I made some last-minute changes to the block and put one of the switches in a different position. Even when I tried to visualize where the switch should be as I swept my hand across my equipment, I could not feel it through the thick rubber mittens that prevented my hands from turning numb in the cold water. After several attempts, I turned to Wolfgang, who looked at me quizzically, and in the gestural language of divers worldwide I signaled him that the dive was over with a thumbs-up. If we had been wearing underwater communications equipment, I could have told him exactly what I needed. But the better part of a decade after the Rouse deaths, sport divers still eschewed communications gear, which most of us considered an extravagant encumbrance that might malfunction, and had several other drawbacks, including increased gas consumption when the diver talked, a limited distance the signals could travel, and helium-induced distortion of speech that caused it to be high-pitched. Because my full-face mask and gas-switching block were in no way standard among divers, I did not attempt to signal Wolfgang to try to switch on the other half of my gas supply. If Wolfgang turned the wrong switch, my gas supply would be completely cut off. Better to play it safe and abort the dive. I chafed at the decision, but I was too well acquainted with the consequences to choose otherwise. Although I would have liked to go inside the wreck and help Wolfgang get some artifacts, I could not risk both of our lives by continuing the dive with access to only half of my gas supply.
As we ascended, I repeatedly tried to turn on the gas switch. No luck. I switched over from my trimix to my air tank and checked the tank’s pressure gauge. Something was wrong. Later, other divers would tell me that they had seen large volumes of gas being expelled from my full-face mask when I descended: I had some sort of a leak in my system. Now, I was very low on air. I would not have enough to complete my decompression stops, which started at 110 feet.
The thought of not completing my decompression brought back to mind Dr. Mendagurin’s words after my nearly fatal encounter with the bends in 1991: “If you ever take another hit like this again, you’ll never walk again. You’ve used up your extra neural pathways. You won’t get another chance.”
I switched back to my trimix, which under normal circumstances I would have breathed only on the wreck. Breathing trimix, with less than half my supply of gas accessible, I would have to extend my decompression time because my body was still absorbing lighter helium gas when it should have been eliminating helium with the aid of regular compressed air as my breathing gas. I watched my timer carefully and gradually made my way up to 70 feet, where I switched back to the air tank. When I started feeling more and more breathing resistance, I knew that I was getting to the end of my air supply. I had no choice but to go to another backup system, though I dreaded it.
To do that I would have to take off my full-face mask, which had two regulators built into it—one a lifesaving spare—and grab my extra free-hose regulator, a third unit that was attached to one of my back-mounted tanks. I would breathe from that unit while I reached into my goodie bag, took out my spare half-mask, which covered only the eyes and nose, and put that one on. When I took off the full-face mask, water would enter my specially made hood and work itself toward my ears. For most divers, that would not be a problem. But only a few years earlier I had suffered several concurrent ear infections that had eaten away 40 percent of my right eardrum; my elaborate equipment configuration, including an earplug, a special hood, and a full-face mask, was designed to prevent water from getting into that ear. Cold water entering my ear canal would give me vertigo, a spinning, disorienting sensation that might make me vomit. Still, I had no choice. I had to go to my second backup option.
I took my full-face mask off, consciously bracing for the cold water that would hit my face and repressing the reflex to breathe in through my nose. I grabbed regulator number three and put it in my mouth, breathing from it. But this regulator was attached to the almost-empty trimix tank. I hung on to the anchor line at 70 feet, bracing for the vertigo I knew was sure to hit me when the water entered my ear. What should I do next?
If I surfaced to get help, I could be crippled for the rest of my life, thanks to my 1991 bout with the bends. Surfacing was not an option. If I stayed on the anchor line, I would drown. I didn’t like that option, either. Was Wolfgang above or below me? I couldn’t see anything, now that I wore no mask. I could ascend, hope to run into Wolfgang or another diver, and see if he had gas to spare. If not, I could keep ascending and then go over to the boat’s oxygen decompression line at 20 feet. That would mean omitting my decompression stops from 70 to 20 feet, but at least I would still be in the water, decompressing at 20 feet on pure oxygen. That wasn’t optimal, but it probably wouldn’t leave me crippled. I knew I had to do something quickly, before the cold water worked its way past my tight hood and then past the earplug. It became harder and harder to breathe from the regulator, which spurred me to start my ascent up the anchor line.
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I saw the fuzzy outline of a diver above me. When I swam up to him, I saw that it was Wolfgang. I spit out my regulator and made a slashing motion with my hand across my throat: the diver’s “I’m out of gas” sign. Everything was blurry without my mask on. I saw Wolfgang groping for a spare regulator at his chest, but I noticed a regulator at his shoulder, its pink protector hose beckoning me. Several men wore pink equipment; they would counter jokes about their color choice with the sharp retort that when somebody needed to see their equipment, the pink would stand out like a highway flare. I was now grateful that Wolfgang was undeterred by what others would think about his wearing pink, and that he had opted for safety rather than vanity.
I gently traced the regulator hose and discovered that it led to Wolfgang’s back-mounted tanks. That meant the regulator was attached to a tank containing trimix, which was meant for use on the bottom, not for decompression. Although it was not the best choice, Wolfgang’s trimix would keep me alive, and it would give me time to take the mask out of my goodie bag and put it on my face. Then I could see.
I urgently needed to breathe, so I grabbed Wolfgang’s regulator with the pink hose protector and breathed from it. Then I got my spare mask out of my bag and put it on, clearing the water from it with exhalations from my nose. I checked my combination dive timer and depth gauge. We were at 50 feet. Wolfgang signaled that he wanted to ascend to the next decompression stop. I agreed. When we got to the 40-foot stop, everything started spinning. I held on to Wolfgang’s shoulder strap so that I would not float away from him and his life-giving gas. The world around me was spinning faster and faster, and all I could do was hope that my body would quickly warm the water in my inner ear so that the spinning would stop. Gradually, the spinning slowed down, as if I were at the end of a carnival ride. Then the spinning stopped completely, and I was 40 feet below the surface, breathing, alive.
The Last Dive Page 38