Shadow Divers (4 page)

Because the anchor line is lifeline, it is too risky to simply leave the grapple snagged on the wreck. Currents shift underwater, and grapples can move with that motion and come undone. The grapple, therefore, must be secured. This is the work of the mates, who dive down to the wreck and “tie in.” Once the tie-in is complete, the mates release several white foam drinking cups, which rise to the surface and act as signal to the captain and divers that the anchor line is secure. White cups mean go time on Atlantic wreck charters.

When word of the cup sighting reaches the divers, they unpack their rigs and begin to put on their equipment. Once dressed, the diver inspects his equipment, a poking, pulling, coaxing, and stroking similar to that performed by a private pilot on his aircraft. Underwater, he will have no such luxury. If he has questions about his gear, if he has the vaguest inkling that anything is askew, he must act now.

A good diver reveals himself in the way he gears up. He is at one with his equipment. He knows where every piece goes; every strap is the perfect length, every tool expertly placed, and everything fits. He moves instinctively, his hands and stuff in a swoop-tug-and-click ballet until he is transformed into sea creature. He rarely needs help. If another diver moves to assist him, he will usually decline, saying, “No, thank you” or, more likely, “Don’t touch my shit.” He favors ten-dollar knives over the hundred-dollar versions because when he loses the cheaper ones, he does not feel obligated, under the pressure of narcosis, to risk his life searching the bottom to rescue them. He cares nothing for the prettiness of his gear, and often tattoos it with patches, stickers, and graffiti that testify to past dive exploits. Neon colors do not exist for him; greenhorns who choose those hues don’t have to wait long before hearing the boat’s opinion on such loudness. When he is fully geared up, a good wreck diver looks like a German car engine; more ordinary divers resemble the interior of a child’s toy chest.

Standing, the geared-up diver’s 350-pound footsteps and hunched posture make him a neoprene Sasquatch. In fins, he takes several seconds to thwack-thud across a slippery deck, and will tumble should a sudden wave strike the boat. Breathing air from his twin tanks, or “doubles,” he will have about twenty-five minutes on a 200-foot wreck before he must begin a sixty-minute decompression ascent.

Once in the water, the diver’s tanks no longer feel heavy on his body and instead seem to float away from him. He grabs a “granny” line, a yellow rope rigged from the stern to the anchor line under the boat. He taps valves on his dry suit and wings to bleed a bit of air from each, making himself slightly negatively buoyant, so that his body fades just below the surface before stopping, spiritlike, at a depth of just a few feet. He pulls himself along the granny line until he reaches the anchor line. He vents a little more air. Now he slowly begins to sink.

He is on his way to the shipwreck. Most likely, he is going there alone. For all a deep-wreck diver brings along underwater, the most striking part he leaves behind is a “buddy.” In recreational scuba, the buddy system is gospel. Divers stay in pairs, poised to help each other. In clear, shallow water, buddies are sound policy. They can share air in the event of equipment failure. They can lead a distressed partner to the surface or unsnag him from a fishing line. They provide comfort and reassurance just by being there. On the bottom of the Atlantic, however, a well-meaning diver can kill himself and his partner. A diver who pretzels himself into a shipwreck’s crooked compartment to help another diver might himself become trapped, or he might foul the visibility so badly that neither man can find his way out. A diver attempting to share his air, or “buddy-breathe,” with a panicked diver—a basic duty in recreational scuba—also risks his life. A suffocating diver at 200 feet sees a healthy colleague as a magic carpet, and will kill if he must to jump aboard that man’s air supply. Panicked divers have slashed with knives at would-be rescuers, torn regulators from their mouths, and dragged them to the surface without decompressing in a mad dash to reach the surface.

Even the act of observing another diver in distress can be dangerous while deep in the ocean. A diver’s emotions at 200 feet are already in hyperdrive from narcosis. Should he come face-to-face with a diver who believes he is dying, that diver’s eyes will leap across the water and become his own eyes, and he will see, through that man’s panic, the spectrum of terrible possibilities that lie just around the corner for himself. He will then either panic himself or, more likely, try to save the distressed diver. Either way, his life has transitioned in an instant from secure to moment-by-moment. This is not to say that divers cannot or do not work together on a wreck—they often do. The good ones, however, never rely on each other for safety. Their philosophy is one of coldly resolved independence and self-rescue.

The diver’s descent down the anchor line is little more than feint fall. Typically, it will take him between two and four minutes to reach a wreck lying at a depth of 200 feet. He is virtually weightless as he drops, an astronaut beneath the sea. During the first few feet of descent, the diver’s world is blue and clear. Overhead, he can see the sun rubbing yellow polka dots onto the glassine ocean surface. The diver does not see much marine life at shallow depths, though an occasional tuna or dolphin might swim along to investigate his odd shape and noisy, flat-bottomed bubbles. The diver himself hears two primary sounds: the hiss of his regulator on his inhalation and the booming gurgles of his bubbles on his exhalation; together they are the metronome of his adventure. As he descends farther, the scenery evolves in fast-forward; currents, visibility, ambient light, and marine life shift with depth, none predictably. In this way, even the simple descent down the anchor line is adventure.

The diver sinks to 190 feet. Now he stands face-to-face with the shipwreck, crooked and cracked and broken in the way Hollywood never captures violent endings, the way that rises from ordinary objects when they are bent backward against nature. Pipes, conduits, and wires splay from open wounds. Plumbing shows. Fish riding water columns move in and out of the broken vessel. Covered in plant life, only a ship’s most basic shapes make sense—a propeller; a rudder; a porthole. Much of the rest must be absorbed and contemplated before the ship reassembles in the diver’s mind. Only rarely, when visibility is pristine, can a diver hope to view the entirety of the wreck at one time. Otherwise he sees only cross sections. The tunnel vision of narcosis causes him to perceive even less.

The diver has perhaps twenty-five minutes to work the wreck before he must begin his ascent to the surface. If he has splashed with a plan, he heads straight for the area on the wreck that interests him. Most divers stay exclusively outside the wreck. They come to touch the ship or search for loose artifacts or snap photographs. Their work is steady and conservative. The spirit of the ship, however, lies inside. That is where the stories have settled, where one uncovers the freeze-frames of final human experience. Inside is where the bridge equipment lies—the telegraph, helm, and binnacles that gave the ship direction. It is where portholes rest, where gauges marked by maritime and national stampings lie buried, where pocket watches and suitcases and celebratory champagne bottles rest under blankets of silt. Only inside the wreck will a diver find a ship’s brass clock, engraved with its manufacturer’s mark and, sometimes, the time of the ship’s sinking frozen on its face.

Shipwreck interiors can be terrifying places, collections of spaces in which order has fractured and linearity bent until human beings no longer fit. Hallways dead-end in the middle. Fallen ceilings block stairways. Nine-foot doorways become two-foot doorways. Rooms in which ladies played bridge or captains charted courses are now upside down or sideways or do not exist at all. There might be a bathtub on the wall. If the ocean is perilous outside the wreck, at least it is consistent and extends in all directions. Inside the wreck, where chaos is architect, dangers come camouflaged in every crevice. Bad happens suddenly. For many, the inside of a shipwreck is the most dangerous place they will ever go.

A diver who enters a wreck, especially if he intends to penetrate deeply, must conceive of space differently than he does on land. He must think in three dimensions, digesting navigational concepts
—turn left, drop down, then rise diagonally and follow the seam to the right—
that are nonsensical outside water. He must remember everything—every twist, turn, rise, and fall—and he must do so in an environment of few obvious landmarks and where most everything is sweatered in sea anemones. Should his command of navigation slip, should his memory falter, even for a moment, he will begin to ask questions:
Did I swim through three rooms to reach the captain’s quarters or only two? Did I go left-right-right or right-left-right before ascending to this gun turret? Have I changed deck levels without realizing it? Is that the pipe I saw next to the wreck’s exit, or is it one of six other pipes I saw while swimming through here?
These questions are trouble. They mean, in all likelihood, that the diver is lost.

A diver lost inside a wreck is in grave danger. He has a finite air supply. If he cannot find his way out, he will drown. If he finds his way out but breathes down his tanks in the process, he will not have enough air left for proper decompression. Narcosis, already humming in the background of his brain, crescendos in the lost diver like a broken record, shouting down reason as it reminds him,
You’re lost you’re lost you’re lost you’re lost you’re lost
.
.
.
He will be tempted to guess at a way out, but if he does so he will become a child in a funhouse, his blind movements virtually certain to deliver him into the ship’s myriad dead ends and false pathways, each of which will only disorient him further. His air drops lower. His time grows shorter. This is how lost divers become corpses.

Even if a diver manages his navigation, he must still contend with issues of visibility. At 200 feet, the ocean bottom is dark. Inside the wreck, it’s darker, sometimes pitch-black. If visibility were simply a matter of illumination, a diver’s headlight and flashlight would suffice. But a shipwreck is filled with silt and debris. The diver’s slightest movement—a reach for a dish, a kick with the fin, a turn to memorize a landmark—can stir the silt and disturb visibility. At times of such stark darkness, the deep-wreck diver is more a shadow diver, aiming at the shapes of a shipwreck as much as at the shipwrecks themselves.

The diver’s bubbles do not help. Exhaust from his respiration rises and unsettles overhead silt and rust. Simply by breathing, he has invoked a rainstorm of rust flakes, some as large as peas, many as small as sugar crystals. The bubbles also disturb oil that has invariably leaked from tanks and equipment and spread everywhere in the wreck, and they disperse that oil into a haze and onto the diver’s mask and into his mouth. Visibility is now even worse. There is no longer any such thing as right and left. Over there doesn’t exist anymore. In a fog of silt and rust and oil, rudimentary navigation seems impossible.

To keep from raising silt clouds, divers learn to travel with a minimum of locomotion. Some move like crabs, using only their fingers to pull themselves along, their fins floating motionless in the water behind them. They do not kick to rise or fall, but rather inflate or deflate their wings, an air bladder between the diver and his tanks used for buoyancy control. When they arrive at an interesting area, they might draw in their knees and arms, adjust their buoyancy, and work while kneeling, their shins only brushing the shipwreck floor.

These measures are stopgap. A diver who spends time inside a wreck will screw the “viz”; it’s just a matter of how soon and how badly. Once the silt billows and the rust flakes fall and the oil spreads, visibility in the wreck might stay fouled for several minutes, sometimes longer. Even if a diver has a perfect handle on navigation, he cannot see enough to work his way back now, and if he moves much at all the silt swells further. In zero viz, a diver might be five feet from the exit and never find his way out. This is the kind of realization that doesn’t play well with narcosis, where small problems grow larger under jungle drums, and zero viz can seem the largest problem of them all. In an overpowering darkness, the blinded diver is a prime candidate to go lost.

Navigation and visibility issues make for a full mental plate. But the diver must contend with another danger inside a wreck, this one perhaps nastier than any other. In the violence of the ship’s sinking, her ceilings and walls and floors likely vomited their guts. Once-civilized spaces are now spaghettied with electric cables, wires, bent metal rods, bedsprings, couch springs, sharpened pieces of broken equipment, chair legs, tablecloths, conduit pipes, and other now-threatening items that once conducted the ship’s unseen business. All of it dangles nakedly in the diver’s space. All of it stands ready to snag his hose or manifold or any of dozens of other bulky parts that make up the life-support components of his gear. Once tangled, the diver becomes a marionette. If he struggles, he can mummy himself in the stuff. In bad visibility, it is nearly impossible to avoid these nests; there is not an experienced wreck diver who has not become entangled—often.

A diver lost or tangled inside a shipwreck has come face-to-face with his maker. Corpses have been recovered inside wrecks—eyes and mouths agape in terror, the poor diver still lost, still blinded, still snagged, still pinned. Yet a curious truth pertains to these perils: rarely does the problem itself kill the diver. Rather, the diver’s response to the problem—his panic—likely determines whether he lives or dies.

Here is what happens to a panicked diver in trouble inside a shipwreck:

His heart and respiratory rates jump. At 200 feet, when every lungful of air requires seven times the volume as that on the surface, a panicked diver can breathe down his tanks so quickly that the needles on his gauges begin to drop into the red before his eyes. That sight further quickens his heart and breath, which in turn further reduces the time he has to solve his problems. Heavier respiration also means heavier narcosis. Narcosis amplifies panic. A vicious cycle has begun.