Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson Read Free Book Online Page A

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,