“Got it,” I said.
“Another thing—if you do decide to go, remember to leave your camera. Your Nikonos is only certified to 160 feet, you’ll warp the case.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks for your help.”
“Take my advice,” he said. “Don’t go there.”
I asked my sister what she thought about it.
“Why not?” she said. “Sounds interesting.”
The next day we drove up to have a look at the site.
There was a sort of industrial pier that went a few yards out into the water. It looked broken-down, disused. There were several ratty houses along the shore, none green. Still farther north, there was some sort of refinery or industrial complex, with big ships tied up. The water by the dock was murky and unappealing.
I was all for giving it up. I asked my sister what she thought. She shrugged. “We’re here.”
“Okay,” I said. “At least we can look for the mast.”
We put on our gear, inflated our vests, and floated north. It was a fairly strenuous swim; I kept watching the houses on the shore. I had about decided that the divemaster had given us bad instructions when I suddenly saw, at two o’clock as I looked back, a green door. It was not visible from the dock.
I looked down in the water. Directly below us was a heavy mast and spar, some metal cables draped over the coral. It looked almost new.
“Think that’s it?” I asked my sister.
She shrugged. “Looks like what he described.”
I asked her what she thought we should do.
“We’ve come this far,” she said.
“Okay, let’s go,” I said. We put in our mouthpieces, deflated our vests, and went down to the spar.
Up close, the spar was big—forty feet long, a foot in diameter. It had very little marine growth on it. We swam along its length, moving out from the shore. Then we ducked over the edge, and plunged down the incline.
That’s always an exciting moment, to drop over an undersea ledge, but my heart was pounding now. The landscape was ugly, with heavy pollution from the nearby industrial site. The water was cloudy and visibility was poor; we were swimming in crud. There wasn’t a lot of light, and it got quickly darker the farther down we went. And we had to go fast, because we had to conserve our air.
At ninety feet, I looked out at the open ocean and decided the instructions were wrong. Anyway, it was difficult to leave the scummy incline and head straight out into the cloudy murk. I decided to go deeper before heading out. At 120 feet, I headed outward. I couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead of me, but once I had left the incline behind, it was difficult to know where to focus my eyes. There was nothing to look at except the milky strands of crud suspended in the ocean.
I was chiefly concerned that we would miss the wreck; at this depth, it was not going to be possible to hunt for it. We would have neither the time nor the air for that.
And then, suddenly, my entire field of vision was filled with flat rusted metal.
I was staring at a vast wall of steel.
The wreck.
The size of it astonished me: it was far bigger than I had imagined. We were at the keel line, running along the bottom of the hull. We were at 160 feet. I started my stopwatch, and swam up to the side of the hull, at 140 feet. The metal surface of the hull was covered with beautiful sponges and wire corals. They made a wonderful pattern, but there wasn’t much color this deep; we moved through a black-and-white world. We went over the side of the hull, and onto the deck of the ship, which was almost vertical, with the masts pointing down the incline. The geography was pretty crazy, but you got used to it. I took some pictures, we had a quick look around, and then our four minutes were up. We returned slowly to the surface.
When a diver breathes compressed air, nitrogen enters his bloodstream. Two things then happen. The first is that the nitrogen acts like an anesthetic, and causes an intoxication—nitrogen narcosis, the famous “rapture of the deep”—which becomes more pronounced the deeper you go. That narcosis was dangerous; intoxicated divers had died because they took out their mouthpieces to give air to the fish.
The other thing is that the nitrogen that enters the blood must be allowed to come out of the blood slowly as you return to the surface. If the diver surfaces too quickly, the nitrogen will bubble out of his blood like soda from a bottle when the cap is removed. These bubbles cause painful cramps in the joints; hence the name “bends.” They also cause paralysis and death. The time needed to decompress is a function of how long the diver has been down, and how deep.
According to published dive tables, my sister and I were not required to decompress at all, but the need for decompression depends on such variables as temperature, the health of the diver that day, or whether part of his wet suit binds him and prevents the nitrogen from coming out of solution. It’s so highly variable we decided to do double decompression stops—two minutes at twenty feet, six minutes at ten feet—just to be safe. We made our decompression stops, and swam back to the dock.
We were both exhilarated; we had dived the wreck, and hadn’t died! And the wreck was remarkably beautiful.
We decided to dive there again, and explore it further. Given a four-minute limit, we felt that we would have to make a separate dive to see the stern, and another to see the bow.
A few days later, we swam around the stern of the ship, about 180 feet deep. The dive went smoothly; we had a good look at the steel paddle-wheels. We were starting to feel quite comfortable around this wreck. Our pleasure was considerable. We felt like kids who had broken the rules and were getting away with it, consistently. We were very pleased with ourselves. And we were getting used to the narcosis, too, accustomed to the way we felt drunk the minute we reached the wreck.
A few days after that, we made a third dive, and explored the bow. The bow was 210 feet down, and as we came around it, I felt the narcosis strongly. I gripped my instruments and kept checking my gauges, to be sure my air was all right. I was aware I was having trouble concentrating. We started each dive with 2,200 pounds of air, and I liked to head back with 1,000 pounds remaining, since it took us nearly eleven minutes to reach the surface.
The wreck was incredibly beautiful; this was going to be our last dive on it; I had 1,200 pounds of air remaining, and we still had a little time left, so I decided to show my sister a tiny, delicate sea fan on one of the masts, 180 feet down. We swam out and had a look, and then it was time to go back. I checked my watch; the four minutes were gone, we were moving toward five minutes. I checked my air. I had 600 pounds left.
I felt panic: 600 pounds was not enough air for me to make it back. What had happened? I must have misread the gauges.
I looked again: 500 pounds.
Now I was in trouble. I couldn’t go up fast; that would only increase my risk of the bends. I couldn’t hold my breath, either; an embolism would kill me for sure. Nor could I breathe less often; the whole point of blowing off the nitrogen was that you had to breathe it out.
I looked up toward the surface I could not see, 180 feet above me. I suddenly felt the weight of all this water over me, and my precariousness. I broke into a cold sweat, even though I was underwater. I didn’t know such a thing was possible.
There was no point in wasting time; the deeper you are, the faster your air is consumed. We started up quickly.
The rule is, you ascend at 60 feet a minute, which meant it would take us three minutes to get to the surface. After one minute, at 120 feet, I had 300 pounds of air left. After two minutes, at 60 feet, I had 190 pounds left. But still before me were the decompression stops.
I had never known such a predicament. Of course I could easily reach the surface—but that wouldn’t do me any good. I had been under too long, and the surface was dangerous, possibly deadly, to me now. I had to stay away from the surface for as long as possible. But I couldn’t stay down seven more minutes with only 190 pounds of air.
We stopped for the first decompression
at 20 feet. My sister, who never consumed much air, showed me her gauge. She had 1,000 pounds left. I was down to 150 pounds. She signaled: did I want to share her air?
This is something you practice in diving class. I had practiced it many times. But now I was panicked; I didn’t think I could manage the procedure of taking my air out of my mouth, and passing her mouthpiece back and forth. I was much too frightened for that.
So much for diving class.
I shook my head, no.
We went up to 10 feet, and hung in the water just below the surface, holding on to arms of staghorn coral. I tried to tell myself that the decompression stops were doubled, and not really necessary anyway. True, we had exceeded the no-decompression limits, but not by much. Maybe a minute. Maybe less.
I couldn’t convince myself that I was fine—all I could think was how damned stupid I had been, to cut it so close, and to put myself in this danger. I thought of all my friends who had been bent, and how it had happened. The stories were always the same. Got a little sloppy one day, got a little careless, got a little lazy. Didn’t pay attention.
Exactly my story.
I stared at my air gauge, watching the needle slowly go down. In my mind, the gauge was magnified, as big as a saucer. I saw every scratch, every imperfection. I saw the tiny fluctuations, the tiny pulses in the needle with each breath I took. The gauge was down to 50 pounds. Then 30 pounds. I had never had my air supply go so low. I noticed a tiny screw in the gauge, a stop-screw to keep the needle from going below zero. I continued to breathe, wiggling my arms to make sure nothing was binding. I completed the six minutes of decompression, just barely. The needle hit the stop-screw.
I had sucked the tank dry.
On the surface my sister asked me if I was all right, and I said I was. But I felt very jittery. I figured I was all right, but I wouldn’t know for sure for a few hours. I went back to my room, and took a nap. In the afternoon I woke with a crawly sensation on my skin.
Uh-oh.
That was one of the signs of the bends. I lay in the bed and waited.
The tingly, crawly sensation got worse. It was first on my arms and legs, then my chest as well. I felt the tingling creep up my neck, taking over … moving toward my face.…
I couldn’t stand it any more; I jumped out of bed and went into the bathroom. I didn’t have any medicines, but I would do something, at least take an aspirin. Something.
I stared at myself in the mirror.
My body was covered with an odd pink rash. It was some sort of contact dermatitis.
I went back to bed and collapsed in a sleep. I never got the bends.
As best I could tell, the dermatitis was caused by the hotel soap.
In more than ten years of living, I had never gotten into trouble. But during my vacation in Bonaire, I experienced serious trouble twice in two weeks.
At the time I just saw these incidents as accidents, bad luck. More than a year passed before I began to reflect on the pattern behind my own behavior, the fact that I had repeatedly taken ever-more-daring risks until I finally got myself into trouble. I was startled when I finally recognized what I was really doing. The conclusion was inescapable: on some level, for some reason, I was trying to kill myself.
Why would I want to kill myself? I could find no explanation in the events of my life at that time. My work was going well. I had ended an unhappy love affair, but that was months in the past, and no longer on my mind. All in all, I felt cheerful and optimistic.
And yet the pattern was there. I had engaged in repetitive, daredevil behavior without ever being consciously aware of the underlying pattern.
But was I really unaware? Because when I thought back, I remembered some odd and uncharacteristic worries during my stay in Bonaire. For a man on vacation, I had been unusually fretful. I worried that the dive shop would fill my tanks with bad air. I worried that the restaurants would give me food poisoning. I worried that I would have a fatal car accident on the road. Yet the roads were nearly deserted; the restaurants were spotless; the dive shop was scrupulously managed. At the time, I had commented to myself that these fears were particularly unfounded. Now I had to recognize that they were not fears at all, but disguised wishes.
In any case, I hadn’t put the pieces all together during the time I was in Bonaire, and the entire episode left me with a renewed respect for the power of the unconscious mind. What I had demonstrated, to myself at least, was that my ordinary assumption that in some casual and automatic way I know what I am doing, and why, is simply wrong.
The acceptance of unconscious motivation obliged me to assess my behavior by methods other than ordinary introspective awareness, because what I think I am doing at the time is almost certainly not what I am doing. In some way, I had to get a perspective on myself.
One time-honored way is to listen to the perceptions of an outsider—a friend, associate, or therapist. There are also ways to get perspective by shifting consciousness, changing to what is sometimes called “the witness state.” Those meditative states didn’t interest me in those days. But I stumbled on another useful technique for entirely different reasons.
Starting around 1974, there was a lot of attention paid to so-called circadian rhythms, the daily rhythms of the human body and its hormones. It had been found that most human beings didn’t follow a precise twenty-four-hour cycle, but that the usual cycle was slightly longer or shorter, which meant that we were sometimes in synchronization with the day, and sometimes not.
In addition, the psychological effects of the female menstrual cycle were receiving new consideration. In England, there were rumors of legal acceptance of a condition called PMS, premenstrual syndrome. And it was commonly accepted that many women experienced some monthly fluctuation in mood and behavior.
I began to wonder if there might be a male menstrual cycle as well. Or something equivalent. After all, there are physical analogues between the sexes—the male scrotum to the female labia, the testicles to the ovaries, the penis to the clitoris, and so on. It seemed to me unlikely that women would develop a complex monthly cycle of hormones and that there would be no trace of such a cycle in men.
That was a job for an endocrinologist, but I wasn’t interested in the hormones. I was interested in seeing if there were patterns in my own moods that I wasn’t aware of. How to keep track of this?
I asked my friend Arnold Mandell, a neurobiologist, how to keep an objective record of subjective mood. Because the danger, of course, is that you will inadvertently create a pattern in your own data. Arnold said the best way was each day to put a mark at the edge of an unmarked diary page, using the top of the page as the best mood, and the bottom as the worst mood. So I began to do this.
Since I was keeping a daily diary mark, I started to record little thoughts for the day, too. I had always thought keeping a diary was a belabored, Franklin-esque thing to do. But since I was doing it for another purpose, it was all right.
After a few weeks, I looked back over my notes with astonishment. Every day, I was so critical! One nasty comment after another, about something or somebody.
I didn’t regard myself as particularly critical, but evidently I was. I began to observe my state more carefully during each day. It did indeed seem that I was frequently judgmental and snappish, even when I didn’t mean to be. So I decided to watch for that behavior and modify it. It was surprisingly difficult to do.
I never was able to detect a monthly cycle of my own mood changes, though from time to time I tried again. In later years, I wrote a computer program to record my responses on a blank screen. I still suspect there is such a cycle, perhaps bimonthly, running seven or eight weeks. But I have never demonstrated it.
However, I demonstrated a great value to keeping a diary, and have kept one even since. I reread Franklin’s Autobiography, and noted that he kept a record of himself, as I did, for exactly the same reasons. This most practical and observant of men had decided that careful record-keeping was the only way to
find out what he was really doing.
Pahang
I became interested in the Sultan of Pahang, ruler of the largest and richest state in Malaysia. I had some notion of writing about him, and I had heard that his birthday celebrations were worth witnessing—horse races on his palace grounds, native dances, and a ceremony in which his subjects ritually poison fish in the river and collect them for a special dinner. It all sounded suitably exotic. From the Malaysian consulate in Los Angeles I learned the Sultan celebrated his birthday in late May, and a week before the date I flew to Singapore with the idea of finding someone there who would assist me in attending the party as a journalist. Failing that, I would crash it.
I was delighted at the idea of crashing the birthday of the Sultan of Pahang. I told everyone that was what I was doing. It sounded so eccentric and dashing.
Unfortunately, when I arrived in Singapore I learned that the Sultan’s birthday was not in May. The old Sultan’s birthday was in May, but he had been dead several years. His son, the present Sultan of Pahang, celebrated his birthday on October 22. I was five months early.
I felt like a fool. And in the meantime, there was the question of what to do, now that I was in Singapore. I decided to see something of the province of Pahang—birthday party or not—and learned that there was a national park in the middle of the jungle called Taman Negara. I arranged to visit it in a week’s time. The Malaysian government required a week to process my application to visit the park, because there was still fighting with Communist guerrillas in that region.
My friend Don, with whom I was staying, instructed me about guerrillas. Don was an international lawyer, but he had been in Vietnam during the war. “Now,” he said, “in case there’s an ambush, you know what to do.”