Surfacing

        Don scrunched his wide shoulders through the hatch, carrying the daily briefings and the three trays of our pre-ordered breakfasts. Ray and I thanked him, and settled into an amiable silence of chewing and reviewing the plan for the day, our final day at 400ft below sea level in the Gulf of Mexico. It was the final work day of our eighteen day assignment, and the three of us had settled into a comfortable routine with each other. We alternated shifts with another three-man team, but socialized and ate mainly with each other due to our offset schedules and the space constraints of the living areas. 

Whole psychology experiments could be conducted (or pehaps had been conducted?) on the interpersonal dynamics of three-man saturation diver teams, who entered a locked metal tube system as strangers, immediately had to battle our own individual discomforts and anxieties, and then had depended on each other for life support. I had been lucky with this group though – while it was only my sixth assignment, Ray and Don had been working at the floor of the Gulf for years, but didn’t belittle my inexperience. Don especially respected my military background – when I had talked about the twelve years I spent as a Navy diver, he spoke reverently of his father who had worked on Navy aircraft carriers, and lamented the rebellious streak that had kept him from enlisting as a younger man. 

Shaking hot sauce onto the rubbery eggs, I thought about how grateful I was that the decompression time would only be four days, instead of the ten days I required by my previous assignment. The predictability of the work days on an assignment made the time pass easily – one hour for breakfast and preparation, transfer into the diving bell, five hours of work on the gulf floor, transfer back to the bell, shower, clothing and supply exchange, another meal, a little bit of free time during which I tried to stretch and meditate, and sleep. I liked the way the transfer procedures required the complete attention of all three of us to avoid any accidents (which were almost certainly fatal at this depth) and the logistical puzzles of tool selection and approaches required by the work itself.   

In contrast, the decompression days were awful. As the pressure in our chamber gradually decreased back to atmospheric pressure, there was nothing to do except read books, watch movies on our laptops (no space in the chamber for any communal screen viewing, which I think would have made things better), and impatiently anticipate everything waiting for us outside the chamber. In my case that was when I allowed myself to start thinking about the freckles on my wife’s cheeks, and wonder how long my youngest daughter’s baby skin would smell faintly of sweet milk, and plan the first things I was going to consume back on shore, which was usually a po-boy and an ice cold Abita beer. Four days of restless anticipatory longing was tolerable, ten days was pushing the boundary. Two assignments ago, a jumpy younger guy named Jack who had made me slightly nervous the whole assignment, reported a headache, and the ship’s medical officer had to err on the side of safety and re-pressurize us, contributing another three days to the planned six day process. Of course I understood the need to do it, but I did also have a few idle fantasies of causing Jack bodily harm retaliation.

Ray’s high-pitched voice, caused by the helium in our gas mix and in hilarious contrast with his booming baritone on the surface, brought me away from my thoughts of the coming decompression and back to the plan for the day. Per our usual rotation, today I would be the workhorse diver #2, Don would be the lead Diver #1, and Ray would be the bellman who stayed in the bell and kept us safe. The plan was to clear debris from a recent hurricane from around a damaged pipe connector, repair the connector, and inspect an adjacent connector. After communication with the ship team, we made our way through the transfer chamber into the diving bell. Don and I ticked through our suit checks, and cross-checked each other. Ray verified standard communication and back-up channels, and checked our helmets and umbilical lines.  Confirming no issues, Ray sealed the hatch and we were smoothly lowered back to the floor. 

With the crackling chatter from the ship as background noise, I looked out of the porthole as the color of the water muted and the brightness faded. Upon arrival at the Gulf floor, Don and I put our helmets and back up tanks on, checked our individual communication channels and our gas flow, and activated the hot water circulation system that would keep us warm, which seemed like an absurd concept in the context of the oppressive heat and humidity of Southern Louisiana in August on land. Don left the bell, hopping along the silty bottom to the worksite as Ray gradually let out his umbilical cable. The aptly-named umbilicals are a literal lifeline for us, serving as the conduits of essential breathing gases, hot-water for suit heating, communication lines, and data monitoring lines. After 10 minutes, Don confirmed his arrival at the nearby work site. I then exited, hopping over the join him and settling in before Ray requested the debris collection cannister to be lowered from the ship.

The hours passed quickly with Don and I working together in a steady rhythm. After five hours of work time, we got an unexpected call down from the deck that the current had shifted significantly and they were bringing us up early. Nothing like this had happened to me before, and I didn’t feel the force of any significant current at the floor, but the mission director was calm and decisive. Ten seconds later, Ray’s cartoonish voice came though confirming receipt of the message, relaying our coordinates and status, and directing Don back to the bell. 

As he bounced off to the nearby bell capsule through the murky water, I picked up the last few tools we had been using and replaced them in the carrier basket. I was latching the door and had my finger on the radio button when my feet flew out from under me as if I had been tackled. The silt from the bottom flared around me, and I lost sight of the basket and the bell in the distance. Without even realizing my breathing had changed, my carbon dioxide alarm beeped. “No, no, no,” I said to myself, panting harder as it felt like a boa constrictor was encircling my chest and flexing. The beeping intensified just as I was jerked up and to my left side. Objectively it must have been five seconds before Ray’s voice came over my radio, but my brain had enough time to realize my umbilical must have become entangled with the tool basket line, envision the umbilical snapping, cutting off my gases and giving me five minutes on my back up tank to get back to the bell before my certain gruesome death.

“Denny, calm down, you’re breathing past your hat,” Ray said, as soothingly as someone who sounds like Donald Duck high on helium could. “Slow breaths, you have to chill. Your umbilical is twisted with the tool line but I have a good visual on you.”

My worst fears were confirmed. I would not only die in the next ten minutes, but I was certain Don and Ray would endanger their own lives retrieving my body.

“Denny stop it. Slow your breathing or you’re going to pass out. I’m serious man, you have to calm down,” Ray squeaked into my helmet.

“Okay, okay,” I whispered back. Ray sounded calm and confident. He said he could see and would have told me to turn on my back up tank if my umbilical was really in danger. I oriented myself as the silt settled and was able to slow my breathing to allow the gas system to catch up in clearing the carbon dioxide. After a few minutes, the beeping stopped, although I did feel a new drag on my legs, like the undertow of a broken wave.

“All right Denny, good job. You’re fine. You need to walk 10 yard straight ahead and then make a hard right,” Ray said. I followed his instructions, estimating the distance with my strange moonwalking hops. “Hard right now, perfect. Now walk back towards me.”

I didn’t look around, didn’t know where the tool cage was. I just blindly trusted Ray because I didn’t trust myself. The bell came into clear view in front of me and I had to squash the urge to try to run. Ray stayed in my ear, talking me along until I was back safely in the bell. As Ray radioed back up to the ship, I pulled my helmet off felling an unexpected sudden tightness in my throat. “You just saved my life man, you know that? I was losing it,” I choked out.

Ray just nodded as we began to be lifted. “That burst of current caught you off guard. I’m just glad it settled so I could see you. They had that tool line too long anyway, we’re going to talk to them about that.”

Don patted my shoulder, grounding me as I flushed with gratitude for these men I hadn’t known a month ago, and for the safety of the shower-stall-sized metal chamber encasing us together.

After that episode, the decompression days were more difficult than usual with their curse of stretches of open time and mental space to reflect on what happened without the soothing balm of a routine work day to fade it from my memory. I had been a daredevil even as a boy – always climbing to the top of the tree or racing to the bottom of the hill without considering whether I actually knew how to stop on roller skates. I had broken bones so often that a few of the ER triage nurses recognized me and my bedraggled mother.  My time in the Navy had almost certainly kept me from dying in the ways that had claimed some of my high school friends – motorcycles, ATVs, waterskiing while blacked out drunk, heroin – and had sharpened my ability to focus, not to mention introduced me to diving. Many people would find the sheer terror I had experienced on that day as evidence of my maturation, or perhaps my dedication to my family, but I could never admit that it wasn’t anything that noble. After four days of intermittently zoning out from my James Patterson novels and Marvel movies, I realized if I was going to die doing something reckless, it ought to be for my own enjoyment, or my country, or my family, and not the evil empire of an oil company. I tried to talk myself down from making any major decisions in the midst of the physical discomforts of decompression, but resolved to at least look into options for scientific work to avoid having to renew my contract.

I must have fallen asleep because I remember the announcement at first integrating into a dream I was having about discovering a gelatinous octopus-like creature, but when it repeated: “Welcome back to earth boys, come on out” my eyes snapped open and my feet flew to the floor. I grabbed the photo of my wife and daughters from the wall where an LSU magnet had held it, and carefully tucked it into the small bag with my other personal items. After a brief jumble of all six of us moving together in the narrow chamber passageway, we squeezed ourselves though the hatch one by one, onto the deck. Blessed with a clear day and a breeze that would disappear as we got closer to shore, the sky was a perfect cloudless cerulean, and almost in unison we raised our pale faces and squinting eyes to the sun, breathing normal air for the first time in weeks.