Those Were Different Times

Science and tech eschew superstition.  Tonight, on April Fool's Day and a Full Pink Moon, they will attempt to send four astronauts on a trip around that orb.  Hmm.  I am not superstitious, either, but. . . . 

I find this feat less than thrilling anyway.  We sent men to the moon in 1969 with math done on slide rulers by people wearing pocket protectors.  The spacecraft was powered by a hybrid Ford/Chevy engine.  O.K.  Not quite, but you get my drift.  Armstrong and Aldrin rode a little space toy to the surface of the moon hoping that when it was time to take off again and they put the key in the ignition, the thing would start.  Meanwhile, Collins became the first man to see the dark side of the moon, alone and out of contact with earth.  In 1969 we still had the Loch Ness Monster and the Abominable Snowman.  He had to be wondering what sort of aliens he would see.  

Nope. I'm not excited that we are going to accomplish less than we did in 1969.  

"We"?  You know what I mean.  "We" planted the American flag on the moon.  It is ours, by God, and we aim to keep it.  There's gold in them there hills.  

And in 1969, Peter Gimbel of the Gimbel family fortune, set sail for adventure and daring.  The ocean was believed to be boundless and enduring, a source of life for eternity.  We still knew little about the creatures of the deep.  Sharks were maneaters.  Hell. . . giant squid could still eat your boat.  

For six months, Gimbel hired a 150 foot steamship, a former whaling vessel, to search for Great White Sharks in order to film them.  This wasn't a scientific expedition.  His team included Ron and Valerie Taylor, both Australian Spear Fishing Champions, if you can believe there ever was such a competition.  For part of the trip, Rodney Fox, the only person every to survive a Great White Shark attack, joined them.  The pictures of his body ripped open, ribs and organs visible, makes it difficult to believe he could actually survive.  He, too, was spear fishing.  

I am tempted to post the photo, but it is pretty gross, so I will leave it to you to Google if you are curious.  It is easy to find. 

Here is a full list of his team:

Peter Gimbel: Expedition leader, lead diver, and director.
Ron and Valerie Taylor: Famous Australian shark experts and photographers.
Stan Waterman: Underwater photographer and producer.
Rodney Fox: Guide, shark attack survivor, and photographer.
James Lipscomb: Director/filmmaker.
Tom Chapin: Folk singer/guitarist who accompanied the team.
Peter Lake: Still photographer.
Phil Clarkson: Diving coordinator.

Holy shit, right?  But at the time, again. . . it was just how things were done.  Now it seems more like "The Life Aquatic."  

Old times were funny.  

So I watched the film in 1971 when it was released and again two nights ago.  The first viewing inspired my already huge desire, birthed by my father's tall tales, the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films, the t.v. show "Sea Hunt," and hundreds of hours of watching old adventure movies, Jacques Cousteau, and Marlin Perkins "Wild Kingdom," to seek out, again, "adventure.  My buddy, Tommy, and I took scuba lessons with a notorious man, Hal Watts, who owned the world record for the deepest underwater dive in history.  He was seen by many, though, as a villain.  He had become an underwater cave explorer and had shown that vast numbers of Florida's underwater aquifers were joined by tunnels and caves.  Trouble was, many of his dive partners never returned alive.

Tommy and I joined him, first on simple dives, but soon following him into wild nighttime lakes accessible only by dirt track and old civil war corduroy roads where we sank below the dark surface waters into tunnels thirty feet below that led to underwater caves hundreds of feet deep.  We were kids, really, and we made one fuck up after another.  One night, we each let go of the rope leading to the surface at the same time, and because it was stretched by the divers below us, it disappeared.  There we were at one hundred feet in the soundless dark, shining our lights into one another's eyes, doomed.  Fortunately, after many moments of panic, we saw another divers light shining below us and we descended and found our lifeline.  

Another night, I got nitrogen narcosis and didn't know if we were descending or ascending.  All I could do was follow my buddy in front of me through the narrow tunnel.  Fortunately, we were going up. 

Tommy and I decided to go out on our own.  Our first trip was a decompression dive into a cave.  It was two dives, actually, as we exhausted one tank and came up for a second.  The next trip down would force us to decompress at several depths for differing amounts of time.  We calculated at the surface before we went back down.  As we got into the water, though, I said, "Tommy, I think we figured this wrong."  We went back to look at the tables, and indeed we had.  If I hadn't caught it, we surely would have had the bends.  One fellow we dove with had gotten them and had a permanent limp from the resulting paralysis.  

On our next trip, we went to a now famous springs that at that time was on private property.  We drove through brush for miles to get to the huge sinkhole.  It was rough getting our dive gear down the steep slope.  Once in, we descended to the tunnel that slanted at about 30 degrees for fifty or sixty feet before it opened up into a giant cavern.  We descended to 150 feet where we were hit by the silent onrush of water spewing from the opening to the spring.  We went ass over tea kettle, as they say, our masks ripped from our faces.  By the time we had gotten them back on and cleared them of water (as we had been taught), we were both ready to head back to the surface.  Stupidly, however, we had not brought a line, and when we headed up, the roof had many tunnels.  We chose one.  It was a dead end.  We backed out and chose another.  It, too, narrowed until we could not pass.  We backed out, and now, shining our lights into one another's panicked faces, the bubbles from our exhalations almost continuous, using up what air we had left far too rapidly, we tried again.  This time, we followed the sloping bottom, merely by chance, and were in the right tunnel to the surface.  

"Holy Christ, I was reading the headlines in tomorrow's papers," I said.  

Since then, the state has put steel bars over the entrance to the cave to prevent divers from going in.  Too many people had died there.  

That is when we decided to become ocean divers.  We were done with caves.  There was nothing to see there anyway.  

And when I went to college the following year, I decided to degree in zoology.  I wanted to be a marine biologist.  

It wasn't what I thought.  I was studying with a world famous invertebrate zoologist who got some of his class a weekend on the State Oceanographic Research Vessel.  We were dredging the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico for marine specimens.  We slept aboard.  The boat was diesel.  In the morning we were served cinnamon buns and orange juice.  The weather was nasty.  By ten, people were puking.  I was doing fine, but one of my friends felt sick and went below to lie down.  I went down to see how he was doing.  Big mistake.  The loss of horizon and the smell of diesel fumes got me.  I went back on deck to try to shake it. I was standing at the railing talking to another fellow when he suddenly and violently puked overboard.  Chain reaction.  I, too, unburdened myself of sweet buns and orange juice.  

By the time we lowered the nets, dredged, and brought it all to deck to pick through our deep sea treasures, the entire class was sick.  Insult to injury, we were picking through our treasures with bare hands, and plentiful among it were spiny sponges that had a toxin.  Depending on your reaction, it was either merely painful, or, as happened, inflammatory.  Some people's hands turned bright red and swelled terribly.  One girl couldn't hold a pencil to take notes for a week.  

That was "The Life Aquatic" without the romance.  Later I learned that Jacques Cousteau didn't travel aboard the Calypso very much.  His crew would go out and Jacques would be helicoptered in for the filming.  Life aboard an ocean vessel wasn't as much fun as it looked in movies.  

Still, I degreed, and a few years later bought a sailboat that I kept on the coast for several years.  By then, I was ready for mountains.  Solo trips, then high altitude and classic rock climbing.  

All because of my father's tall tales and old movies.  

When I watched "Blue Water, White Death" the other night, it seemed fairly shocking.  The crew followed whaling ships, for the blood in the water attracted sharks.  The footage of ships using huge pneumatic guns to harpoon whales from the deck of 150 foot ships seemed barbarian.  Shot through the lungs, the whale spewed bloody plumes high into the air.  The crew would blow the carcass up with air, attach a float to it, and head off to kill more whales.  Meanwhile, Gimbel and his crew dropped steel cages in the water to film packs of sharks stripping the flesh from the whale.  

They decided to film outside the cages.  People had not swum in shark infested waters with feeding sharks before.  For the times, this was truly shocking.  

Six months later, they finally found Great Whites, by god, and they filmed them.  

They congratulated one another.  Roll the credits.  

Man. . . that was another time.  I guess we live our lives in eras.  

Now, of course, we are on the road to perfecting human behavior.  It has taken a lot of therapy.  

Phew.  I have to go now.  Busy day.  T took me to dinner last night to tell me he was moving back to Tennessee.  He asked me to take him to the little airport in Grit City this afternoon.  Before that, I have to take my mother to do some banking.  And her niece returns today, so I must wash the sheets and make the bed. . . and make other preparations.  

Tonight, once again for a little while, I will sleep in my own bed.  April 1.  Full moon.  It should be something.   

I'll look up and remember. 1969.  Man on the Moon.  Those were different times.