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Preface to Into the Lion's Mouth

 

 

In 1986 I left the North Sea and moved back to the United States. I settled down, bought a small farm, and eventually opened a computer training business which required me to take on help. I hired a man named Jack Johnston and one night in 1991, he led me to the obsession that resulted in this book. I didn't know it at the time, but Jack had a Master's degree in psychology and had taken an interest in my behavior. He wanted to know why I paid so much attention to detail in just about everything I did.

At first, I deflected his question, but under his persistent inquisition I looked into my more recent past and offered that I had once been a diver which required a certain diligence to perform one's job well.

Jack reacted in the way I'd seen others when I mentioned the word diver—thinking in terms of Jacques Cousteau, Lloyd Bridges, Sea Hunt—that I must have had an exotic job swimming among colored fish in clear water. It took a while, but I managed to disabuse him of that picture, replacing it with one closer to reality—pitch black freezing water, a gloomy moonscape seabed, huge wolf eels lurking about, claustrophobic diving bells, critical gas tolerances, week-long decompressions, and the omnipresence of danger.

The more I unveiled the commercial diving world, the more Jack kept firing questions at me. I told him about the overwhelming awe of working alone at 600 feet, the physiological and psychological impact, the stress, the money, the constant dependency upon other members of the team, the use of fatalism as an antidote to fear, and the technique of saturation diving in which men breathe helium-oxygen mixtures and never see the light of day for as much as 40 days unless it's through the porthole of the bell. That fact alone really struck home with Jack. That after a dive you didn't get to walk around on deck and fill your lungs with fresh air. Instead, you remained cocooned inside a chamber complex in the bowels of the ship until the next dive.

Who would live like that? was the expression on his face. This was all new to him, but he was beginning to have an inkling as to why I was the way I was. We talked for more than an hour while I drew pictures on the classroom board to quicken his introduction into the world I had left behind, painting a picture of a life that very few people know about when they pull up to a gas station to fill up their tank. The central theme of what I was telling him was that, in the commercial diving industry, one always had to know—not assume—what he was doing every minute of the working day. The consequences for not knowing were too horrific to contemplate.

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