James Tabor: The Deep Zone

The patience of tourists , she thought. The options: stay at the shop for four hours or until whenever Mary came in, sell some fins and masks to tourons who would call them “flippers” and “goggles,” or guide Thomas Brewster and make three hundred, maybe five-fifty, for the shop. Bird in the hand.

“Let’s go.”

The shop was two miles north of Ginnie Springs Park on State Road 47. With Brewster following in his black Escalade, she drove the shop’s red F-150, windows cranked down. It was very hot already, but she loved the moist air, sweet with gardenia and hibiscus and orange blossom and, when the wind was right, with the Gulf’s saline tang. Welcome change from the diesel and sewer reek of D.C.

They parked in a dirt lot and carried their gear to a wooden dive platform by the water. Nearby, families who could not afford trips to the Gulf or the Atlantic were picnicking on fried chicken, potato salad, burgers, and Budweiser, drawn to the shade of the park’s big live oaks and the cool springs’ turquoise water.

Assembling her rig, Hallie looked over Brewster’s gear. Double-steel 100-cubic-foot tanks, Halcyon buoyancy compensator with Hogarthian rig, dual Atomic regulators, redundant NiTek dive computers, fifteen-hundred-dollar Halcyon cave lights, OMS fins with steel-spring heel straps. Maybe I was wrong about the guy , she thought. It was a new thing with her, judging quickly and harshly, and, she understood, a direct result of the mess in Washington. It had soured her as surely as a cup of vinegar spilled into a bottle of good wine. Easier to get it in than to take it out, was the problem. Hanging around with Mary, who had been an Apache pilot in Iraq and was scarred in body and soul, was not the best cure.

She explained the dive plan: one-third of their air going in, one-third coming out, one-third in reserve.

“Sure, sure,” Brewster said. “SOP.”

“There is no SOP in cave diving, Mr. Brewster. And especially not in the Boneyard.”

He nodded, stared back, after a while looked away. “Right.”

“I lead going in, you lead coming out. The line is clearly visible all the way to the Boneyard Chamber. Viz should be good but not great, thirty feet or so. We’ve had rain.”

“Any obstacles?”

“One restriction. Tight, but no doffing gear required.”

“I’m gonna shoot some video.” He held up a Nikonos digital video recorder with integrated lights that, she knew, retailed for about five thousand dollars.

“Gas allowing, not a problem.”

“So what actually happened in there?”

They had been donning gear as they talked and were almost ready to enter.

“Two good divers drowned in 1998.”

“How’d it happen?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Why are the bodies still there?”

“Recovering would have been too dangerous. Plus both had wills stating that if they died in a cave, they didn’t want people risking their lives to bring them out. And, so I heard, the state thought it would help prevent repeats.”

“Law of unintended consequences kicked in, though, am I right?”

“What do you mean?”

“The place is famous now. Like the Doria . Everybody wants to dive here, go see the skeletons.”

He had that much right. They ran through predive routines, made giant-stride entries, hovered at ten feet to perform bubble checks and S-drills. She vented gas from her own Halcyon and settled to thirty feet, the water sweetly cool after the heat above. The cave mouth was a dark hole in a pale underwater wall. Inside, beyond the entrance, she shone her light on the white guideline on the cave floor. Brewster pointed at his eyes, gave the circled thumb and forefinger: Okay .

Hallie tied off line from her main reel to the permanent guideline. She pointed in the direction of their intended travel, watched him acknowledge by repeating the gesture, then took them down toward the Boneyard, spooling out line as she went.

The first quarter mile was like the intestinal tract of a giant worm, ten feet in diameter, bending and twisting, striated limestone walls flaring green and white and black in their dive lights. The bottom was tan silt, fine as flour; the particles would remain suspended in the water for an hour if disturbed. The only sounds were the hissing and burbling of their regulators.

Hallie loved being down here. She had been in her first cave at six, just a touristic operation, nothing special, Luray Caverns in Virginia. But that day something went click deep inside, and she had loved going into caves ever since. Sometimes she thought of herself as a troglodyte, one of those creatures, perfectly adapted to the cave environment, that died if brought out into the light. She wouldn’t die and she loved light, but in caves a certain ancient calm took her over. Very different on the surface, where type A genetics drove her like wind behind a sail.

They each had two lights on their yellow helmets and bigger primary lights affixed to the backs of their right hands with surgical tube straps. Every twenty feet, Hallie looked back between her thighs at Brewster. He was moving well but breathing hard, blowing out a steady stream of bubbles.

Four hundred yards in and forty-five feet deep, they came to the restriction. The ceiling dropped and the walls closed in, leaving an opening the size of a refrigerator door. It was called the Jaws of Death, something Hallie had neglected to mention to Brewster. She slipped through and hovered, waiting. His head and shoulders made it, but his big chest and double tanks did not. Instead of relaxing and emptying his lungs, Brewster started throwing his hips and legs around and yanking on rocks with his hands—bad mistake. Before he silted them out, she grabbed both his wrists, gave them a hard jerk, made eye contact, held up an index finger: Stop .

He did.

She signaled again, pushing down slowly with both hands: Relax .

He nodded, backed off, tried again, and worked his way through. They reached the Boneyard Chamber in ten minutes. The main cave passage continued to the left, and the short feeder passage to the chamber dropped steeply fifteen feet down to their right. Hallie went in first. The chamber was shaped like a bell, thirty feet in diameter at the bottom, no bigger in diameter at the top than an oil barrel.

Brewster came in and settled down toward the skeletons, whose bones flashed white in his bright dive lights. They were on their backs, where the weight of their tanks had pulled them. As their flesh had decayed, their mask straps had loosened and the masks had fallen away. The eye sockets gaped, black holes in the white faces.

Brewster videotaped ten feet from the skeletons for thirty seconds. He sank lower until he hung a foot above them, the sharp light making the skulls shine like silver. Then he jerked and spun, dropping his Nikonos. Inside the mask his eyes looked wide and wild.

Hallie had seen it before. The skeletons had spoken: We died in here. You can, too . He had begun to imagine their deaths, the panicked breathing, thickening silt, the flailing search for the exit in zero visibility. Thrashing and gasping, tangling bodies, panic feeding panic, air coming harder as tanks emptied, frantic last gasps, thoughts flickering out, and then… nothing.

She knew that Brewster’s deep, reptilian urge for self-preservation would be screaming, Out! He charged, tried to shove her out of the way. Hallie grabbed his harness and spun him around and smacked him hard on the side of the head, just beneath his helmet, with the steel handle of her primary light. Not many things could cut through panic, but good old-fashioned pain was one. She gave him a shake, held up one finger: Stop! For a moment she wasn’t sure, but then he got control of himself. She looked at his pressure gauge: 1,300 pounds . They had started with 3,000. He should have signaled for the turnaround long ago .