Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [35]
The men bailed and reeled wildly across the cabin. At some point, Kirkwood, half-dead with exhaustion and seasickness, looked up to see Hall stuffing his face—a full stick of butter, a loaf of bread, anything in the galley. “How the hell can you eat at a time like this?” he asked. Hall replied through an overflowing mouth: “Whoever eats the most will last longest in the water.”
“That was cool thinking,” thought Kirkwood. “I couldn’t argue with the wisdom of it.”
Describing the moment later, Kirkwood wrote, “It almost came as a shock when I realized that the good physical condition I’d always prided myself in didn’t mean very much out there. The sea was foreign to me and I found it to be a savage environment; completely different from anything I’d ever known, and one in which man is nothing. The slamming and the thudding and heaving were never ending. We were jarred to the teeth every few seconds…We had quickly been exhausted, but the sea, far from being spent, increased in force almost as though to show us how puny, how insignificant we were.
“What the hell was I doing out here anyway? Only an idiot would attempt such a preposterous scheme as building a new country; and only a numbskull would be out here trying to do it. But even as the thought took form in my mind, while the numbing exhaustion crept through my mind and body, I knew it wasn’t true. I didn’t mean it at all. Building this country was exactly what I wanted to do—what I had to do. And my being there, being part of it from the inception, to watch it grow and take shape, from dream to reality, was just me. That was my way. Otherwise there was no joy in it.”
After another endless hour, a Coast Guard chopper appeared on the horizon and Hall and Kirkwood sobbed in relief. They were safe, but the near miss would leave Kirkwood with a stark realization: It would take far more than a twenty-six-foot boat, a loaf of bread, and a stick of butter to conquer the Cortes Bank.
He knew exactly who to call.
For James Houtz, the mid-1960s were heady days. In early 1965, the former navy demolitions expert had set a world cave-diving depth record, descending to an astonishing 315 feet with a scuba tank filled not with an exotic mixture of nitrogen or helium but simple compressed air. The accomplishment was remarkable not only because it had bested a Jacques Cousteau record by a hundred feet but had been performed in the claustrophobic depths of Devil’s Hole, an abyssal deepwater cave whose only access point is a tiny gash in the earth near Death Valley.
The expedition had earned Houtz considerable renown and a grant for further exploration. He now owned his own dive shop, was making a living doing what he loved, and was a happily married father to boot. Life was good.
Yet if Houtz was already well known at the start of 1965, a rescue attempt five months later very nearly turned him into a household name. Four young friends had descended into Devil’s Hole. When two failed to surface, Houtz was called to lead the rescue.
Houtz and his team twisted and turned through labyrinthine limestone passageways hoping to find a terrified diver dog-paddling in one of the cave’s primordial air pockets. Yet all he ever discovered was a scuba mask. “They were never found,” he said. “The only thing down there now is bones.”
All of which is to say that when, a month later, the phone rang in his dive shop, he understood the correlation between foolhardiness and death, particularly in the water.
“Hello, Mr. Houtz,” said a robust voice on the other end of the line. “This is Joe Kirkwood.”
The caller needed no