Rachel Carson is barely remembered today but through the 1950s and 60s,
her name was as recognizable as that of any movie star or pro athlete. The
author of four books -- the first three, beautifully written treatises on just
about everything then known of the oceans; the fourth, a world-shaking attack
on the overuse of pesticides -- she was just as likely to be the topic of
conversation at any family dinner table as at one of President Kennedy’s press
conferences. She was big.
I’ve always had a bit of a mixed relationship with her books, though. On the
one hand, from the first time I picked up a copy of The Sea Around Us in
junior high, I loved the thought of Rachel Carson. I loved that most of what
she wrote centered on the ocean. I loved that she made it seem possible to have
a near-encyclopedic knowledge of a vast subject. I even loved the somewhat
dowdy photo of her on the back cover of the book.
On the other hand, I have to admit that I was never quite able -- then or now
-- to make it all the way through any of her books. As beautifully written as
her ocean books are, they’re too general for me. I prefer more detail over a
smaller range. As for Silent Spring -- her attack on the overuse of
pesticides -- I found the fact that such a book even had to written too
maddeningly frustrating.to stay with from cover to cover. (But the truth is
that you can still hear the ignorant blaming Carson for the
deaths of millions from malaria.)
Through all these years, though, Carson herself remained a shadowy figure about
whom -- with the exception of that back cover photo -- I knew little. When the
biography On A Farther Shore came out, I decided to rectify that.
The book does a decent job of showing us that much of Carson’s early adult life
gave little hint of the success she would have or the mark she would leave. An
above-average student from a poor family, she graduated from a women’s college
with a degree in a biology, and wound up at the Bureau of Fisheries, a federal
agency that would eventually become the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Her job
was not as a scientist, though, but as a writer, taking scientific reports,
distilling them down to their essence, and then writing them in language a
layman could understand.
The work brought her into contact with countless marine scientists, many of
whom she developed working relationships with, some of whom encouraged her
toward work beyond what she was already doing. Her first step in that
direction, the book Under The Sea-Wind, was a minor success at
best. The second, however, The Sea Around Us, spent months on the
best-seller list and catapulted Carson to fame. Its follow-up, The Edge Of
The Sea, did almost as well.
The details that emerge of Carson during this period are a study of
contradictions. She did little to dissuade the misperception of herself as a
scientist and a diver (she had made one helmet dive off the coast of Florida,
during which she never let go of the boat’s ladder). The combination of
ill-health and inveterate re-writing meant that her books were generally
finished years behind schedule. She sought almost no publicity for herself. She
never hesitated to complain to her publishers about even the slightest of
grievances she felt had been committed against her books. When she agreed to
the making of a documentary based on The Sea Around Us, it was
produced by Irwin Allen, of The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure
fame. It won the Academy Award for best documentary in 1953 but Carson hated it
as overly sensational. Before it was made, though, she had had the chance to
work with a young Jacques Cousteau instead. She decided against it.
The picture that emerges of Carson is of an exceedingly private, quiet but
confident woman, who seemed an unlikely protagonist in the war against the
giant chemical industry. Silent Spring -- the events that eventually
convinced her to write it, the research that went into it, the years it took to
finish it, and the battles that were fought after its publication, take up
nearly the second half of On A Farther Shore. And, for me, that
imbalance is where much of the difficulty of the book lies. By comparison, the
details of the research, the trials and tribulations, and the thought processes
that went into Carson’s three ocean books are barely touched upon. And since
that’s where my interest lies, it’s a disappointment.
Still, On A Farther Shore does a good job filling in the blanks of
Carson’s life. And it’s a life that should be remembered because, without her
and Silent Spring, the environmental movement as we know it today
probably wouldn’t exist. More importantly, the way in which Carson first staked
the battle against the chemical industry and its close ties with its supposed
regulators, and the manner in which she then calmly defended her work against a
barrage of blustery attacks -- weirdly reminiscent of those used today against
anyone raising environmental warnings -- provides a strong intellectual
blueprint against hyperbole and in defense of the environment.
It was published in 2012 by Crown Publishers.
I picked up Shadow Divers with very low expectations. The story
of the U-Who had already been told in numerous media and the fact that the book
was a best seller just convinced me that it would turn out to be so much
schlock. I was wrong.
Shadow Divers is the story of two men, John Chatterton and Richie
Kohler, who find themselves thrust together while diving the wreck of an
unidentified U-boat off the coast of New Jersey. The motives and methodologies
of the two men, both in life and in diving, seem polar opposites. Chatterton lives
a tenaciously disciplined life in which he consistently strives to do the
honorable thing. Kohler prefers to keep things a bit looser, drinking to
excess, mooning families on passing boats and pulling up as many artifacts as
he can from the wrecks he dives. Not surprisingly, the two start off not liking
each other.
Equally unsurprising is the fact that they turn out to have a lot more in
common than they initially believe. Both have more than a passing interest in
U-boats. Both are able to look past the subs' Nazi origins to see the
characters of the men who manned them. And both are committed to doing whatever
it takes to discover the identity of this particular one -- which lies in a
place where no U-boat is supposed to be.
To the uninitiated, it would seem a simple matter to discover the identity of a
wreck. Someone must have reported a sinking. Somewhere a name must be engraved
or stenciled in. At the very least, there must be some mention of a crewman.
Well, not in this case. Whatever secrets the U-Who has, it doesn't give them up
easily. It lies in 230 feet of water and its interior is a nightmare
combination of silt, skeletons, hanging cables and caved-in pieces of
machinery. Of the first six divers who enter it, three lose their lives. Still,
dive after dive, year after year, Chatterton and Kohler devise new plans to
find some marking, carry those plans out perfectly and then come up empty.
I get the feeling that the author, Robert Kurson, is not a diver. If this is
the case, then his ability to describe the dangers and claustrophobia of deep
wreck diving is remarkable. And the human side of this story is nothing to
sneeze at either. I actually got a little verklempt near the end -- that's the
first time that's happened while reading a wreck diving book!
Despite my original misgivings, Shadow Divers is a very good book.
It was published by Random House in 2004.
I picked up The Dive by Francisco "Pipin" Ferreras with
great trepidation. The book is the story of how Ferreras, the world-record
holder in the extreme sport of no-limits freediving, met and fell in love with
his wife Audrey Mestre, how she then became a freediver as well, and how she
went on to die during a record-breaking dive attempt under his supervision.
Now, to write effectively about lost love -- one of the most difficult things
there is to do -- you need to have a very, very light touch. But when you
consider that Ferreras has never really written anything before, that English
is not his first language and that he is something of a mystic/romantic, you
have the potential for some very purple prose.
But there was no way I could skip the book. A few years ago, I was lucky enough
to spend time in Miami with Ferreras and Mestre while working on a magazine
profile of them. Watching Ferreras move easily up and down through the water,
holding his breath for minutes at a time as if having no need whatsoever to
breathe, was a humbling experience. And Mestre was a stunningly beautiful,
extremely serious woman who seemed to have made very clear decisions on what
was important and what wasn't. She was always polite to me, but as a member of
the media, I fell into the category of unimportant. Still, I came away thinking
that they were both unique people -- people that you just knew were somehow
operating on a different level.
For those of you who aren't up on the sport of competitive freediving, it's a
strange one. There are three categories: constant weight, where divers swim
down and then back up again completely under their own power, wearing the same
amount of weight throughout; variable weight, where divers sit on a weighted
sled as it drops through the water, then stop and ascend under their own power;
and no-limits -- Ferreras' specialty -- where divers ride the weighted sled
down, then inflate a lift bag that rockets them back to the surface. And, of
course, they do it all while holding their breath.
Ferreras devotes the beginning of The Dive to his rise to international
stardom in Europe as a freediver representing Cuba (freediving is a popular
spectator sport in many Mediterranean countries), his chafing under the
communist system, his personal dealings with Fidel Castro, and his eventual
defection. It's all interesting stuff. When he gets to Mestre, however, sure
enough, the prose turns a fairly deep shade of purple. Let's face it, some of
the world's great writers have difficulty with this stuff. But once Ferreras
moves past the early stages of their relationship, he gets back on track --
their efforts to popularize the sport in the US, his record-breaking dives to
depths well in excess of 500 feet, the accidents that take their toll on him
physically, and Mestre's emergence as a freediver herself.
The final third of the book is devoted to Mestre's last dive and is as
compelling as anything I've ever read. Reacting perhaps to his own temporary
inability to dive due to injuries, Ferreras plans with Mestre for her to make a
no-limits breath-hold dive that will not only break the women's record, but
break his record as well -- a dive to 590 feet. The day of the dive is
described in excruciating detail, from the weirdly casual approach made to
equipment checks and operating procedures, to the circus-like atmosphere on the
surface while Mestre tried to enter into the meditative state necessary for
such a dive, to the long minutes on the surface well after she should have
ascended but hadn't. This is all very good stuff.
I'm happy to say that The Dive is a good read.
It was published in 2005 by Regan Books.
Stan Waterman is one of the pre-eminent underwater photographers in the
world, and has been for decades. With that in mind, there's no way not to get
excited about anything that he writes.
As the subtitle of the book says, though, Sea Salt is a collection of
memoirs and essays -- not a strict autobiography -- so it doesn't cover every
aspect and time period of his life. And it's not all about diving. In fact,
while the book follows a linear path through Waterman's life, there's no
predicting who or what he'll write about on the next page. If something caught
his fancy, he includes it. If it didn't, he doesn't.
As a diver, though, everything you could want is here. Waterman discusses his
introduction to the underwater world, his first days diving, his early years on
the dive lecture circuit, and the countless adventures, from the story behind
the classic Blue Water, White Death to diving ancient wrecks in the
Aegean. Naturally, there are a lot of shark stories.
Waterman also doesn't shy away from things he and his companions did in the
past that would definitely be frowned upon today. And he does it all in the
easy tones of his Old World charm -- so much so that it often feels as if he's
sitting there beside you, telling the stories himself.
As much as I enjoyed this book, though, I often found myself skimming past
those sections that were not dive-related. That being said, I never had far to
go to get to a part I couldn't wait to read.
Sea Salt was published in 2005 by New World Publications.
The Remarkable Life of William Beebe sat on my shelf for more than a year before I
picked it up. The truth is I wasn't that interested. While Beebe was a
childhood hero of mine, that status was based solely on his exploits as the
first deep-sea explorer. But his life had been much more than that and unlike
the other recent Beebe book, Descent, The Remarkable Life takes
it all into account -- his career as a world-renowned ornithologist, a
naturalist extraordinaire, prolific best-selling author and mentor to countless
young scientists eager to follow in his footsteps. Despite my lack of interest
in any of these subject areas, though, I gave it a shot.
I'm glad I did. The picture that emerges of Beebe is indeed a remarkable one.
He starts life as a young boy obsessed with collecting, categorizing and
understanding the wildlife around him, and then carries that obsession with him
straight through the next eighty-plus years in a single-minded pursuit of
knowledge that sharpens, but never varies. And all that stuff I was wasn't
interested in ... well, it's pretty interesting.
The key point for me, though, and for anyone principally interested in Beebe as
an ocean explorer, is that The Remarkable Life puts it all into context.
We see that Beebe didn't just wake up one morning and decide to switch fields
from ornithology to marine biology. Of the many expeditions he had made to
study tropical birds, each began and ended with a long ocean voyage. During
those voyages, Beebe's boundless curiousity had no where to turn but the
water around him. He was constantly trawling for fish, observing invertebrates,
collecting saragassum. It was only a matter of time before too many questions
had been raised, too much curiousity piqued.
We also see how his study of wildlife evolved from the Victorian model of a naturalist
looking at each animal species in a vaccuum, removed from its environment, to a
wholistic approach taking it all into account -- the weather, the seasons, its
competitors for food and mates, its predators and prey, etc. Rather than making
a simple study of birds in a rainforest, he mapped out a quarter-mile square in
that forest to study the inter-relationships of everything in it from the
ground up to the tree canopy. At a time when the rest of the scientific world
was beginning to prize specialization, Beebe was, of neccessity, casting his
own observational net wider and wider. It's only natural that he found no
barriers preventing him from moving his field of study from that of birds, to
marine life, and then back again.
Beyond that, we see Beebe's own extraordinary social life, in which he counted
among his friends and acquaintances Teddy Roosevelt, Rudyard Kipling, Katherine
Hepburn, and A.A. Milne, to name just a few. He was also among the first of his
generation to encourage the women around him to pursue their own scientific
studies and both of his wives had successful writing careers of their own. He
was truly a man ahead of his time.
The Remarkable Life captures all of this and more. It doesn't examine
his adventures in the bathysphere to the same degree of detail that Descent
does, and nor should it. But it's no exageration to say that it does put
everything in Descent into a whole new prespective. The Remarkable
Life of William Beebe is a wonderful book.
The Remarkable Life of William Beebe was published by Island Press in 2004.
Dragon Sea is the story of an underwater archaeological dig that took place off
the coast of Vietnam. For those of you not up on archaeology and its
hierarchies, marine archaeology is typically held in low regard by its
land-based brothers -- the provenance of adventurers and Indiana Jones-type
wannabees, one step above treasure hunting.
Understanding this is crucial to understanding the main conflict of Dragon
Sea. When the leader of Oxford's underwater archaeology department, Mensun
Bound (you might remember him as the host of the old Discovery Channel show, Lost
Ships), is approached by a known treasure hunter, Ong Soo Hin, and asked to
to help him raise precious porcelain cargo from a sunken 15th Century junk to
sell at auction, the obvious answer for him is to say no and avoid further
castigation from colleagues. The problem is that the wreck lies in deep water,
beyond the range of the volunteer scuba divers he typically uses. This wreck
can only be worked by saturation divers, earning big bucks and with a world of
expensive technology above them, all of which Ong is willing to pay for --
along with the promise that Bound will be allowed carry out his archaeological
investigations at the same time.
Bound puts his reputation on the line and accepts Ong's offer, realizing
there's no other way that this historically significant ship could ever be
excavated. As much as Bound is reliant on Ong, though, so is Ong reliant to him
-- unless Bound reports that he was allowed to carry out a full-scale
investigation of the ship, the government of Vietnam won't allow Ong to remove
the cargo for sale outside the country. The fortunes of the archaeologist and
the treasure hunter are intertwined in the first such collaboration ever.
The potential problems are obvious from the start: the operation costs Ong tens
of thousands of dollars a day and he wants it completed as quickly as
possible. Every day that Bound spends studying the wreck, is another day that
the tab goes up. And, course, unexpected problems pop up all along the way.
It's a great story with a great premise. The author does have some annoying
habits, such as ending each mini-chapter on some kind of cliff-hanging note,
most of which turn out to be red herrings. He also has some strange ideas about
diving, such as how the air in a scuba tank is compressed as the diver goes
deeper. But these are relatively minor affairs. All in all, Dragon Sea
is an excellent read.
The Devil's Teeth is the story of two marine biologists, Peter
Pyle and Scot Anderson, who spent a decade studying great white sharks off the
Farallon Islands, which lie just 30 miles west of San Francisco.
The title, The Devil's Teeth, doesn't refer to the sharks but rather to
the islands themselves, a nickname they were given by sailors back in the1800s.
It's an apt one. The islands rise up from the sea, canine-like, to form one of
the most inhospitable environments on the planet. Fierce winds regularly whip
them. The sea constantly pounds them. Hundreds of thousands of sea birds
congregate to mate on them, cawing and screeching in a deafening cacophony like
something straight out of the ninth circle of hell. Kelp flies swarm -- having
already spent time lodged in the anuses of the local seal population. Death and
destruction lie all around, from the countless birds pecked to death by other
birds, to the seals and sea lions ripped apart in bloody spectacles by the
sharks circling just offshore. There are only two houses on the islands and the
revolving team of biologists who live in them swear they're haunted. But as the
author, Susan Casey, points out, ghosts on the Farallons would simply be
overkill. Their wild desolation -- how they repel the vast majority of people
who set foot on them but suck in a tiny percentage who learn to love them -- is
described beautifully throughout.
Back to the sharks, though. For several months a year, the Farallons are home
to the one of the densest congregations of large great whites in the world.
Thirteen-footers are considered runts. Pyle and Anderson spent years studying
these animals as a neighborhood and can identify dozens of them on sight.
They've managed to document their natural feeding habits, their hunting
strategies, the tidal states in which they're most likely to strike and their
behavior around other sharks. They've learned that their vision is probably
better than we give them credit for and that while they don't swim in pods,
they do seem to stay in loose aggregations.
The Devil's Teeth has some big flaws, though. First, for all that Pyle
and Anderson have learned, little of it has made its way into the book. The
information listed above is pretty much the sum total. Even then we're usually
just told that they've learned something, not what they've learned. This
lack of information does a great disservice to Pyle and Anderson. Without the
results of their research to back them up, when we see them running down a hill
at breakneck speed to launch a boat and witness a seal attack, or squaring off
with a shark-cage diving operator that wants to observe the sharks as well, or
just competing against each other to see who'll be the first to surf in the
sharky waters, they come off as little more than adrenalin junkies who don't
want to let anyone else in on the fun. This isn't the case, of course. At least
I don't think it is.
The second problem is that the most interesting character in the book, an
urchin diver named Ron Elliot who regularly scours the bottom here for urchins
while massive great whites circle around, plays a minor role at best. We're
told little of how he's managed to stay alive beyond his having some vague
sense that a shark is nearby or when it means business. Sorry, that's just not
enough.
These weaknesses notwithstanding, The Devil's Teeth is an interesting
read, particularly if you're into adventure in desolate places.
The Devil's Teeth was published in 2005 by Henry Holt & Company.
Descent is the story of William Beebe's and Otis Barton's revolutionary
exploration of the deep sea in the 1930s. I picked it up with memories of Beebe's
exploits still locked in my mind from 4th grade history class. After studying
about them, I ran home from school, picking up the largest cardboard box I
could find and dragging it along. I then spent hours sitting inside, pretending
to re-live Beebe's exploits. But even at the height of my hero worship, I
didn't quite get what Beebe and Barton had done. They had a great adventure,
yes, but was it really much of an achievement? I mean, all they did was sit
inside a steel ball while it was raised and lowered on a cable. Obviously,
there were a few gaps in my understanding. It's taken several decades but Descent
finally filled those gaps in.
Long before Beebe ever heard of the bathysphere, he was a world-renowned
ornithologist who made numerous helmet dives in the tropics, fell in love with
the ocean and then made an abrupt career change -- with no formal education in
marine science. Barton, his all-but-forgotten partner, was a rich kid who
idolized him from afar. But he had what Beebe wanted -- a workable plan for a
vessel that would take them into the ocean depths. The two men were formally
introduced and formed an immediate partnership that would change deep-sea
exploration forever.
The author, Brad Matsen, does a great job painting a picture of the life of
explorers in the 1930s, trying to raise money and keep funds flowing during the
Depression. He does an even better job describing the technical problems Barton
and Beebe faced in building and operating the bathysphere. No one had
experience with anything like this before. To withstand the water pressure
thousands of feet beneath the surface, how large and thick would the portholes
have to be? How could a watertight seal be made between the portholes and the
sphere? Was there a cable in the world strong enough to raise and lower it? How
could the cable be kept from tangling? And was there even a winch that could
lift all three tons of it? None of this was known for sure.
When finally ready, Beebe and Barton sat inside the bathysphere on the deck of
a ship covering their ears while workers outside spent long minutes hammering
the metal hatch shut. Once underwater, they fanned palm leaves over trays of
chemicals to remove carbon dioxide from the air. Based on how they felt, they
guestimated when and how much oxygen to release into the bathysphere to keep
their air breathable. \All the while, pressure was constantly forcing water
into the cramped space.
In the end, Beebe and Barton saw and described sea creatures no one before them
ever had ever seen. Their undrewater trips were carried live on radio to
a waiting nation, starved for heroes and escape from economic hardship.
Unfortunately, though, neither of them attained what they had truly hoped for.
Beebe was almost universally scorned in oceanographic circles as little more
than a circus showman, while Barton never rose above the status of second
banana.
Descent is a wonderful book and I can't wait to read it again. In the
meantime, who knows, I might have to go out there and find myself another big old
cardboard box.
Descent was published in 2005 by Pantheon Books.
If you've never heard of Sheck Exley, then chances are you've never
spent much time in an underwater cave. Because when it came to underwater
caving, Exley was, without a doubt, The Man. Even now, more than 15 years after
his death, his accomplishments seem almost superhuman. And Caverns Measureless
To Man is his diving autobiography (the title is taken from a line in the
classic Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem Kubla Khan).
Caverns opens with Exley's introduction to Florida's underwater
caves during a Boy Scout trip to Silver Springs in the late 1950s. Armed with a
mask and a pair of fins, he pokes his head underwater, sees the opening to a
cave, and is never quite able to pull his head back out again.
Exley went on to survive the 1960s, the early days of Florida cave diving when
divers who became trapped in inside were drowning in record numbers. From
there, he helped explore the Blue Holes of the Bahamas, made numerous solo
dives to depths in excess of 500 feet in caves in Mexico and South Africa.
Along the way, he also experimented with mixed gasses, becoming one of the
pioneers of tech diving, while experiencing numerous mind-altering incidents of
High Pressure Nervous Syndrome.
Obviously, Exley's final dive, on which he drowned while in Mexican ceynote
while at depth in excess of 900 feet, isn't covered in Caverns. He
wasn't around to write about it. But he wrote just about everything else,
though. Never have I read a more dive-intensive book than this. If it doesn't
pertain to diving, he didn't put it in. So much so that, after a while, it actually
gets a bit repetitious -- one mind-blowing dive after another. But that's no
reason to not read Caverns. Exley was an incredible guy and it's
staggering to read the things he did.
For a shorter account of his exploits and of the birth of tech diving that I
wrote for Wired Magazine a few years back, click here.
Caverns Measureless to Man was published in 1994 by Cave Books.
Blue Meridian is the written account of Peter Gimbel's expedition to film white
sharks for the documentary Blue Water, White Death in the late 1960s.
Considering the greatness of that movie, and Matthiessen's own storied literary
career, you'd expect any review of it to be sprinkled with stock lines such as
"a real page-turner!" and "I couldn't put it down!" or the
always popular "I didn't want it to end!" And then again, maybe not.
There's one major problem with Blue Meridian that almost completely
sinks it. The book isn't simply a written version of the documentary but is,
rather, Matthiessen's first-hand account of what went on behind the scenes
during the filming. And because of the expedition's extended nature (it lasted
months longer than it was supposed to) and Matthiessen's own prior commitments,
he wasn't there for large chunks of it. These gaps in the story stand out like
a proverbial white elephant, with Matthiessen attempting to convey (seemingly
halfheartedly at times) what others told him had transpired in his absence. It
just doesn't work.
But that's not to say that Blue Meridian is a total disappointment. It
isn't. The sections written from Matthiessen's own experience can be pretty
interesting, sometimes veering off quite a bit from the storyline of the movie.
He particularly succeeds in flushing out Gimbel's personality in ways the
documentary couldn't. For instance, Matthiessen's account of the testing in the
Bahamas Gimbel did on the shark cages he built gives an incredible sense of the
danger the divers placed themselves in just by entering them, but also of
Gimbel's own pit bull nature. It's also amazing to see how lax training
standards were then compared to today. Matthiessen basically received no formal
dive training before being declared ready to jump in with the sharks (hey,
there's an idea for PADI and NAUI -- a Shark Diver certification!). It's also
interesting to see Matthiessen accurately predict that the travelogue footage
of the the expedition showing the divers, Valerie Taylor in particular,
interacting with various types of marine life in cute and cuddly ways, would be
a major weak point in the film.
All in all, if you like Blue Water, White Death and are interested in
more background info on it, Blue Meridian is a decent read. Other than that,
the book, unfortunately, doesn't stand well on its own.
Blue Meridian was originally published in 1971 and is currently
available from Penguin Nature Classics.
