Dr. Glenn Singleman, our ship’s surgeon, was prepared when my symptoms, after nearly eighteen months of quiescence, suddenly developed into a resilient and widespread wheeze across my lung fields. He had brought along an entire duffel bag filled with extra medications because “some stupid scientist can always be counted on to favor a reference book or a box of sampling equipment over lifesaving medicine.” Then, more seriously, he asked, “You live in New York?”
I nodded.
“Did you go near the dust from 9/11?”
I explained, and he told me I must have been crazy to go in there. I tried to laugh it off, pointing out that this definition of crazy was coming from one of the men who had actually created the extreme sport of BASE jumping (parachuting from a high structure).
“You don’t understand,” Singleman said. “If you confine yourself to bed and follow every one of my instructions, I think I can get you well enough for your August 8 Mir dive. But I really shouldn’t be clearing you, medically. I can clear you, just barely. But you’d better grab every good specimen and every good memory you can take with you from the ‘Lost City’ vents.”
He told me to prepare my mind for a new reality: August 8, 2003, would be the last dive of my career. I would never see the Titanic again.
The Woods Hole, Massachusetts, scientist with whom I shared my cabin took up a Russian challenge that could never be won: he tried to match, shot for shot with four Russians, drinking a shipboard brew manufactured by the Marine Biology Department—a powerful new species of vodka with a unique and actually pleasant flavor. It’s called Sheila. The scientist found out the next morning that “Sheila is a severe mistress.”
The obvious stress of realizing that an important part of my career was over led my friend Lev to make repeated offers to me of Sheila; as in 2001, I said I could not make the “requisite” number of toasts and be able to do my job. He respected an expression of dedication to one’s work and promised that we would share some of his food and only make a single toast to our friendship. The Russian stood by his promise, and whatever was in that single shot of Sheila actually did bring a sense of calm—even during my reception of the idea that the terrorists appeared to have now physically gotten a piece of me.
Sheila had perhaps the most colorful history of any high-alcohol concoction. During the 1995 filming expedition for the movie Titanic, in a world still lingering in the shadow of the Cold War, many parts of the Keldysh were off limits to Americans. There were a number of engineers aboard who had many hours to kill while the Mirs (and Jake’s predecessor, Snoop Dog) were down at the Titanic. That’s when one of the Marines discovered that Sheila was essentially 100 percent alcohol. He realized that when Sheila was combined with pure oxygen, it could actually be turned into an effective rocket fuel.
The rocket, built in secrecy by Americans on a Russian ship that was just coming out of its KGB years, was an impressive design. Oxygen tanks that could hold up to two thousand pounds per square inch were mated with a pressure tank for Sheila (which would be held under pressure by a bubble of inert compressed nitrogen). The design needed no pumps. Under pressure, only valves were required, as well as an igniter in the combustion chamber. After the fins were welded on, a control system was added, using a gyroscope from one of Jim Cameron’s steady cams. The only remaining engineering challenge was timing the valves to open simultaneously, within the same tenth of a second. John-David Cameron and Big Lew Abernathy were scrounging below decks one night for spare parts, from which the timed trip mechanism could be built—and that’s when Anatoly Sagalevich caught them and found the rocket.
During the 2001 expedition, John-David learned that the rocket had been dismantled but carefully stowed, having become a much laughed about and much cherished souvenir of the “crazy American and Canadian friends who filmed Titanic.”
AUGUST 8, 2003
“The cup was half full,” I told myself. The Lost City vent system had been discovered only three years before. Inorganic chemical reactions were venting dissolved carbonates, methane, ethane, butane, and sulfides. The hot carbonates crystallized into brilliant white towers of extremely porous rock standing more than two hundred feet tall—more than half the height of the Washington Monument and the Great Pyramid of Giza.
It was another planet down there. The dry weight of a Lost City rock sample was as much as 10 percent living material, ranging from bacteria to shrimplike ostracods. The best part of all was that during the day, at a depth of “only” one kilometer (almost two-thirds of a mile), the deep scattering layer scrapes the tops of the Lost City pinnacles the way low-lying clouds scrape the needles of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building.
This time, when we descended to the bed of the Atlantic, we were not merely counting organisms as we passed through the deep scattering layer at two feet per second. This time we were stopped within it: bioluminescent fish; the occasional large grouper; a tubular white worm no longer than a fingernail flapping wildly and swimming (bizarrely) sideways; and sheets of bacterial floc drifting past the viewport, many of them inhabited by absolutely stationary fish no more than a fraction of an inch long and so transparent as to be revealed only by their eyes at the ends of long spinal columns.
“Floaters” with dangling “baits,” or traps, drifted by in fleetlike formation. Their fishing lines were rarely longer than a finger, and the hunters at the tops of the lures were invariably smaller than beans.
If the ocean surfaces were the mere skin of Earth, the empires beneath were rich with the unexpected. What at first appeared to be a fish approaching us turned out to be a large, bright red cousin of the common nautilus. But the coiled shell rippled as though it were made of a thick fleshy mantle instead of shell, and the mantle was strangely ornamented, like the shell of a paper nautilus. Yet the thing moved with all the grace and speed of a mackerel. It was difficult to believe; but when I double-checked with Sagalevich and cinematographer/explorer Vince Pace, they agreed: it looked like a cephalopod. We would never know what it really was without a capture—which on a gut level did not feel like the right thing to do. It was the only one we had seen and probably the only one anyone had ever seen, so what felt right this time was to take pictures, not samples.
As dusk fell upon the world above, the deep scattering layer left us and began migrating toward the surface. It also left behind a new realization: stragglers. Not all of the organisms migrated up, and the stragglers were just as strange as the migrants.
We would never know for sure what all of these stragglers were. The mysterious red cephalopod was among them, but at 9:18 p.m., when either it returned or one of its cousins showed up, filming the wildlife was not a priority. Eight minutes earlier, we had been caught in an avalanche from one of the pinnacles and we began losing hydraulics. Equipment was dislodged from the aft shelf, and I held it against my back until Pace was able to lift the metal boxes into their proper position and strap them down. It seemed to me that whatever hit us on the starboard side had pitched us forward only ten to fifteen degrees, but Pace insisted that it had been more than thirty degrees, because our equipment was bolted and strapped to accommodate high angles whenever we surfaced into rough seas.
We were losing hydraulic control and protective oil (and the remaining oil was heating up fast). Through the center port, Sagalevich saw another complication: a water sampler had crashed down among the Mir-1’s cables.