Although DJ had met Billy only in passing back in the early 1990s when he’d worked with Tap in Vermont, they were now close friends. Over the last two years, he and Billy had logged time together on a bunch of Black Dog jobs, bonding with, and busting on, each other. Every time DJ made a crack about Billy’s ’stache, Billy would shoot right back, needling his buddy about his curious inability to grow more than a thin band of hair above his upper lip. “Hey, DJ,” Billy would quip, “some middle school kid was here looking for you. He wants his mustache back.” Billy was like no one else DJ knew. He had once shown up at a dive job with blood on his coveralls and a wine-colored substance wobbling around inside a Tupperware container. “This is lunch!” he told DJ excitedly. On the drive to work that morning, a deer had leaped out in front of his truck, and Billy hadn’t been able to stop in time. So he pulled over, removed the animal’s heart, and packed it up. When DJ asked how he would cook it, Billy laughed and said he’d use one of their hot-water hoses as his heat source.
DJ was relieved that the easy relationship between Tap and Billy seemed to be back on display. He’d heard that the tension between the two partners over how much the business should consume their lives had escalated to the point where Billy, feeling thoroughly burned out, had actually sold his ownership share back to Tap. Still, a few months before the Deer Island project, Billy had returned from a big dive job in Turkey feeling so rejuvenated that he had decided to return to Black Dog as an hourly employee. The transition had been surprisingly smooth. Billy was back working with Tap at the business they’d both poured their souls into, but he’d figured out how to do it without sacrificing everything else in his life.
DJ’s life had finally improved, too. For three years after his fight with the sinker drill in Vermont, he’d been hobbled by a worsening pain that no doctor was able to treat, no matter how many he tried. They all told DJ it was a soft-tissue injury, and there was little they could do besides prescribe ever more powerful pain medication and anti-inflammatory steroids. He’d begun by swallowing fistfuls of Advil and before long was taking enough prednisone to treat a team of Clydesdales.
The only good thing to happen to DJ during this dark period was that he became a father, though the circumstances around his son’s arrival in 1995 were hardly ideal. Still pining over Dana following their breakup, DJ had begun dating the ambitious ex-girlfriend of one of his buddies. Just three months into their relationship, she discovered she was pregnant. They tried making a go of it as a family, moving into a small apartment in Waltham. But DJ was still too wild to settle down, and they were both too young and strong-willed to make it work. Regardless, DJ was determined to maintain strong ties with his boy, Cody, and not become the kind of disappearing act his own father had been.
Just after Cody turned two, DJ had been driving to pick him up when he suddenly felt cold and worried he was about to pass out. Instinctively, he maneuvered his truck into the middle of a busy intersection and threw it into park. There, he slumped his head over the steering wheel and began vomiting blood. Then he blacked out.
After DJ awoke in the intensive care unit115 of the hospital, he learned that his decision to use his last moment of consciousness to plant his truck in the middle of the intersection had been a wise one. The attention he attracted led to the speedy arrival of paramedics, who found DJ in shock.
At the hospital, doctors quickly pumped blood into him to replenish what he had lost, and they continued to pump in more—twenty-eight pints in all—as they searched for the cause of his internal bleeding. Finally a gastroenterologist inserted an endoscope into DJ to find the source. It was an ulcer. It turned out that much of the back pain he’d been enduring for the years since the Vermont job had actually been referred pain from a posterior duodenal ulcer, which itself had apparently been caused by the massive amounts of medication he had been taking.
By the fall of 1997, after two additional surgeries, DJ was back diving. And by the start of 1999, his love life had come full circle. It began when he bumped into Dana’s sister, Lisa, in Waltham. She invited him to join her and Dana for a night out at one of their old haunts. Even though he hadn’t spoken to Dana in years, the laughs began flowing as easily as the beers. At the end of the night, Dana drove DJ home. Idling in the car outside his mother’s house, she asked him, “So what’s going on?”
“What’s going on with what?”
“With you and me.”
“I didn’t know there was anything going on between you and me,” he said tentatively. He told Dana he was seeing a nice girl, a bartender in town, and she was very good to him. Dana told him how sorry she was to have broken his heart and how much she wanted him back. Then, as quickly as he had left his pile-driving work for the tantalizing tunnel job, DJ broke up with the nice bartender to reconnect with Dana.
For DJ, the Deer Island tunnel job felt like a chance to reset the clock back to that pre-injury period when his future had seemed limitless. As he sat in the Portsmouth training session, one more reunion was taking place. Joining him on this tunnel assignment would be his old friend and mentor, the ex-Navy SEAL he hadn’t seen since Vermont. Ron Kozlowski may have had a few more strands of gray in his sandy ponytail, but for a guy who was about to turn fifty, he seemed as high-energy as ever.
Five years after Vermont, here DJ was, back working with Kozlowski, Tap, and Billy, back working for construction powerhouse Kiewit, back dating Dana. Back where he belonged.
You’re a firefighter charging into a burning building. You and your partner split up in the hallway and head into different rooms. Through the raging flames and suffocating smoke, you find a boy, perhaps six years old, lying on the floor, unresponsive. You call for your partner but get no answer. Heading into the next room, you find he’s also down on the floor now, unconscious. The roof above you is threatening to collapse. You’re running out of oxygen in your tank. You realize you can carry only one person out, at most. Who do you take? The boy or your partner?
In painting that scenario, the trainer had captured DJ’s attention. And it didn’t take DJ long to make up his mind. Of course, I’d take the kid. He’s got his whole life ahead of him.
The trainer stressed that you have to respond with logic, not emotion. Given how long the fire has been blazing, there’s a high probability that the boy is already dead. Your partner, meanwhile, will have gone down only a minute or two earlier. He still has a chance.
All right, DJ thought, I’d better pay attention to this guy.
A representative from the Central Mine Rescue Company of Idaho led the divers through days two and three of the training, following day one’s instruction by the Drager rep. If the Drager session had showed the divers how they would be relying on different equipment for the mission, this mine rescue portion showed them how they would be entering a different world entirely.
In fact, although that firefighter scenario had been an attention grabber, DJ and the other divers would face an environment more treacherous and uncertain than what firefighters or even coal miners encountered. After all, most buildings and mines have at least two entrances, often many more than that. When miners get trapped, the first goal of rescuers is to establish a “fresh air base” staging area as close to them as possible. But if a nightmare happened nine and a half miles into the Deer Island tunnel, with its single entrance, the rescue challenges would be staggering.
115 (Chapter 5, note 15)
After DJ awoke in the intensive care unit: “ ‘I Thought I Was Going to Die’: How DWH Staff Saved a 28-Year-Old Man’s Life,” Deaconess Waltham Hospital