Recreational divers, with their self-contained breathing apparatus, usually go no deeper than 130 feet. Commercial divers, attached by umbilicals to a surface supply of compressed air or mixed gas, can go to depths of a couple hundred feet. For shallower dives, they typically use a premixed oxygen-nitrogen combo called nitrox, and for deeper ones, a helium and oxygen blend called heliox. Going still deeper, from 300 to 1,000 feet, requires what’s called saturation diving. Highly trained divers are lowered by crane in a special chamber called a bell, whose inside pressure precisely matches that of the deep water outside it. Those “sat” divers typically don’t surface for about a month. They work down below from this bell and sleep in bunk beds in a slender attached vessel filled with a helium-rich air supply that makes the divers all sound like Donald Duck.
At this point, climbing the ranks to become a sat diver remained a distant goal for DJ. Still, he’d already spent countless hours making heliox dives in the 200-to-300-foot depth range. So even if he was still adjusting to the cold and the murkiness of this river water in Vermont, he knew he’d have no trouble shining when the real work began.
He inserted a waterproof electrode, or rod, into a rubber stinger, fired up the DC power, and watched the familiar arc form. This was underwater welding. The very idea of it seems to violate the public service announcements that every child has heard about how electricity and water don’t mix. But when done with the right equipment and under the right circumstances, underwater welding is a safe and essential part of marine construction. In the Gulf, DJ might go through fifty rods in one dive, either welding parts together to repair something or “burning” to break down a structure, such as an old oil platform. The scale was quite a bit smaller on this job in Bellows Falls, a village of restored brick buildings nestled between the river and the green mountains that gave Vermont its name.
Native Americans used to gather9 at “Great Falls,” a gorge at a narrow point of the otherwise wide Connecticut River, to catch migrating salmon. But the migration had largely ended two centuries earlier, when the waters were dammed and a canal was built. The waterfalls were used first to power multiple mills and later to generate electricity. Now, after forging an agreement with environmental groups, the big power company in town was working to make things right again for the salmon. The job involved building an elaborate concrete fish “ladder,” which would allow the migrating young salmon to get past the hydroelectric plant without getting mangled in its turbines.
To do construction in water, you must either work submerged or you must move the water. The plan here mostly called for the latter, through the construction of a cofferdam. This temporary dam structure, the kind often used on bridge construction or repair work, resembled an enormous bread loaf pan, twenty feet wide by a hundred feet long. Once it had been assembled, out of steel sheet piles and gaskets, all the water inside it would be pumped out, allowing workers to work “underwater” in an entirely dry space, as they built the actual fish ladder. Still, constructing the cofferdam—everything from drilling anchor holes to cutting steel—required real underwater work, a challenging task that naturally fell to divers.
As the months-long job wore on, DJ found himself bonding with the inland guys. They were clearly impressed with his burning skills, and he had gained a new appreciation for the tough conditions they had to endure. Not that he would ever admit to that publicly. Commercial divers exist in a hardworking, hard-drinking, itinerant world where they must constantly prove themselves to one another. At the bar after one shift, DJ continued to press his chauvinism. “Gulf divers,” he crowed, “are more experienced, smarter, better looking, get more women, drink more beer, and drive better trucks than inland divers.”
Outside the construction trailer, a short guy with his sandy hair pulled back in a ponytail charged up to a much taller, much younger diver and clocked him. The kid had been running his mouth, trying to take credit for some burning work the older guy had actually done, and he’d also been tossing his wet gear onto the other divers’ dry stuff. So the ponytailed guy had administered some riverside justice10.
DJ looked on in admiration. Dive work was often like a relay race, where one guy would get as much of a task done as he could and then hand things off to the next guy. Sometimes divers would burn their initials or a mark to note their progress, before coming up to the surface. But it was essentially an honor system. This young diver had violated the code, so he needed to be taught a lesson.
In no time, that ponytailed guy, who was two decades older than DJ, became his closest friend on the job. Ron Kozlowski seemed to have packed a couple of lifetimes of adventure into his forty-four years. As a Navy SEAL, he’d served in Vietnam and been injured in a firefight near Chu Lai. As a commercial diver, he’d worked both offshore and inland jobs all over the globe. As hard as he worked, the cocksure guy was just as serious about his surfing, photography, and mountain biking, and he spent the bulk of the winter at his place in Costa Rica. While most of the other Vermont divers stayed in one motel, DJ followed Kozlowski to another one ten miles away. They both worked the overnight shift, where Kozlowski taught him, among other things, how to do that spider work-around to keep warm. They began hanging out together during the day, whether snowboarding or just relaxing over a few beers back at the motel. In Kozlowski, DJ spied the kind of future he wanted.
Kozlowski cautioned DJ that the diving life had its drawbacks. No matter how seasoned you were, danger was always lurking. A year earlier he’d been repairing electrical cables that were buried just under the seafloor in the 130-foot waters of Long Island Sound. After crawling along a lengthy stretch, with very little visibility, he finally located the bad splice that had to be repaired. But when he went to stand up, he was shocked to find he couldn’t lift his head up more than a few feet. When enough mud had cleared, the headlamp on his helmet revealed that he was trapped under a very large fishing net. He was horrified, but experience told him the fear coursing through him would put him at risk for hyperventilating. To guard against that, he turned up the air in his hat. He used the comm wire in his umbilical to tell a coworker on the boat above him that he was in trouble. With his heart racing, he lay flat on his stomach and began crawling in reverse. After he’d shimmied himself some fifty feet, he reached up his hand to feel for the net. It wasn’t there. He was in the clear. The next day the boat pulled up the discarded fishing net, which turned out to be two hundred feet long.
Kozlowski knew DJ was a young, ambitious diver who had a mother he was close to and a girlfriend he was crazy about. Dana, the hairstylist, had come to visit DJ in Vermont more than once. Kozlowski was middle-aged and divorced. Still, he’d been through enough to warn DJ never to come clean with his loved ones about how hazardous diving could be. He told him about a T-shirt that had been popular in the trade when he was starting out. It featured the image of a helmeted diver playing a piano that had a scantily clad woman lying on top of it. Underneath that picture was the caption DON’T TELL MY MOTHER I’M A DEEP SEA DIVER, TELL HER I’M A PIANO PLAYER IN A WHOREHOUSE.
DJ first met Tap Taylor when Tap came to Bellows Falls to pick up some extra hours. Tap was working in Vernon, a Vermont town just down the river, on another project being run by the same employer, the respected construction giant Kiewit. DJ later learned that Tap’s full name was George Tapley Taylor III, a handle that made him sound more like a Harvard legacy than a sturdy, down-to-earth diver. So Tap it was.
9 (Chapter 1, note 2)
Native Americans used to gather: Marilyn Ledoux, “Bellows Falls Attraction: The Fish Ladder,”
10 (Chapter 1, note 3)
riverside justice: While Ron Kozlowski recalls that the dispute focused primarily on the wet gear, DJ, who witnessed the confrontation, remembers it concerning the young diver taking credit for work completed by Kozlowski.