That includes the surviving divers. “We were wronged, but I don’t feel like the world owes me anything,” Dave Riggs told me. “I feel like the world owes itself the truth. I feel like the powers that be that brought this whole situation into play should be held responsible. And I have no feeling whatsoever that that’s happening or going to happen. I’m not saying that Roger and Harald are the only ones. But I certainly feel that Roger and Harald have a lot more to answer for than they have.” Riggs, whose relationship with his wife became increasingly strained, said he’s careful not to pin all his problems on Harald and Roger and the big project players. “It’s not their fault that my marriage is a wreck. I don’t blame them,” he said. “I blame them for killing Billy and Tim—and damn near killing me.”
It’s a gorgeous, cloudless day in 2013 as I type this, much like that radiant Wednesday in 1999 when five divers ventured into the tunnel and only three returned. I’m sitting on a wrought-iron bench on Deer Island, looking out into Massachusetts Bay. In the distance, past the white sailboats bobbing on the gentle blue waves, I can just barely make out a spire of drab granite. Although it appears to be standing sentinel at the far edge of the horizon, the lighthouse is actually only about five miles from me. For more than a century, Graves Light served as a signpost for seafarers sailing from the bay to enter the shipping channel into Boston Harbor. But I’ve come to see it as a different kind of signpost, since the Deer Island tunnel runs directly below it. Even though I have to squint to bring that lighthouse into view, I know that the spot near the end of the tunnel where Billy and Tim took their final breaths is almost twice as far away, not to mention hundreds of feet below those blue waves.
I’m sitting on Tim’s bench, with the plaque that reads: in memory of tim nordeen 1960-1999. Twenty feet to my right, there’s an identical black bench featuring a plaque with Billy’s years: 1965-1999. A few hundred feet behind me on the island stands another memorial. On a replica of one of those fifty-five Apollo-module-shaped diffuser heads that sit on the ocean floor, the MWRA has affixed a plaque, preserving the same words that the Boston Globe letter-writer had chosen to extol the unknown divers: ordinary heroes.
The parade of people strolling, running, and biking past me along the popular public walkway that rings Deer Island is just one testament to the rebirth of Boston Harbor and Massachusetts Bay. Another is the steady stream of fishermen setting up their poles near me on the walkway or floating by on boats, getting their daily catch of striped bass and bluefish, which no longer come blanketed in cancerous tumors. It’s an even more remarkable sight when you consider that they are fishing the same waters into which sewage from the old Deer Island plant once expectorated without embarrassment. Other native fish have returned in significant numbers, along with seals and porpoises. Fears that the tunnel would harm the whales and other marine mammals of the bay have so far proved unfounded.
The other side of Deer Island looks out onto Boston Harbor, where the daily catch is flounder, and the view across the blue water is the glistening skyline of downtown Boston. The bustle along the 2.6-mile walkway ringing Deer Island is repeated all along the new 39-mile HarborWalk, which makes the bulk of the harbor perimeter accessible to the public. That walkway now runs from the northern edge of the city, where the USS Constitution sits on the Charlestown coast, to the Seaport District, a former wasteland of muddy parking lots that now buzzes with top restaurants and hotels, a sprawling convention center, and the gleaming new Institute of Contemporary Art building. And it keeps going south, past the city beaches of South Boston and Dorchester, which attract throngs of families and preening teens now that they no longer face routine closures because of elevated bacteria levels. The renaissance of the harbor that the federal Environmental Protection Agency calls “a great American jewel” has been so profound that Boston’s center of gravity is moving inexorably from the Back Bay to the waterfront. The mammoth cleanup of Boston Harbor is a reminder that, even during an era when government has been diminished and derided, it remains capable of doing great things to improve the public good. Still, this postcard-perfect image of reborn Boston also reminds me of what Billy’s mom said during an earlier visit I’d made with her to the benches: “People here should never forget the lives that were sacrificed to give them a clean harbor.”
Around the same time as that conversation with Olga on Deer Island, I had a similar one with a different diver’s mother while sitting on a different bench. After the bailiffs led DJ out of the federal courtroom following his sentencing, I walked out of the gallery with Lorraine and her sister. The corridor outside the courtroom offers a sweeping view of Boston Harbor through a massive, curved glass wall, which stands seven stories high and stretches for nearly four hundred feet. The $228 million Moakley Courthouse is one of Boston’s newest showpieces, designed by the same firm that handled the glass pyramid addition to the Louvre in Paris. As we rode the elevator down to the lobby, Lorraine told me she could feel the worry inside her simply wash away. She knew her son still had a long road ahead of him if he was going to put drugs fully in his past. But she was hopeful, because he’d been clean for a year now. “I need a cigarette,” she said. I followed her as she walked out the front door, turned left, and found a curved granite bench in the grassy park that snakes between the courthouse and the harbor.
Turning away from the harbor to look in the other direction, she spied the top of the fifty-two-story Prudential Tower rising above the Back Bay. Her carpenter father had helped build that landmark while protected by little more than the Virgin Mary medal he kept in his pocket, the same medal that DJ had tied to his hat on the day Billy and Tim were killed and he barely survived.
As she quickly smoked her cigarette down to the filter, Lorraine said, “DJ told me once, ‘Ma, you have to be on these jobs to see the things that we do. You can’t imagine them.’ ” She paused to blow a plume of smoke out of the side of her mouth. “Well, take a look around us,” she told me, gesturing to all the high-rises soaring above downtown and rimming the harbor. “Who put all these things together but people like him? When you think about it, it’s not doctors and lawyers. It’s these guys that make things happen. The buildings are built, the trains run, the planes fly, because of people like my son who get out there and can put things together.”
Lorraine paused to light up another Benson & Hedges, and when she looked up, she saw the taillights of an armored van heading out of the court parking lot, toward the highway. “I think DJ was in there,” her sister Ann said, waving hopefully. Lorraine nodded, knowing it would be delivering her son back to his cell.
DJ was released from prison a few months after that conversation, and about one month after the tenth anniversary of Billy and Tim’s deaths. He told me the magazine articles I had written about the tunnel incident helped ease his transition out of jail. While he had feared old friends and acquaintances around Waltham might cross the street to avoid him, on account of the bank robbery and the drugs, he was relieved to be met with the opposite reaction. People sought him out, telling him that reading about his ordeal in the tunnel helped them finally understand his descent during the years that followed the accident. I was grateful that they saw in DJ what I had seen, a guy who had gone through hell and made a host of horrible decisions but remained a good person to his core.