‘Pay no heed to the urge to breathe,” Bill Streever reminds himself at one point in his book “In Oceans Deep,” as he descends toward the seabed with no diving equipment other than the air in his lungs. He must disregard “that braying donkey, the mind’s irritating insistence that it might be best to turn around, to ascend, to surface.”
Mr. Streever’s book is subtitled “Courage, Innovation, and Adventure Beneath the Waves,” and that’s an accurate description of his survey of envelope-pushing initiatives to investigate the 71% of our planet that is submerged and eternally beckoning. If you read it back to back with Jill Heinerth’s “Into the Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver,” you’re in for a memorable underwater double feature.
In Oceans Deep
By Bill Streever
Little, Brown, 303 pages, $28
Into the Planet
By Jill Heinerth
Ecco, 273 pages, $29.99
Both volumes are about the same length, have similar bluish-green underwater photographs on the cover, and titles that are generic enough to be interchangeable. And each, in its own way, wrestles with the human compulsion to ignore the braying donkey and explore a world that is every bit as hostile as it is beautiful.
But the books have different reasons for being. Mr. Streever’s is a broad-spectrum examination of underwater adventuring, from the first submarine voyage in the Thames River in 1620 to autonomous subsea robots and next-generation research on the possibility of augmenting a diver’s blood with oxygen-storing nanoparticles. Ms. Heinerth’s is an adventure memoir, love story and harrowing salute to those who have perished in underwater caves. (One of its chapters is entitled “My Dead Friends.”)
I’ve spent a night or two in underwater habitats, and have done some diving in caves and caverns in the U.S., Mexico and Borneo, but after reading these books I felt like someone who had changed planes once in Charles de Gaulle Airport and thought he was a Parisian boulevardier. Nobody would mistake either of these authors for underwater tourists. Mr. Streever, who has written previously on elemental subjects like heat, cold and air, is a former commercial diver with intense personal experience of such diving hazards as oxygen toxicity and decompression sickness—the ailment better known as the bends. Ms. Heinerth has also been “bent”; it’s one of the most vivid passages in a very vivid book. (“Despite having taught hundreds of divers about the symptoms of decompression illness, nothing prepared me for the absolute horror of recognizing that it was happening to me. . . . I was a shaken pop bottle waiting to see if the cap was going to get ripped off.”) She not only has the heart of an explorer but, as she relates, the genetics as well—specifically the risk-taking gene identified as the DRD4-7R allele.
Mr. Streever doesn’t reflect on his own genome in his book. He’s too busy bringing us up to speed on undersea explorations and acquainting us with “the part of our world that is shrouded by depth.” He begins with the descent of Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard in the submersible Trieste to Challenger Deep, which, at 7 miles below the surface, is the deepest place in any ocean. That happened in 1960, and it’s an indication of how ocean exploration has always been a stepchild of government funding that nobody ever went that deep again until James Cameron, the director of “Titanic,” made a solo descent in his own submersible in 2012. “Humanity,” Mr. Streever writes, “was and to this day remains a stranger to the abyss.”
“In Oceans Deep” looks at the ways in which human beings have tried and are trying to correct that situation. The author attends a workshop in Honduras that specializes in training people to dive using only lung power. Among the risks of free-diving, as it is known, is something divers call a samba, which is what happens when oxygen depletion causes a loss of motor control. “The characteristic backward jerking of the head reminded someone, somewhere, of the Brazilian dance.” The author recounts his own such experience on a free-dive to 101 feet. On the way up, he recalls, “my limbs feel full of syrup, of lactic acid molasses.” Later, he is told that, when at last his air-starved body reached the surface, he uttered the word “samba” before passing out.
Mr. Streever’s writing is lucid on subjects ranging from gas chemistry to dredging to underwater robotics, though it’s best when it’s most candid, even when it verges into oversharing—when the author regrets to inform us that he couldn’t get Mr. Cameron or a Chinese shipbuilding company to return his calls (“far from the only interviews I failed to obtain”); or when he worries that he might be “stalking” diving pioneer Sylvia Earle ; or when he finds himself fretting during a free-dive about how to write the book he’s writing. Maybe, he hopes, the focus required not to run out of air “will show me how to convert hundreds of pages of notes into an account that does not read like an extended and densely populated obituary appended to a series of accident reports.”
No worries. The book doesn’t read like that, although—since it’s about the promise and perils of undersea exploration—there are plenty of accident reports. As Mr. Streever points out when he’s diving to 1,500 feet in a homemade submersible that has not been “certified as safe by independent authorities,” the deep ocean is “no place for a nervous disposition.”
That goes double for underwater caves, the subject of “Into the Planet.” “I’m going to carry you on a journey to places you’ve never imagined,” Ms. Heinerth promises in the prologue, “deeper inside underwater caves than any woman has ventured. I will take you on an uncomfortable rendezvous with fear.”
That may sound like the introduction to an episode of “The Twilight Zone,” but it’s not off the mark. Anyone who has ever dived in a cave has likely experienced both the rapturous sensation of soaring through a pristine chamber beneath the earth’s surface and the incipient terror when a careless swipe of a fin causes that same chamber to fill with silt, creating a white-out in which the path home to air and sunlight is utterly obliterated.
Ms. Heinerth is very good at making you understand both the otherworldly euphoria and claustrophobic horror of cave diving. She’s a solid writer, as adept at rendering the decor of her grubby student apartment in Toronto (“a Pink Floyd poster almost covered the water stain that ran down the sloped ceiling to the pile of cayenne pepper on the windowsill”) as she is at describing what it’s like to be trapped in a current inside an Antarctic iceberg 130 feet below the surface. “How had I arrived at this point in my life, facing death in the most beautiful place that nobody would ever see?”
This “How had I arrived?” question echoes throughout the book. Ms. Heinerth doesn’t simply pin her explorer’s motivation on her genes. She writes about the life-altering experience of being a young woman alone in her apartment, fighting off an intruder with X-Acto knives. The strategy she takes away from that experience translates directly into the essential cave-diving skill of conserving your air supply: “Slow my beating heart. Breathe away the stresses that wouldn’t serve me.” Among her stresses: Being a woman in a sport dominated by men; and, after proving her worth in an expedition that mapped the longest cave system in the world, being labeled her husband’s “sidekick, or explorer-partner by marriage.”
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Ms. Heinerth devotes a significant part of her book to tracking the cresting and collapsing of a marriage between two cave divers with different metabolisms and different agendas. (Her ex-husband, Paul Heinerth, she tells us, came to the conclusion that he “just wanted a wife.”) If there were a Guinness World Record for most dangerous place to stage a marital dispute, it might very well be claimed by Jill and Paul Heinerth, who were 300 feet deep in a submerged cave in Wakulla Springs, Fla., when various simmering grievances found full expression. “He ended up yelling through his rebreather at the top of his lungs. . . . The contorted high pitch of his helium-laced voice was completely unintelligible.”
Ms. Heinerth takes careful notice not just of the psychological burdens of cave diving but of the physical ones as well: the daunting challenge of hauling hundreds of pounds of gear through steep Mexican canyons just to get to the dive site; the sandflies and deadly fer-de-lance snakes encountered along the way; the adult diapers and long underwear and wool socks that need to be worn under a diving suit to stave off hypothermia during a voyage through cold water and dark creepy crevices that can last for 12 hours or more.
I’ve had just enough experience in caves to know that I would never want to follow her, not even for an hour. But the combined effect of reading these two books about the lure of the deep made me understand why, when a doctor told Ms. Heinerth after her excruciating bout with the bends to “never dive again,” her only viable response was to ignore him.
—Mr. Harrigan is the author, most recently, of “Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas.”
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