Chapter TWQ
Two Near-Death Experiences
I guess a lot of people have had a near-death experience sometime in their lives I’ve been privileged to have had two, both involving scuba diving.
From the time I was a small child I had al6ways wanted to go scuba diving, and in the spring of 1983 when I was first interviewed for a male stenographer position with McDonnell Douglas Services in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, I knew I had to get certified. My son, Kent, and I took the open water certification classes from a local diving club in St. Louis, and a few weeks later we were at Norfolk Lake, Arkansas just south of the Missouri Arkansas border for our class open water certification dives.
Kent had chickened out and decided not to complete the course, but I was determined to finish and get my open water certificate so I could go scuba diving in the pristine clear waters of the Red Sea off the west coast of Saudi Arabia. I took my family down to Norfolk Lake for the weekend so the kids could go swimming and enjoy the outdoors while I tried to pass my scuba certification dives. But Mother Nature decided to play a little trick on us. It rained the day preceding and during the weekend; the temperature that Saturday morning was in the 60s, and the water temperature was somewhere in the 50s. Needless to say, even with my heavy wetsuit on, I still froze my ass off. I also had my first near-death experience.
Qne of the requirements for open water certification is to breathe off your scuba partner’s tank with both divers using the same air gauge in other words, passing the air gauge from one partner to the other, taking a few deep breaths and passing the air gauge back again. My scuba partner (I’ll call him Jim as I can’t for the life of me remember his name) and I back flipped off the side of the rowboat into the cold water. I think both of us wanted to get all of the requirements over as soon as was humanly possible. As I descended, I equalized the pressure in my ears. My body shivered all the way down to about 25 feet.
With the rain and the silt from the runoff the water was murky and I could only see about two or three feet in front of me. Jim and I did all of our required tasks and it came to that point when we were to breathe off each other’s air gauge. I gave the OK signal with my right hand and passed my gauge to Jim who took a couple of breaths and returned the gauge to me. We repeated this procedure three or four times and encountered no problems.
We had been in the water for about twenty minutes. My fingers resembled those of a shriveled old man I was shiveri