Accent on Living

THE rewards of skin diving depend, naturally enough, on where the diving is being done. Some dive for sea shells, others to spear fish, still others for treasure and gold. Where none of these incentives exists, the diver may go down for a corpse or two, or perhaps to recover the Murder Weapon: a ball-peen hammer, it was, in the case the divers’ magazine was describing; the sheriff was no end pleased.

Many divers are satisfied simply by the underwater scene and taking photographs or movies of it. One can imagine what bizarre sights a stroll would yield along the bottom of the Raritan Canal or the Charles River in Cambridge — the ruined bedsprings, the saucepans, the great reefs of beer cans, the scaling sinks, kitchen ranges, jalopies, old ice chests. Visibility in metropolitan waters of this sort is likely to be limited, one suspects, so that the harsh outlines of a rusted-out boiler might come to resemble vaguely an exotic remnant of an earlier civilization; the discarded bathtub, amid its festoons of whatever that stuff is supposed to be, recalls the languors of Pompeii.

A fascinating literature on skin divers has suddenly come into being. The magazines for the divers seem to be quite optimistic about diving for gold and treasure. They estimate that only a fifth of the available gold in the mining country has been taken out, while the other four fifths is still just sitting there in the ground, or on the bottoms of streams, waiting for the well-equipped diver to come along and pocket it. This calls for a fairly large investment in an underwater gold dredge, and getting a diver into the water can cost more than putting a golfer on the first tee. The prospects for treasure hunters look even rosier: Spanish galleons all along both coasts, a German submarine in 125 feet of water off Point Judith, and $275,000 in gold awaiting a claimant since 1854 in a paddle-wheel steamer one and a half miles off the California coast (in shallow water), to mention only a few opportunities.

Equipment for the diver includes a kind of instrument panel which shows his compass bearing, depth, temperature (but not his r.p.m.); spears, knives, and harpoon guns; and all sorts of piping and wiring. There are cuff links, tie clasps, and emblems for his car to identify “the enthusiast,” not to mention the “Our Lady of the Silent World Diving Medal,” to be worn on a stainless steel chain. The diver who would rather ride than walk or swim along the bottom can buy a submarine with two tandem seats and a plexiglass canopy ($1500 to $2500). Off the California coast, he might just as well add an “abalone gauge” to his kit (“useful in measuring mollusks, crustaceans and fish from 4 to 7 inches”). What seems to be regarded as a great step ahead is the recent announcement by a rubber manufacturer of a wonderful new accessory for skin divers: a five-finger glove! “Another first by B. F. Goodrich,” the manufacturer called it.

There are many organizations for the diver to join. One notes the Middle Atlantic Underwater Council’s Miss Skin Diver award to Louise Laviano of the South Jersey Lung and Spear Club, who beat out sixteen competitors for the title. The comic strip “Jim Jigger, Frogman” deserves mention; it appears in the “official organ” of the Underwater Society of America.

This is all a very long jaunt indeed from the days when Annette Kellermann was bulging her black tights and queening it in coast-tocoast vaudeville. Aside from the daring of her costume, the climax of this little lady’s performance came when she sat down on a property rock in her glass-fronted tank and peeled, elegantly, and daintily consumed, bite by bite and in full view of her astounded audience, a banana. Let the Underwater Society try that one on its scubas.

CHARLES W. MORTON