#14 Final Dive, Forgotten Details: A Conversation with a roommate who remembers

Mr. X called me. I wasn’t sure what to expect from a man who had shared a room with my uncle before he vanished. (I hate calling him “Mr. X”. It sounds X Files or worse, porno.)

At 88 years old he sounds very sharp and robust. He didn’t know Uncle Bill well at all. He was Uncle Bill’s roommate at the time of his disappearance. He was on San Salvador Island for a total of 2 years and 3 months, but had only been there a short time when the accident happened, maybe a month? There were 3 people to a room and they were all coming and going at different times, not spending much time in the room.  He definitely remembered the incident, but was fuzzy on the details. “As I recall it was sort of going to be his final dive trip…” He wasn’t all that fuzzy.

He had thought Bill had gone diving alone. He’d forgotten about Don Diehl. He said that since Diehl worked for GE and not RCA, he might not have been told about it. He didn’t know why Bill had taken the boat. He believed it had something to do with diving to a certain depth. “Yes. I think it was about the depth.”

We both were excited to talk about the Eastern Range and his place in it. I offered to send the government report and he readily accepted. His adult daughter, who is just a couple of years younger than I am, shared the conversation with us. She is hip to the dive scene and, coincidentally, a SCUBA diver. We all speculated about what Bill could’ve been up to. The capabilities of divers in 1958. We laughed about the term “Skin Divers”, which is what divers were called then. It sounds so … Sea Hunt.

He didn’t remember that the divers bodies were never found.

We discussed “hydrogen narcosis”.  (A Google search comes up with, “Hydrogen narcosis produces symptoms such as hallucinations, disorientation, and confusion, which are similar to hallucinogenic drugs. It can be experienced by deep-sea divers who dive to 300 m (1,000 ft) below sea level breathing hydrogen mixtures.”) Bill or Don could’ve succumbed to it. Either could’ve tried to help the other and… bad things happened?

The conversation moved on to what stuff there was to do on the island at the time. He told me, ” There was, in Cockburn Town, one so-called hotel and it also had a bar and there was Jake Alvrie’s [sp?] bar – that was the more popular one.” I asked him if he’d spent time at the bar, laughing. He said “A little bit, but rum and banana cream sodas doesn’t go too well together.”

It sounded to me that the real place to be was Jake Alvrie’s. Could that have been The Rip? It had the rum, the stories, the men who spent their nights drowning something other than their bodies in the water.

He volunteered that he hasn’t kept in touch with anyone from there. “I’m 88 years old and I was there in my early 20’s.”

We spoke for about a half an hour.

I asked about his thoughts on black coral. “I’ve never heard of black coral. I think I would have if it had ever been talked about or anything.”  I asked if it would have been frowned upon for someone who worked for RCA or whoever, to try to make money on the side? “Possibly … they really didn’t want us to do anything to upset the status quo with the native people. They were British subjects at that time. I would think that trying to do something like that might be considered interfering with their welfare.”

We ended the conversation with me promising to send him the government report and, yes, we’d keep in touch. We hung up.

Stuck in my head was his comment about not upsetting the “status quo” of the native people. An ironic comment, considering.

Start at the beginning.