Seahunt
A Midwest Journey
At our choir picnic this summer I met the husband of one of our singers. Howard struggled even with his wife’s help to get out of the car and into a rollator. I introduced myself, but we never talked until Howard and his wife were getting back in the car and heading home.
My buddy and I rushed to help them. With his wife steering, the man had a real hard time getting out of the lightweight four-wheel walker. After several maneuvers, he positioned himself alongside the open car door with our help before launching himself into the passenger seat.
His wife went to get something and I stood at the open door and asked about the food he enjoyed that afternoon. “It was all good,” he said, with a smile, his breathing still a bit heavy from the exertion.
When his wife didn’t immediately return, I asked him about the work he had done before retirement. He had worked as a maintenance custodian in the Stow city schools, adding that he also volunteered in his early twenties for the Sheriff’s Summit County underwater rescue team.
I piled on the questions and he talked about a bridge collapse in the early 1970s. Howard said that they spent many hours combing the river bed for bodies amid twisted wreckage, cars, and trucks, bringing those killed to the surface with cables from a large crane atop a barge.
Howard described how divers couldn’t see more than a foot in front of them in Ohio lakes and rivers. “You’re pretty much blind down there. Feeling your way around.” Side by side, the divers would hold on to a long pole tied at each end with rope hung from a pair of boats. Slowly, they’d make their way forward. Their arms overlapping, they’d reach out into the darkness until they made contact with debris or a body.
During training at the bottom of a fifteen-foot outdoor pool, Howard said he was ready to make his ascent when his oxygen flow abruptly ceased. Not rushing, he held his breath and slipped off his tank, and found that his oxygen shutoff valve had been closed. He opened the valve, took in the welcome, breathable air, and stayed under water. His instructor had approached him from behind and closed the valve, testing to see if he’d panic and immediately race to the surface.
Howard soon discovered that he also needed a lot less oxygen compared to the other divers, saying that an hour tank meant most divers were typically at the surface in 45 minutes for a refill or a fresh tank. Howard’s sixty minutes oxygen supply often lasted nearly an hour longer. He understood that just because someone is trained well and performs well, the unexpected often pumped up the adrenaline, heart rate, and the lungs demanding more oxygen. I remember from Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff that John Glenn handled an anxious moment differently from the other astronauts. When the other astronauts blood pressure and heart beat rose, his stayed at his normal resting level.
The divers quizzed Howard on his calm demeanor—"I watched Sea Hunt as a kid,” he’d tell them. “Loved the main character, and watched him handle each problem with lots of smarts and cool. That impressed me. Plus, I like the water. I swam and snorkeled as a teen. I had nothing to fear.”
The virtue of courage was as much a part of Lloyd Bridges’ character in Sea Hunt as was the wet suit that clung to his body. In that TV series from the late fifties, Howard witnessed courage and adopted that courage in a practical way to help and save others. Thank God for American TV show heroes and men like Howard, who was inspired to begin his own quest, and take that first step of the heroes journey.