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Saturday, Nov 28, 2009
In this artistic and technological breakthrough -- today almost impossible to find -- the sinewy French explorer took us all into unknown depths.
Jul 15, 2002 | My father used to take me into the ocean off the New Jersey shore, coaxing me out farther and farther from the beach where I felt comfortable, where the weary ends of the waves lapped gently at my toes.
I was 6 or 7 and the murky Atlantic Ocean, I was quite certain, was full of Dangerous Things. If a rubbery piece of seaweed brushed against my side, I was about to be slimed to death. Underfoot were hideous, prehistoric horseshoe crabs with their hard, chitinous shells and long tail-spines that seemed as sharp as Ginsu knives. Farther out, where the waves were breaking, there were flotillas of icky, blood-red jellyfish, trailing tendrils that I was convinced were injecting me with paralyzing neurotoxins. And of course Steven Spielberg's "Jaws" had recently been released. Although my parents didn't let me see it, there was enough talk of the movie around that I knew this much: Sharks liked to eat people, especially little boys. And they lived in the ocean.
Bottom line: The ocean scared the piss out of me. Sometimes literally. But as is often the case with these things, it fascinated me too.
This was the era of ABC's documentary series "The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau," and the funny little man with the funny little accent and the funny little red cap was showing me, via the safety of the television screen, what I dreaded seeing in person: sharks gathering for a feeding frenzy, viciously clawed crabs scuttling sideways across the ocean bottom, creepy translucent critters hanging in water so deep that the sun never penetrated their inky universe.
Cousteau's television documentaries transfixed me with horror and wonder. I remember sleek, sharp-teethed barracudas cutting through the water like torpedoes; ugly puffer fish that suddenly inflated to twice their size and, like porcupines, protruded fearsome spikes all around their bodies when threatened; forests of dazzling Technicolor coral and underwater flora; colonies of wacky, awkward penguins that slipped from their ice floes into the freezing Antarctic waters where they became graceful underwater dancers; and the slow-motion descent of whale tails crashing mightily into the surf. Most captivating (and simultaneously repugnant) of all, I remember sharks with squat rectangular heads, their queer, prehistoric eyes fixed to the furthest extremes of that deformity: hammerheads, so bizarre in appearance they looked like they belonged on a planet where there had never been any land at all.
Cousteau showed me a world of life more shocking and entrancing than anything imagination might conjure. When he died at the age of 87, on June 25, 1997, I realized I had lost perhaps the only real hero I had ever had. A flawed hero, I later learned, but a hero nevertheless. As the fifth anniversary of his death approached, I wanted to find some way to honor him. I learned that before Cousteau ever became popular for his documentary films, he had written a best-selling book, "The Silent World" (1953), which chronicled the early days of his underwater adventures.
In the midst of World War II, Cousteau and Émile Gagnan, a Parisian engineer, invented and successfully tested the first aqualung or SCUBA (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus), which became the key to the modern age of underwater exploration. In Cousteau's book, he describes his first scuba dive, in the Mediterranean waters off the French Riviera in June 1943:
"At night I had often had visions of flying by extending my arms as wings. Now I flew without wings ... I thought of the helmet diver arriving where I was on his ponderous boots and struggling to walk a few yards, obsessed with his umbilici and his head imprisoned in copper. On skin dives I had seen him leaning dangerously forward to make a step, clamped in heavier pressure at the ankles than the head, a cripple in an alien land. From this day forward we would swim across miles of country no man had known, free and level, with our flesh feeling what the fish scales know."
Later in his book, Cousteau demystifies the dangers I had been obsessed with as a child. "The monsters we have met seem a thoroughly harmless lot," he writes. "Some are indifferent to men; others are curious about us, most of them are frightened when we approach closely."
Now he tells me.
The immense success of "The Silent World" -- it sold more than 5 million copies in 22 languages -- demonstrates that Cousteau was more than a cameraman who brought back pictures from the deep. He brought a poetic spirit to his adventures and observations and so became the conduit by which millions of people made their first communion with the vast world of underwater life.
