In what years I have remaining, I have narrowed my road down to one of two fates. I am totally committed either to living out my remaining years on Mars (which is my second choice) – or – my primary desire is to live out my remaining years in an undersea colony on the ocean floor at 24 fathoms. I have turned it over to my Creator to choose which of those final destinations He has already decided for me. But I can say with all authentic honesty that it will be one or the other.
How do I state this with such confidence? Because God has trained me up for both. My professional pathway, as well as the direction of my heart, has always been headed toward either destination. Some would foolishly say that at 73 years old, I am “running out of time.” And as a professional aquanaut, some could also say I am “running out of air.”
It just so happens that I know exactly how that feels. But, as I will explain, this phrase does not apply to my future… just my past!
On a NASA undersea mission I was participating in as an aquanaut during the Fall of 1995, I was living and working out of the MarineLab habitat on the seafloor slightly below 30 feet of depth in Key Largo, saturated at 21 FSW (feet of salt water). This particular day was rainy opside, the water was moderately silted up with runoff, and the sun was behind the clouds.
On the bottom just a few feet distant from the habitat, I was working in a dim, white, silty fog and had, as best, perhaps 4-6 feet of visibility. While I could see my fins on the sandy bottom, the habitat was lost in the haze, even though I knew it was just beyond my reach. I knew this because, for an aquanaut working in low visibility conditions on a saturation dive, situational awareness is everything. My aquanaut’s eyes were trained to always map my position as conditions changed, remembering what was not visible in the fog.
My task for that moment was to untangle the 100 feet of umbilical air hose that was anchored to the habitat and ran to the air compressors on the surface. At the end of the hose that was always clipped to my weight belt was the regulator out of which I breathed. This set-up was referred to as a hookah. On my back was a relatively small “pony bottle” – a diminutive SCUBA tank – with its regulator also clipped to my weight belt. It was designated to be used in an emergency if the hookah lost air pressure.
As fate would have it, the 100-foot air hose was fast becoming a true Griswold Christmas light ball of twisted, tangled horror. It soon became very clear that to disentangle this mess, I had to unclip the hookah regulator and remove it from my mouth so that I could unwrap it from the knotted chaos. It was the only option to untangle the full 100-foot length. At that point, I spit out my hookah regulator, unclipped my pony bottle regulator, swapped it for the hookah, and began breathing off the air in the small bottle.
As I continued to wrestle with the ever-frustrating ball of hose, I did not notice that with all of my labored breathing, my average lung volume changed. This caused the loss of my net negative buoyancy and I began to drift upward off the bottom of the lagoon. With my eyes focused on the hose in front of me, I was suspended in the fog of the water column with no position markers – and an unintended loss of situational awareness.
Lost in the aggravating task of clearing the knotted, relatively rigid air line, I exerted myself vigorously and began to breathe more heavily while I unknowingly slowly drifted upward and away. Finally, I took a deep breath, exhaled, and started to take another breath.
But that breath did not come.
Unless someone has had the experience of trying to take a breath that did not come, it is difficult to explain this sensation. Unfortunately, most people who have had that experience don’t live to tell about it. It was literally like trying to suck air off an iron wall. There was a solid, unforgiving, unrelenting total absence of breathable air.
I did not bother looking at my air gauge. I already knew what I had done. So, my first reflex was to look around me, noting right away that I was no longer near the bottom and had zero idea of in which direction the habitat lay. I was holding the wadded ball of hookah hose in my hand and knew that there was plenty of air available from the regulator at its end – but I had no idea in which direction or how far away that end was.
I had to make an immediate choice of how I was going to spend my next limited seconds.
Surfacing was never an option. If I did, I would zero the clock out on my aquanaut mission. In this business, I could not head toward the surface because if the water was even one foot deeper due to tidal shifts or runoff, the bends would result. For an aquanaut, life and living means going down, while injury or death could result from going up. Besides, surfacing during an aquanaut mission was asking to wear the dive hat of shame.
So I decided that I only had one sure option – find the missing habitat in the haze.
Resisting the real urge to panic, I rotated in a circle to see if any part of the very large habitat would reveal itself. It did not, and I had no idea how deep or shallow I was. But, fortunately, as I circled, I heard the raucous bubbling of the MarineLab’s exhaust vent. I turned, focused on the sound, and quickly swam in that direction. In seconds, the habitat’s upper frame came into my view.
I had drifted some 9 feet off the bottom and now approached the habitat’s top quarter. I then quickly descended toward the open hatch and swiftly entered, forcefully exhaling as much of the air out of my lungs as I could while entering.
As I rested in the open moon pool, deeply inhaling the sweet air of the MarineLab, I evaluated my last few minutes. I had learned two extremely important lessons. The first and foremost was to never lose situational awareness. The second was to never treat a supplementary air source the same as an unlimited air source, if even for a few minutes.
I was never actually in any danger of death by drowning – just death by humiliation from my peers. In my split-second decision to swim down instead of up, I was able to recover fully from the mission anomaly and learn those important life lessons – lessons not to be forgotten. Even after three decades, I have never lost that unique and terrifying feeling of running out of air.
Yet, as an individual, I never apply that feeling to my future. Either Mars or the undersea colony is my destiny. My God has accepted responsibility for the part of how and when it happens. My task is simply to be prepared for when it does, as it surely will!
But as a Templar officer in the Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem, I sometimes have the muscle memory of that moment in the water and the feeling that the air is getting mighty thin. Why? Because as one who has a large family, several business and research ventures, is an active writer, and has tons of responsibilities that need attending every day, losing situational awareness and wrongly assuming the Templar clock is one that has unlimited resources of time are two things that I keep a most cautious and watchful eye out for.
But I know exactly what to do when this slow anxiety creeps upon me.
I have learned that any actively involved Templar who goes out on the battlefield every day solo is a fool. Just like a saturated aquanaut who is working in a fog could use another diver to help keep track of the many things that happen in real-time in the water column, so could any Templar who walks out on the battlefield every day use a fellow Poor Soldier of Christ to assist them.
In the Priory of The Temple Church, I can assure you that I have been immeasurably blessed with not just a dream leadership team, but also a group of Knights and Dames who are all consistently ready for the call to action! I depend on this team literally every day to help carry this load. I am so tempted to name names here, but you know who you are, each of you, and I can assure you that without this team working as a team, the battles would all be lost.
Because of each of you, I never have a single worry about losing situational awareness or running out of time. And I never ever lie awake at night fearing that the Temple Church will ever run out of air!
And Who has the sole responsibility and ability to hold all of this together?
“Now to Him Who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.” (Jude 24-25)