I was an archaeology student in 1974, working on Dr. George Bass’s last season excavating a 4^th century Roman ship sunk off a tiny Aegean island smack dab on the modern border between Greece and Turkey. The island is called Yassi Ada, or Flat Island, and it’s nothing more than a hunk of razor-sharp volcanic rock the size of a football field, twelve feet above the water at its highest, without so much as a blade of grass.

Bass began excavating three stacked wrecks there in 1960, a year after sponge divers showed their location to archaeologist Peter Throckmorton. Now, after a five-year hiatus, Bass was returning for a final season on the oldest of the wrecks.

There was a lot of tension in the eastern Med in the spring of ‘74. Greece’s U.S.-supported military dictatorship had been losing popularity, and to try to get some of it back the Generals were flooding the media with propaganda calling for Enosis, or the annexation of Cyprus, which was about half ethnic Greek and half Turkish. Turkey had promised to invade Cyprus if Greece went ahead with annexation.

Coming by plane from Boston to Athens and then by ferry from Piraeus to the Greek island of Cos, I found the border with Turkey closed and ran across a few other members of the dig stuck on Cos.  As luck would have it, I also found a friend’s boat tied up in the harbor. He was an alcoholic journalist, a former Washington Post middle-east bureau chief who had drunk himself out of his marriage and his job, but he still had his boat. The sailing community in the Aegean is really kind of small, and I had been around for a while and I knew a few people. After all the ‘hail fellow well met’ prelude, I asked if he would sail us to Bodrum, the dig’s gathering and staging point in Turkey, right across the straight from Cos. It took a bottle of gin to persuade him, but he finally agreed and the next morning he sailed all of us across. Don Frey, one of Bass’s staff and a fine archaeologist, met us at the dock. We had the right visas and Don convinced the guy with the rubber stamp to let us land. I hadn’t met Don before, and after I introduced myself he said, “Welcome to Bodrum Jonum, and always remember, Jonum means Dear!” It was going to be an fun summer.

Bodrum is an interesting town. It was called Halicarnassus in the 5^th century BC, and was home to Herodotus, the first historian. The Mausoleum, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, was built there in the 4^th century BC. Our headquarters for getting all our gear together and checking it out before we headed out to the island was in a 15^th century crusader castle.

Members of the dig crew straggled in over the next few days as they found their way across borders. Mary, a high school classmate of mine, took me completely by surprise. I knew she was studying classics at Washington University, but I had no idea she’d be at Yassi Ada. We’d never dated, but it was clear to everyone we knew each other well, and she was the only single woman on the dig, so I had guys coming up to me asking if it was okay if they “wanted to get to know her better.” I was amused and a little mean spirited, so I said, “No! Of course not! What the hell are you thinking?” Well, you had to find your fun where you could, and I knew Mary wasn’t looking for a boyfriend.

We were an eclectic crew. There was Pierre Bakai, a Lebanese archaeologist from the Tyre excavation who would take me to Bodrum’s taverns and shout out common Turkish names like Mehmet! and Youksel! There was always a Mehmet or a Youksel, and when one answered, he would say, “It’s been so long since you beat me at backgammon, and honor demands I even the score!” Pride always won out over absent memory, and Pierre never lost. He played for drinks for both of us. Nice. There was Dr. Michael Katsev and Robin and Gay Piercy, all fresh from their reconstruction of the Kyrenia shipwreck on Cyprus; Dick Steffey and Don Frey, long time colleagues of Bass and Katsev; a history professor from New Hampshire, a naval architect from Seattle, husband and wife graduate students from Texas, an archaeologist from the Netherlands, an American photographer, a navy diving medical officer from Groton, and T. Walker Lloyd, the VP of sales for Rolex America. There were a few others I don’t remember after all these years, but they were fine young men and women all. Rounding out our crew was our Turkish overseer Oz, the kitchen staff, and two local crew for the dive barge who had worked for Bass for many years. With wives and children, we were thirty-five on board the barge when the tugboat left Bodrum for the island.

It was an overnight trip under starry skies. Someone played a guitar. Bottles of wine were passed around. I feel asleep at some point and was awakened by sunlight and the sound of anchor chain running free as the barge was moored over the wreck.

We got busy erecting two large shelters on the island on concrete pads left from the earlier expeditions. There was already a solid wall to windward on each pad. We added framing and screening for the other three walls and a tin roof.

No power. There was a generator on the dive barge but the one on the island failed on our first day, and we never got it working again. We had camp cots. That was nice.

We had brought everything we needed with us including food and water, but not enough water for fresh-water showers. Our toilet was a convenient hole in the rock hanging out over the water at the far end of the island.

There were rats. Big rats. Even stranger, the rats survived on a diet of marine iguanas. There is a myth that marine iguanas exist only on the Galapagos islands of the Pacific, but there they were, thick around the waters of Yassi Ada in the Aegean Sea. We assumed that both the rats and the iguanas were shipwrecked castaways. A hundred years ago? A thousand? Two thousand? No way of knowing. Bass sent a dead rat back to Oxford looking for a clue to its origin. A letter came back scolding him for playing such a crude prank on the university, because everyone knew that no rat like this has ever existed anywhere in the Mediterranean.

I woke up one night to find one curled up next to me for warmth. My shout woke half the crew in the shelter and wasn’t appreciated, but what the hell, if I wake up with a giant rat in bed next to me, I think I have every right to let loose a high-decibel holler!

But overall life was good by dig standards. The cooks kept us well fed and we each had a personal stash of sodas and bottled fruit juices. We dropped wooden cases full of glass bottles in about ten feet of water near our landing beach and dove in whenever we wanted something cool in the middle of the day. We’d brought beer, wine, and gin too, but we were only allowed to drink alcohol on the night before our one day off a week. Deep diving protocol.

The work was challenging. At 140 feet, a diver had only fifteen minutes on the bottom twice a day, with 45 minutes of decompression on the way back to the surface. Nothing makes a diver colder than hanging motionless at a decompression stop breathing from compressed air. The air is cold after expanding to ambient pressure. It chills you from the inside out, so a wet suit is no help.

It’s really boring, too, just hanging there. Some of us kept paperback novels in the bucket at the 10-foot stop, where we had to wait the longest. As long as you didn’t take the book out of the water it didn’t fall apart, and you never lost your place. When you finished a page, you just ripped it out and let it drift away on the current.

A few days after we began dive operations on the wreck our supply boat arrived from Bodrum with news there had been a coup d’état on Cyprus by supporters of Enosis. We waited for the other shoe to drop.

Five days later I was on the bottom, working on the wreck. You’ve got to understand that at 140 feet, breathing regular air, everyone experiences nitrogen narcosis. It’s usually described as feeling like being drunk. You lose your inhibitions and your good judgement, and you feel pretty darn good. Well, being drunk never felt as good as being narced to me, but that’s just me. It’s a dangerous combination of symptoms, as a lot of divers have learned the hard way. But we’d been trained to work through it. You learn not to trust everything you see and hear when you’re narced. So, when I heard the sound of large ship screws over the noise of diving regulators and air-lifts, I wasn’t sure what was going on. I worked out my bottom time and headed for the first decompression stop, all the while searching the surface for some glimpse of large ships. Even though the water was crystal clear, I didn’t see anything, but the noise kept getting louder. When I finally broke surface and climbed the ladder to the deck of the dive barge, what I saw terrified me.

A convoy of Turkish gunboats was steaming south along the Turkish side of the island and a convoy of Greek gunboats was plowing north in Greek waters along the other side of the island. Their big guns were tracking each other, and our little island was the pivot. One of the crew held a tiny plastic transistor radio to his ear and was waving the antenna around trying to pick up the BBC or VOA. He was calling out bits of news as he heard them. Turkey had been true to their word and invaded Cyprus. The fighting was still confined to Cyprus itself, but both countries were on the verge of all-out war.

We had no two-way radio and therefore no communications with the mainland, but Oz Bey, our Turkish government overseer, had instructions: if war was imminent, he was to suspend our dig permit and we were not to leave the island. Period. We had to get by on the water and provisions we had on the island and any vessel leaving risked being fired upon. We had built our own detention camp!

We immediately rationed our food and water. Wars in that part of the world tended to be fast and furious, so we weren’t too concerned about running out of essentials, but it made good sense to be cautious. We also rationed our batteries. All we had was the one plastic transistor radio, the kind that was advertised back then as being “no larger than a pack of cigarettes”. It was our only connection with the outside world. Twice a day we’d find the high spot on the island, all twelve feet of it, and huddle around trying to pick up news. Some days we could, others we couldn’t. It was nerve wracking and by God boring, but, you know, you muddle through, and we were a good crew.

After the first week, the BBC broadcast news of a friendly-fire incident. The pilot of a Turkish Air Force fighter-bomber, patrolling at night, had radioed a verbal friend-or-foe challenge to a naval warship running without lights off the coast of Cyprus and received no reply. What the pilot didn’t know was that the Turkish destroyer Kocatepe was also under radio silence orders. The pilot dropped its bombs on the Kocatepe and sank it, sending sixty-seven sailors and marines to their watery graves.

The incident was a scandal for the Turks. Premier Ecevit offered to resign, but this was even more unpopular, and he stayed in office by acclimation.  Smart move on Ecevit’s part. It was an instant affirmation of his leadership in time of war. Then the VOA broadcast that the Greek military junta had collapsed. The military dictator Georgios Papadopoulos was thrown out and a provisional democratic government took over. Two days later a general cease fire was declared on Cyprus. The Turks had taken control everywhere there was an ethnic Turkish majority, more than half the island, and both sides were standing in place. That’s when the last of our batteries ran out and the radio went silent. All we could do was wait in ignorance.

A few days later, around lunch time, we saw a small boat appear on the horizon from the direction of Bodrum. It took an hour before we could make out with binoculars that it was a mail boat. It took another two hours for the boat to reach us, and by that time every soul on the island had gathered in a semi-circle on the beach around George Bass. The boat drew up to our small dock and the lone occupant tossed a line to waiting hands and climbed ashore. He was an ancient fellow, probably in his late sixties, kind of small and scraggly. He had all of three teeth and a big smile on his unshaven face. He put his official postman’s hat on and buttoned up his threadbare uniform, then shuffled on bare feet as he reached into his mail pouch and removed a single yellow telegram and handed it to Bass with a two-fingered salute to his cap.

I heard George mutter something under his breath as he broke the seal and unfolded the paper. Everybody watched him read the telegram. He finished and sort of stared out over everyone’s head back towards Bodrum, then held out the paper to me and said, “It’s for you.”

Stunned, I took the telegram, well aware everyone was now focused on me. I looked down and read: ‘HOW ARE YOU STOP VERONICA’.

Ha! My girlfriend back in Boston wanted to know if I was okay. Nice, but surreal. I was in a daze. Why had the postman made the long trip out to the island just to deliver this useless telegram? Then I looked up. Thirty-three other people were staring, waiting for me to say something of great importance. It was pathetically funny.

I said, “Uh, it’s from my girlfriend, and she wants to know how I am.”

There was a moment of suspended animation, you know, when even the breathing of thirty-plus people seemed to pause, then the inquisitive looks on all their faces turned to sneers of disbelief and a collective moan spread through the crowd.

I think that for the first time since his arrival the postman suspected his heroic effort was being received with less than universal appreciation. But things happened very quickly after that. Some of the crew interrogated the postman about the war. Others debated the best course of action now that we could communicate with the mainland.

The postman knew little more about the invasion that we did.  He said the harbormaster had confined our supply boat to Bodrum. The postmaster himself had placed the telegram in the postman’s hand and told him to get it to Dr. Bass immediately. Bass explained that the postmaster was a friend and no doubt selected a completely benign telegram as an excuse for the postman’s trip so he could provide us with some relief.

George decided to return to Bodrum with the mail boat. He gave everyone half an hour to bring outgoing mail, told the cook to give the postman a meal, and went off to pack a bag. When he returned, he listened to last minute requests from anxious crewmembers before he and the postman cast off the lines and the boat chugged away from the dock. He returned a few days later with the supply boat and permission for us to leave the island.

Thus ended the final excavation season of the Yassi Ada shipwrecks.

But there is just a little bit more to the story. It was 1974! While all this was going on, Richard Nixon’s presidency was collapsing back in Washington. Or perhaps it was the other way around. Perhaps all this was happening because Nixon’s administration was collapsing. Would Papadopoulos have annexed Cyprus if Nixon’s administration had been stable and strong? Would Turkey have invaded? I think the chaos in the U.S. provided an opportunity for these events to unfold.

And one other thing. As I was traveling back through Greece to Athens and a flight back to Boston, I stopped to visit friends in Cos and in Piraeus. Well, that’s the thing; I thought they were my friends. They slammed the door in my face. My “friends” in Cos at least had the kindness to explain themselves before shunning me. They said, “When Papadopoulos was in power we had to be nice to you. Now we don’t.”

It was an education.

One of the first things I did when I started Boston University was join the staff of the school’s Daily Free Press. Five days a week during the school year the paper published between sixteen and twenty-four pages and had five thousand copies on campus by sun-up. I was a staff photographer my first semester, and when I returned to Boston after my cadet cruise aboard the sail training tall ship Westward, the editor in chief made me photography editor and asked me to build a darkroom in the paper’s offices in the remaining month before the fall semester.

I liked building darkrooms. This would be my third. First things I needed were a professional enlarger and a large drum print dryer. When I worked at Kranzten-Gould studio in New York after high school I was introduced to Cass Carr, a Jamaican bandleader known for his photographs of Bettie Page and known as a used photographic equipment dealer. Cass’s midtown place of business was a vast fourth-floor dimly-lit open warehouse where the layers of dust were probably older that Cass himself who, at age sixty-five, rarely moved from his high-backed stool at his counting desk. If it was ever made for commercial photography, you could find it in some corner of Cass Carr’s warehouse.

I estimated the equipment would cost twelve-hundred dollars and I knew Cass ran a cash business. Leaving my prized Rollei SL-66 camera as collateral, the editor put the cash in my hand and gave me a look that said, “I trust you, I think!”

I wanted every cent for equipment, so I decided to save the train fare and hitchhike to Manhattan. It was summer and the weather was clear and at sunrise the next morning I stuck my thumb out at the Mass Pike entrance near Fenway and made it as far as the Bronx in three rides by noon. Then my plan hit a snag. My ride dropped me off at an exit of the Cross-Bronx Expressway that had no corresponding entrance. I knew nothing of the Bronx. I needed to find an entrance to the expressway or a subway station, but I didn’t have a clue. I was in a neighborhood of dilapidated high-rise public housing with no shops in sight. The few people on the sidewalks looked nothing like me and they walked quickly away when I tried to ask directions.

I was walking on a zig-zag route through the streets trying to move parallel to the Cross-Bronx when a group of five guys about my age walking, more like sauntering, along the other side of the street came to a dead stop when they saw me, crossed over, and surrounded me. Yeah, OK, they were gang-bangers, but in 1972, I’m not sure I’d even heard the term. But it’s what they were.

With a strong Latino accent, the guy I pegged as the leader of the pack said, “What’cho doing here?” His attitude was, ‘In my face’, but It was what I had expected, so it didn’t make me shake in my boots. (Yes, I was wearing boots. It was the early ‘70s!)

I said, “I’m lost. I’m hitchhiking to Manhattan and was dropped off here, and I really don’t know where I am. Can you tell me where I can find a subway?” I smiled. And smiled.

The leader said, “You don’t know where you are? That’s a helluva thing. Well I can tell you, you’re someplace you don’t wanna be!”

I said, “Yeah, I’m kinda getting that feeling.”

Leader said, “What’cho name?” I told him. He said, “I’m Carlos. You hungry?”

“A little bit.”

“Okay! You come home with me, and my mother gonna fix you a nice lunch. Then we’ll walk you to the subway and see you get on without no trouble.”

What was I to do? I followed Carlos and his gang, who by now had all introduced themselves, patted me on the back, and treated me like their long-lost brother. Carlos had draped his arm across my shoulder and I decided that, at least for the moment, I should just go with the flow and hope I wasn’t acting like a lamb being led to the slaughter.

We walked to the nearest housing tower, passed through a graffiti-filled lobby that reeked of urine and mildew, climbed six flights of stairs because no one thought to even see if the elevator was working, made our way down a grimy, dimly lit hallway, and stopped in front of a door that had probably seen its last coat of fresh paint before I was born. Carlos knocked.

The door swung open and the sweetest, kindest smile greeted me on the other side. Carlos’s mother invited us all in, and she was glad to meet the stranger her son had pulled in off the street. She fed us bologna sandwiches and milk, and I was bombarded with questions about college, Boston, and my travels, which I tried my best to answer without sounding too privileged. Carlos’s mother lamented her son couldn’t afford college and hoped for a better future for him. Carlos never lost his good humor.

After lunch, the gang did as they had promised. They escorted me to a subway line that would take me straight into Manhattan and sent me off with a request. Would I please tell everyone how nicely I was treated in the Bronx?

I made it to Cass Carr’s place in time to buy the equipment I needed. I was lucky enough to find another Omega D2V enlarger, some good lenses, and a print dryer, all within my budget including the packing and shipping of the gear up to Boston. I paid up and discovered I had enough left for train fare home! I was never so glad to sink into a coach-class seat on an Amtrak train.

I finished the darkroom in time for the fall semester, when the returning members of the board, all now seniors, sacked the editor in chief and gave me the job. I appreciated their vote of confidence, but I was still a freshman and didn’t know a damn about running a daily paper or being an editor in chief! I lasted one semester and I made finding my replacement my top priority. By the start of the second term The Daily Free Press has a senior from the School of Communications at the helm and I hung up my green eye shade and arm garters for good. Still, it earned me the right to put Editor in Chief of Boston University’s Daily Free Press on my resume.

Everything changes with time. Film cameras are a nearly extinct; the art of wet-chemistry photography has become an exotic pursuit, right alongside alchemy. I can find a few references to Cass Carr, which pleases me. He should be remembered. The oddest change is that BU’s Daily Free Press, while keeping its name, is now a weekly. Perhaps the name is just another ‘alternate fact’. What are they teaching these kids in journalism school?

I’ve never been back to the Bronx except to traverse the nightmarish trench of the Cross-Bronx Expressway going from somewhere to somewhere else. But I will say this: I was treated very nicely in the Bronx.

In 1971, I was working for marine archaeologist Peter Throckmorton in Greece. I was eighteen at the time, trying to figure out whether I wanted to devote myself to photojournalism or archaeology.

I had been told “Doc Edgerton” was coming to work with us on a few projects, but I’d never heard of him and I wasn’t one to ask too many questions. I mean, I was the youngest of the crew and didn’t want to seem too dumb, so I figured I’d find out who this guy was when he arrived. And I was very busy, putting the finishing touches on a darkroom I had built for Throckmorton, cataloging all his photographs from his years as a photojournalist and archaeologist, and photographing artifacts and ship models for his chapter in George Bass’s next book.

But I was curious enough that I mentioned Doc in a letter to my father. He rarely wrote to me and we weren’t getting along very well since I’d decided not to go to university straight out of high school. I wrote to him regularly anyway because he was the only person who knew me well enough to make it worthwhile opening up and sharing what I was thinking, even if he didn’t reciprocate. So I was pretty surprised when I received a response in what was, for him, record time. And what a letter! I don’t think I had ever received a letter so full of surprises.

My father, Curtis Marshall, earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Washington as the possibility of a second world war was looming. His family had called World War I “Wilson’s War”, and they wanted no part of what they were already calling “Roosevelt’s War”. What I learned in his letter was that he had applied to and been accepted by MIT for graduate school because he wanted to study under the man who had invented the strobe light, professor Harold “Doc” Edgerton. But he became convinced that graduate studies wouldn’t get him a draft deferment and medical school would, and he wanted to avoid the war more than he wanted to study with Doc, so he gave up his spot at MIT and went to medical school at McGill instead. He threw away his chance to do what he really wanted and never had contact with Doc again.

It was his bad luck that the war lasted longer than he had expected, and he was drafted into the army right out of medical school. I’ll tell you another time about his experiences as a doctor with Patton’s Third Army as they rolled across Europe. But I will say this much: he was an amateur photographer and machinist and as the war wound down he heard of this Frenchman in Marseilles who was experimenting with taking cameras underwater. My father had accumulated leave and he used it to take a train to Marseilles and find this guy, someone named Jacques-Yves Cousteau. They hit it off, and my father used his machinist’s skills to build camera housings while Cousteau was kind enough to teach him how to use his underwater breathing apparatus. They stayed in touch, but the last time they saw each other was in the mid-sixties, when Cousteau’s research vessel Calypso made port in New York for a fund raiser. He said Cousteau was more interested in raising money than in seeing an old friend, and he was probably right – it takes the fund-raising skills of a politician to keep an organization like Cousteau’s going. I always get a good laugh when I watch the film “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” because it really does have some witty sarcastic insight into the world of egotistic explorers and their personality cults. Archaeology certainly has its share, especially marine archaeology, where I spent so many years. It’s a strange way of life.

And in case you’re wondering, I think yes, my father’s interests in photography, machining, diving, and sailing might, just might, have rubbed off on me. My father had me open ocean diving when I was five and I’ve never stopped. I’m not bragging. Five is too young and I wonder why he allowed it. But he didn’t push me. I pleaded with him to let me do it, and I guess I was persuasive. He also taught me to use a lathe and mill when I was eight, I build my first oscilloscope when I was eleven, and I took up photography when I moved east full-time for high school.

I digress.

Doc arrived in Piraeus while I was up in Jugoslavia renewing my car’s visa. You had to drive out of Greece every three months and then back in to get a new car visa and hope there was a different customs agent on duty who didn’t look too closely to see when the last one had expired. Otherwise you had to pay a tax nearly equal to the value of the car. It usually worked. I was the only one of the crew with a car. Not even Throckmorton had one.

So Doc was there when I got back and I only had time to say hello before Throckmorton commandeered my car and sent Doc and another member of the crew off to Istanbul to pick up Doc’s side-scanning sonar gear that had somehow been shipped there instead of to Athens. It was another week before they would return so I got back to work machining some new parts for the darkroom enlarger – some negative carriers, autofocus tracks to match our lenses, and a new manual focusing rack and pinion. I was finishing this up when Doc returned and I was aware he was looking over my work. We started talking, and it turned into a good conversation and the beginning of a wonderful friendship.

The assistant Doc had intended to bring along took ill before he had left Boston, so I was seconded to him as his driver and gopher (again, I had a car!). He worked with us on a search and survey for wrecks from the 1571 Battle of Lepanto in the gulf of Patras and later on an underwater survey of the Minoan civilization on Thira, also called Santorini, in the Aegean. Ah, Thira! Maybe Atlantis? That’s a story all by itself.

Let me just indulge in a verbal sidebar for a second. I mentioned earlier that Doc invented the strobe light. Just one of his many accomplishments. There was once a giant defense contractor named EG&G that, among other things, ran the nuclear weapons testing program for the U.S. Government. Well, EG&G stood for Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier, so, yeah. And if you’ve never seen them, you should search the web for the strobe light photographs Doc did in his lab. My favorite has always been the milk drop splash, but the bullet piercing the apple is another favorite. He also did a famous series of multi-exposure stop-action photographs with photographer Gjon Mili. Photographs of tennis players and ballet dancers and the like. Beautiful images.

Anyway, Doc always carried postcards of his strobe light photographs in his shirt pocket and a small camera when we were driving around. When he would see a child, or maybe a group of children beside the road or in a schoolyard, he would ask me to pull over, he’d hand me the camera, and he’d get out and hand each of the children one of his postcards. It was my job to snap a picture that captured the moment of wonder on a child’s face, making sure I had Doc’s grandfatherly smile in the background.

Aboard ship Doc was an energetic inspiration. Every morning, before the sun was up, he came through the boat, shaking shoulders and nudging feet, saying loudly, “Wake up! Time to get going. Daylight’s wasting. If you don’t wake up every morning excited to face the day, then you’re just wasting time.” He would already have coffee made and was ready to get to work.

Doc taught me how to use side-scanning and mud-penetrating sonar and how to interpret the tracings, and he taught me the calculus behind the side-scanning sonar array, which was an eye-opener to me. It got me thinking I really needed to get going on my formal education. And after he left at the end of the summer I realized I had made my decision. I would study anthropology in the American form, which included archaeology.

So in December I showed up in Cambridge and walked into Docs office at MIT. I threw back my shoulders and announced, “Doc, I’m ready to join up. I’m ready to start university!”

He kind of smiled and said, “Have you thought about where you want to go? Do you want to go here, or maybe Harvard, or somewhere else?”

I said, “Boston University has an excellent anthropology department. I was thinking there.”

He quietly took a piece of paper out of his desk drawer and wrote a note, handed it to me, and said, “Then take this across the river.” I did, straight into BU’s admission’s office, and I started classes the next month. Do you know what amazes me to this day when I think back to that moment? It’s that I passed up a chance to go to Harvard!

Two years later, after I had dreamed up and worked hard to get the universities around Boston to give college credit for SEA’s sail training and oceanography experience, which we named the SEA Semester, I was at a dinner celebrating the success of the program and was sitting next to Bradley Richardson, the director of Harvard undergraduate admissions. After a few glasses of wine he leaned over to me and said, “Brad, I know BU’s a fine school and all, but, tell me, why isn’t a bright guy like you at Harvard?”

I nearly chocked and then laughed out loud. I’ve got to go back a bit, to the January, 1971. I had just quit my job in New York and had taken a ski holiday to Stowe before I was going to head off to Europe. A gift from my father for Christmas and my 18^th birthday, even if he was still angry that I wasn’t going to college. To appease him, I had applied to Harvard, more as a gesture than anything else, but I’ll also admit I was beginning to get a little nervous about the draft. I had no student deferment and it was now my draft year. I was going to stop off in Boston on my way back from Stowe for my Harvard interview. Good plan, but it didn’t anticipate me having a horrible crash on a double black diamond trail, being removed from the mountain by toboggan, being put in a hip-to-toe cast for all the bones I had broken and soft tissue I had torn, being dosed up with oxycodone for the first time in my life, having a big glass of wine with all the other guests at our ski lodge to toast my marvelous ineptitude, having no idea what happens when you mix alcohol and oxycodone, setting off for Boston at nightfall, ending up in the Dartmouth University hospital at two in the morning having my stomach pumped, and stumbling into the office of Bradley Richardson, the director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, at 8 AM in the morning, disheveled, reeking, drugged, unsteady on my new crutches, unable to sit because of the hip cast, and still wearing ski clothes with one leg cut off. I thought I would at least get some credit for showing up! I didn’t. It was a short interview.

So, back at the Sea Semester dinner, I said, “Mr. Richardson, you don’t remember the first time we met, do you?” I told him, and we had a good laugh and another glass of wine.

Doc became my mentor and counselor. He used some magic to create a collegium for me, an arrangement by which I could take any course I wished at BU, Harvard, MIT, and Northeastern, a privilege I used and for which I was enormously grateful.

I had to earn money for housing and food when I was in college. After my freshman year I moved up to Rockport on Cape Ann, bought a lobster boat, and became a commercial lobsterman. Today I can’t even imagine having the energy I did back then. I was out on the water by 4 AM, pulled a hundred traps, fell onto the train, slept all the way to North Station, and took the Green Line to BU in time for a nine o’clock class. I’d study in the library until I had to leave to catch the last train home, sleep all the way, which was OK, because Rockport was the last stop, walk up the hill to my house, and start the whole think over again four hours later. I didn’t fish year-round. I’d start as soon as the weather allowed in the spring, lay-up the boat when I headed to wherever I was going to excavate that summer, then I’d get my traps back out in the fall and fish as late into December as I could. There is a whole story behind why I decided to do this and how I was able to become accepted into a New England lobster fishing community as a complete outsider. I’ll save it for another time.

I mention all this because Doc was constantly making small improvements to his sonar and he would bring new gear up to Rockport and we would take it out on my lobster boat for a test. His wife would make bologna and Velveeta sandwiches and send along a few bottles of Coke, and we would cruise Sandy Bay with the sonar pinging away. Those were good days.

There hadn’t been many times I’d been able to do something for my father he could really appreciate. My father and I eventually reconciled our differences and I was able to invite him to come up and visit me in Rockport. I think he liked coming fishing with me and seeing the life I had made for myself. But what I think made him especially happy was when I took him to Cambridge for lunch with Doc. It was a moment of closure for him and I’m glad I could make it happen.

Fifteen years later, in 1990, I was in my office in Washington late one January afternoon watching the news on television when it was announced that Doc had died suddenly, while having lunch with a group of his students in the student union dining hall, the same place where he had had lunch with my father and me. It is one of only three times in my life I can remember spontaneously breaking out in tears on learning of someone’s passing. Twenty-six years after that, while taking my older son Skylar on a tour of eastern colleges, I found myself standing in the hallway outside what had once been Doc’s office and laboratory. it’s still called ‘Strobe Alley’, and the walls are decorated with Doc’s strobe-light photographs. There are several kiosk-like demonstrations of strobe-light stop motion. You press a button and streams of fluorescing green liquid strike each other or splash into bowls. Strobe lights reveal the streams are actually pulses of droplets that appear to stand still, and by turning a knob that adjusts the flash rate, you can make the droplets slowly advance or retreat, making it appear the streams are flowing back towards the nozzle. But the most interesting thing is watching the streams collide because you can examine the splash of the impact as it appears motionless. Sky was playing with the demonstration when he looked up and asked why I had tears streaming down my face. I explained that the last time I had stood in this same spot, fiddling with the same apparatus, was with my father and Doc Edgerton, forty-one years earlier.

There’s another little story that isn’t long enough by itself for its own post, and it seems to fit in with these thoughts on father figures and how sons and students strive to please them.

There is only one thing my father ever asked me for directly. When I was leaving for Europe the first time with the plan to make my way to Greece and find a marine archaeologist to work for, he said he had always wanted a bronze hard-hat diving helmet, and that if I ever should chance upon one, would I try and get it for him.

Well, after our expedition to Thira that summer, which I’ll tell you about in another post, I spent a month on the island of Kalymnos working with Peter Throckmorton’s wife Joan to document the last sponge diving fleet in the Aegean. Her job was to interview the divers and their families and mine was to hang out in the shipyard and photograph the shipwrights at work and to generally document the sponge divers’ life on the island. Some days I went along with Joan and photographed documents, ship models, paintings, portraits, and other artifacts of the sponge divers’ families. On one of those days I was photographing a gallery of paintings of boats owned by many generations of one family. An old widow was rummaging around in a closet looking for another painting and I caught a glimpse of shiny yellow metal peeking out of the top of a gunny sack. I asked her what it was, and she said, “Oh, that’s my husband’s helmet. He died in it and no one else wants to use it, so it just sits there.”

I asked why she held on to it, and she just gave me a sad shrug. I looked it over and it was in perfect usable condition. We settled on a price of 135 dollars, payable in drachmas.

Getting it home was a bit of a farce. when I finally left Greece, I drove my car back to Amsterdam and flew out of Schiphol for Baltimore. I sure as hell wasn’t going to check the helmet as luggage, so I claimed it was a hat, and wore it onto my Pan Am flight. The stewardess balked and we argued for a while until the flight engineer came back to see what was going on. He appreciated my dilemma, and the helmet rode across the Atlantic strapped into the empty second engineer’s seat up in the cockpit. Those were the days when airlines tried to make passengers happy!

It felt good when I presented my father with an 1861 Siebe Gorman bronze diving helmet, the one and only thing he had ever asked me for. It stood on a pedestal in his library for the next decade, until an electrical spark in a junction box buried in a wall started a fire in the middle of the night that destroyed his home. The fire was hot enough to melt the solder holding the neck-ring bolts in place and about half were lost. The glass in all the viewports cracked, and the bronze shell itself softened and warped, but just a little. Today is sits in a corner of my living room, part of our family history.

There is an island in the Aegean, about sixty miles north of Crete, called Santorini by most people, but called Thira by the Greeks. It had an even older name in antiquity, Strongili, which means round island. If you have visited Santorini, you know it is crescent shaped. That’s because around 1600 BC the island exploded in a volcanic eruption geologists peg at ten times stronger than the eruption of Krakatoa. The amount of ash thrown up into the atmosphere had a global impact on climate for decades. The ash that fell to ground all over the world provides an absolute chronological reference point for the date. The empty caldera stood suspended over an immense void for another century before collapsing under its own weight, sending a tsunami across the Mediterranean that changed the face of civilization, wiping out the inhabitants of the island and destroying the Minoan palace of Knossos on Crete, ending the dominance of Minoan civilization in the Aegean. Some say the ensuing flood is the seed of truth at the heart of the great flood in the book of Genesis. Archaeologists and sensationalists both wonder if the Minoan city on the island was Plato’s Atlantis.

What we do know is that a farmer noticed some building foundations in his field that had been exposed during a rare rainstorm. He reported them to the authorities and the next thing he knew, he had been thrown off his land and given a crummy Russian car to drive around as a taxi while Spiros Marinatos, the Greek Minister of Antiquities, reported to the world that the location of an ancient Minoan city on Santorini had been revealed to him in a dream, and that he was going to personally lead the excavations at Akrotiri. No! wait a minute! That’s not the official story. But it is what the taxi driver told me and he was backed up by his mother, uncles, and cousins when I went there in 1971 as part of Peter Throckmorton’s team to conduct an underwater archaeological survey of the waters surrounding the island. But it was complicated.

Marinatos wanted Throckmorton to do an underwater survey, but he didn’t want to pay for it. The Greek islands then, and maybe still today for all I know, were more like feudal societies with the Lord of the Island owning most of the land and having nearly complete political and economic control over every aspect of island life. On Thira, and I think I’ll call it that from now on, the hereditary power was held by the Nomikos family, who were also the third largest of the Greek shipping dynasties, after Onassis and Niarchos, and therefore very wealthy. The current head of the family, Petros Nomikos, wanted an underwater geological survey done of the island but was having difficulty finding someone qualified to do it, so he made a deal with Marinatos. He would fund the archaeological survey if we first completed his geological survey.

After we had arrived on the island by ferry and settled into a house Nomikos had provided near Akrotiri, we were invited to dinner at the Nomikos villa in the island’s main town, Fira.

Petros was a pretty smart guy. He had a Bachelor’s degree from a German university and a Harvard MBA. It was no wonder his family business was so successful. And while he spent much of his time running his shipping empire out of Piraeus, his heart and true home was still the island of Thira. Once we were seated at his massive dining room table in the luxurious surroundings of his villa, he poured us all wine from his vineyards and began a long and increasingly fascinating tale of why he wanted an underwater geological survey of the island’s surrounds.

His story began with a 1961 earthquake that sealed off the aquifer that supplied the island with all its fresh water. There had been a devastating earthquake in 1956, and while the 1961 quake wasn’t as severe, the loss of the island’s water was a huge economic blow. The island population had plummeted after the 1956 quake, and fell even further after the water disappeared, from about ten thousand in 1956 to around 1,500 by the time we arrived in 1971. I just checked, and the island’s permanent population is still around 1,500.

Nomikos wanted to save his island and stabilize its economy. The first thing he did was build a fleet of three ocean-going tugs to haul 100-meter-long rubber tubes of fresh water from the nearby island of Paros. The full bladders undulated along the surface as they were being towed and looked like sea serpents, so Nomikos named the tugs Drakon 1, 2, and 3. A fleet of Dragons! It was expensive. Very expensive. But at least there would be enough water to survive.

Next, he turned his attention to finding cash crops that could survive on the island’s almost non-existent rain. Luckily, there was usually a heavy morning dew. It was enough to sustain the vineyards in good years and they could get by with a little extra water in the difficult years. The challenge was to find other, more profitable crops that could do the same.

Nomikos believed in the superiority of German engineers and scientists, so he hired a team of German botanists to come and research suitable crops. After two years of work and at great expense, they recommended planting pistachio trees and building an export business for their nuts. Experiments had shown that pistachio trees would survive the harsh island climate up to the extreme of the theoretical hundred-year drought.

Nomikos build and populated a tree nursery and reached out to farmers all over the island. Plow under your vineyards, he said, and I will lend you pistachio saplings to plant instead. You will have better lives, he promised. It was Nomikos asking. He had been educated in Germany and at Harvard. Many of the islands farmers made what must have been an incredibly difficult choice to break with tradition that was older than the island’s recorded history and planted pistachio trees, and they did it just before the theoretical 100-year draught become a reality. All the pistachio trees died. The grape vines that had survived on the island for millennia endured.

Nomikos is not a man to give up. He knew that other islands had developed successful craft industries from local resources and he knew there was a breed of sheep on the island that was almost indestructible. I thrived on the island scrub and endured its hot summers. Nomikos had a vision of women all over the island knitting and weaving clothing and tapestries from their wool. But there was a problem. The native breed’s wool was for shit. It was short, tight, course, and wiry. You couldn’t make anything out of it.

So what did he do? He hired a team of German animal husbandry experts to develop a hybrid between the native sheep and the Swiss Marino sheep, who have the most marvelous wool in the world. He built a large, air conditioned barn for his breeding stock of Marinos, because the island heat would kill them otherwise. They couldn’t survive on the island scrub, so he had rich, green alfalfa flown in by helicopter from the mainland every week. And they succeeded! Well, almost. They did produce a hybrid. Problem was it had the fleece of the native sheep and the stomach of the Swiss sheep. Useless. The entire output of the experiment was a single pull-over sweater which had been lost by the time we arrived. I do at least hope there had been some good mutton stews.

Undeterred, Nomikos turned his attention to the island’s geological resources. Thira is a volcano. The igneous rock is rich in iron, and the island has some black beaches because of it, but not so rich as to be worth mining the sands. The island is also buried under massive amounts of volcanic ash, only a few meters thick in some places, and a kilometer thick in others. This “Tuff” as it’s called, is a valuable resource. There is a steady demand for it in making fertilizer and building insulation. But through some long-standing business arrangement with strong political and legal overtones that were not fully explained to us, the island did not derive a single drachma of benefit from the tuff mining operation.

It was fascinating to watch in action though. Bulk cargo ships would pull up to the base of the cliff inside the volcano’s caldera; panels and chutes were attached to the cliff face to direct the ash into the ship’s open cargo holds. Then dynamite charges were set off and an avalanche of tuff would tumble down the cliff face straight into the ship’s holds. All to no benefit of the island or its population.

So what did Nomikos do? He hired a team of German geologists to scour the island for any other commercial mineral resources.

It’s odd because for the first time since the German occupation of the island during the war, Germans were allowed to see the hidden base of the island’s resistance fighters. There were tunnels and chambers carved out of the ash throughout the cliff face and under the town of Fira, and the main entrance to this labyrinth was in the Nomikos winery, adjacent to the villa. One of the giant oak wine casks is actually fake. The face swings open to reveal the entrance to a tunnel and a stairway descending into the depths of the ash.

Nomikos was concerned the geologists might be mistaken for treasure hunters as they dug for geological samples around the island. Since Britain’s Lord Elgin stole the stone carvings off the Acropolis frieze and shipped them off to England, there has been a high degree of paranoia throughout Greece when it comes to foreigners digging up and slinking away with their ancient artifacts and architectural wealth. They have good reason. There has always been and continues to be looting of artifacts throughout the Mediterranean, middle east, Asia, and south and north America for that matter. These treasures are in high demand.

Nomikos decided to hide the geologists from view as much as possible, so he had them set up their analytical laboratory in the underground tunnels. We were given a tour after our dinner. It was surreal. The steep staircase descending from the wine vat eventually leveled out and led to a large and well-lit chamber that looked like the set of a James Bond film. There was all the laboratory glassware you would expect to see as well as an atomic absorption spectrophotometer, rock grinders, polishers, an X-ray spectrophotometer, and other things I couldn’t identify. A shelving system along one wall held the specimens. More tunnels ran off in different directions, and I was told one of them descended all the way down the caldera to sea level.

I was eighteen years old and wanted to run off and explore every inch of the maze! But I was there representing Throckmorton, so I just enjoyed the moment and restrained myself.

After two years work the geologists, standing there in their white coats deep in the bowels of the island, told us they had come up with zilch. Nothing at all. The lead geologist was no longer there, It seems he had taken a fall from a high place and landed on his head, killing him.

Which brings me to why we were there. Nomikos was running out of options. His last hope was that there might be a near-shore or off-shore mineral resource of commercial value. Our job was to collect rock samples in a grid pattern in the shallower waters around the island, nothing deeper than 250 feet.

250 feet! All we had was air, not mixed gasses! I ended up being convinced we could do it. There would only be a few bounce dives inside the caldera to that depth. We would follow a shot-line straight to the bottom, fill a basket at the end of the line with everything we could grab in five minutes, then come up with decompression stops.

Nomikos loaned us Drakon 1 for a dive boat and had shipped Throckmorton’s recompression chamber from mothball storage in Piraeus. We secured the chamber to the after deck of the Drakon. I was not reassured when we ran recompression drills. The main hatch’s O-ring was cut through and nothing we tried to join the two ends held under pressure. And one of the high-pressure hoses kept blowing off its fittings. We had no spares for either. So of course, we started the expedition with the deep dives!

If I have any criticism of Throckmorton after all these years it would be that he shouldn’t have begun the survey until these problems were fixed. But we never needed the chamber. We completed the deep dives without incident, other than the uncomfortably hot water at the bottom of the caldera and the constant bashing of heads against floating boulders of tuff on the surface, so the issue was forgotten. Except by me. Probably why Bass was so annoyed with me three years later when we were in Bodrum gearing up for Yassi Ada when, after painting the recompression chamber inside and out, I kept insisting I could smell paint vapors inside. I have exceptional vision, hearing, and smell, and I sure wasn’t going to let anyone get pressurized in a chamber with enamel paint fumes without putting up a fight. The difference is that Bass listened, in spite of the inconvenience. We put fans and a dehumidifier inside the chamber and ran them until even I couldn’t smell anything, long after everyone else swore they couldn’t detect any more fumes. Safety always came first with George Bass.

We spent a week collecting samples from our grid and the lab was busy processing them, and when we were done and started reconfiguring for our archaeological survey, we heard from Nomikos that our efforts hadn’t produced any fruit – no new discoveries from the samples. He wanted us to try one more thing, then we were free to devote ourselves to archaeology. There was a submerged volcano about thirty miles to the north, the Colombo Sea Mount, and he wanted us to collect samples from the ejecta surrounding the mount.

The wind was up and the sea was rough when we set out the next morning, and without a water bladder in tow, the Drakon was an uncomfortable ride, wallowing around like a cork adrift. Everyone on board, crew and divers alike, were seasick by the time we reached the mount. I was part of the first team down, and my partner was Ian Smyth, an RAF pilot and experienced diver. We were vomiting over the rail even as we assembled our gear and suited up. Both of knew we’d settle down once we were below the surface in still water.

Our normal protocol was to check our own gear and then to check our partner’s. The deck was heaving and we agreed to skip the second part. We ran a staggered dive plan. Ian want down first. He would check the set of the anchor, then get the lay of the land. I would join him five minutes later and we would begin collecting samples. He would be relieved by the first diver of the next team five minutes before I would be relieved. This overlap gave a member of each team a few minutes topside to talk and pass on information about the work.

So I waited five minutes and went over the side. Once I was about twenty feet down I started feeling better. The water was crystal clear and I could see the volcano. It looked like a child’s drawing of a volcano, a perfect cone with steep sides, like an ice cream sugar cone turned upside down, its sides disappearing into the depths. The top of the cone was flattened, a plateau ninety feet beneath the surface and about sixty feet across, with the Drakon’s anchor resting pretty much dead center. The only thing I didn’t see was Ian.

I followed the anchor line and touched down on the plateau, searching in every direction. Finally, I saw a stream of bubbles coming up from the south side of the plateau and swam over, noticing as I did a current going my direction getting stronger. It had become very strong by the time I reached the edge and I had to hold on to a boulder to keep from being swept away as I peered over the rim. Ian was about thirty feet below me, climbing hand-over hand up the side of the cone and struggling against the current. And then his bubbles stopped. I let go and the current dragged me down to his level and I managed to stick my hand into a hole and stop my descent. Ian took my regulator for a breath of air and we climbed the rest of the way to the plateau together, sharing the air in my tank, until we were free of the current and able to swim to the anchor line and return to the surface.

Back on the boat Ian said he had run out of air about five minutes into the dive, just, I suppose, as I was going over the side. Ian wore a Bouee Fenzy buoyancy vest, a new invention in 1971, and it carried a small air bottle of its own to adjust a diver’s buoyancy, or to completely inflate the vest or, and this is how Ian had used it, as a very short duration emergency diver’s air supply. He had just exhausted the air in the tiny bottle when I found him.

We went over his gear again, and discovered he had no O-ring in his tank-to-regulator connection. His air had simply purged itself and he had been too seasick to notice. That’s what can happen when you’re seasick. That’s what can happen when you break safety protocol. I should have checked his gear too. I was as much to blame as he was.

The buoyancy compensating vest, or BC, was a new gadget back then. I usually stayed away from new gadgets, thinking them just one more thing to go wrong, because out on the water, the things man makes always break, and I wanted to be dependent on as few high-tech pieces of gear as possible. But Ian’s experience that day made me a convert, and I’ve never dived without one since.

The seas calmed down and we resumed our dives. Ian and I made a second dive around noon and we were learning many interesting things about the Colombo sea mount. It was riddled with lava tubes that had both weak and strong currents flowing into and out of them. Ian and I had been caught up in one of the strong currents flowing down from the rim and into a tube that could have swallowed us forever.

The other amazing thing about the volcano was that just about every large lava tube had a giant grouper living at its mouth. By giant, I mean five hundred to seven hundred pounds of fish! It’s extremely rare to see even a solitary grouper this size, and it was amazing to see dozens of them at a time.

A very interesting place, but, as it turned out, devoid of any commercial mineral value. Sorry Petros. The economy of the island of Santorini today is entirely dependent on its tourist trade. The demand for water has grown all over the Mediterranean and Paros is no longer able to spare the water Santorini needs, so Nomikos built a desalination plant out of necessity. Very expensive water. But still enough for the grapes, and the island has been experiencing a resurgence in its wine production. The wines of Santorini are well worth trying.

We got to work on our archaeological survey, digging a grid of holes through one to two meters of ash off the Akrotiri coast. We found evidence the ancient city extended at least half a kilometer farther out from the existing shoreline. One surprise was the discovery of the foot of a Minoan altar base resting on the bottom near the limit of the city’s extent offshore. It was little more than a heavily encrusted piece of marble, roughly bell shaped, about forty centimeters high and thirty centimeters wide. Easily identifiable by comparison to similar artifacts on Crete, and nothing too special or valuable. Our permit required us to turn over all artifacts to the local police station the same day we recovered them.

But there was a problem. The local police station was closed by the time we quit for the day and tied up in port. Throckmorton decided to store the artifact in one of our rooms and then to take it straight to the police station when they opened in the morning. Not such a good idea. “Someone”, and there are eyes everywhere, someone saw us carrying “something” from the boat to our house. As luck would have it, Throckmorton had stashed the altar base in my room, and I was shocked awake in the middle of the night by the police barging through the door, flashlights in my face, handcuff on my wrists, and it was off to jail.

It took until noon the next day and the intervention of Nomikos to get me out. No apologies were offered but no one was angry with me; I was just a pawn in the game. Marinatos had used the opportunity to make the point that no foreigner, not even as famous as Throckmorton or Edgerton, was immune from the power of Marinatos and the military dictatorship.

It was a small thing. No real harm done. We got back to work and finished what we had come to do. On the day of our departure we waited in a café at the top of the cliff in Fira for the arrival of the Iraklion, the Nomikos-line ferry that would take us back to Piraeus, and when it was time, I settled in for the donkey ride down the trail to the bottom, looking forward to getting home. It wasn’t until an hour after we had sailed that I realized I had left my large-format camera, a Rollei SL-66, sitting on a table in the café.

I know, I know – it sounds crazy. But I had a lot of gear and, well, I messed up. I had to wait out the two-day trip hack to Piraeus, the four hours to refuel and take on new passengers and cargo, then the two day return trip before I could start the search for my prized camera.

I ran up the trail from the harbor. 850 feet up the face of the cliff. I was breathless when I stumbled into the café and wasn’t quite sure I was seeing things right. There, on the same table, four days after I had left them, were my camera and even my coffee cup, untouched.

No one messes with Nomikos or Marinatos. If I had suffered the backside of the hand of power with a night in jail, here was the power of both respect and fear working in my favor for a change. No moral here, just an observation.