or the buzos of the Mosquito Coast, who routinely make 15 or 20 dives a day, the cost of the lobster industry is most starkly manifest in what they call the golpe. Until recently, most Miskitos took this to be a form of divine vengeance meted out by the Mermaid, a.k.a. Liwa Mairin, the goddess of the sea. Liwa was said to strike down buzos who took too many lobsters, as commercial divers routinely do. Recently, however, while not renouncing Liwa's mystical and moral powers, divers have come to call the golpe by more scientific names -- decompression sickness (DCS), caisson disease -- or simply the bends.
DCS is a modern malady, largely unknown before humans devised methods to breathe underwater via artificial means. Due to increased pressure below the surface of the sea, air in a submerged body becomes compressed. When a diver ascends, the denser air begins to expand, forming bubbles in the bloodstream. If a diver surfaces too quickly, or goes down too deep or too often, these nitrogen-rich bubbles can block capillaries, cutting off oxygen to the brain and leading to tissue damage, paralysis, or death.
In an unregulated, high-volume situation like the Honduran-Nicaraguan lobster industry, DCS can reach epidemic proportions. According to a 1999 World Bank report, "close to 100 percent of divers show symptoms of neurological damage -- presumably due to inadequate decompression." Over the past decade, local sources say, more than 800 of the 2,500 divers in Sandy Bay (a Honduran Miskito town north of Puerto Cabezas) have died or suffered serious injuries.
None of this is news to Bob Izdepski, who has spent the better part of a decade watching processions like the one at the Puerto Cabezas pier. "It is like watching a plague...thousands of men lined up to get on boats to be paralyzed or killed," says Izdepski in his signature rolling drawl as he stands by the pier's rusting gate, watching the buzos prepare to board another boat.
The Miskito engagement with deepwater doom has become something of an obsession for Izdepski, who admits to "a kind of intricate relationship between the twin poles of life and death." Izdepski spent 30 years as a commercial diver working on oil rigs as much as 500 feet below the surface (one of the most dangerous jobs in the world), while still retaining enough hope in the future to raise a family of eight kids. Indeed, it is this interplay between life and death that has always attracted Bob Izdepski to the Mosquito Coast, because, as he says, "those things are so close together down here."
Izdepski, 53, first became aware of what he calls "the La Miskitia disaster" in 1986. "I was hanging around Sabine Pass on the Louisiana-Texas border, working as an oil rig diver," says Izdepski, describing himself at the time as "a semi-redneck soldier of dis-fortune and former acidhead." It was then, he says, "I ran into a man with a cracked leather face and iceberg eyes who told me any white man with half a brain could get rich in the Central American lobster business. He said, `You can buy these Indian divers for five or ten bucks a day, and when they quit or get bent that's no problem, because there's always plenty more where those guys came from.'"
Some years later, after founding the self-published Working Diver magazine, which promised "the bottom line in a very deep sea of ideas" and included columns entitled "Izdepski in Depth" and "Izdepski in Deeper," he visited the Mosquito Coast himself, finding conditions "worse, way worse, than I imagined." That was when Izdepski, usually known as Bob Iz, or simply, elementally, as Iz, says, "I had my epiphany. I understood that I was a diver, I made my living as a diver, that diving was my life- -- and what was going on in La Miskitia was the moral Armageddon of the diving world, a slow-motion underwater genocide. I stood on the beach and felt the blinding light of human obligation, as if the crosshairs of destiny had settled on my shoulders."
The way Iz describes it, this has become his life mission. "You see, there's no other way for them to make money down here. No agriculture, no industry. These guys aren't going to sign on at the 7-Eleven, drive a truck. Lobster diving is it. What they do is insane. They dive maybe 15, maybe 16 tanks every day for two weeks straight, when the U.S. Navy dive tables tell you two or three tanks a day is the safe limit. They go to absurd depths. Ten years ago you could find all the lobsters you wanted at 40, 50 feet. But they've fished out the shallows, picked the coast clean. Now you've got to go down 120, 130, even deeper to catch lobsters, and the deeper you go, the more chance of getting bent -- especially with that equipment.
"In the States, scuba tanks are inspected every year. I've never seen a Miskito tank, some of which are 20 years old, with an inspection sticker. No diver has a depth gauge or a pressure gauge. They don't know how deep they are or how much air they've got left in the tank.
"Let me tell you: I've been down there, and I know. When there's 150 feet of water between you and the surface and you suck on that hose and there's nothing there, that is a notable event. You can't hold your breath; that only makes it worse. The air you breathe, once your friend, is now your enemy. A beast is inside you, snaking around your heart and lungs, fitting you for a wheelchair or the graveyard.
"Down here they call lobster red gold," Iz says. "How many have been killed, how many societies wiped out, because of gold? And what for? Gold doesn't drive your car, it won't heat your house. So why? Because we want it. You, me, all of us. Lobster is like that. Lobster is special. It isn't a mayonnaise sandwich. When you're eating lobster you're a somebody. It is a fetish, like a Cadillac."
This is how it's always been, Iz says. The rich and would-be rich are consumption machines, and the poor are serfs combing the fields of dwindling plenty. It is a horrible cycle that will end in disaster, as sure as the last book in the Bible is Revelations. But if you really want to help, not simply be a windbag do-gooder, you have to focus, concentrate on accomplishing one small thing.
