or Iz this small thing has been setting up decompression chambers on the Mosquito Coast. Developed in its modern form in the late nineteenth century, the chamber, most typically a 12-foot-long metal capsule shaped like a septic tank, simulates underwater pressure, allowing the diver inside to be "brought to the surface" gradually. Time is key. The Navy recommends an interval of no more than five minutes between the time a bent diver surfaces and the time he enters the chamber. On the 300-mile-long Mosquito Coast, however, with perhaps three or four decompression facilities open at any one time, it can take a diver 72 hours, sometimes much longer, to get to a chamber, if he makes it there at all.

It was a chamber mission that summoned Iz to Puerto Cabezas this bright tropical morning. In 1995, as cofounder and president of SubOceanSafety (SOS), Iz brought the first decompression chamber to this bustling, ramshackle port city. In the five years it was in operation, more than 600 divers were treated, saving many from paralysis and worse. But now the machine, no longer functional, was rusting away in a tumbledown wharfside warehouse.

This was an unpleasant discovery, mostly because the chamber wasn't supposed to be in Puerto Cabezas at all but rather on Corn Island, more than 100 miles to the south. How a two-ton chamber could get misplaced was, in Iz's words,
"a f---ing complicated situation."

The basic facts are these: In 2002, with a second chamber ready to be installed at the Puerto Cabezas hospital, Iz decided to move his original machine to Corn Island, long a center of Miskito diving. This made sense, since there was no chamber on the island or in the nearby mainland town of Bluefields. Thousands of divers were going untreated. The problem was how to move the chamber, pay for repairs, and set it up in its new location.

Prospective help in this regard came from an unexpected source: Jorge Morgan, the dominant figure in southern Nicaragua's fishing industry. Encountering Iz in a Corn Island bar, Morgan, who is widely known as the Godfather, said it would be "no problem" to move the chamber. The Godfather said he would do this as a gesture of goodwill, owing to the many Miskito divers who had worked for him over the years.

This was great news, except for the fact that Iz did not quite believe Jorge Morgan. After all, Morgan -- a member of the dominant Creole minority and widely rumored to trace his roots back to Henry Morgan, the classic Pirate of the Caribbean -- was a longtime confidant of former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. Morgan had never been known as a friend of the Miskito diver. Many buzos had been hurt or killed while working his boats. However, Iz thought the old boss might want to make amends after so many years of exploitation. Perhaps Morgan was a man of honor after all.

It was on the strength of Morgan's pledge that Iz went to Corn Island. The idea was to inspect the chamber and see what was needed to make it operational. But Jorge Morgan had not made good on his promise. Encountered by Iz on the Corn Island airport tarmac, the Godfather, a physically imposing man of about 70 with café au lait skin and a pale yellow guayabera shirt, casually revealed that he'd never moved the chamber at all, that it was still in Puerto Cabezas. Not to worry, Morgan told the apoplectic Iz; everything is in place. The chamber would be moved, Morgan said, someday "soon."

This was a setback in several ways. First of all, Iz had believed Morgan, something he now allowed had been a grievous mistake. The man had given his word, Iz railed, more hurt than angry. He was a snake, a robber baron, unworthy of trust. Beyond that, Morgan's failure to deliver had placed SubOceanSafety in a bad light, since Iz had spent time pitching the Corn Island mayor and the town council on the benefits of decompression, trying to persuade them to place the machine in the local hospital. This seemed ridiculous now, the chamber not being on the island at all. Asked if perhaps it might have saved some trouble to call ahead, Iz frowned.

"Call ahead?" bristled the SubOceanSafety president, his eyes narrowing behind his sunglasses. Even in the backwater context of Nicaragua and Honduras, the Atlantic Coast was a world apart. There were no roads. Phone service was not reliable. Information could not be depended on. People told you whatever they thought you wished to hear. If you wanted to know anything, you had to see it with your own eyes.

Besides, it wasn't as if SubOceanSafety were one of those plush outfits whose minions spend their time writing up fancy foundation grants and riding around in $50,000 Toyota Land Cruisers. Iz didn't play that game, couldn't even if he wanted to. Ticked off that he has "never gotten the time of day from big-shot groups like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club" (despite the past presence on the SubOceanSafety board of respected people such as the well-known hyperbaric physician David Youngblood), Iz finds it next to impossible to operate any way but unaffiliated, under the radar.

Yet even the most pared-down assault on injustice requires cash, and that's tough for an unpaid moral activist with eight kids, living in a clapboard house with a flooded front yard in the funky section of Lacombe, a community on the north end of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway from New Orleans. Iz's travel expenses are often dependent on backyard welding jobs (the sign outside his house says, simply, "WELD") and Tom Sawyer-like cajoling of visiting writers to help paint the top of a neighbor's double-wide trailer to pick up a much-needed $250 the day before setting off on a critical mission. What is really needed in this particular ad hoc line of do-gooding is faith. And faith is something that Bob Izdepski, a grand, cockeyed kind of un-Ugly American, has in abundance.

So it was in an upbeat frame of mind that Iz arrived in Puerto Cabezas, several days after the Corn Island incident, to inspect the chamber Morgan was supposed to have moved. It turned out that a tropical storm had blown off the roof of the building, so the chamber, exposed to the elements, had acquired an unsightly coat of rust. But things could have been worse, Iz proclaimed after checking out the pressure gauges. With a little sanding and paint the chamber would be as good as new. This was no surprise, Iz said, since a decompression chamber was a simple device really. Useful for treating a variety of maladies, from burns to carbon monoxide poisoning, the chamber's basic function was to ensure life over death. Objects with such a singular purpose, like similarly unconflicted human beings, tend to be tough, difficult to discourage.

Now Iz was standing atop that unvanquished chamber, using it as a pulpit to rally the SubOceanSafety troops, which consisted of half a dozen Puerto Cabezas divers, two of whose lives had been saved within those very same steel walls, and the super-cool dude Juan Alejandro Samuel, a Miskito who holds down the Nicaraguan desk of SubOceanSafety, a movable sort of bureaucracy located wherever Samuel happens to be at the moment.

"We are on a mission from God," Iz declared, quoting a John Belushi line from The Blues Brothers, a favorite inspirational touchstone. "We will not be deterred. It is the pitfalls in a man's life which give him the impetus to move forward, to test his character," Iz preached with manic, Whitmanesque optimism.

"Brilliance is required, and brilliance will be supplied," he thundered. "When you are trying to do something good, things always work out. You don't have to be a saint. You can be a fool. It is a thin line between a hero and a clown. We are small, but moving under the cover of our own ineptitude, we will succeed!"