Magnificent Desolation (31 page)

W
HEN IT CAME
to skiing, Lois could beat me hands down. Having never skied until I was in my fifties, I might not have had the most graceful style, but I picked it up relatively quickly. Lois was an excellent teacher, with her unmistakable quick-turning, deep-knee-bending style. We did most of our skiing in Sun Valley, where Lois had a home. I became familiar with the slopes, and with all of her ski buddies there. The year before Lois and I met, she had attended a gala celebrity event celebrating Sun Valley’s fiftieth anniversary. It was produced by Marjoe Gortner, a onetime child evangelist and movie star, now turned premier event producer. Supposedly named for Mary and Joseph by his minister parents, Marjoe could preach a sermon and quote scripture when he was only four years old. With his angelic yellow curls, he went on to pack revival tents throughout the South until he was seventeen.

Since 1987 he had devoted most of his time to producing several invitational celebrity sports events per year in locations such as Sun
Valley, Lake Louise, Cabo San Lucas, Hawaii, Jamaica, and other resorts. These events often brought together a diverse group of entertainment and sports celebrities to compete in ski races, target snow-golf, snowshoe races, tobogganing, and water sports, but the weekend always revolved around an auction that raised money for a charity.

Our team leaders were Winter Olympics stars, and at one such event I was expected to be one of the slalom racers. Spectators didn’t care whether I had ever been on skis before or not, they just loved to see the celebrities slipping and sliding and tumbling their way down the mountain. But, thanks to Lois giving me ski lessons that first Christmas we were together, I fooled them, and although I was older than most of the competitors, I held my own. I didn’t win any of the races, but I sure didn’t lose, and I rarely fell on my face.

I’
VE BEEN A
member of The Explorers Club for years, meeting and interacting with such world-class explorers as the Cousteaus, Sir Edmund Hillary, and many more. At one of the annual galas, Lois and I met Lady Alexandra Foley a woman who worked with RMS Titanic, Inc., the company that had been granted “salvor-in-possession rights” to the
Titanic.
They had the right to explore the wreck and surrounding ocean areas, to obtain oceanographic material and scientific data from the area, and to retrieve artifacts from the sunken ship. The RMS Titanic folks had arranged for two cruise ships, the
Royal Majesty
, which would depart from Boston, and the SS
Island Breeze
, embarking from New York in August 1996, to sail to the area above the wreckage. Among the 3,000 passengers aboard those two ships would be survivors from the
Titanic’s
maiden voyage in 1912, when, on April 14, it struck an iceberg and sank with the resultant loss of 1,522 lives.

More than eighty years later, passengers aboard the two ships would watch the live video feed on giant screens, as a tiny three-man titanium submersible, the
Nautile
, would descend to the
Titanic
to raise a section of the ship’s hull that was lying in the debris around the wreckage, and
explore the bow section of the ship for the first time. I was invited to be one of the three men to make the two and a half mile dive to the
Titanic.
At the time, I was in the midst of an international book tour, promoting
Encounter with Tiber
, so it probably took me at least half a second to accept that invitation to include the cruise itinerary in my tour and explore the
Titanic
!

Since
Encounter with Tiber
was released to rave reviews, I had been doing a whirlwind tour of the Planet Hollywood restaurants and entertainment complexes across the country. Arthur C. Clarke, the author of
2001: A Space Odyssey
, as well as many other works of science fiction, had started the buzz with his kind comments, lamenting facetiously that although I had written two nonfiction books, I was now moving into his territory. “It doesn’t seem fair,” Clarke wrote in the foreword to the book, “There was a time when we science fiction writers had Space all to ourselves and could do just what we liked with it. Not anymore…. People like Buzz have been there, and can tell us exactly where we went wrong. And now, to add insult to injury, they’re writing science fiction themselves. Even worse—it’s darn good science fiction.” I preferred the term “techno-thriller,” but I certainly appreciated such a glowing endorsement from one of the world’s best SF writers. We had begun negotiations with Paramount Pictures to do a miniseries based on the book. The script was snatched up by ABC Television. But Disney, ABC’s parent company, had already begun production on their
Mission to Mars
feature film and determined that the projects would be competing, so ultimately the
Tiber
series was tabled.

The RMS Titanic organizers planned several special events for Lois and me to meet our fellow passengers aboard the the
Royal Majesty
and
Island Breeze
, and to promote my new book. Then we rendezvoused with the utility ship carrying the
Nautile.
Looking at the tiny yellow submarine, it was almost impossible not to think of the Beatles song by that title. But the Beatles could not have imagined climbing into such a minisub and slowly descending through the darkness nearly three miles below the surface. The submersible was spherical, with small
portholes of glass on the left and right sides, built to withstand the enormous pressure of the water at such a depth. It was one of only a few submersibles in the world able to make such a dive.

The inside of the sub was extremely tight, even smaller than the command module
Columbia.
A claustrophobic person would not have lasted three minutes once the hatch was closed. To maneuver the sub, the pilot had to sit and work the controls, while his copilot and I had to lie flat on our stomachs on boards just off the floor to remain dry, due to the wet floor area. If nature called, we had a pail on the floor for collection purposes. It was not a luxurious ride.

My fellow divers were French, so they could speak a bit of broken English to me, but most of the communications with the surface were in French. Although I could probably order a decent meal in Paris, that was the extent of my French, so in addition to the odd feeling of dropping toward the ocean floor through darkness, I felt a bit at a loss to understand the instructions and conversations of my colleagues.

Meanwhile, a British film crew was making a documentary,
Explorers of the Titanic
, that they planned to air on the Discovery Channel. They had asked me to provide the audio commentary as the submersible made its way down to the
Titanic.
Visibility was extremely poor, perhaps less than 150 feet at best, so my live transmissions were rather limited until we got down to within 150 feet of the vessel. Even then, because of the depth, it was impossible to see far beyond whatever was immediately in front of us. But the television folks asked me to describe the lonely darkness on the bottom of the ocean as compared to what I had experienced on the moon. I gave it my best shot.

It took us more than an hour to descend to the
Titanic.
We were not attached to the ship above us by a tether, but moved under our own power as we dropped through the darkness. I was on the right of the pilot, with my face pressed against the porthole-type window, straining to see as we made our way down. I caught sight of the eerie remains of the sunken ship, like a ghost rising through the hazy darkness. The
Nautile’s
pilot eased the sub forward until it hovered just above the
Titanic
’
s
bow. We were 12,500 feet below the surface. I
grabbed a camera and started snapping pictures of what I thought was probably a place where passengers had once stood and looked out over the sea. The algae and other organisms covering the rusty bow gave it a strange whitish, surreal appearance, almost as though it were made of crusty gingerbread covered with frosting. We continued all the way down to the ocean floor. Color means nothing on the ocean’s bottom, since no sunlight ever makes it that far down. But in the lights from our submersible, I saw a sight almost as fascinating as the
Titanic
itself. Some pure white sea creatures that looked like a cross between a crab and a starfish were swimming all around the vessel. They had no eyes, which made sense to me, because there was no light to see anything by. In all my diving experience, I had never seen such unusual creatures.

The pilot maneuvered the submersible around the
Titanic
, searching for the items we hoped to raise. We were planning to float a fifteen-ton section of the
Titanic
’
s
hull to within 215 feet of the surface. We had six lift bags filled with diesel fuel, which we pulled to within 100 feet of the wreckage. Each of the bags was capable of lifting more than three tons of material. Diesel fuel does not compress under the water’s pressure, and is lighter than water, so ostensibly the lift bags would cause the
Titanic
’
s
hull to float. The
Nautile’s
pilot used the sub’s manipulator arms to connect the bags to the hull section with strong cables. But as we began to lift the hull, one of the cables connecting the lift bags snapped, and another would not release, causing the assembly to become unstable. We tried cutting the rope with a knife in the manipulator arm. But even though we cut the rope, nothing happened. One of the bags had somehow disengaged, so nothing we did was going to bring up the hull. The rough seas had caused the
Titanic
’
s
hull to sink into the ocean’s floor. We had already been down about nine hours, and still needed another hour to ascend to the surface. Although the mission itself was scrubbed, the experience for me was truly worthwhile. To have traveled to the moon, Earth’s new frontier, and to the ocean floor, Earth’s deepest frontier, in a span of less than thirty years, was an extraordinary pair of adventures.

I
N
1998, I traveled to the North Pole on the Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker
Sovetsky Soyuz
, on a trip scheduled by Quark Adventures, organized by The Explorers Club, and headed by Mike McDowell. My longtime friend and ABC network news personality Hugh Downs, and his wife, Ruth, were also aboard. Hugh had a film crew on the ship for the ABC television program
20/20.
I had asked Lois if she would like to accompany me to the North Pole, and she said, “No way, but you go and have a good time. Then you can come back and tell me all about it.” If Lois planned to be cold, she preferred to have skis attached to her feet. She didn’t relish the idea of spending a week on a Russian icebreaker. She did, however, find a camping store in Paris where she bought my French couture cold-weather red-orange mountaineering outfit. I felt very warm and quite fashionable—and later wore this same outfit for my “Final Frontiersman” photo shoot with photographer Annie Leibovitz for
Vanity Fair.

We flew to Murmansk, Russia, and from there it was a fascinating trip across the Arctic Ocean, slowly crunching our way through the thick ice as we moved northward. The nuclear vessel, with 75,000 horsepower, made the trip without a problem. My fellow passengers numbered about a hundred people from every continent, including a group of Japanese tourists who were among the first to own GPS devices and were constantly trying to figure out where we were. Everyone seemed to get along well, and except for comments about the cold, I got the sense they were inspired by the surroundings.

During the day as we traveled, the president of the Explorers Club presented lectures along the way. He had been a Navy captain who commanded submarines during the Cold War, and had charted the northern coast of Russia for American spy subs. Once he had actually surfaced a U.S. sub at the North Pole, bringing it up through a break in the ice.

I enjoyed the lectures, but I spent just as much time sketching out new rocket ideas on a
Sovetsky Soyuz
scratch pad. I knew that at some
point the U.S. space shuttle program would come to an end, and we would need some sort of program to get us back to the moon and on to Mars, so I constantly doodled ideas for new rocket designs. Perhaps because I was on a Russian ship, I thought a lot about the Soviet five-engine rockets, wondering how we might be able to adapt those ideas for American rockets. Some of the configurations I scribbled on those scratch pads later formed the basis of my StarBooster rockets, developed by the band of engineers at my rocket design company that I had formed a few years earlier.