Depth Perception
The interview was almost an hour long and it was a pain to transcribe, but I thought I got some pretty decent sound bites out of it. Unfortunately, due to space constraints, I ended up having to slash more than half of it off to fit. Here’s what I originally wanted to include. – CL
It was Don Walsh’s dream to fly a plane for the Navy, but after the academy told him his eyes weren’t good enough for the air, he went in the opposite direction – thousands of leagues below the sea.
He and fellow oceanographer Jacques Piccard later went on to become the first two people to reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest point on Earth’s surface. He was recently in town to open the Rolex Deepsea Challenge exhibition, which pays tribute to his expedition in 1960, as well as director and explorer James Cameron’s solo dive to the Trench last year.
The 81-year-old still runs a marine consulting business, and has no immediate plans to stop exploring the depths. He takes some time to share the experiences that have kept his spirit of adventure alive.
- I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and I used to watch ships along the Golden Gate, before the bridge was built. Because of the curvature of the horizon it looked like the ships were sinking, and that’s when I started to wonder what was out there.
- I joined the navy in 1948 as an air crewman for torpedo bombers. I wanted to fly an aircraft but my eyes weren’t good enough, so I went in the other direction: submarines. That’s how I eventually got into deep-sea exploration.
- Prior to the Mariana Trench dive we had been doing increasingly deeper test dives for five months to prepare for it. So by the time we were doing the actual descent, I just thought of it as another day at the office.
- When we reached the bottom we stirred up a lot of really fine sediment. It was like being in a bottle of milk. We couldn’t see anything. Visibility didn’t improve after 20 minutes so we had to make our way back as we were losing daylight.
- There was actually a loud bang at about 31,000 ft that shook the whole bathyscaphe. We didn’t know what it was and everything seemed normal. Since we were still alive we decided to continue. We later realised a window had broken. It wasn’t hazardous, but it would have taken them a long time to get us out because they had to drain the water first. Fortunately Jacques had a nice supply of Nestle candy bars. I had Hershey’s bars since I’m American.
- Fear can be very enervating and you can end up losing your edge. I mean you can drown in your bathtub, so the idea of being scared depends on your level of alertness. In a submarine, you just have to learn what noises are normal and which aren’t, what things could break and how to fix them. Always test, repair and improve.
- My friendship with Jacques was very proper at first. He wasn’t a very gregarious person but over the years we became fast friends. He was never hostile, just hard to know. He passed away in 2009 but his children and I are still close. They still think of me as “Uncle Don”.
- Jacques and I bet that the next manned expedition down to the Trench would be in two years. We were wrong by half a century.
- Last year I was in 23 countries, flew 100,000 miles and was at sea for 16 weeks. My wife says I should start acting my age.
- While I was still in the Navy I was sent to Houston to see what NASA was up to since I had an engineering background. That’s when I decided I also wanted to be an astronaut as well as an oceanographer, but my eyesight didn’t make the cut then, too. Maybe in the next life.
- We’re all born with the exploration gene, and you can see it in babies and toddlers. But later on, thanks to hormones or peer pressure, it gets beat out of so many kids. I define exploration as curiosity that’s acted upon, so keep it alive. It might return.
- Actually I’d like to come back as a seagull in my next life and get back at the people I didn’t like.
- Jim (James Cameron) and I first met when he was consulting me for “The Abyss” so we’ve been acquainted a long time, and he’s a top-notch engineer and explorer. I was the last person he spoke to before they closed the hatch for his dive, and I wished him luck and to have fun. I was also the first person to greet him when he returned and I said to him, “Welcome to the club. There’s just two of us now.”
B-Sides 