I was about two hundred feet underwater when I felt I had to force oxygen into my lungs, and I didn’t think I could hold my breath as I swam fast, but not too fast to the surface so I wouldn’t suffer what divers call “the bends”–decompression sickness. It was 1977, and I was diving at Cabo San Lucas, where the hotel staff would take any guests who signed up and hand over the cash. I wasn’t a rank amateur; I had never even dived before, but this snot-nose kid who talked my ear off while the boat took us to a shipwreck to swim around said he was a certified diver and to stay near him.
Normally, I would have shined him on and done my own thing, but as the hotel crew strapped the tanks on my back and gently shoved the regulator in my mouth, this foreign stuff made me feel like I had better hang out with someone with experience. I was two hundred feet down, when I grabbed the kid and gave him the universal sign for “No O2,” his eyes almost popped out of his sockets and rolled around the inside of his mask. After that, he quickly reached around me and twisted something, and I heard a hiss, followed by my lungs easily filling with oxygen—sweet, life-giving O my body can’t process through seawater.
BURGER SCOOT 
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