I've been thinking about this incident a lot over the past few weeks since I've been cleaning out my dive locker and selling off a bunch of the gear. Please bear with me.
Seven years ago (tomorrow)... It was a Tuesday, I had just finished finals a few days before at Santa Fe, and was getting ready to take a few days of rest and relaxation because working full time while taking three classes during the spring semester at Santa Fe had killed me.
My friend, and frequent dive buddy, Jesse Armantrout called my cell phone; I remember the call vividly. I was standing outside of Grinter Hall on the UF campus, right by the little wall surrounding the alligator.
"What do you think about Berman?"
The Berman that Jesse referred to was Steve Berman. One of the most experienced divers and nicest guys I had ever known.
There was (and probably still is) a lot of ego and politics in cave diving circles, with factions constantly arguing. Sometimes the politics got contentious to the point where people would shout at each other in the middle of workshops and conferences.
However, Berman was one of those rare individuals who was able to transcend and rise above the negative discourse and was well liked and respected by everyone in the cave diving community.
"Berman? Well, he's sort of short with curly hair and a great sense of humor," I said.
While I didn't know Stevie as well as I would have liked, we stayed in regular contact and had made plans a week earlier to go dive Die Polders around the time of the NSS-CDS workshop at the end of May.
Armantrout used to call me regularly to talk about things, so I just figured he wanted my opinion on Steve to bring him in on some special project he was cooking up. There was no way I could have ever imagined the words which were to come from Jesse's mouth.
"He's dead."
Those words hit me like a ton of bricks. I remember I had to sit down on the wall as my head spun out of control. How could this be??? Berman was one of the most experienced cave divers that ever graced the planet. He was like a fish in water. Experienced cave divers were not supposed to die!
"What???? Where?" is all I could mutter.
"Ginnie springs, last night."
This made absolutely no sense to me. Up until recently, Berman had worked at Ginnie Springs for over fifteen years. He probably had literally over a thousand dives in the cave system at Ginnie. In my mind, this would be like getting run over by a truck while sitting in your lazy boy at home.
However, Steve broke a cardinal rule and in an effort to try and finish his map of the Devils Ear cave system to collect the last of the survey data. Sure, he may have done a bunch dives in the devils ear, but this one cost him his life.
Seven years ago today we all lost a good friend. Steve, you're missed.
http://www.sptimes.com/News/052401/F...he_Devil.shtml
