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  Mike Board squirmed with discomfort, recognizing Nick’s decision was a dangerous one. Instead of heading to the surface at the first sign of trouble, he was making the same mistake he’d made just two days before. Only this time he’d made a second questionable choice. According to footage of the dive, obtained by a GoPro camera mounted on the bottom plate adjusted to the diver’s goal depth, it appeared that Nick was having a hard time equalizing, so he reversed his body position, turned upright, and stayed at 68 meters for nearly thirty seconds. Anybody who has ever scuba dived, or simply kicked and dived down to a reef, knows the feeling of their head being squeezed in the vice grip of barometric pressure.

  Scuba divers equalize by pinching and then blowing through their nose. Freedivers, especially those attempting record depths, can’t equalize that way. Instead, as their lungs shrink due to increased pressure, they move air from their lungs into their mouth. During freefall, their job is to close off their throat and keep their cheeks inflated with that air, like a chipmunk with a mouthful of acorns, so they can funnel it into the sinuses through the soft palate to equalize along the way. It’s a delicate technique that can be hard to master and especially difficult to execute under the glaring lights of international competition, when divers often attempt depths they’ve never achieved before. It’s harder still if a diver is already injured.

  Yet with the clock ticking, in the midst of a record attempt, Nick managed to do it and began descending again, this time falling feet first. Within seconds, he was at the bottom plate, searching for the tag that would prove he made depth. Because of his reversed position and the pitch darkness of the hole, it took time to locate the plate, and he made subtle yet visible arm motions to tread water until he finally found it. In a flash, he ripped away one of the tags, secured it in his wetsuit, and rocketed toward the surface, swimming hard, and once again looking very much in control.

  That footage was not available in real time, so nobody on the surface knew what he was going through. Still, the vibe was uncomfortable if not eerie. “Diving to that depth with no fins, that’s a hard, physical dive,” said Mike. “I was thinking, ‘okay, he’s going to have a hard time getting up.’ ”

  Sam announced the time and depth as Nick rose, and was worried enough to address the safety team directly, something he had never done before. “You better be ready for this one,” he said.

  Defying the odds, Nick shot to the surface, under his own power, after a dive of three minutes and thirty-eight seconds, nearly a minute longer than planned. He flashed the okay sign and attempted to complete the surface protocol that would make his attempt official by saying the words, “I am okay.” Unfortunately, his words were garbled, and he never removed his nose clip. He’d fumbled the protocol so his dive was nullified, but he didn’t black out, at least not right away. For nearly a minute he clung to the line with both hands, still conscious, laboring to breathe, before falling back into Ren’s arms. Ren held him and called his name, hoping to keep him alert and connected to this world.

  Ren and Nick had trained together and even sailed together to Jamaica and Cuba on Ren’s boat, Nila Girl. Ren’s safety team, all of whom were certified in life-support techniques, closed in around him. They included an Australian paramedic, Joe Knight. Ren and Joe hefted Nick onto the nearby platform, where he faded into unconsciousness. Dr. Jeschke moved in to try and revive him. That’s when the scene turned nightmarish. “There’s a problem with his lung,” shouted Marco Consentino, one of the safety divers. The team turned Nick onto his side and blood seeped from his mouth, pooling on the platform before dissipating into the sea. Will jumped into the water and swam over to join the effort. Their attempts to revive their friend included three shots of adrenaline, but nothing worked.

  After about twenty minutes, Ren and the others transported Nick by bodyboard from the platform to the beach, and lifted him into a Honda station wagon, the event’s de facto ambulance. It was a ten-minute ride to the Vid Simms Memorial Health Centre, a rugged and remote 2,000-square-foot clinic founded by American missionaries and set on a promontory.

  With water-stained ceiling tiles and rusted air-conditioning vents, Long Island’s clinic is equipped to handle general illnesses and trauma common to the island’s 3,000 residents. It’s not the emergency room you’d hope for in a matter of life and death. By the time Nick arrived there, he had no vital signs, but his friends kept fighting for his life. Ren, Joe, Will, and Dr. Jeschke took turns continuing CPR, in the Honda and in the clinic, where they were joined by a local physician, Yvette Carter, who declared him dead at 1:44 p.m. According to AIDA (International Association for the Development of Apnea), the governing body of the sport, that’s when Nicholas Mevoli became the first athlete to die in an international freediving competition.

  Within minutes of his arrival at the clinic, athletes and their families began converging on the hilltop. A tight-knit group in the best of times, most sat on a patch of grass under a young jacaranda tree, the boiling sea visible in the distance. Some joined hands in prayer. Others embraced. A light rain fell. A rainbow bloomed.

  Ren emerged from the clinic, shirtless, his wetsuit dangling from his waist, and addressed the gathering. “We wish Nick luck in his new world,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. “He died doing what he loved to do, I know that.”

  “It’s an extreme sport,” Mike said, still mulling Nick’s crucial decision at 68 meters. “We all make split-second decisions, and sometimes we pay the consequences. But his will to get the job done and win is what made him such a great freediver.”

  It wasn’t just his competitive fire that was recalled in the aftermath. Others mentioned how the year before Nick eschewed a hotel or rental house to sleep in the rectory of a local Catholic church. He helped repair the roof of the church’s hurricane-damaged bazaar grounds, and ferried some of the island’s poor, elderly residents to the bank to cash their pension checks and then on to the store to buy groceries in the church pickup.

  “He was universally loved,” Grant Graves said.

  That point was underlined at around 3:30 p.m., when, after most of the competitors had filtered back toward their respective rental homes, Junko led a Japanese contingent to the clinic’s doorstep, flowers in hand. They asked to see Nick and pay their respects one last time. Ten people visited his remains, wrapped tightly in a pristine white sheet, his hands rested in prayer. One by one his fellow divers took turns whispering in his ear, sprinkling white blossoms on his heart, and softly sobbing into one another’s arms.

  In the days after his death, Nick Mevoli’s story went viral, and a niche sport’s tragedy became front-page news all over the world, sparking a public debate. Readers wondered why freedivers bother to do it at all. What could possibly be the draw to a sport where athletes plummet to the very edge and risk so much to achieve records in relative obscurity? What Nick’s critics couldn’t grasp is that it isn’t external glory these divers are after. The dive itself is the glory.

  “I really enjoy going on this journey where other people can’t go,” Mike said. “The feeling of being deep underwater, somewhere you’re not meant to be, and feeling this sort of mastery over your body and your mind and it being so peaceful. It’s a real achievement.”

  The way Mike and the others describe it, freediving is both an athletic quest to push the limits of the body and mind, and a spiritual experience. When they overcome their fears and surrender to the sea down deep, they become a speck of pure consciousness in a vast dark abyss. Time slows down, and the deeper they fall, the tighter the sea seems to squeeze, until they feel a merge, a total loss of I.

  Skeptics might consider such feelings to be rooted in a string of chemical reactions, where pressure exerted on the human body can compress organs and lead not only to nosebleeds, bloody tracheas, and hemorrhaged capillaries, but also to nitrogen narcosis, until the diver feels a throbbing euphoria that’s as close to an acid trip as it is enlightenment. But to freedivers that’s beside the po
int. They still need their fix, which is why Nick spent his life savings roaming the globe, from competition to competition, to dive ever deeper, to disappear into the darkness so he could see the light. But if all he and these other great athletes care about is the dive, if the results don’t matter as much as the feeling, why compete at all? And why didn’t Nick simply come up when he hesitated at 68 meters?

  Nick Mevoli’s death put an end to Vertical Blue 2013, and the next day a memorial was held. A crowd of eighty mourners, including all the competitors and several local residents who knew and loved him, gathered on the crescent white-sand beach on the edge of Dean’s Blue Hole. Some wore their Sunday finest. Others dressed in beach gear. Three women linked arms beneath a parasol. A Bahamian couple arrived and passed out wildflowers. One woman rested her bouquet against the heel of the craggy limestone cliff. The Shins crooned from the Vertical Blue PA system, but all other traces of the competition had been removed. The platform where Nick had been treated the day before was anchored down the beach, in postcard-perfect turquoise shallows that extended for half a mile. In contrast to those shallows all around, Dean’s Blue Hole looked a deep purple, ripe for a farewell dive.

  Reverend Carl Johnson, a pastor at nearby Millerton Seventh-Day Adventist Church, launched the ceremony with the story of Lazarus. “Life gives you these experiences that you think you’re ready for, but you’re not,” he said. Though he was referring to the emotional complexity of grief, he may as well have been referencing the death of Nicholas Mevoli and the sport of competitive freediving.

  In the wake of tragedy there remained a mystery. How did Nick die? This tight community of misfits, daredevils, yogis, and renegades had been rehashing the episode in small groups for twenty-four hours. Over a year later, their discussion would still be simmering.

  “It was an event we haven’t seen in freediving before,” Will Trubridge said after the memorial, “and until we know exactly what happened, there is no way of knowing if it’s some sort of freak occurrence or something that happened on the dive.”

  Most agreed that it was his decision at depth that was Nick’s undoing, yet some were beginning to come to grips with a haunting realization. Up until November 17, 2013, the freediving community would dismiss loss of consciousness, nosebleeds, and even lung squeezes as inconveniences. AIDA pointed to its spotless safety record in competition to prove the point. Nick’s was the first fatality in more than 35,000 competitive dives. Afterward, they were forced to admit that nobody could say for sure how repeated dives to superhuman depths impacted the body, especially the lungs. This wasn’t a matter of conflicting science; research was almost nonexistent. Once Nick died, the prevalence of lung squeezes became competitive freediving’s dirty open secret, and their root cause is linked to something all divers do, whether they admit it or not.

  Competitive freedivers dive for numbers. Top athletes often say that fixating on a number pulls their focus away from the feeling of the dive, and that the only way to dive deeper is to forget about the number they’re aiming for and stay with the feeling. Yet, there is no escaping the fact that when an athlete dives along a line, getting deeper is the intrinsic goal. Which is why at its core, freediving can be a mindfuck, a Zen koan, a shape-shifting riddle impossible to solve.

  Each time an athlete hits a new depth, he feels a new charge, a new pride. When he goes to bed that night, he revels in accomplishment, and when he wakes the next morning, he sets a new goal, a new depth—a new number. One he has a hard time letting go of until it’s in his rearview. That’s true for beginners, for competitors gunning for records, and it was especially true for Nick Mevoli. “We all know how he was,” Ren said. “He wanted it so bad that he hurt himself.”

  There is no doubt that Nick wanted numbers, but he didn’t use them to inflate his ego. He wasn’t the type to peacock and preen. He gave away the trophies and medals he’d won, not interested in them at all. His mother, uncle, and older sister, his closest loved ones, never even knew that he was the best American freediver of them all. So what was it that he wanted so badly? Who was Nicholas Mevoli, and what would happen to the sport he loved? Would top athletes begin to temper their ambitions, or would his death simply raise the stakes for those conditioned to push past their fears, right up to the edge of their mortality?

  At the memorial, Sam Trubridge read a poem sent by Nick’s mother, Belinda Rudzik. It was “A Song of Living” by American poet Amelia Josephine Burr.

  Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.

  I have sent up my gladness on wings, to be lost in the blue of the sky.

  I have run and leaped with the rain, I have taken the wind to my breast.

  My cheek like a drowsy child to the face of the earth I have pressed.

  Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.

  I have kissed young Love on the lips, I have heard his song to the end,

  I have struck my hand like a seal in the loyal hand of a friend.

  I have known the peace of heaven, the comfort of work done well.

  I have longed for death in the darkness and risen alive out of hell.

  Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.

  With that, everyone swam together to the edge of Dean’s Blue Hole and formed a circle. They tossed their flowers into the center, took a collective breath, and dove down to the underwater cliff’s edge. The divers, balletic and graceful as ever, swam through wild ginger blossoms and bougainvillea, past the sandfalls into deep darkness. When they surfaced, Grant huddled the group close.

  “When we have a new national or world record, the tradition is to splash the hell out of the diver. Let’s celebrate Nick’s life, like we celebrated his record in Honduras. Let’s splash it out for him.”

  Together the divers, consumed with sadness and anxiety, knowing their sport would never be the same, began beating and kicking the water in fury, in celebration, with release. There was laughter. There were tears. The hole foamed and frothed.

  It was another sunny Gulf Coast morning when Josephine Owsianik led her eighteen-month-old grandson, Nick, through the kitchen door and onto the pool deck, carrying an armful of laundry. It was one of those mornings that make anyone grateful to be alive, and to be alive in Florida. Josie was doubly blessed. Not only had she fled her frigid New Jersey neighborhood for a few weeks, she was with her toddling grandson, the light of her life.

  A long-legged New Jersey beauty in her day, Josie adored these quiet mornings with Nick when her daughter and son-in-law were at work and his older sister was at school. It was just the two of them. Unless she counted Smokey, the black-and-white cocker spaniel mix, who shadowed Nick everywhere, and Lion Bear, his other best friend. Wherever the boy went, that stuffed bear went too. Still new, it was already patched together, thanks to his habit of dragging it along the ground. It had a music box embedded in its fluff, so when he dropped it, she’d hear a lullaby. Words were just starting to come when Lion Bear first arrived around Christmas, and he promptly named his new friend, refusing to believe it wasn’t both lion and bear.

  The year 1983 was still fresh when Josie watched Nick toddle and drag Lion Bear by the hand in the backyard of one of St. Petersburg’s newest homes. Although it had a pool, the house was a modest single-story 1,200-square-foot cinder block construct, sided with stucco, wood, and stone. Nick’s folks bought it for $50 down, when there were just three houses on a block shaded by Chinese flame trees. These were heady times in one of America’s fastest-growing states. Weather was sweet, property was cheap (this house went for $21,500), and all seemed possible. Neighborhoods would sprout from barren ground, almost overnight.

  Josie looked up at blue sky, closed her eyes, and felt the sun on her face, then began hanging laundry on the lines. A few seconds later, Smokey charged through the back door and bumped Nick, who toppled and slipped soundlessly into the pool. The dog barked furiously. Lion Bear sang his lullaby, and Josie turned to see Smokey peering into
the pool and glancing back at her, guilty as charged.

  Panicked, she rushed toward the edge and kicked off her shoes, but before she jumped in she looked down. There was Nick, his pudgy cheeks puffed out, his two big brown eyes shining like flying saucers, happy and calm as he could be. When he was older she’d tell him, “I knew right then, you were gonna be a fish.”

  Nicholas Lawrence Mevoli III was born at the stroke of midnight on August 22, 1981. His father, born Nicholas Jr. but known as Larry Mevoli, met Nick’s mother at Tusculum College in Greeneville, Tennessee. One of Larry’s fraternity brothers set him up with Belinda and they went to a dance. They knew nothing about one another, except that they were both from large, ethnic Jersey families, which was no small thing at a tiny, rural Tennessee college in 1970. He was Italian. She was Polish, which felt to her like common ground. Also, Larry had some moves. He spun Belinda around that dance floor to doo-wop and early rock and roll, and for a moment the two streetwise kids from working-class East Coast neighborhoods felt like they were back home.

  They fell in love and Belinda became pregnant later that year. Larry, who had enrolled in college to avoid the draft, had to leave school to make ends meet, and worked two jobs. He punched the clock in the school cafeteria’s kitchen for $1.25 an hour by day and bused tables at a Greeneville dive bar for $1.75 an hour by night. They moved into a trailer on Belinda’s professor’s property, and got married on the steps of a New Jersey city hall. By the time Jennifer, or Jen, was born, Larry was a line cook and bartender at that same Greeneville dive, but they weren’t long for the Tennessee hills.