6

South Australia, 1974

Part III

We flew to Adelaide, South Australia, and from there across Spencer Gulf to Port Lincoln, a rugged frontier town in a neighborhood rife with optimistic place-names like Coffin Bay and—our destination—Dangerous Reef.

This was the world of the great white shark and the home of Rodney Fox. Fox had become a national hero in Australia, introducing the Blue Water, White Death crew to the great whites of South Australia and embarking on a career as a shark expert, tour guide, and conservationist. Even back then, Rodney knew ten times more than anyone else, scientist or civilian, about great whites, and he was the only individual in the known world who had any notion of how to attract them and film them, under water, in relative safety.

It was Rodney who had built the cages, he who had chartered the boats and hired the crews and bought the dead horse to use as bait and minced the chum and convinced me that I would be perfectly safe in the cage that was now being hammered to rubble by two thousand–plus pounds of maddened, panicked, and, seemingly, enraged great white shark.

It was Rodney’s name that I invoked in vain as I was slammed about in the cage, envisioning myself reduced from a suddenly successful writer to a surf-’n’-turf snack for a prehistoric monster.

The curious thing was not merely that I wasn’t afraid but that I knew I wasn’t afraid. In all the turmoil, the violence, the confusion, the darkness—the sensory overload—my brain made room for a conscious observation about itself. We had departed the realm of fear, my brain and I, and emerged into a peaceful pocket of detached observation. I felt no pain, save for the odd ache accompanying the thunk of my insulated bones against the bars. I watched my stubby rubber fingers plucking futilely at the little rubber ring that held the knife in its sheath. Every movement looked slow and deliberate, as if the “play” mechanism in my mental VCR had been slowed to “frame advance.”

The noise was raucous, each sound distinct and surprising: the hollow, metallic whang of the cage slamming against the hull of the boat; the subdued whoosh as a ton of shark flesh lashed wildly through the water; the bubbles blasting both from me and from the rippling gill slits of the huge frightened animal; and, so far in the distance that they might have been imaginary or the relics of a resurrected dream, shrill shards of human voices.

Even my own survival had become a matter more of interest than of anxiety.

The cage began to move, scraping along the bottom of the boat, and now there was light enough for me to see that we—the shark, the cage, and I—were somehow still connected to the boat above. With a thrust of its tail, the giant body lunged upward and forward.

What’s this? Now it wants to board the boat?

Suddenly, with swiftness and grace and in complete silence, the shark slid backward and down, turned, and swam away. The rope had disappeared from its mouth. I had a final glimpse of its tail, and then the shark was gone, absorbed into the misty blue fabric of the sea.

The cage righted itself, but because one of its floating tanks had been punctured, it hung askew. Someone above pulled on the rope, and I felt myself moving up toward the light. Through the moving glassy plane of the surface I saw faces, grotesquely distorted, staring down at me from the boat and, a bull’s-eye in their center, the round black eye of the ABC Sports camera lens.

Once on board, I described my ordeal for the camera, nearly weeping with relief.

Rodney, who had undergone (forget merely seen) circumstances infinitely worse, enthused with complimentary expostulations like, “You’re mad!”

Stan, gifted with a silver tongue, an affection for eighteenth-century diction, and an infinite capacity for ironic flattery, said, “Tell me, sir, is it true that you don’t know the very meaning of fear?”

Not till I described what I thought had gone wrong and inquired as to what had, in fact, gone wrong was there an awkward pause. Most of the crew seemed unaware that anything had gone wrong, and those few who did know seemed less than eager to discuss the matter.

I chanced then to look up at the flying bridge, where my wife, Wendy, was leaning on the railing and watching with wry amusement the scene below on the stern. We’d been married for ten years by then, and from her expression I knew immediately that she knew everything, from exactly what had gone wrong to who and what had been involved in correcting it. I was confident, too, that whatever had transpired, she had played a role in its satisfactory outcome.

As indeed she had.

In 1974 much of Australia, particularly such outlying states as South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territories, was socially equivalent to Tombstone, Arizona, in the 1880s or Hanover, New Hampshire, in the 1920s. Binge drinking was a national pastime, fistfighting was accepted as entertainment and a valid means of self-expression, and women were regarded as fragile workhorses, delicate termagants, and necessary evils. (A joke of the time asked, “What’s Australian foreplay?” The answer: “Brace yourself, Shirley!”)

Wendy and I stayed overnight in the Tasman Hotel in Port Lincoln, and when we went downstairs for a drink, we discovered that she was not permitted access to the bar; she could get a drink only in the ladies’ lounge.

It was rare, therefore, if not unprecedented, for a wife to accompany her husband on an expedition like ours, living in close quarters on small boats, and Wendy found herself treated with profound awkwardness, though neither resentment nor disrespect.

So when the white shark had appeared and I had climbed into the cage, Wendy was banished from the action, exiled up to the flying bridge.

Admirably, she hadn’t argued, and almost immediately she discovered that she had the best position on the boat, with a comprehensive view of everything that was going on: the giant shark lunging at the baits, bumping and biting the two cages—mine and Stan’s—the surface cameraman struggling to keep up with fast-moving figures, ever-changing focal lengths, shifting light, and splashes of blood and oil and water.

She saw the rope attached to my cage slip into the shark’s mouth; she saw it catch between the teeth; she saw the shark grow increasingly desperate to rid itself of the cage, thrashing and gnashing and pummeling both cages.

She also saw that nobody else had noticed any of it. They were all too close to the action, too focused on their own tasks. Cameramen were leaning over the transom, trying for close-ups; assistants held on to the cameramen’s belts to keep them from tumbling overboard; some crewmen were busy ladling more chum into the water; others could do nothing but stare, openmouthed, as a fish the size of a Buick went berserk behind the boat.

Wendy knew what would happen if the shark couldn’t shake loose of the rope, and it became obvious that it couldn’t.

She slid quickly down the ladder from the flying bridge, marched aft, shouldered aside one chummer and one idle gaper, and took hold of the rope a foot or two behind the cleat to which it was tied on the stern. She leaned over the stern, trying to see the head of the shark and locate the spot where the rope entered its mouth.

Just then the shark raised its head and lunged upward, and Wendy found herself nose-to-nose with—perhaps twenty-four inches away from—the most notorious, hideous, frightening face in nature. The snout was smeared with red. Bits of flesh clung to its jaws, and rivulets of blood drooled from the sides of its mouth. The upper jaw was down, in bite position, and gnashing as if trying to climb the rope. The eyes, as big as baseballs, were rolled backward in their sockets—great whites do not have nictitating membranes—and as the great body shook, it forced air through its gill slits, making a noise like a grunting pig.

All this Wendy recalled in meticulous detail. She also recalled shaking the rope and yelling at the shark, calling it a son of a bitch and other epithets she wasn’t aware she knew, and demanding that it let go of the rope. The shark grunted at her and twisted its head, showing her one of its ghastly black eyeballs, and the rope sprang free.

The shark slid backward off the stern and away from the boat, and when it was fully in the water, it rolled onto its side and, like a fighter plane peeling away from a formation, soared down and away into the darkness.