A deep-sea diver’s life story in book form

Editor’s note: Johnny and Halie Wilson of Life Writers are son-in-law and daughter of the Town Crier’s co-publishers and editor.

Longtime Idyllwilder Phil Thompson has completed and published a memoir focused on his globe-spanning career as a commercial deep-sea diver, “Where No Human Has Walked Before.” Locals may know him for his 20 years volunteering with Riverside Mountain Rescue Unit. He’s also spent a few years on the board of Jazz in the Pines.

His wife Cindy is a special education teacher at West Valley High and a member of the local women’s chorus, Local Color.

But like many of us, most of the “iceberg” is below the waterline. The stories that define a life don’t always come out in casual conversation. Phil said, “I’ve lived in Idyllwild 40-plus years and met a variety of people and talked to them, but you don’t want to take over the conversation. If you only talk about yourself, you don’t learn anything. Consequently, no one, including my wife, knows all the stories. There just isn’t time. Groups need to talk together.”

The book follows Phil from the day he, a Vietnam veteran at his parent’s home in Upland, sees a TV commercial extolling a lucrative and adventurous career in deep-sea diving. Phil recounted how even his first attempt at diving school was a challenge: After making a substantial payment ($2,000 in 1969 dollars, over $15,000 today), the school folded with no warning and no refund. He had to save his money and try again. Eventually he finished his training and set out to find work.

Phil spoke of the progression from apprenticeship to mastery:

PT: “To break out as an additional diver in Louisiana you had to first go to diving school, which costs a lot of money. Then you have to go somewhere you don’t live, to be an apprentice, a tender diver. In actuality, it’s a diver’s slave, paid $2 an hour. You have to keep going if you really want to achieve. There were 300 of us, over two and a half years, competing for three openings as divers.”

“My intent [in the book] was to show how difficult it was and how little it took to throw you out of the running. One ‘non-productive dive’ [a dive in which the mission is not accomplished, regardless of the reason] after several hundred productive dives, you got sent home. You weren’t fired from the company, but taken off that job. That’s how competitive. As a tender, so many people dropped by the wayside, it didn’t take much.”

The difficult and dangerous work took him from the U.S. to the North Sea, Scandinavia, Mexico (no Coast Guard) and the United Arab Emirates (make sure you understand local laws and customs). It is a chronicle of a life in a vanishing profession, as much of the work is now done by robots.

One message that emerges repeatedly in the book is the all-important and eternal combination of preparation and luck, or as the ancients said, “virtute” and “fortuna.” Phil was involved in massive, even monumental projects, and experienced many setbacks, but persisted.

PT: “You have to be in the right place at the right time, with the right credentials, with the right attitude, and even the right look. Each task required that. Even when you broke out as shallow water air diver, your next step was a deep air diver, and then after that you became a mixed gas diver, and then a saturation diver. That is the end result. “That’s because when you are in a living module pressurized to the depth where you are working, there is such a commitment and financial responsibility from the client. When you are in that saturation mode, regardless of what physical condition you are in they can’t just take you out. You have to pass all these other task before anyone is wiling to put you into this saturation commitment. I took it higher than that. I became a saturation superintendent; management.”

TC: “You had other people’s lives in your hands instead of just your own?”

PT: “That’s correct.”

TC: “Tell us how this book came to be.”

PT: “I had been toying with the idea of writing a book, because of my unusual lifestyle. I assumed everyone else had the same, but then it became apparent that ‘no, they don’t.’”

TC: “If all your friends were deep-sea divers, that would seem normal?”

PT: “Yes. My best friend in the world (who was a colonel in the second world war) pleaded with me to write a book because he found our adventures fascinating (mine and his son Gary’s, another deep-sea diver that had worked for me in the North Sea, and is in the book). We promised him that we would write one. We made several attempts to do it, but it’s harder than you imagine, to write a book. It was out of our line of expertise.”

DJ: “It’s easier than deep-sea diving.”

PT: “Anything is easy if you know how to do it; we didn’t know how to write a book. It didn’t get done, it became a burden, you know those needles in the yard need raking… “

TC: “How did you connect with Johnny and Halie, the Life Writers?”

PT: “I had known Johnny because he was my eldest son’s best friend (who we had lost at 21; he came home from college and hit his head on a tree and died. Anyone who lived here then knew Brandon; its’ a small town.)

“Johnny came to me one day and explained to me what he and his wife Halie were trying to do. It seemed an excellent idea. As you know, there are a lot of people up here with wonderful experiences in their lives, that have accomplished major things, that no one knows about. As I told Johnny, ‘If it’s not written down someplace, someone else is going to tell your story and it may be very different from the actual version that you experienced. Do you want someone else to write your epitaph?’”

TC: “Tell me about the process.”

PT: “The actual process started with Johnny coming over to my house with a high-tech sound recording system. Then I just talked for 2-1/2 straight hours. It seemed like 10 minutes, it went by so quickly. Johnny took that away and transcribed it, and wrote it as a third party.

“And that gave me a direction and I just started writing event stories. It made it easier for me to have a start. It made it doable rather than being scattered… it gave me a direction.”

TC: “Any more projects?”

PT: “I am working on an expanded version. I have three stories completed and two more partial stories to be in an expanded edition. I didn’t have any idea how many I would need. I found them interesting, but didn’t know if other people would. We all think we’re interesting, but we’re not [always.]”

The process yielded a professional and reader-friendly product, without any of the excesses sometimes found in self-published memoirs. The stories are mostly told in first person, but well-structured and edited, never rambling or repetitive. The editors provide interpolations and introductions, and keep the readers “up to speed” in the course of a narrative that spans the globe.

A copy of the book is available at Idyllwild Library. Those interested in working on their own memoirs can find out more at www.mylifewriters.com or call (951) 744-5800.