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The Man in the Red Cap Jacques-Yves Cousteau · June 11, 1910 – June 25, 1997 from a surfer, a diver, and a kid who grew up in front of the TV

Hi. I'm Marisol Tavares. I'm 28, I teach surfing at the Shores in the summer and I'm a divemaster at a dive shop in San Diego the rest of the year, and on weekends I skate the ditch behind my cousin's house in Chula Vista with a bunch of kids half my age. That's why this page is in the Halfpipe. This is a page about a Frenchman who never surfed or skated as far as I know, and who is the reason I do what I do. When I was little, my grandmother's TV only got about four channels, and whenever Cousteau was on, everything stopped. My abuela didn't speak French and didn't speak much English, but she watched every minute, and so did I, sitting on the floor about a foot from the screen. The red cap, the accent, the Calypso cutting through the water, and then the divers going over the side backwards and the whole world turning blue. I was hooked before I could swim. He died two years ago this summer. I made this page for the second anniversary.

His life, in dives 1910. Born June 11 in Saint-André-de-Cubzac, in the southwest of France. A sickly kid, which is hard to believe. 1930s. Goes to the French naval academy and wants to be a Navy pilot. A bad car accident in 1936 breaks both his arms and ends that. To get his strength back he swims in the Mediterranean, and a friend gives him a pair of diving goggles. He puts his face in the water and that's it. Everything after comes from that one moment. 1943. With an engineer named Émile Gagnan he works out the Aqua-Lung, a regulator that gives a diver air from a tank whenever he breathes in. It was the first scuba that really worked, and every regulator on every diver in the world today, including the one on my back, comes from it. 1950. Gets the Calypso, an old wooden minesweeper built in the United States during the war, and turns her into a research ship. She was his home for the next forty-some years. 1953 to 1956. His book The Silent World, then the film of the same name with a young director named Louis Malle. The film wins the top prize at Cannes in 1956 and an Academy Award. He won another Oscar later for World Without Sun. Early 1960s. The Conshelf experiments: people actually living in houses on the sea floor, one of them in the Red Sea. Also the little yellow diving saucer that looked like a flying saucer. I wanted one so bad. 1968 to 1976. The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau on ABC. The one my abuela and I watched. After that, more shows on public TV and cable, right up into the nineties. 1973. Starts the Cousteau Society, to protect the oceans. He had been fighting pollution since 1960, when he helped stop a plan to dump nuclear waste into the Mediterranean. 1979. His son Philippe, who was his partner in a lot of the films, dies when his seaplane crashes in Portugal. I didn't understand that when I was eight. I do now. 1985. The Presidential Medal of Freedom. 1988: elected to the Académie française, the forty "immortals" of France. 1996. The Calypso is hit by a barge in the harbor at Singapore and sinks. They got her back up. She's waiting to be fixed. I hope somebody does. 1997. He dies in Paris on June 25. He was 87.

June 25, 1999: the red cap dive For the anniversary, eleven of us from the shop and the surf school did a dive at the Cove in La Jolla, which is an underwater park, so nothing can be taken. Everybody wore a red cap on the beach. Mine is a knit one my aunt made me, which in June in San Diego is a sacrifice, trust me. Here's my log entry, copied straight out of my logbook: DIVE #     612 DATE      Fri., June 25, 1999 SITE      La Jolla Cove, beach entry MAX DEPTH 48 ft BOTTOM    51 min WATER     64 F, 7mm suit VIS       20-25 ft, a little surge SAW       garibaldi everywhere (bossy as ever), sheephead, a big bat ray on the sand, kelp bass, one shy octopus in the rocks NOTES    At the bottom of the first wall we all stopped and knelt on the sand for one minute, no talking (ha, underwater), and just breathed. Eleven regulators going. Best sound in the world. Merci, Captain.

What I tell my students None of this is in his words. It's mine. But I learned all of it from watching him. You're a guest. It's their house. Act like it. Don't touch the coral, don't stand on the reef, don't grab the animals. Get your buoyancy right so you don't have to. Tuck in your gauges and your octopus. A dangling hose drags across everything. Don't feed the fish. I know. The garibaldi will look at you like you owe them money. Still no. Slow down. Nothing good underwater happens fast. If you're kicking hard you're missing it. Take out more trash than you brought. Every dive, one piece. Fishing line, a can, whatever. Be curious. He was curious his whole life, at eighty-something, still going to see.

A letter I didn't send Dear Captain Cousteau, I meant to write you for about fifteen years. I figured you got a million letters from kids, so what's one more. Here it is anyway, late. I was a little girl on a living room floor in Chula Vista, and you showed me there was a whole other world under the one I lived in. Blue, and quiet, and full of things nobody had named yet. Nobody in my family had ever been underwater on purpose. Now my little brother dives, my cousin dives, and last month I certified my own mother, at fifty-four, in the pool at the shop. She cried in her mask the first time she breathed underwater. Then she laughed, and you can't really laugh with a regulator in, so she almost drowned me. It was great. That's you. That's all you. Thank you. Marisol

Divers, surfers and couch-divers who've come by: Did he get you in the water too? Tell me about it: [email protected] Last updated: July 11, 1999 · Marisol Tavares, San Diego