Text Leveling System

Shadow Divers

RDQ:	4390	Max Word/Sent	55	Total Words	3556		Diff Words	1229
Lex	1150	Ave Word/.Sent	18	Hi Freq occurs	2326	65.4%	Hi freq	404	32.9%
AR	9.0	Long Sentences	39.8	Low Freq occurs	463	13%	Low freq	366	29.8%

The Book of Numbers
Brielle, New Jersey, September 1991
BILL NAGLE'S LIFE CHANGED the day a fisherman sat beside him in a ramshackle bar and told him about a mystery he had found lying at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Against his better judgment, that fisherman promised to tell Nagle how to find it. The men agreed to meet the next day on the rickety wooden pier that led to Nagle's boat, the Seeker, a vessel Nagle had built to chase possibility. But when the appointed time came, the fisherman was not there. Nagle paced back and forth, careful not to plunge through the pier where its wooden planks had rotted away. He had lived much of his life on the Atlantic, and he knew when worlds were about to shift. Usually, that happened before a storm or when a man's boat broke. Today, however, he knew it was going to happen when the fisherman handed him a scrap of paper, a hand-scrawled set of numbers that would lead to the sunken mystery. Nagle looked into the distance for the fisherman. He saw no one. The salt air blew against the small seashore town of Brielle, tilting the dockside boats and spraying the Atlantic into Nagle's eyes. When the mist died down he looked again. This time, he saw the fisherman approaching, a small square of paper crumpled in his hands. The fisherman looked worried. Like Nagle, he had lived on the ocean, and he also knew when a man's life was about to change.
In the whispers of approaching autumn, Brielle's rouge is blown away and what remains is the real Brielle, the locals' Brielle. This small seashore town on the central New Jersey coast is the place where the boat captains and fishermen live, where convenience store owners stay open to serve neighbors, where fifth graders can repair scallop dredges. This is where the hangers-on and wannabes and also-rans and once-greats keep believing in the sea. In Brielle, when the customers leave, the town's lines show, and they are the kind grooved by the thin difference between making a living on the water and washing out.
The Seeker towers above the other boats tied to this Brielle dock, and it's not just the vessel's sixty-five-foot length that grabs one's attention, it's the feeling from her battered wooden hull and nicked propellers that she's been places. Conceived in Nagle's imagination, the Seeker was built for a single purpose: to take scuba divers to the most dangerous shipwrecks in the Atlantic Ocean.
Nagle was forty years old then, a thin, deeply tanned former Snap-On Tools Salesman of the Year. To see him here, waiting for this fisherman in his tattered T-shirt and thrift-shop sandals, the Jim Beam he kept as best friend slurring his motions, no one would guess that he had been an artist, that in his day Nagle had been great.
In his twenties, Nagle was already legend in shipwreck diving, a boy wonder in a sport that regularly kills its young. In those days, deep-wreck diving was still the province of the adventurer. Countless shipwrecks, even famous ones, lay undiscovered at the bottom of the Atlantic, and the hunt for those wrecks with their bent metal and arrested history was the motion that primed Nagle's imagination.
Treasure never figured into the equation for Atlantic shipwreck divers in the Northeast. Spanish galleons overflowing with gold doubloons and silver pieces of eight did not sink in this part of the ocean, and even if they had, Nagle wouldn't have been interested. His neighborhood was the New York and New Jersey shipping lanes, waters that conducted freighters, ocean liners, passenger vessels, and warships about the business and survival of America. These wrecks occasionally surrendered a rare piece of china or jewelry, but
Nagle and his kind were looking for something different. They saw stories in the Modiglianied faces of broken ships, frozen moments in a nation's hopes or a captain's dying instinct or a child's potential, and they experienced these scenes unbuffered by curators or commentators or historians, shoulder to shoulder with life as it existed at the moment it had most mattered.
And they did it to explore. Many of the deep wrecks hadn't been seen since their victims last looked at them, and would remain lost while nature pawed at them until they simply didn't exist anymore. In a world where even the moon had been traveled, the floor of the Atlantic remained uncharted wilderness, its shipwrecks beacons for men compelled to look.
You had to have steel balls to do what Nagle did in his heyday. In the 1970s and 1980s, scuba equipment was still rudimentary, not much advanced past 1943, when Jacques Cousteau helped invent the system of tanks and regulators that allowed men to breathe underwater. Even at 130 feet, the recreational limit suggested by most scuba training organizations, a minor equipment failure could kill the most skilled practitioner. In searching for the most interesting wrecks, Nagle and the sport's other kings might descend to 200 feet or deeper, virtually begging the forces of nature to flick them into the afterlife, practically demanding their biology to abandon them. Men died often diving the shipwrecks that called to Nagle.
Even if Nagle's equipment and body could survive the deep Atlantic, he faced a smorgasbord of other perils, each capable of killing him a la carte. For starters, the sport was still new; there was no ancient wisdom to be passed from father to son, the kind of collective experience that routinely keeps today's divers alive. The sport's cautionary tales, those lifelines learned over beers with buddies and by reading magazines and attending classes, were beaten into Nagle underwater at antihuman depths. If Nagle found himself in some crazy, terrible circumstance and there were countless of them on these deep wrecks odds were that he would be the one who would tell the first tale. When he and his ilk survived, the magazines wrote articles about them.
Nagle pushed deeper. Diving below 200 feet, he began doing things scientists didn't fully understand, going places recreational
divers had never been. When he penetrated a shipwreck at these depths, he was often among the first to see the vessel since it had gone down, the first to open the purser's safe since it had been closed, the first to look at these men since they had been lost at sea. But this also meant that Nagle was on his own. He had no maps drawn by earlier divers. Had someone visited these wrecks before, he might have told Nagle, "Don't brush against that outboard beam in the galley the thing moved when I swam by, and the whole room might cave in and bury you if you do." Nagle had to discover all this by himself. It is one thing, wreck divers will tell you, to slither in near-total darkness through a shipwreck's twisted, broken mazes, each room a potential trap of swirling silt and collapsing structure. It is another to do so without knowing that someone did it before you and lived.
The Atlantic floor was still a wilderness in Nagle's prime, and it demanded of its explorers the same grit that the American West did of its pioneers. A single bad experience on a shipwreck could reroute all but the hardiest souls to more sensible pursuits. Early divers like Nagle had bad experiences every day. The sport eagerly shook out its dabblers and sightseers; those who remained seemed of a different species. They were physical in their world orientation and sudden in their appetites. They thought nothing of whipping out a sledgehammer and beating a porthole from the side of a ship, even as their heavy breath hastened nitrogen narcosis, the potentially deadly buildup of that otherwise benign gas in their brains. Underwater, rules of possession bent with the light; some divers cut prizes from the mesh goody bags of other divers, following the motto "He who floats it owns it." Fistfights aboard boats and even underwater often settled disputes. Artifacts recovered from wrecks were guarded like firstborn children, occasionally at knifepoint. In this way, early deep-wreck divers had a measure of pirate in their blood.
But not Nagle. In the sport's brawniest era, he was a man of the mind. He devoured academic texts, reference works, novels, blueprints, any material he could uncover on historical ships, until he could have stood in the dockyards of a dozen eras and built the boats alongside the workers. He was a connoisseur of the parts, and
he reveled in the life force a boat took on from the interlocking of its pieces. This insight gave Nagle two-way vision; as much as he understood the birth of a ship, he also understood its death. Ordinary divers would come upon a shipwreck and see the mélange of bent steel and broken wood, the shock of pipe and wire as a cacophony of crap, an impediment that might be hiding a compass or some other prize. They would plant their noses in a random spot and dig like puppies, hoping to find a morsel. Viewing the same scene, Nagle repaired the broken parts in his mind and saw the ship in its glory. One of his greatest finds was a four-foot-tall brass whistle from the paddle wheeler Champion, a proud voice that had been mounted on the ship's mast and powered by a steam line. The whistle was majestic, but the most beautiful part of the discovery was that underwater it looked like a worthless pipe. Floating amid the wreckage, Nagle used his mind's eye to watch the ship break and sink. He knew the ship's anatomy, and as he imagined it coming apart he could see the whistle settle, right where that seemingly worthless piece of pipe lay. After Nagle recovered two helms from the British tanker Coimbra in a single day (finding one helm once in a career was rare enough), his photograph was hung alongside that of Lloyd Bridges in the wheelhouse of the Sea Hunter, a leading dive charter boat of the time. He was twenty-five.
To Nagle, the value in artifacts like the brass steam whistle lay not in their aesthetics or their monetary worth but in their symbolism. It is an odd sight to see grown men covet teacups and saucers, and build noble display cases to these dainty relics. But to divers like Nagle these trinkets represented exploration, going off the :harts. A telegraph on display in a diver's living room, therefore, is :much more than a shiny object; it is an announcement. It says, If
someone had been to this ship's wheelhouse before me, he would not are left this telegraph behind.
It was only time before Nagle's instinct delivered him to the Andrea Doria, the Mount Everest of shipwrecks. The grand Italian passenger liner had collided with the Stockholm, a Swedish liner, in dense fog off Nantucket Island in 1956. Fifty-one people died; .1659 were rescued before the liner sank and settled on her side at
depth of 250 feet. The Doria was not a typical target for Nagle.
Her location was widely known, and she had been explored by divers since the day after her sinking. But the Doria made siren calls to great wreck divers. She was brimming with artifacts even after all these years: serving sets made of fine Italian china and painted with the ship's legendary Italia logo, silver utensils, luggage, ceramic tiles by famed artists, pewter sherbet dishes, jewelry, signs. In Nagle's day, and even today, a diver could explore the Doria and worry only about having enough stamina to lug home the prizes he recovered.
Had the Doria only her riches to offer, she could not have romanced Nagle so hopelessly. The ship's real challenge lay in exploration. The wreck rested on its side, making navigation dangerous and deceptive. A diver had to conceive the world sideways to make sense of doors on the floor and ceilings to the right. And she was deep-180 feet at her shallowest and 250 feet where she crushed the ocean floor. Men sometimes got disoriented or ran out of air or lost their minds from narcosis and died on the Doria. The wreck was so deep, dark, and dangerous that decades after her sinking, entire decks remained unexplored. Those decks were Nagle's destinations.
Over time, Nagle penetrated the wreck in places long relegated to the impossible. His mantel at home became a miniature Doria museum. Soon, he set his sights on the bell. A ship's bell is her crown, her voice. For a diver, there is no greater prize, and many of the greats go a career without coming close to recovering one. Nagle decided to own the Doria's bell. People thought he was nuts scores of divers had searched for thirty years for the Doria's bell. No one believed it was there.
Nagle went to work. He studied deck plans, books of photographs, crew diaries. Then he did what few other divers did: he formulated a plan. He would need days, maybe even a week to pull it off. No charter boat, however, was going to take a diver to the Doria for a week. So Nagle, who had saved a good bit of money from his Snap-On Tools days, decided to buy a dive boat himself, a vessel constructed from his imagination for a single purpose: to salvage the Doria's bell.
That boat was the original Seeker, a thirty-five-foot Maine Coaster built in New Jersey by Henrique. In 1985, Nagle recruited five top divers, men who shared his passion for exploration, and he
made this arrangement: He would take the group to the Doria at his expense. The trip would be a dedicated one, meaning the divers went with just one objective to recover the bell.
For the first few days on the wreck, the divers stuck to Nagle's plan. They found nothing. The bell just wasn't there. At that point, even the hardiest divers would have turned back. A single day on the open Atlantic in a sixty-five-foot boat will turn intestines inside out; Nagle and his cohorts had been out for four days in a thirty-five-foot glorified bathtub. But a man is not so inclined to give up when he sees in panoramas. Nagle abandoned the bow of the Doria, where he and his team had been searching, and rerouted to the stern. They would now be flying by the seat of their pants, an improvisation on the deadliest wreck in the Atlantic. No one had ever been to the stern. Yet by conceiving the Doria as a single, breathing organism rather than as detached, twenty-foot chunks of wood and steel, Nagle and the others allowed themselves to look in unlikely places.
On the fifth day they hit pay dirt there was the Andrea Doria's bell. The men rigged it, beat out the bell's pin with a sledgehammer, and sent up the prize on a heavy-duty lift bag. Shock waves rippled through the diving community. According to their agreement, Nagle owned half the bell, and the other five men owned half; the last man living among them would own it outright. Nagle placed the 150-pound bell into the back of his wife's station wagon and asked her to drive it home. When she arrived, the bell wasn't there anymore. She called Nagle, saying, "I don't know what happened to the bell!" Nagle nearly suffered a heart attack. He called the highway patrol and asked, "Did anyone find a giant bell anywhere?" Someone had, in fact, made a report, telling the police something like "I found something and I don't know what it is, but it looks like a big bell and it says Andrea Doria." Nagle almost had another attack. He retrieved the bell and insured it for $100,000. He was among the immortals.
Soon an idea began percolating in Nagle's imagination. What if he could run the Seeker full time as a charter boat for divers? That would allow him to earn a living doing what he loved most. "I want to be the guy that turns this into a career," he told friends. He could make a half dozen trips to the Doria every year, then use his free time to search for the Carolina, Texel, Norness, and Pan Pennsylvania-
great ships still missing decades after sinking. His wife and two children lived in Pennsylvania, but he resided in Brielle now; he dated other women and kept a bachelor pad, yet his wife held out hope that he would return someday, and she raised his kids to admire him, so that he could do this now, he could make this business happen. He commissioned a second Seeker, this one nearly double the length of the first. It would be outfitted to transport divers to the great wrecks, the ones that required a pioneer's heart.
Almost immediately, Nagle struggled with the business. It wasn't that he lacked for customers. It was that he couldn't abide the customers. This was the wrong problem to have in the charter-boat business. On a dive trip, the captain's real job is to schmooze his patrons; at the end of the day, what the weekend, bread-and-butter customer really wants is to bond with a man of the sea. Nagle had envisioned his business as an endless series of trips to deep and dangerous wrecks like the Doria or the Choapa. But his patrons desired only the easy, nearby sites, wrecks like the Stolt Dagali, SS Mohawk, and the Tolten. To Nagle, these people weren't divers, they were tourists. He watched them climb onto the Seeker with their brand-new lime green fins lime green! and listened to their giddy plans to take pictures of lobsters or touch the side of a "real" shipwreck, and he could not hide his contempt for them. He had established a business in order to explore, and now he was beholden to customers who were thrilled precisely because they didn't have to.
And Nagle was drinking. Jim Beam didn't like the Seeker's customers any more than Nagle did. Before long, Nagle became surly with his clients. Often, he stood outside the wheelhouse atop his boat and rained down commentary on stunned customers. He'd shout, "This isn't what diving's about!" or "Look at you greenhorns go to the Caribbean with those green fins!" or "You dive shop guys got balls selling that garbage equipment to these innocents you're crooks!" At the end of a trip, after he'd been drinking for hours, he might say, "Get these fucking cattle off my boat!" Friends and crew pleaded with Nagle: "Bill, for Christ's sake, you can't talk that way to paying customers. This is a business!" Nagle didn't care. This wasn't what diving was about.
His drinking worsened. During one charter, Nagle unilaterally
decided to reroute to a more challenging wreck, a site that had captured his imagination and begged to be explored. The 150-foot depth of the new wreck was beyond the abilities of the divers on board. The man who had chartered the boat was incensed. "What the hell are you doing, Bill? We're supposed to go to a hundred-foot wreck. My guys can't handle this kind of depth." Nagle growled, "You gotta teach these guys to do decompression diving!" then stormed into the wheelhouse. And that was it. Nagle went where he wanted he was no goddamn taxi driver, he was no sellout, he would not betray the spirit of diving. But as the 1980s gave way to a new decade, Nagle's drinking began to bleach the greatness of his skills. His shoulder blades became spires on his emaciated frame, his jaundiced skin and stringy hair a goulash of self-abandon. He still swam beautifully, somehow, in the way retired baseball greats still throw gracefully at old-timers' games. But experienced divers noticed that his Doria dives had become less strenuous, that he wasn't quite going anymore where no man had been. "Ah, I just gotta get in shape," he'd grumble to his few close friends, which they took as code for "I gotta stop drinking." By 1990, Nagle had made his last Doria dive you couldn't challenge a wreck like that without every ounce of your faculties tuned high, and there had been recent corpses aboard the Doria to prove it. Nagle continued to lose customers. Every day, he told the few remaining people he respected about how right things had been in the old days, in the days when diving was great.
This was Nagle's life and business in the late summer of 1991, as Brielle shut down for the season and returned to the rhythms of its regulars. Nagle had spent much of this August day washing the Seeker and contemplating his life. Now, with the sun setting, he took a short walk across the dock, through the cratered, dirt parking lot, and into an establishment seemingly placed there for him by God. The Harbor Inn was open late year-round. It served Jim Beam. Nagle was thirsty.
No one quite recalls when they started calling it the Horrible Inn, but everyone can tell you why. Hard-core smokers choked on the

Subjective Criteria

Illustrations: No support

Dialog: Multiple speakers

Dialog: Broken dialogue

Dialog: Unlabeled Speaker

Vocabulary: Many difficult words

Language: Many descriptive words

Sentences: Many Long Complex

Text structure: Story/Poem

Inferences: Several Implications

Complexity: Several unrelated ideas

Concepts: Abstract/Complex Social

Table of Contents

Glossary

Chapters

Author's purpose: Implied

Prior Knowledge: Familiarity

Sequence of Events: Several shifts in time

Mature Concepts: With some uncommon experiences

Features

Character traits

Integral Setting

Complex Problem/Solution

Difficult names

Foreign words

Topic

Boats

Teams/Teamwork

Danger

War

Determination

Ships

Discovery

*Feelings, Behaviors

Underwater diving

Low Frequency Words

abandon	abandoned	abide	abilities	aboard
academic	according	aesthetics	alongside	anatomy
announcement	antihuman	appointed	approaching	articles
artifacts	bachelor	beacons	beers	beholden
benign	betray	biology	blueprints	brawniest
brielle	brielle's	brimming	buildup	bury
cacophony	carte	cautionary	ceramic	challenge
challenging	chartered	circumstance	clients	cohorts
collective	commentary	commentators	commissioned	community
compass	compelled	conceive	conceived	conceiving
conducted	connoisseur	constructed	contemplating	contempt
convenience	corpses	countless	covet	crap
cratered	curators	customers	dabblers	dagali
dainty	deadliest	decade	decades	deceptive
decompression	dedicated	depth	depths	descend
devoured	diaries	disoriented	disputes	diving's
dockside	dockyards	doria	doria's	doubloons
drawn	dredges	emaciated	envisioned	equipment
era	eras	establishment	everest	exploration
faculties	firstborn	fistfights	former	formulated
freighters	fucking	fully	galleons	galley
giddy	glorified	glory	goddamn	gotta
goulash	gracefully	greats	greenhorns	grooved
guarded	harbor	hardiest	harts	hastened
hell	helm	helms	henrique	heyday
historical	hopelessly	hoping	hull	ilk
imagination	imagined	immediately	immortals	impediment
improvisation	incensed	inclined	innocents	insight
instinct	insured	interlocking	italia	jaundiced
jersey	jewelry	judgment	knifepoint	knowing
lacked	legend	legendary	lifelines	liner
liners	lobsters	locals	location	logo
luggage	mélange	magazines	majestic	mantel
mast	material	mattered	measure	mesh
mind's	miniature	minor	modiglianied	mohawk
moments	monetary	morsel	motion	motions
mount	mounted	nagle	nagle's	nantucket
narcosis	nation's	nature	navigation	neighborhood
neighbors	nicked	nitrogen	noble	norness
northeast	novels	object	objective	occasionally
ordinary	organism	organizations	orientation	original
otherwise	ounce	outboard	outfitted	outright
overflowing	paced	panoramas	passenger	passion
patrol	patrons	pawed	penetrated	pennsylvania
percolating	perils	pewter	photograph	photographs
physical	pier	pioneer's	pioneers	planks
pleaded	plunge	possession	possibility	potential
potentially	practically	practitioner	precisely	prime
primed	propellers	prove	province	purpose
purser's	pursuits	ramshackle	random	rans
recalls	recent	recover	recovering	recreational
recruited	regularly	regulars	regulators	relegated
relics	represented	required	reroute	rerouted
rescued	resided	respected	retired	retrieved
reveled	rhythms	rickety	rippled	romanced
rotted	rouge	routinely	rudimentary	sake
salesman	salvage	sandals	saucers	scallop
scenes	schmooze	scrawled	scuba	season
seeker	seeker's	seemingly	sellout	sensible
series	shallowest	shared	sherbet	shipping
shipwreck	shipwreck's	shipwrecks	sideways	sightseers
silt	siren	sledgehammer	slither	slurring
smokers	smorgasbord	souls	spires	sport's
stamina	stern	stockholm	stolt	strenuous
stringy	structure	studied	stunned	sunken
surly	surrendered	survival	survive	survived
swedish	swirling	symbolism	tattered	texel
tilting	tolten	tourists	transport	tuned
twenties	typical	unbuffered	uncharted	uncover
underwater	undiscovered	unexplored	unilaterally	utensils
vessel	vessel's	vessels	viewing	virtually
vision	wannabes	warships	wheeler	wheelhouse
whipping	whispers	wisdom	worsened	worth
wreckage