Below the Surface

Diving in Kodiak water
Kodiak is a diver’s paradise with enchanting kelp forests inhabited by colorful and curious creatures.

I got my PADI diver’s license in 1980 while working on the Maldives in the Indian Ocean. Since then, I have explored most of the premier diving sites of the world, like the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the Red Sea, the Andaman Islands south of Burma, the West Indies, and the South Pacific. But few places are as rich in fish, shellfish and other marine wildlife as the coral gardens and kelp forests that surround Kodiak. A calm, sunny day in Kodiak waters is one of the most exciting dives a diver will ever experience.

There are many odd and colorful creatures in the ocean around the Kodiak islands. Besides the five species of salmon, there are several species of cod, herring, halibut, starfish in every color of the rainbow, sea cucumbers, octopi, shellfish, sea otters, several kinds of whales, and the giant salmon shark.

My first dive on Kodiak was off the shores of Fort Abercrombie. After a few minutes in the water, two curious sea lions approached me, poking at my diving equipment. On land sea lions are large and cumbersome animals, but in the water they are elegant and graceful. Their familiarity was both exciting and alarming. One little nibble on my rubber air hose could have had devastating consequences. But they soon decided that I was a rather boring playmate and left me and my equipment without harm.

In the 1940s and 1950s, new radar equipment revealed large hoards of king crabs in the waters around Kodiak. This discovery launched a boom in the fishing industry, and in just five years, Kodiak was transformed from a small fishing community to one of the largest commercial fishing ports in the United States. Annual catches of up to 100 million pounds were pulled from the waters around Kodiak and delivered to the canneries.

Commercial fishing of king crabs continued for 25 years. Then, in the 1970s, the population of king crabs dwindled. By 1982, the catch was so poor that fishing was stopped. No one knows for sure why the king crabs disappeared, but researchers believe that overfishing could be one of the main factors.

Pete Cummiskey, one of my good friends on Kodiak, is a diver and marine biologist who has been working with the king crabs since the mid-80s. I asked him to show me the crab pods. There is protection in numbers, so juvenile crabs group together in giant balls to protect themselves from predators. A large pod can have several thousand crabs.

One gorgeous but cold November day, we went out in Womens Bay in search of crabs. Earlier that year, Pete had tagged several individuals and attached transmitters to their shells. Pete lowered the receiver into the water and soon picked up a signal. We prepared for our dive.

The pod was about 90-120 feet down, engulfed in a dense cloud of sediment churned up by the crabs. It was so thick, I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, and it took a few minutes to locate the pod. Because of the poor visibility, I had to get really close to the crabs in order to film.

The king crab is an impressive animal with a leg span of up to 6 feet across, and with large powerful claws that could easily snap off a finger. As they get older and larger they are less dependent on the pod, but the crabs in the pod I was filming were still fairly large.

Lying on the bottom, trying to get as close as I could with my camera, I felt the sharp pinch of a claw grabbing on to my arm through my thick diver’s suit. It was so painful I almost dropped the camera. I tried to pull the crab away, but it refused to let go. I realized that the only way to free myself from the monster was to rise to the surface. Halfway up, the crab finally let go and sank to the bottom. I had learned my lesson – Give the king crabs a wide berth!

I did descend again, however, and resumed my filming of the remarkable crab pods on the bottom of Womens Bay, keeping a respectful distance.

We located more pods and made several dives in the bay that day. Through his research, Pete has learned a lot about the king crabs’ environment and their migration along the ocean floor. Hopefully his research will lead to a rejuvenation of the king crab population so that commercial fishing of this wonderful delicacy can resume on Kodiak.

(Excerpt from “Kodiak, Alaska – The Island of the Great Bear”. The book can be purchased from Camera Q )

Don’t miss our first ”Kodiak Scandinavian Film and Culture and Festival” on Kodiak, Alaska, November 6-12, 2017. See Camera Q for more information.

Choice of a Lifetime

June 19, 1982
June 19, 1982

Many of the choices we make through life can be changed or revoked without very much difficulty, but some ought to be thoroughly thought through before they are made. One of the more difficult of these would be the choice of a life partner or spouse – a choice that can be a great blessing or devastating for the rest of your life.

Today, June 19, LaVonne and I are celebrating 35 years of marriage. 35 years!    It’s unbelievable that time has passed so quickly. When we were newlyweds we met a couple that had just celebrated their 5th anniversary. WOW! We thought that sounded like a very long time.

In 1979 I was working in California and renting a few rooms in the house of a Swedish woman. One day, when I came home, she said that we were invited for dinner at the home of her friend who was also from Sweden. That sounded nice so I accompanied her to dinner. Of course I couldn’t imagine that May-Britt, the Swedish woman who had invited us, would soon be my mother-in-law. We drove to the house in Arcadia, about an hour from where I was living, and it was here that I first met LaVonne. It wasn’t, perhaps, love at first sight, but it was memorable. I saw LaVonne a few more times before I returned to Sweden in the spring of 1980.

In the spring of 1980 I was filming a documentary about the mission sailboat, Elida, and their orphanage in India. In the summer I was going to film on the boat in Sweden. LaVonne was in Sweden visiting relatives and had, a bit reluctantly, stayed to sail with Elida along the west coast for a week. It happened to be the same week that I was filming onboard the boat. It didn’t take very long before LaVonne was glad that she had stayed behind when her mother went home to the USA. A few days after we left Elida, I invited LaVonne to go with me to Liseberg, an amusement park in Gothenburg. Liseberg can be a dangerous place for a bachelor who wishes to remain single. That’s where it said, “click.”

LaVonne returned to her aunt’s house in Småland where she would stay for a few days before going back to the states. While there she called her mother. LaVonne, who hadn’t spoken many words in Swedish earlier, began babbling in Swedish about this man she had met. May-Britt was surprised and shocked, something BIG had happened.

In 1981 I was again working in California and was able to spend a lot of time with LaVonne and her family. The following winter I was working on Sri Lanka and could only talk to her briefly by telephone. At that time you had to order your call through the post office on Sri Lanka and then wait for a couple hours to be connected. But LaVonne wrote to me every day, making the other members of my team a bit jealous over the amount of letters I received.

The wedding was set for June 19, 1982. I returned to Sweden from Sri Lanka and one week later flew to California. Luckily LaVonne and her mother had made all the plans and everything worked wonderfully. My father and brothers and their wives all came to the wedding. We had over 400 guests and it was a celebration we’ll never forget.

I got an amazingly beautiful, intelligent and loving woman for a wife. It’s now been 35 years and I want to say in all honesty and with all my heart that I love you more now then ever, you, my best friend and wife.

A Peek at Eternity

What was left of my Triumph Spitfire
He told them not to hurry since no one could have survived such a crash.

It was a beautiful, sunny morning, January 10, 1978. Temperatures had dipped below freezing during the night, but by 10 o’clock in the morning the sun was already warming up when I climbed into my little Triumph Spitfire sports car. I was on my way to town for a meeting with the director of the school where I had been teaching classes since I was in high school. It was a 15-mile trip that I had done hundreds of times.

Exiting Vårgårda at the intersection by the Doggy dog food factory, there were no on/off ramps to the highway, only a stop sign before I would turn left. It was just like any other day, only a little prettier and sunnier then most winter days. I loved my Triumph, which I had bought six months earlier. It handled beautifully and purred like a kitten, licking the asphalt as I sped away. I drove down the hill, past the gas station and over the bridge past Doggy. I carefully stepped on the brakes as I approached the stop sign. Large spruce trees by the side of the road cast a shadow across asphalt. I tried the brakes again but nothing happened. The road approaching the intersection was covered in black ice. It was impossible to stop and there was a huge semi-truck speeding past. I saw the big wheels and realize that I was heading straight towards the truck. My reflex reaction was to pull the handbrake to skid sideways so I wouldn’t glide under the trailer. I found out later that that reaction bought me a mille-second of time and I missed the truck trailer.

The car spun around, coming to a stop in the middle of the highway, with its nose pointing towards Vårgårda. But I have no memory of what happened after I saw the wheels of the truck and pulled the handbrake. A tank truck was behind the semi-truck. The driver hit the brakes 200 meters from where I stood but, because of the icy conditions, couldn’t stop the truck. Another car was approaching in the opposite direction so he had no choice but to plow into my little sports car.

In a violent collision the truck ended up on top of my sports car and together we slid for another 300 meters before coming to a stop. My Triumph was completely crushed underneath the cab of the truck. The only thing somewhat unscathed was the driver’s seat. Since the car had spun around on the road, the truck hit it on the passenger side.

It seems that someone was watching over me. Medical personnel were immediately on the scene. The car behind the tanker was driven by a doctor on his way the hospital. In the second car there was a nurse, also heading to work. A third person ran to the Doggy factory to call an ambulance but, I later learned, he told them not to hurry since no one could have survived such a crash.

The wheels of the first truck are the last things I remember. After that all feelings of fear or worry were gone. I came instead to a world filled with enormous joy, where there was no sorrow or pain. I had a very distinct sense of the presence of other people, but there was one person in particular who guided me. I experienced a world that was indescribably beautiful and wonderful. A world much more real and tangible than the world I knew. I had no desire to return to the old world, neither did I think of my family or friends. In this new world the joy was so intoxicating it eradicated all thoughts of what was left behind. Death and sorrow didn’t exist.

Suddenly my guide was telling me that I would have to return to the old world. I was only 19 and had everything to live for, but I was devastated that I wouldn’t be allowed to stay. If I had to leave this wonderful place and return to what we consider to be life, I wanted to tell everyone in the whole world about…could it have been heaven? But a very kind voice told me that I would not be able to tell anyone about what I had seen and experienced. I was taken to a round door and, passing through it, returned to the old world and all my memories of what I had experienced were carefully erased.

When I regained consciousness at the hospital all I had left was the disappointment of not being able to stay in, or remember, the world I had visited. I also felt the pain of all my injuries. My disappointment turned to anger and a profound sorrow that is hard to describe. My parents were by my bed. I can’t remember what we said, but my mother told me later that I was so angry when I woke up that they had to leave the room for a while.

For a long time afterwards I struggled to remember my experiences. Sometimes I tightened all the muscles in my mangled body to force the memories to the surface, but it didn’t work, my memories were gone. All I could remember was that it was a wonderful place, more “real” than the life we are living, and the voice telling me that I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about it.

The experience of being pinned under the tanker truck, lying there on that frozen asphalt, then being transported by ambulance and those first painful hours in the hospital would most certainly have been excruciating if I had been conscious. Instead I was given a glimpse of eternity, a reality that has given me great joy throughout my life. It hasn’t taken away my desire to live, but has assured me that something much better is waiting. I am convinced that it was God who appeared as my kind guide who was strangely familiar.

Sir, Sir!…Don’t be afraid!

Stefan Quinth holding cobra, 1982
It took awhile before I was comfortable holding a cobra in my hands, but I learned a great lesson; fear is our greatest enemy in any situation.

My first visit to Sri Lanka or Ceylon, as it is also called, was in 1980 when I was 23 years old. It was, and is, a fabulous island with amazing wildlife, scenery and history. One day, when I was sitting in my hotel room, I saw two young boys squatting by the side of the road. They didn’t seem to be local boys. They carried cloth bags and a box that they had placed on the road in front of them. Curious, I watched them for a while and discovered that they had snakes crawling out of their pockets and around their feet. Not just your garden-variety snakes, these were cobras, the snake they say kills more people than all other snakes combined!

When I was four years old my father told me, “Son, be careful in the forest and never go near the stone walls because there are snakes there.” That admonition served only to spike my interest in the animals that I was supposed to avoid. Now, when I had a chance to study the king of all snakes, I just had to go out and get a closer look and talk to the boys. They told me, in broken English, who they were and where they came from. I was impressed by the way they handled their animals. As a filmmaker, who had produced and sold a few of my first wildlife documentaries to television, the temptation was just too great. I would have to go home, get my camera and then return, as soon as possible, to Sri Lanka.

One year later I was back again and produced the first documentary about the snake people for Swedish Television. They are actually called Ahikuntake, which, in Sanskrit, means, “people who catch spear bodies,” or rather, “snake catchers.” They are nomads, traveling around the island collecting poisonous snakes from rice paddies, plantations, homes and gardens.

As the rice ripens it attracts rats and mice, and the snakes follow in their wake to feast on rodents. When it is time to harvest there are plenty of poisonous reptiles lurking in the knee-high rice. Before the reapers can step out into the paddy they call on the Ahikuntake to come and gather the snakes. When their bags are full, they’ll walk around to another field and release the snakes. That might sound strange, but if they killed the snakes, the rats and mice would destroy every harvest for years to come. The snakes, especially the cobra, are essential for the economic survival of the rice farmers.

When I returned to Sri Lanka to produce my first film about the Ahikuntake, I followed the children out to the fields to gather poisonous snakes. The children, only 8-10 years old, picked up those dangerous animals as if they were toys. It looked kind of fun and I, who had been interested in snakes since I was a small boy, also wanted to try. Understandably a bit nervous, I tried approaching the serpents from behind, but every time I got close enough to grab the least dangerous end, the snake turned around, hissed and lunged at me. After umpteen attempts that all failed, one of the children tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Sir, sir! Don’t be afraid! DON’T BE AFRAID!” These children who had been playing with snakes since before they could walk, saw nothing dangerous in their task.

You could compare those children in the field with our own children who have learned to walk on the sidewalk along a heavily trafficked street in the city. We’ve also taught them how to safely cross that same street. As long as we follow the rules, we are not particularly concerned about the cars, but one false move, a thoughtless mistake, could be catastrophic. The same applies in the field and since snakes can also sense or smell fear, it is important to remain calm when working with poisonous snakes.

The children in the rice field taught me an important lesson that day. “Sir, don’t be afraid!” Fear is, in itself, the most dangerous thing we carry with us wherever we go. Fear causes us to make foolish decisions, whether it is when we confront a bear in the forest or our boss when we are asking for a raise. It took awhile before I was comfortable holding a cobra in my hands, but I learned a great lesson; fear is our greatest enemy in any situation.