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Womb & Mother. Given openings like these, psychiatrists are studying skindiving and making of it what they will. One common theory: water is the great mother symbol; divers are only trying to get back to the womb. Another: divers get an omnipotent superman sensation from playing with danger. Whatever the lure, Freud or fun, U.S. divers are going down to the sea or the backyard pond as never before. More than 200 Y.M.C.A.s now teach free diving; more than 500 teach skindiving with held breath alone. Students at the prestigious Horace Mann School in The Bronx get classroom credits in diving, can pick up pointers by watching Sea Hunt, a television underwater adventure series starring Real-Life Diver Lloyd Bridges. Equipment sales of U.S. Divers Co., American licensee for Cousteau's Aqua-Lung, tripled from 1957 to 1959, are expected to soar another 75% in 1960 alone.
At Death's Door. Fastest-growing U.S. area for skindiving is the Northeast, despite water cloudy and cold enough to dismay a mackerel. For warmth, New Englanders may pull on foam-rubber "wet" suits,* will even chip a hole through ice to get at water. In the landlocked Midwest, divers gang together for long trips to Death's Door—a channel off a Wisconsin peninsula jutting into Lake Michigan, where, tucked among hidden reefs, lie more than 200 ships dating back to the 17th century. In parched New Mexico, a club called the Dusty Divers makes weekend round trips as far as 600 miles to find water, has even sought out places that just sounded wet, e.g., Fence Lake, which turned out to be completely dry.
U.S. diving has quality to match quantity. At Malta last year, the world's spearfishing championship (done with held breath alone) was won by California's rangy (6 ft. 2 in., 180 Ibs.) Terry Lentz, 22, who landed 15 fish weighing 106 Ibs. One of the finest free divers in the world is Security Analyst Peter Gimbel, 32, husky, Yale-bred scion of the department-store family. As a boy, Gimbel sat on the bottom of his parents' pool with a five-gallon can over his head, gulping air from a garden hose. He grew up to become a crack ocean diver, swam on the first team to reach the Italian liner Andrea Doria, 42 fathoms down off Nantucket.
On the Road. Last month a few lucky U.S. skindivers got a firsthand look at the great man himself. Jetting in for a business trip and lectures to scientific societies, Jacques Cousteau found himself surrounded by skindivers who plied him with questions far into the night. (Sample: "Can you compress air into tanks lots smaller than the ones we have now?" Answer: "Yes, but it is too expensive—the demand will have to be greater.") Typically, after one late night the irrepressible Cousteau was up at 7 o'clock, woke his traveling companions by bursting into their rooms shouting "Whoo-up!"—a cry he uses to rouse his divers at sea.
Skindiving's patron saint was born in Saint-André-de-Cubzac, a small town (pop. 4,000) near Bordeaux, which was picked for the occasion by his parents because they had both been born there. No sooner did he enter the world than the squawling Cousteau was bundled up and hustled back to the family home in Paris.