Excerpt from Trapped Under the Sea by Neil Swidey, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Cut off from their normal social circles, they filled some of their downtime taking scuba-diving lessons at a local pool. As a kid, DJ had always loved swimming, refusing to get out of the water until he had reached that blue-lipped, body-shivering state that only children and shipwreck victims seem able to tolerate. Before one class, as he flipped through a scuba magazine, he came across an article describing commercial diving as a career. It explained how these divers did underwater welding and construction and traveled the world, finding adventure and making good money. It dawned on DJ: This is something I could be good at.

In February 1991, twenty-one-year-old DJ moved to Houston to enroll at the Ocean Corporation dive school. After a month in school, around the time when many wannabe divers realize how punishing the job is and quit, DJ called home to Lorraine.

"Mom," he said, "this is exactly what I want to be doing."

DJ grabbed his yellow fiberglass diving helmet out of his truck and headed over to the job site. The SuperLite 17 was his prized possession. He'd bought it used, when he was just getting started in the Gulf, and even then it had set him back nearly three grand. Despite its name, the helmet still weighed about thirty pounds out of the water. This job in the fall of 1993 had brought DJ to a hydroelectric plant in southeastern Vermont. Given his experience as a deep-sea diver in the Gulf, where he'd done underwater welding at depths of 250 feet, he figured working in the waters of a New England river one-tenth as deep would be like a dip in the pool.

Excerpted from Trapped Under the Sea by Neil Swidey. Copyright © 2014 by Neil Swidey. Excerpted by permission of Crown, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.