Earle Swope died in January 2008, trapped under icy water during a routine training exercise for his rescue dive team.
That is just the beginning of the story.
"We're not meant to be underwater," the Boise firefighter says on a video, filmed from underwater, that is part of a performance art piece titled "POST: PTSD the Musical."
"You lose body heat 25 times faster in water " you move slower, but with more freedom than anywhere else in life -- except you can't breathe."
Swope, now 44, struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder for two years. Though the condition wrought havoc on his life and his family, the experience became a conduit for his transition to becoming an artist, he says.
The near-death experience "altered my perspective on everything," he says.
Swope's performance will explore the experience during September's First Thursday in the outdoor pavilion at the Idaho Historical Museum, 610 Julia Davis Drive, in Boise.
He worked with dancer and choreographer Kelli Brown, musician and composer Jared Hallock and vocalist Michele Cronen to create the 20-minute journey.
The group received a small grant from the Boise Department of Arts and History to produce the performance.
They tell the story through video projections, static images on televisions, original music, and live dance and voice performances by Swope, Cronen and dancer Leslie Thompson.
"I see this more as a contemporary epic poem than a performance," Swope says. "It's filled with tragic elements, introspections and rebirth through water. The experience really awakened my muse. All the women in the piece represent the creative muses."
The simultaneous images on the screens speak to the way multiple emotions battled it out inside him, he says.
"I'm trying to convey the experience of being overwhelmed," he says.
You'll also feel the cold of the water as you walk through ice walls, and then taste the cold with a blue sno-cone.
WHAT HAPPENED
In that routine practice almost four years ago, a small plastic valve assembled backwards forced Swope to breathe from his five-minute reserve tank instead of his full scuba tanks.
Realizing he was in distress in that frigid water, he went through the steps he knew would help him survive. In the end, he used his mask to suffocate himself before he could drown.
"I knew that was my best chance of survival, and that they could bring me back from that," Swope says. "I kept saying, 'Don't aspirate, don't aspirate' to myself."
His crew brought him to the surface and resuscitated him. By the time he got to the hospital he was alert and talking, but the ordeal was far from over.
PTSD is a strange thing, and it hit him hard the first year, Swope says.
"It was like all of a sudden I was inhabiting someone else's persona. I wasn't in control. You're experiencing four or five emotions at the same time. It was kind of like crazy town to me."
For a while it made him a stranger to his family, says his wife, Beth. She was in graduate school at the time and raising their two young children. She needed his help, but Swope dropped out.
"He was not the person I had married for a while. It was hard for me," she says. "I didn't understand why he just couldn't be happy that he survived and just get over it. He needed time to think; I needed to get life back to normal."
WHERE ART COMES IN
Swope already had been taking art classes at Boise State University -- art history and Tom Trusky's book-arts classes -- but he never felt the freedom to define himself as an artist, especially in his world as an ex-Marine and working firefighter. (Swope is a captain for the Boise Fire Department -- and a regular on the river rescue team.)
When faced with his mortality, all of his reticence fell away.
Now, things are starting to settle down, allowing him enough emotional distance to dive into this very personal subject. He also will have a piece of art and an essay about his near-death experience published in Artist's Book Yearbook, which will be out this fall.
Art wasn't the answer to his PTSD, but it became a way to find answers.
"The process of putting this together has been very cathartic," he says. "Going through it all again has helped clean up the straggling details. Now, there's nothing to hide."
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
