Most of what is written about my father describes him as a communications professional. The phrase appears in the Global Forum on Agricultural Research and Innovation's expert listing for him: "Eric McGaw, a communications professional, has lived and worked in the developing world for over 40 years." It is on the formal records that follow him through his ICRISAT, ICBA, AGRA, and FARA appointments. It is the way most of his colleagues at the senior agricultural research institutes of the world would have introduced him at conferences.

It is also, in an important sense, only half the story.

Before he was a communications professional, my father was a diver. The transition from one to the other is the part of his life I want to write about here, because it is the part of his life that almost no one outside our family knows.

Brunei and the Philippines, 1970s

Eric McGaw was American, born in 1948 in New England, the son of David E. McGaw. He grew up climbing the White Mountains. He went through college and into the world. By his mid-twenties, he had moved to Southeast Asia and was working as a professional dive master.

Dive master is a specific qualification. It is the highest non-instructor certification in recreational diving — the rank below dive instructor, well above advanced open water diver. To be a working dive master means leading dives, supervising less experienced divers, planning dive operations, knowing the local water conditions and marine life with the kind of granularity that lets you predict what is going to happen on a given site at a given tide on a given day. Dive masters work for dive shops, for scientific expeditions, for film crews, for commercial operations, for oil companies, and for anyone else who needs reliable underwater leadership.

Fort Pierce (c. 1979)

Eric worked in Brunei and the Philippines. The waters of Southeast Asia in the 1970s were, in a real sense, frontier waters. Sport diving was still relatively young — recreational scuba had been commercialized in the 1950s and 60s but was nothing like the global tourism industry it would become. Commercial diving operations, particularly those tied to the offshore oil and gas industry, were expanding rapidly across the South China Sea, where Brunei and the Philippines and Malaysia and Indonesia all border deepwater oil fields. Dive masters with technical experience were in demand. The waters were spectacular, dangerous, full of marine life that nobody had quite finished cataloguing.

My father spent years in those waters. By the time my older siblings were small children, he was working off an oil rig — the kind of commercial diving job that pays well, takes you away from your family for weeks at a stretch, and asks you to do the kind of physically demanding underwater work that pre-dates the era of remotely operated vehicles. He came up from oil rig dives knowing how to handle pressure changes, equipment failures, currents, low visibility, and whatever you happen to encounter on the way down or back up.

The sea snake citation

There is a documentary record of his diving expertise that I want to put in this post, because it is one of the strangest and most specific surviving traces of that part of his life.

In a scholarly book titled Marine Archaeology, edited by G. Kuppuram, on page 37, an author writing about a frightening underwater encounter with a sea snake reaches for an authoritative voice on the behavior of sea snakes. The author quotes my father by name:

Professional diver Eric McGaw (pers. comm.) has dived around sea snakes in Asian marine waters for years. McGaw says the snakes have no fear of any marine life, and are sometimes quite curious about divers. He has never known one to attack a diver.

That "pers. comm." is short for personal communication. It means the author of the chapter wrote to my father, or called him, or talked to him in person, and my father's expertise was substantial enough to be cited by name in the published book. Sea snakes — the family Hydrophiinae — are among the most venomous creatures in the world. Some species are docile, some are aggressive, all of them are capable of killing a human. The author of the Marine Archaeology chapter had been chased by one and wanted to understand what had happened. He asked my father. My father told him, in effect, that he had been around a great many sea snakes in Asian waters and had never seen one attack a diver, even when the diver had given the snake every reason to.

Fort Pierce (c 1979)

Forty-five years later, that single citation is one of the only published records of his diving career. There are no oil rig dive logs in the public record. There are no certifications listed online. There are no photographs of him underwater that I have ever seen. But there is, in a marine archaeology textbook on a research library shelf somewhere, a paragraph that ends with "He has never known one to attack a diver," and that paragraph is, in its way, the documentary record of a part of my father's life that no one else has written about.

The Tampa Bay engineers

There is a second documentary record, more recent, that places my father's diving expertise on more formal ground.

On October 21, 1987, the Tampa Bay chapter of the Society of American Military Engineers (SAME) hosted a guest speaker at one of their meetings. The speaker was Eric McGaw. The topic was commercial diving.

Fort Pierce (c 1979)

This is recorded in the Society's annual journal, Professional Memoirs, on page 137, in a list of chapter meeting topics for that year. SAME — the Society of American Military Engineers — is the professional society for engineers serving in or supporting the US military, including the Army Corps of Engineers, the Navy's civil engineering corps, and adjacent commercial firms. SAME chapter meetings draw working engineers, contractors, and former military officers. They invite speakers whose expertise is concrete and operational.

Eric McGaw, in October 1987, was invited to address that audience on commercial diving. The kind of speaking engagement that comes when a professional society treats your knowledge as worth the room's time.

From the sea to the desk

Somewhere in the mid-1980s, my father came up onto dry land for good. He had worked off an oil rig when his oldest children were small. He had built a body of expertise substantial enough to be cited in books and invited to speak at engineering societies. And then, for reasons that I cannot now fully reconstruct — perhaps because diving is a young person's job and he was approaching his late thirties, perhaps because he and my mother wanted a more stable family life as their kids got older, perhaps because he had begun to feel the pull of work that did not require pressurization — he made a career change.

Fort Pierce (c 1979)

He took a job in agricultural communications. First at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, in the Philippines — one of the original CGIAR centers, a sister institute to ICRISAT, where Borlaug-style varietal development for rice had been carried out since the early 1960s. Then at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Manila, where his name appears in the acknowledgments of multiple ADB publications through the late 1980s and into the 1990s for editing services. The two institutions — IRRI and ADB — were the great research and development institutions of the Philippines, both of which would credit him for years afterward as an editor and communicator.

Then, in 1989, ICRISAT hired him as Research Editor and the family moved to India. The internal ICRISAT staff bulletin that announced his arrival summarized his background: he came to ICRISAT with experience at IRRI and ADB and "considerable experience in the use of audio-visual aids."

Audio-visual aids was the period's term for what we would now call multimedia. Photography, slide presentations, film, video. ICRISAT did not hire him as just a writer. They hired him as someone who could turn agricultural science into images, presentations, reports, and stories that donors and policymakers and farmers could absorb. The skills he had developed underwater — observation, patient interpretation, the ability to communicate something complicated to someone who had not seen it themselves — were the same skills, applied differently.

The arc

This is the arc I want to mark in this post.

My father began his career thirty meters underwater, off the coast of Brunei, watching sea snakes investigate his face mask. He ended his career as the senior communications voice of one of the great agricultural research institutes of the developing world, co-authoring chapters with the Director General, photographing Norman Borlaug and Kofi Annan, and serving as the public face for ICRISAT, ICBA, AGRA, and FARA across two continents. The distance, on paper, between those two careers is enormous. The distance, in practice, was small.

Both careers were about looking at something complicated and translating what you saw into something other people could understand. Both careers required patience, technical expertise, and a willingness to work in conditions that other people found uncomfortable. Both careers required you to be the person in the room — or in the boat, or under the surface — whose calm description of what was happening was the thing other people relied on.

Fort Pierce (c 1979)

He was a diver who became a writer. He was a writer who never quite stopped being a diver. The man quoted in Marine Archaeology in the early 1980s on sea snake behavior, and the man quoted in International Agricultural Development in the mid-1990s on the agricultural reconstruction of Rwanda after the genocide, were the same man, doing the same work, with the same disposition.

He had spent years watching the natural world up close, in difficult conditions, and learning to interpret what he saw.

That was the skill. He took it underwater, and then he took it onto dry land, and then he gave the rest of his working life to it.

Tucker and Eric, Great Barrier Reef, Australia (c 1997)

Sources

G. Kuppuram (ed.), Marine Archaeology, p. 37 — citing Eric McGaw on sea snake behavior. Professional Memoirs (Society of American Military Engineers), 1988, p. 137 — Eric McGaw, presentation on commercial diving, Tampa Bay chapter, 21 October 1987. "At ICRISAT" (1989), internal ICRISAT staff announcement. Eric McGaw — GFAR expert listing.