After lumbering downward with the grace of a cargo plane approaching Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Denver had used a beak engineered by 100 million years of evolution to clamp on to Santa’s red cap, then headed for the surface while the strap of the jolly old elf’s cap tightened around his neck as visions of ER nurses danced in his head.
While all turned out OK, the story – and the look in Santa’s eyes as he told it – explains why Santa had reason to be grateful that one of the two volunteer elves responsible for his security one recent evening was a former deputy Ohio attorney general for law enforcement who founded the state’s Forensic Dive Team.
A childhood promise
Steve Schumaker grew up in the Sunnyland subdivision on Springfield’s South Side watching Air Force movies and listening to the World War II stories of his father, Eugene, a decorated Army Air Corps fighter pilot.
An oddball story from near war’s end involved Eugene flying “over the hump” of the Himalayas stuffed with a cargo plane stuffed with then worthless Chinese currency on a mission that seemed to make sense to someone at the time.
Much more dramatic stories and exposure to the Lloyd Bridges television show Sea Hunt led Schumaker to promised himself that, one day, he would dive through the air in a plane or the through water with scuba gear on his back.
He was 50 and well into a record 26 years as Clark County prosecutor when he finished an open water diving course at the Springfield Family YMCA. Six years later, he was a Dive Master teaching part time in a since discontinued program at Wright State University when a friend suggested he visit the Newport with a notion to taking students there.
“I absolutely loved the place,” Schumaker said as his car crawled inched toward the aquarium through a molasses of Cincinnati traffic. Part of the love is from the opportunity to dive, he said. Another part that “divers love to be around divers,” about 90 of whom, like him, now volunteer at the aquarium year-round through the non-profit Wave Foundation. Of those, 25 participate in Scuba Santa.
This community of divers is made interesting both by the wide variety of life callings and the variety of experiences and stories they share from time spent in the 71 percent of earth covered by water. (Their term they have for the poor souls who spend their entire lives on dry land is 29 Percenters.)
Schumaker described one dive that rewarded him a memorable double dose of both wonder and awe.
While exploring the innards of a World War II Navy ship scuttled in the Caribbean, he found himself awed by the courage of those who risked their lives for their country there and in wonder over the claustrophobic quarters the great generation of obviously smaller men endured.
Emerging into the open water, he then soaked in a dream-like vision of an assemblage of eagle rays floating effortlessly in the sea without the help of masks, air tanks, buoyancy systems or any of the tools humans had to invent to observe them.
Whether done in the tanks at an aquarium along the Ohio River or in the warmth of the Caribbean, Schumaker finds diving “extremely tranquil” in a way all who love nature can appreciate: “You’re sitting back, looking around and enjoying God’s creation.”
Black water to black robes
In 2011, two years after becoming a Dive Master, Schumaker accepted then-Ohio Attorney General and former Greene County prosecutor Mike DeWine’s invitation to become deputy attorney general for law enforcement.
Soon, he suggested (and DeWine accepted) the idea of creating a state law enforcement dive team to help local jurisdictions recover evidence (mostly weapons and cars) that criminals discard into lakes, ponds and rivers.
“That’s not pleasure diving,” Schumaker said. “Mostly, it’s black water (and) you can’t see your hand when you put it in front of your mask.”
But Schumaker uses the term “blessed” to describe the people he worked with for the eight years he traversed the state and says it was only the unrelenting pace that led ultimately led him to decline the invitation to continue.
He did so to be appointed, then elected, as a Springfield Municipal Court Judge, where he’s felt as blessed by co-workers as he did while a prosecutor.
“With all my experience (in criminal work),” Schumaker said, “everybody assumed I wanted to move to Common Pleas Court.”
But after 34 years laying down the law, he said he enjoys a chance to use its power to change the direction of people’s lives, both for their sake and the community’s.
Schumaker said Municipal Court is populated with those “who have made mistakes” of a different sort than career criminals.
While “trying to be right and do right for the community,” he said, his goal is often “to try to understand what’s going on” in the defendants’ lives and consider their futures, “especially when it comes to the sentence.”
That’s because, when appropriate, sentences can direct people to the places that can help them redirect their lives both for their own benefit and the community’s.
His job as one of Santa’s guardian elves has an obvious parallel.
Redirecting Denver
Most of the creatures in the shark tank are “pretty docile,” Schumaker said.
Still, he entered the tank with Santa and a fellow elf recently with hopes for the best and plans for the worst.
With his head on a swivel, he surveyed everything from the colorful big-eyed French grunts and eel-like zebra sharks, Pico and Queso, to larger sharks that coast like submarines and the massive grouper, Brutus, who floats by like a metal balloon at a Macy’s Thanksgiving parade.
While crouching a few feet from Scuba Santa and with his back to the audience, Schumaker gripped the tool he had to keep the peace, a plastic candy cane.
“Those are not used as a weapon,” he explained. “They’re used to steer the animals away if they get too close to Santa,” whose mission on the dive is, after all, to be preoccupied with the children.
Schumaker said eye contact with the animals is often enough to redirect them, and that his goal is the same as traffic cop’s: Preventing unwanted accidents that could ruin anyone’s day.
If there is a close call or a disturbance in the tank community, Schumaker is ready to place a hand on Santa’s back to signal that the jolly old elf should “ho-ho-hold it” for a moment and freeze in place.
A waving of the elfin hands in times of tension is contra-indicated.
If things go sideways, Schumaker is called to “put Santa on the bottom of the tank” until help arrives.
“If there’s any predation (anywhere in the tank at any time)” he adds, “you’re supposed to call the dive.”
While he said, “normally it’s just no problem,” he nonetheless climbed out of the water relieved that the animal community had been well behaved and that his sole worry about Denver involved the turtle’s hovering in a place where he could have become tangled in the sound cable connecting Santa with the Whoville equivalents.
Schumaker’s Scuba Santa security shifts are among the 18 trips to the aquarium he makes each year, during which he customarily does two shifts in the water, an annual total sufficient to keep his skills in trim.
He does it for reasons that clearly hold water.
At age 71, he will be too old to run for another term as judge and is looking at retirement as he might an open stretch of ocean. His hopes for how long he might dive during those years are buoyed, as it turns out, by a dive that inspired him nearly as much as one of his father’s war stories.
After watching the oldest member of in his dive team struggle mightily against gravity just to get over the side of the boat, Schumaker saw the water take the weight of the world not only from the fellow’s shoulders, but his spirit.
And in that moment the diver received a gift so many divers ask Santa for: One more chance to sit back, look around and enjoy 71 percent of God’s creation.
HOW TO GO:
What: Scuba Santa’s Water Wonderland
Where: Newport (Ky.) Aquarium
When: Today, Monday and Tuesday
Details: Search words Scuba Santa Newport Aquarium
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