For over twenty-five years, Rick Carney has been hunting for antique bottles and treasures where nobody else is looking—in the water. He does "extreme diving, in extreme weather," he says, off his 17' Thundercraft, Finders Keepers. "There are not many people who do this. It's very dangerous." Winter diving has advantages. "In January, the Kennebec River will freeze and I'll have fifteen feet of clear water," he says, or "viz," short for visibility. "Once the rivers freeze up north, there's no more silt coming down."

Carney repairs copy machines "in real life," he says. Boxes of toner are stacked on shelves in the workshop of his modest ranch house on coastal Maine, a couple large copiers in the center of the room, machine parts scattered on benches, trays of tools. "I own the business, so when the calls are done, I'm either digging, fishing, or diving." Carney chain-smokes and coughs frequently, though today he attributes the cough to a head cold. On a wall hangs a caricature of Carney at Old Orchard Beach, Maine's touristy midway with merry-go-rounds, salt water taffy, a boardwalk lined with souvenir hawkers. The artist has given Carney a wide grin, which is true--Carney has a vivid movie star smile, perfect orthodontia in a handsome, gruff face, a trim reddish beard, thick brown hair with silvering sideburns. The caricaturist drew Carney a pert upturned nose, which is not physiognomically accurate but captures Carney's rapscallion nature. He's exuberant, quick to smile, which emphasizes a deep chin cleft and creases around his eyes. His face is weathered like a Maine fisherman, only his "catch" is not urchin or lobster, but hundreds of cast-off objects. Trash. Treasure. The booty from Carney's diving forays adorns his shop. Bottles, glass, ceramics, figurines. He dredges his fingers through a shallow cardboard box filled with doll heads, buttons, clay pipes, small bottles. "Here's a nice one," he says. "Dr. Loring's Pacific for Dispensia, Constipation, Sick Headache and Piles."

Carney's interest in antique bottles began in childhood. "My mother dug a dump behind her house in Orland, a 1700s cape. I didn't know she was my mother at the time, 'Oh, you have another mother!'" He chuckles. "She was having this yard sale with bottles she dug," he says in a thick, Maine accent—"yahd sale." Carney first dug for bottles behind his "second" mother's house. "I cut this knuckle right to the bone," he says. After he was stitched up, Carney returned to dig some more. "I stuck my hand in the SAME HOLE," he says, and sliced his hand "ON THE SAME PIECE OF GLASS!" He never got cut again, though. "I could sit in broken glass, paw right through it, never get cut, like those guys walking the coals, you know?" He laughs. "The bottles were gorgeous colors, and I was hooked."

Carney joined the marines, traveled out west ("there ain't nuthin' old out west"), and returned to Maine to find that the bottle dumps were picked over. "Back in the seventies there was a massive bottle-digging craze. WIVES! CHILDREN! It was a family thing," he says. Like a creature devolving, Carney went from land to water, starting with aquatic metal detecting. "If a house is ten feet from the shore, they threw the trash in the water." He sought historic hotel sites from the heyday of Maine's railway tourism. "On Cobbossee Lake there was Island Park, which had a casino and an outdoor theater. Back in the 1870s, it was at the end of the trolley line. It was the place to go." A steamboat ferried visitors to the island, where passengers paid a dime to use the beach. "Over the years, dimes got dropped. My metal detector was just going beep beep beep beep. In that much weeds and muck, I found over 200 mercury dimes one day." Carney spent a decade metal detecting before stumbling on underwater bottle dumps. "I was feeling through the mud—whoops, there's a bottle. Then I started actively seeking out bottles and they seemed to be everywhere."

"If there was a house fifty feet from the water, then there is an underwater dump," he says. "I'm doing a site right now in Exeter, New Hampshire. Four feet of water, four feet from the shore. There's five 1790s houses within ten feet of the water." Carney knocks on doors to get permission to cross people's property if there is no public access, though he's been arrested for crossing private property. "A lot of bottle diggers sneak in, Rambo in, but it's always nice to get permission," he says. "Nobody owns the water so as long as I go by boat, ain't nuthin' they can do." Carney does about a hundred dives a year. He carries his diving gear with him on copy machine repair calls in case there's a lake or pond nearby. "Within a fifty miles radius of my house there isn't a gully or a lake or a river than I ain't been in."

He dives in inland ponds and in the ocean along the coast of New England. He dove near Hartford, Connecticut near an old viaduct. "There's a place called Adrian's Landing. The original cribstone granite docks are still there. When they built I-90, they tore down the oldest part of the city, but they never touched the waterfront. We probably pulled $5000 worth of stuff out of that Connecticut site," he says, including a Hyatt's Infallible Life Balsam, a $200 bottle. "All you can see are skyscrapers on the shoreline, and I'm digging up stuff from the 1700s," he says.

Carney uses a four-inch dredge to unearth the bottles. "I have an underwater torpedo, which is a little propulsion device—it pulls you along at 2.5 miles per hour--zzzzzzzzzz," he says. "I flip it around backwards, puh, puh, puh—it blows holes in the bottom to uncover stuff." He laughs, coughs. Using the dredge, he found a motherlode of bottles and ceramics in Moosehead Lake, Maine's largest inland body of water. "I went into the local yokel store and said, 'Who's the oldest guy in town?' They said, 'Bustah is, and he's sittin' right over they-ah!'" Carney asked Buster where they dumped trash when he was a kid. "When he was just a little boy, they used to haul all of the trash out onto the ice between Mt. Kineo and Moody Island. In spring, the ice would go out, and—ploop—down goes the trash."

Mt. Kineo graces the shoreline of Moosehead Lake, a mere hill in the shadow of Maine's tallest peak, mile-high Mt. Kathadin. Kineo was the site of a grand hotel in the 19th century that housed 500 guests who traveled by train from Boston and points south. Carney dove in the spot Buster had identified. "I'm going along with my scooter in about forty feet of water and I come across a hump in the mud. I reach my arm down there—solid bottles! One of the first things I found was a little creamer with a big cobalt-blue 'K' for Kineo, from the hotel. Three feet from that I found the saucer it sat in." He shows me a tiny round ceramic dish no more than two inches in diameter, also with the hotel's insignia, a butter pat. The singular function of this doll-plate sized dish, in Victorian times, was to hold butter for one diner.

Diving for bottles is not for the faint-hearted. "I would love to see more people get into this," Carney says, "but there are issues. It's dangerous." Carney suffered the bends once. "It was my own fault. I did three tanks in forty-five feet of water, back to back, because I got all excited. I was finding clay jugs with big blue flowers." (Cobalt-decorated crockery from the 19th century can sell for thousands.) Divers must have a "surface interval" every so often to prevent build-up of nitrogen in body tissue. "It was like somebody put a nail into my thumb," Carney said. He was rushed to the hospital and stuck in a hyperbaric chamber for six hours. Most of Carney's dives are in less than twenty-feet of water. "As long as you don't go deeper than thirty-three feet, you can stay underwater all day long. Sometimes I'm underwater twelve, fifteen hours a day. Tank after tank after tank, just digging and having a blast."

When he's diving in shallow waters near shore, kids who mistake him for a snapping turtle throw rocks at him. Real snapping turtles have a nasty bite. "One snapper just kind of launched itself off the bottom toward me, and I was like—ahhh—out of here I go," he recalls. Carney has been swarmed by "hundreds" of catfish, tormented by boaters who used his dive flags for slalom, and once, bombarded with rocks by an annoyed property owner in a canoe, who then tried to smack Carney with the canoe paddle. Diving in dark tannic ponds is like swimming through "chocolate milk," Carney says. "Once, in black-water diving, I flipped my light up and saw branches above me. I was underneath a tree," he says. He has to watch for underwater landslides. He describes one incident: "I'm on my tips of my fins and this bank is sheer vertical. I'm digging into it, undermining the bank. If you watch the bank, you'll start to see it raining mud, almost like an avalanche. I just happened to look up and pushed away, and as I did the whole bank went whumfp! It caught my fins. So I dug my fins out and started digging again!" he says with a cheery little laugh.

I ask Carney what compels him to engage in such risky recreation. "The love of old bottles?" I say. "It's the search, and the finding," he says. In a pond just a few miles from his house, Carney recently found fifty-eight clay pipes. "Somebody back in the 1870s threw them all in the river. Clay pipes are like today's cigarettes. They made them by the millions, literally. I've found them with chew marks on the stems, hanging out of this guy's mouth for twenty years. These were unsmoked, pristine. Worth $12 to $20 bucks a piece. Finds like that are just exciting!" In spite of a potential $1000 profit from the clay pipes, Carney says, "It=s not so much the value. Most of what I find is in the $100 to $2000 range." He takes a drag from his cigarette, coughs, continues. "I find so much I could probably make a living at it. I've had up to seven antique stores that I just stuffed with things. I rent glass cases and fill them with doll heads and clay pipes and crocks and jugs and bottles and bells. After four or five years, I actually started running out of stuff." Hahahahaha, his peal of laughter.

"There's so much out there to find, and so many places that have never been tapped," he says. "I can't stress it enough, there is so much that I'll never find it in my lifetime." Besides "stuffing" cases in antique shops, Carney sells his bottles on eBay (his dealer name is "Bottlegod"), and he sells directly to collectors and dealers, who knock on his door periodically to see what he's found. "Me and other guys like me are the suppliers for the antique dealers and the collectors. We're at the bottom end of the scale," he says. Carney is at the bottom literally—the bottom of the ocean.