When I was a child in Ohio in the 1970s, I would sit lay down in front of the big console television – too close, my mother would say – and watch “The Underwater World of Jacques Cousteau“, whenever he was on, mesmerized by his exploration.
More than Star Trek or Gunsmoke or even M*A*S*H, this was the television show that could hold me hostage to the demands of parents.
It was a very different world then, and a very different world for me. Ohio is nowhere near an ocean, but through the lens of a huge wooden console television, I could see the world that Jacques Cousteau was exploring. Wondrous!
When we were asked at the Elementary School what we wanted to be, you heard the standard fare of ‘fireman’, ‘doctor’ and ‘policeman’. And then, I was there standing up saying, “I want to be an oceanographer… or maybe a Marine Biologist, I’m not sure yet.” I remember a few heads turned, and one girl smiled at me.
To me, it was all about the fun parts Jacques Cousteau would show us, the edited version of his world. That’s what we share with each other, really, our own edited versions of the world, some more staged than others. I did not understand all the work that went into it, all the waiting around, none of that.
No, it seemed like every time I saw my buddy Jacques Cousteau, he was immediately jumping into the water and showing me the cool stuff – not all the work that went into finding it, all the work in preparing and all the safety precautions. To my young mind, all I saw was that this guy got to go floating around the world and showing me the coolest stuff I had ever seen that was real. It was stunning, it provoked imagination.
Later in life, if I wasn’t near an ocean, I was on the way to live within driving distance of one. Snorkeling or diving, if there was something worth seeing I would go look. I also spent a lot of time looking where no one else did, crawling on reefs that jutted out of the ocean at low tide, scraping myself but peering into cracks and crevices.
I never found anything new to the species, but each thing I found was new to me. A new creature. A new thing to understand. A new part of the world that I had not just read about, but saw in person, experienced in person. I had lived some moments with it, sharing time however fleeting, knowing full well that they were likely looking back at me. This was especially true of the octopuses I interacted with.
If I was fortunate, it had not bitten me or stung me somehow. I’ve been pretty fortunate, though I will tell you swimming through a bunch of baby Portugese Man-O’-Wars in a sleeveless t-shirt does not have a fortunate outcome.
The equipment, though, wasn’t cheap, and my life had a way of pushing and pulling me away.
When there was nothing to look at in the water, the water was still there, a promise of the unexplored, the wind always seeming to blow my hair one way or the other as I looked out at it. I belong near the ocean. There’s a part of me that always wanted to be a part of it, living underwater like in Jules Verne‘s “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea“.
So in my life, I’ve read everything I could find on anything to do with the oceans. My time in the Navy wasn’t on board a ship, so I didn’t get the ‘haze grey and underway’ experience, but the Navy being the Navy every command was treated as a ‘ship’, so I understood the crew thing.
Fast forward to today.
The news finally confirmed what I had thought had happened, that the Titan had imploded on it’s little expedition. It was the only reasonable explanation given the redundancies for surfacing. I’m no expert, but I know how systems are engineered for hostile environments and.
If anything went wrong, it was supposed to surface within 24 hours either by the crew or automatically. That it never showed up at the surface within 48 hours, to me, meant that it had suffered a catastrophic failure.
But to me, the biggest question remains, “Why go down there?” The French diver I understood to an extent, but the rest I did not. A wreck seen once is pretty much the same wreck, it would be cold down there (I read that it frosted on the inside when it did successfully go down), visibility was limited to a porthole with the light you brought with you… and the wreck symbolized one of the greatest tragedies at sea, and in my mind is a graveyard.
I don’t imagine they were laying wreaths.
So as someone who has explored, I don’t see why a sane person would spend $250K to go do that. I could see scientists doing it under specific circumstances, but in a world where drones are commonplace, I’d rather watch a flat screen from a drone and have a long hot shower whenever I wanted. What sort of person wants to do that? And who has that kind of money laying around in their couch? Maybe the two questions are connected.
We spent a lot of time looking for them, too. There will be some knowledge to gain from this for underwater engineering, I’m sure, as well as procedures and so on. Yet it seems a waste overall, a waste to go down in the first place, a waste to everyone who went looking, a waste to their loved ones who now are left to mourn, perhaps even saying themselves that it was a waste.
As deaths go, I imagine it wasn’t too bad. It would likely be quick at that depth, the pressure of 4,000 lbs per square inch taking their lives probably as fast as a human can lose a life. Maybe there was a leak at first, and maybe there was a bit of anxiety or despair.
The ocean is deep, mysterious, full of amazing things. We should continue exploring. Tourism, though, should be kept to PADI depths. We have flat screens. We have drones. We should be smart.
