Into the Deep
It’s a human compulsion to make the world small. We have brought a planet to heel, exploited every quadrant, and reduced wilderness to a few tidy squares on the grid. We treat creation like a beaten foe and spare it only patronizing forms of love.
When nature shows its teeth, we are undone. It is disturbing to realize we are not the world. Despite all our tools, the earth refuses to bend to us. It remains enormous and devouring. In its vastness, we’re not very much at all.
Today is a critical day. Ships and aircraft scour the North Atlantic for the Titan, a 22-foot-long submersible tube carrying five voyagers. In the surface world, these men are highly accomplished. Some of them are very wealthy, having paid $250,000 each to tour the wreckage of the Titanic, yet another human ingenuity shattered by nature. But what are any of us against the enormity of the sea?
The searchers comb through an area twice the size of Connecticut, nearly 400 miles from the black cliffs of Newfoundland. The wreck of the Titanic rests 12,5000 ft. below the surface of the Atlantic. The great ship’s skeletal hull is a pinprick in that trackless outback; More than 80 percent of the oceans are unmapped and unexplored. We know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the bottom of the sea.
The Titan could be bobbing in the big empty, but the hatch can’t be opened from the inside and its oxygen supply is nearly gone. If the craft is marooned on the ocean floor, the odds of a rescue are even longer. Earlier this week, Canadian surveillance planes detected faint banging sounds emanating from the deep. The U.S. Coast Guard deployed underwater drones in the vicinity, and a French robot is aiding in the search. So far, they’ve turned up nothing.
Debris around the Titanic could account for noises picked up by sonar, but there is still a whisper of hope that the men will be snatched back from the abyss and returned to their loved ones. This vigil has gone on since the world was young: We always wait for wanderers to come home, for the lost to be found.
Last month, a Cessna carrying seven people plunged into the Colombian jungle. Four children, aged 13, 9, 4, and 1 year old, walked away from the crash that killed their mother and two other adults. Led by the eldest, a girl named Lesley, they survived in the rainforest for 40 days until rescuers found them.
These children were lost in deep Amazonia, a darkling wood filled with malarial mosquitos, snakes, and jaguars. Because they were Witoto, a people indigenous to the region, they were raised to survive in the wild. Lesley kept her siblings alive by gathering fruit and palm seeds and fashioning makeshift mosquito netting. The group climbed trees to stay safe from wild animals. Later, they supplemented their meager diet with supplies dropped from a search plane. This happened in 2023 when children the world over have retreated from nature into realms that exist only on screens.
When I was eight, I wandered into the woods with my 10-year-old stepbrother. We could not find our way out. This was hardly the Amazon, but Appalachia. It was summer, and my feet were bare. The trees closed in around us and the human world vanished. We scrambled over stony hills and through brushy hollers, miles off the grid. As night fell, we became aware that we had crossed into a more dangerous country. It was terrifying but also thrilling. When the first search plane soared overhead, we did what the Witoto children did—took cover in the trees. Foolishly, we wanted to find our own way back. Or maybe stay hidden forever.
We lost ourselves in the wild. It drew us in and transformed us into something feral. We were part of a boundless, terrible world and irrelevant to it; In a matter of hours, there was nothing to do but survive. Even now, nature can work such magic. It tempts the adventurous and proud. Sometimes, it does not let them go. The rest of us keep vigil by the home fire and pray for their return.
