Bodyword #2 Bodies in hostile environments

There are some places a body shouldn’t go or be. You’ve likely heard the story that unfolded this past week: a Titanic-tourist submarine excursion lost in the Atlantic ocean. There were five people aboard. The sub imploded. Not confirmed, but it is assumed that their bodies are long pulverized. An explorer entrepreneur; a businessman explorer; a wealthy father and son explorer; and a diving, Titanic expert. All gone.

When the body is two miles down it gets crushed, mushed, exploded to nothing. You become sea fodder.

When a whale naturally dies and falls to the sea floor it’s called a whale fall. The remains become “a grand banquet that will last decades.” That’s how the writer, and expert on the body after death, Caitlin Doughty put it. Bones will even disappear.1 For any human remains that hit the bottom, this will likely be the case, too.

According to reports, Adm. John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard told the press he did not have an answer on recovering the remains: “This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the sea floor.”2 Their bodies have been transformed — unrecognizable. Hostile environments do that to you.

Some seek such a hostile environment. Others are born into it. Maybe you heard about the other maritime accident that occurred days before the lost sub. In one of the worst shipwrecks in a decade, it’s estimated that more than 650 people drowned off the coast of Greece. It was an overstuffed 100-foot fishing boat called Adriana that set off from Libya. People from Pakistan, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and elsewhere packed onto the boat — women and children were in the hold, according to reports. They never got out. In mixed reports, and during a chaotic scene with the Greek coast guard during a near-moonless night, the ship was overwhelmed and sank. It went down in one of the deepest parts of the Mediterranean Sea.

Like the Titanic, the Adriana — along with the people trapped within — most likely sunk two miles to the sea floor. Approximately 100 people (reports say all men) were rescued from the water by the Greek coast guard and a superyacht that answered a distress call. 3

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Last year, nearly 3,800 people died on migration routes within and from the Middle East and North Africa, the most since 2017. This is according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). IOM is the leading intergovernmental organization in the field of migration and part of the United Nations.4

“The world’s waterways have become a reflection of global inequalities in recent days,” one journalist pointed out the incongruent nature between the events that have taken place on and below the surface of the sea this month. From the wide-ranging and multinational (and estimated millions of dollars) search for a submersible tourist vessel carrying billionaires compared to the coverage of, and delayed response to, migrants stuffed on a squalid, broken fishing vessel who are seeking better jobs, safer lives away from physical and political violence.

Rich people dive to the deep. Rich people shoot off into space. They climb high-ass peaks. They explore the Amazon for lost cities. They zip underground. They charge into these harsh environments seeking a curiosity, a glory, to breathe in the decayed hull of history so it might bring them closer to a long dead moment — it’s adventure. They do it to exercise the “human spirit” and to prove something “extraordinary” can be achieved. 5

Poor people put more spirit and extraordinariness into just surviving day to day. According to the latest figures, it’s estimated there are 281 million migrants worldwide. That’s 51 million more than 2010.6

They run to avoid being shot or thrown in jail. They go because their homes were destroyed from climate change. Or their country is in a famine. They seek to escape poverty and find better jobs. They migrate to unite with family members. They move to give their children a better chance at life.7 There are 110 million people who have outright been forced from their homes — these numbers have broken records year after year.8

A hostile environment will cause you to get up and move. They ride across deserts, hike through a rain forest, pack on a boat with hundreds of others, shoulder to shoulder. They hire smugglers, they sneak across borders, apply for entry, seek refuge. They risk dying on the road, or being a body that ends up at the bottom of the Mediterranean. All not for something extraordinary, but rather, a shot for something ordinary — freedom, safety, and stability.

No matter the circumstances, it’s never good when someone dies underwater. I think of the five on the sub and the entire complex that surrounds the wreckage of the Titanic. Over 1,000 bodies were never recovered from that shipwreck. Many of those people perhaps were seeking a different, better life while aboard the Titanic when it sank in 1912. Some of whom, most likely, went down with the ship. No bodies have been found, likely cleaned up by the bottom scavengers and the ruthlessness of the environment — they went not back to the earth, but to the sea. Lots of shoes have been found in pairs, though, that suggest that there once was a body. They even find sandals in ancient shipwrecks, but rarely human remains. 9

If curiosity drove the five explorers who died this week to the Titanic, and their eventual doom, then perhaps curiosity — it’s unique human force — can drive something else.

Perhaps, those with immense wealth, power, and ability should point their curiosity to the living, breathing migrant crisis (and others crises) happening all over the earth. They can’t help the shoes or long-gone bodies at the bottom of the sea. But they can help the living humans seeking vessels that will bring an ordinary life. To point curiosity and aid in that direction would indeed be greater than any single adventure to a distant star or shipwreck.

ENDIT