Submerged Cultural Resources

Our “Ocean People” this week lifts up those who have lost their lives at sea, and those who keep their memory alive, for helping us care about all that lives in the ocean.

It used to annoy me at the Monterey Bay Aquarium that people would walk right by the big beautiful Kelp Forest exhibit with all its amazing fish and plants, and barely stop to look, but if there was a scuba diver in there cleaning the windows or vacuuming up the poop, the visitors would linger and look at the diver forever.  “Look, a diver, what are they doing,” they would ask me, the great volunteer guide knowledgeable about flora and fauna, but not so interested in diving.

But then I learned that a basic principle of “interpretation” (the art of sharing information about a park or museum or historical site in an imaginative way) is to make a connection between the story you are trying to tell and the visitor’s own story, to connect your story and their story.   The National Park Service “father” of the art of heritage interpretation, Freeman Tilden, named 6 Principles of Interpretation, and the first is: “Any interpretation that does not somehow relate what is being displayed or described to something within the personality or experience of the visitor will be sterile.”  So the guests are saying, I am a person, there’s a person inside that 300,000 gallon tank, that could be me, I wonder what it is like underwater.

Learning to make this connection helped me get over my similarly snide superior judgment about the value of the Maritime Heritage Program of the National Marine Sanctuaries.  Our tax dollars have funded all kinds of research into what NOAA calls the many “submerged cultural resources” in the protected waters of the Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf and Great Lakes.  Yes, that’s what they call shipwrecks, submerged cultural resources. 

I protested, “No, I am serving on the Monterey Bay National Sanctuary Advisory Council because I wanted to protect the fish and coastline, not to hawk shipwrecks.”   But, they explained, quoting Tilden, that’s how to get people interested and committed to ocean protection.  If they think, that could have been me, or you, in that ship at the bottom of the sea, they will want to protect it.   Care about the people of the ocean, those who lived by the sea, or died by the sea, and you will care about everything, human or not, that lives in the sea.

1933 Macon Flying Over ManhattanIn 1935, the airship USS Macon, a dirigible sort of like the Hindenburg, crashed off the coast of Big Sur with some survivors, some loss of life.  Dramatic eyewitness accounts and some photos appeared in the press, but the waters there are so deep and rough and dark that no one considered looking for the wreck until the 1980’s.  Underwater technology had improved, sonar and submersibles.  David Packard, founder of the Aquarium and of its research sister institution MBARI (Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute) as well as founder of Hewlett Packard, had also been Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Nixon Administration.  He knew that the Macon had been an important part of the pre-World War II Navy preparations for air defense (it could scout farther than planes and it carried Sparrowhawk biplanes in an internal hangar).  So he encouraged MBARI and NOAA to partner in using new technology to find the wreck. 

Their first expedition was a failure; they looked in the area where the old photos showed the Macon sinking, but found nothing, only fish and the dark.  Then they heard that the daughter of one of the Macon’s survivors had seen displayed at a fish restaurant in Moss Landing, near MBARI, a piece of metal girder that she recognized as being like airship pieces her father, the airship commander, had shown her as a girl.  Turned out the metal piece had been given to the restaurant by a local fisherman, who had found it in his net and thought it was some picturesque oddity.  Tracking him down the researchers asked where had been his favorite spot in that rich fishing ground, and he was able to help them fine tune where to search.   Next voyage – voila!  In 1500 feet of water they found the wreckage of the airship, its 5 biplanes and the enlisted men’s stove and chairs.  Another Titanic.

At the Point Sur Light Station there is now a display about the Macon, with old newsreels and recent pictures and the famous girder, a needle in a haystack ocean, the breadcrumb that helped the lost be found. 

And the Sanctuary folks were right.  Finding this historic, military, adventuresome, poignant, fisherman-found “submerged cultural resource” brought much more interest and protection to the coast than any rare coral or fish.

A skyhooks on the Sparrowhawk biplanes the Macon carriedOf course, the fact that there are dead bodies in these wrecks adds to its appeal and mystery, and reinforces the sense that the waters deserve some protection, an underwater cemetery.   MBARI and NOAA have sworn to keep the Macon’s location a secret, and the water is so deep and rough that it’s unlikely to be disturbed.

NOAA published a fascinating book about the historical contexts of all 15 National Marine Sanctuaries called Fathoming Our Past.  Describing the long history of human connections to the sea, it says, “A predictable by-product of marine travel, habitation, trade, harbors, and sea battles is the deposition of waste.  Coastal building foundations, human remains, discarded or lost items, from tools and household goods to ships, usually found repose in the water.” 

At first I liked this quote about how all these discarded and lost items find their repose in the water and can teach us about the past.  But then I thought, no, don’t call it waste. Those are precious memories. 

And I realized that my objection to calling it waste was because that I was beginning to connect these stories to my story. I have just finished moving my elderly father from independent living into a much smaller single room and we have had to go through every book and dish and hat and souvenir.  Each item has a story and it’s hard to let things go.  I imagine my kids doing the same with my things, hopefully years hence.

Helping my father move and going through all his stuff has been a poignant way to review his many years, to see what he has saved, what he brought with him here from New York 20 years ago, what he has had since he was a kid.  Much of it is precious, in value or in memories.  And much is what you could call mundane.  I cleaned out his kitchen, yesterday we went through clothes, I went through boxes and boxes of saved receipts and bills from years ago.  Much of it I threw away pretty casually.  But some I long to keep, because these items tell his story, and in some sense, my story.   I don’t want them called waste.  I don’t want my kids or archaeologists years hence to call my stuff waste.  It is evidence of my life and choices.  I know that in the long run it will all be discarded or rebought from the church rummage sale and then reused and then discarded.  

And if we have dramatic sea level rise, all our stuff will become not just waste, but submerged cultural resources! Some marine archaeologist years hence will try to describe my life based on my soggy items.

See it worked!  Their story connected to my story.  The sailors at the bottom of the sea and the fisherman finding the girder and my father and all my stuff and climate change and rising sea levels, all connect.  I will care more about the ocean not just because I love fish, but because I’m only 3 miles from the shore, and my precious stuff might get flooded and some marine archaeologist will call it waste.

Our stories are all part of a big ocean of stories, submerged or not.  Bring them to the surface!

Copyright © 2018 Deborah Streeter