My friend Wendy is a fearless adventurer, downhill skier, and scuba aficionado, in addition to her many other accomplished roles including art historian, curator, and first-class cook.  I already knew that when yesterday this photo showed up in my email linked to a Facebook post she had made:  Wendy inside a Lockheed L1011 air intake on the sea floor in Jordan.

This image terrifies on so many levels—some more obvious than others.  Airplanes should be either in the air or on the ground, not under water.  And as for posing while scuba diving inside a sunken plane’s air intake:  that’s pushing the “air intake” metaphor to its literal limit in my book.  Just the thought of scuba makes me claustrophobic. If you want a safe but heightened taste of that phobia, watch Ron Howard’s excellent 2022 film Thirteen Lives, based on the true story of the 2018 mission to rescue 12 boys and their soccer coach from Thailand’s flooded Tham Luang Nang Non cave system.  Holy cow.

For me, Wendy’s photo also rhymes experientially with two other direct encounters of the scarifying sublime. Looking down into a Hoover Dam spillway on one of our many visits to the desert southwest really gave me the willies. And artist Nari Ward’s Nu Colossus (2011), part of Ward’s “Sub Mirage Lignum” installation at MASS MoCA (2 April 2011-4 March 2012) had an awful allure.

The form of Nu Colossus came from the small conical basket-woven fish traps used in Ward’s native Jamaica; fish are lured into these traps only to get ensnared once inside.  Ward’s leviathan 60-foot long sculpture, a whirlwind on its side, appears to have sucked in random bits of weathered furniture—and threatens the viewer in much the same uncanny way.

As for the Hoover Dam spillway, a terrestrial undertow that so creeped me out that I vividly recall its alarming gravitational pull decades later, it took my searching the Internet for a picture of it to discover that there’s a Reddit community devoted to sharing images prompting “the fear of partially or fully submerged man-made objects.”  Ah, so!  There’s a word for the sensation Wendy’s dive, the Hoover dam spillway, and Ward’s Colossus all evoke in me:  submechaniphobia!  And it’s curious how absent the “man-made” aspect, approaching the lower depths does NOT scare me, not even the 755-foot descent into Carlsbad Caverns that my husband and I managed to hike back in March of 2016.  What’s the deal with that?

I’m wondering, too, how much agency versus being pulled against one’s will into the vortex has to do with this phobia.  At 70, the allegorical vortex I fear is the Charybdis of dementia, the slow sucking away of cognition.  I feel its tug when I think of a thing and cannot come up with the word for it.  Most recently, that was the “abacus” that appeared in an early morning dream.  Why an abacus?  And why couldn’t I think of that word until later that day?  Even in the dream I was struggling to name what I saw before me, an oblong frame with rows of wires along which counting beads are slid.  Dreaming is a favorite hobby these days: I’m fascinated by the self-generated stories that retirement affords me the leisure to enjoy, however much they sometimes disturb.

This morning I awoke in a coil (Ah! There’s that sucking circle again!) about someone’s taking over my Centre College office in the Norton Center for the Arts back in Danville, Kentucky, an office I left voluntarily almost 28 years ago.  I had loved that nicely appointed peach-colored space with its Taliesen floor-to-ceiling one-way glass window, a far cry from the bull pen stall afforded Tulane teaching assistants from which I had graduated.  Coming back to the comfortable present after that dreamed distress took quite a bit of calming concentration. I certainly had agency back then, but I reckon the sense of loss remains.

Then, too, I think this morning I was still under the influence of A Man Called Otto, the new Tom Hanks film I saw last night with its moving and rather-too-recognizable portrait of a bereaved husband so eager to join the spouse he lost that only his new neighbor (played for maximum warmth by Mariana Treviño) can pull him back into living life.  Or again, maybe my dream was the spell cast by the imminent 65^th birthday of my “baby” sister, the occasion sucking me back into the past.

Still, the trigger could even be the box of past vacation folders I am slowly sorting and mostly discarding, activity simultaneously pulling me back in time and making me chary of what lies ahead.

But really:  submechaniphobia?  Bah!  As the Irishman I once stopped on the road to Kinsale to ask directions replied, “You’re here now, right?” 

Indeed.  And here now is just fine.