"It could also be the time he led an expedition in the Canadian high Arctic, battling unforgiving ice to locate a lost British vessel crushed by those same elements. Or, when diving in waters off the Florida Keys humming with history, he passed a pod of lobsters clustered in a reef that was composed entirely of 16th-century silver bars from a Spanish galleon."
"In the final arc of your life, you start thinking of shipwrecks differently and they become a metaphor for understanding the forces of the world, he says from his Toronto home. Because, above all, they help us grapple with one of the toughest things that we have to do as humans: to reckon with the reality that we're mortal. Death is coming for us, but it gives life an unexpected beauty and a deep sense of urgency, MacInnis adds."
Joe MacInnis, an 88-year-old Canadian undersea explorer, draws on decades of dives among shipwrecks to understand the ocean and human mortality. He experienced a cable snag two and a half miles below the Titanic with Anatoly Sagalevich and led the first team to view the Edmund Fitzgerald wreck in Lake Superior. He led Arctic expeditions through crushing ice to find a lost British vessel and discovered a reef of 16th-century silver off the Florida Keys inhabited by lobsters. Shipwrecks function as metaphors for natural forces and mortality, revealing both the beauty and urgency of life as well as injury and death.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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