When An Evergreen Story About A Submersible Becomes Timely

Matthew Gavin Frank shares his experience learning about the missing OceanGate Titan.

In media, we’re often obsessed with time. The time it takes to report a good story. Getting a scoop before someone else does. Keeping up with the fast pace of churning out content, timing a story to a specific event, or reacting to an event in a timely fashion.

Sometimes a perfectly timed story can’t be planned, though. When Matthew Gavin Frank began his reporting on the DIY submersible community, a story he would later pitch and report for Harper’s ahead of his upcoming book, he simply couldn’t have known the story would go live the same week the OceanGate Titan submersible went missing and became the buzziest news item of the week. In this case, the perfect timing of it all is eerie, to say the least. No one wants to hear news of a missing submersible mere months after taking a trip into the ocean in one. It’s a nightmare scenario that could intensify a person’s worst fears. 

“Quite frankly, Erin, I’m still working it out but a couple easy adjectives are haunting and disarming,” Frank tells me. 

In “Submersion Journalism,” Frank writes about his trip 2,000 feet into the sea off the coast of the Caribbean island Roatán, Honduras in captain Karl Stanely’s home-built amateur submersible. After spending the last three years researching the DIY submersible community and our (broadly) obsession with the deep sea, Frank and his editor at Harper’s discussed the project and decided on a reporting trip for early 2023. 

Early on in his essay, Frank writes about his fear of drowning, stemming from his mother’s experience of nearly drowning in the Atlantic Ocean as a child. “I’ve had drowning nightmares since the age of four—nightmares that have persisted into adulthood with little variation,” he writes. But his editor insisted the one thing missing from his original story was a diving trip on a submersible. “I was back and forth on it. But typically when I throw myself into a writing project, for better or for worse, I’m able to detach from a sense of danger, especially when it comes to me and my own body,” he says.

And so he embarked on his journey into the deep sea in February. 

With his story finally out as the search continues for the missing OceanGate Titanic tourist submersible, Frank says it’s been an emotional time. “Sharing [my story] on social media felt weird and not right somehow,” he tells me. As of Thursday morning, rescuers feared the Titan may be nearly completely out of oxygen. 

To make matters stranger and even more serendipitous, Frank shares that in 2019, his captain Karl Stanley took a trip of his own in the Titan, the very submersible that went missing. 

“Yesterday especially I was acutely aware of the fact that I was alive,” he says. “And that meant something different at different moments throughout the day. First of all I was really pissed at myself for going down in that submersible in the first place. And my mom is still mad at me.”

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