An article turned up in my news feed yesterday which said that staghorn and elkhorn coral off Florida are “functionally extinct.... The two coral species have disappeared there because of extreme ocean temperatures...[B]etween 97.8% and 100% of these species’ colonies have died in the Florida Keys and near the Dry Tortugas islands”. Wait, I said to myself, said I: Isn't that all the coral? Well, technically there are about thirty species, but when I began diving in Pennekamp, in the 1970's, and experiencing the “oceanic”, numinous feeling I described North, most of the branch coral one saw was staghorn, interspersed with brain corals the size of a Mack truck. The brain corals all died in the late teens, for a different cause. Hot water is killing the staghorn coral, but the brain corals died due to an epidemic of stony coral tissue loss disease, thought to be bacteria-transmitted, which killed them in days a decade ago. A NOAA web page on the outbreak includes photographs of a single large brain coral, with five percent of its fauna dead on January 5, 2017, and 60% on February 1. For more than twenty years I have been wondering about Pennekamp reef. I kept wondering what shape it was in, and then, after 2010 or so, about the Meta-problem of how to find out, in the world of the Lying Internet. Yes, I could have gone there at any time to see for myself, but: (Unnecessary Numbering Alert): 1. It seemed wasteful to go there without returning to scuba first, which I ould not summon the courage (and time) to do until 2023. 2. Then I wasn't traveling much any more. 3. Then Florida became a hateful autocracy, and I didn't want to go there anyway. I remember, one night (probably also insomniac) when I did one Google search after another, and discovered sites which said the coral was dying (science reports of uncertain provenance, posted by doomy bloggers) and cheerfully announcing it was beautiful and fine, thank you! (scuba shops and the Florida tourist industry). I fell into a sort of confused anomie, powered by denial: I did not want the coral to be dying. Then one year, in the late teens or early twenties, at Meri's insistence, we went to Aruba for her birthday. My plan to take a pool refresher, and do an easy dive, fell through when the company canceled. We asked what the “best” snorkeling beach was, and went: I was Seared to find that there was no living branch coral there, just dead fragments, and a few tiny apparently living brain corals, the size of my hand. I wanted to think that this was just an outlier, a reef which had been destroyed because it was too close to shore, giving access to inexperienced snorkelers who touched or accidentally kicked the coral; but the presence of boats, pulling up to discharge thirty more thrashing and floundering people, indicated there was no better reef around.
I got certified in Boston in the winter of 1978, and according to my hand-written dive log, my first dive in Pennekamp was on August 15, 1979. I recorded staghorn, brain and finger coral; parrotfish and sergeant majors; and the Christ of the Deep statue. It was my fourth dive. My fifth was that same afternoon, on another reef, where I recorded seeing a loggerhead turtle before beginning the dive; neon gobies and gray angelfish; I “swam under small ledges”. On April 1, 1980, I was back in Pennekamp. I saw a “sharksucker attached to a larger fish” which “acted like a squirrel, skittering to the other side” of its host; a large barracuda; the wreck of an old barge. My second dive of the day was on the Christ statue. “[S]ome trouble with backpack....screw was not sufficently tight—tank slipped out underwater and partner had to replace it”. This statement has some Neptunean content. (Unnecessary Numbering Alert:) 1. It was negligence on my part. Tightening the screw holding your tank to your back is part of the safety checks you perform before jumping in. 2. The experience of your regulator almost pulling out of your mouth at 40 feet because your tank is bumping along the bottom six feet behind you is unforgettable. 3. However, this is also a Small Case Study in the vanity of memory. I recall this happening when I was alone underwater, and I had to capture the tank and replace it myself-- but how could I even have done that without taking the harness off, as the screw was behind me? Before retrieving and reviewing my log, I was thinking about that experience and actually wondering where my partner was. In many of my scuba memories, I am alone on the reef, and certainly I had some hotdog partners, strangers met on the boat who swam off and left me. In this case, I recorded the same day that someone else put the tank back in the frame and tightened the screw. In my later version, I am a careless hero; in the incident I recorded within an hour or so after it happened, I am an idiot. 4. The fact that you had to secure the tank to your back with a screw meant that this was still a very early generation of scuba technology. I had actually trained in a swimming pool in 1978 with a tank which was completely independent of an orange safety vest, looking much like the ones traffic officers and construction workers wear, which could be inflated either by mouth or by a CO2 cartridge attached to it. I don't remember if the iron hoop you bolted the tank into was on a completely separate harness, or attached to the back of the vest. By April of 1980, I record that I am wearing a “BC”-- buoyancy compensator-- which suggested a heavier vest which you could use the air in your tank to inflate, via a tube. Later, and in the technology I utilized on my last dive in 2022, the tank would be as enmeshed with straps in the much fluffier BC, as toddlers are in the snowsuits which render them spherical. But now, instead of feeling like a bare-chested, eager swimmer wearing a minimum of equipment, the amount of gear you had to put on in order to walk to the boat ladder, or down the beach, seemed as bulky as, and interfered with sensation and perception as much as, a space-suit. But you couldn't lose your tank anymore by means of a screw you forgot to tighten. I did two more dives that trip, on April 4: “Large ray, barracuda....large anchor and other small wreckage...beautiful coral canyons”. “Queen angel; old chain”.
Then five years go by. I apparently forgot my dive log, because I have filled it in later, and left the date in September 1985 blank. But I remember the context. I was a partner in a four person law practice, litigating a trademark case in Miami, assisted by a large local law firm. I did a pool refresher in a scuba shop in the Keys, and thought I had hired the instructor to be my partner on the boat the next morning, but she didn't show up, one of a long series of disappointments in finding dive partners, which almost felt like misadventures in dating. Strangely, on the boat, was a group of young lawyers I had met at the firm, who invited me to dive with them, so it was a relatively pleasant day, after all. In the “Remarks” I wrote only “Lionfish”, but in the “Equipment Used” field, I entered, “”BC hooked to regulator (the CO2 cartridge era apparently ended during the five years I didn't dive)”. Which raises a fact issue: were the primitive dive vests with CO2 cartridges ever referred to as “buoyancy compensators”? In using the phrase “BC” in 1980, had I been referring to the newer technology, and forgotten by 1985? In the remarks to the afternoon's dive, on “Frenchman's Reef”, I have written only “brain coral”.
Oh, another change in the technology: I wrote that day that I used “an octopus rig for the first time”-- the attached spare regulator so you can offer someone else air, what the dive guide should have handed me when I ran out of air off a North Fork beach in 2022, but did not.
In May 1986, I dived Pennekamp twice more in a day, the morning on a “wreck blown up by the Coast Guard”, in the afternoon on a reef called “the Fingers” because of the branch coral.
I was back in Pennekamp four years later, in 1991. My youngest brother R. had now certified, and a brief golden age began, when for the only time in all those years, I had a partner I completely trusted. We did four dives in two days in January, the first on a reef called “The Elbows”, where I wrote “NURSE SHARK!” My recollection is we looked through a hole in the coral, and saw this benign shark, eight or ten feet long, immobile, apparently asleep, in a grotto. On the other dives, a “yellow stingray.... Large 'cuda and snook”. “ “Especially tough to get back on that ladder in the surge”. We saw another barracuda in the afternoon, on the Tonowanda wreck. In February 1993, I was back in Florida, Key West this time. Not sure if technically I was still within Huge Pennekamp. I saw a spiny lobster and a southern ray, and “descended to almost seventy feet down 'wall'”. The next day, I complained that my random dive partner3 was a “newly certified rookie”, ha-- it was my twenty-eighth dive, and I only did eleven more.
That's it for my dive log. I never dived in Florida again. A dive log is a small book in which there is space to scrawl just a few sentences of description. I never mention seeing a moray eel4-- is it possible I only saw them in the Caribbean? There is nothing in the dive log about the Numinous, weightlessness, the reef as a cathedral, the Biblical sunlight beams shining down from the surface, or the phenomenon (bedoobadoobie) of going all Zen, just floating, breathing and staring. The Oceanic experience. Since I started in 1978 and stopped in 2022, though I didn't dive a lot, I saw changes. At the outset, there were groupers which must have weighed eighty pounds. Just ten years later, you never saw them any more. When I encountered brain corals the size of a house, branch corals which went on for miles, I never dreamed I was one of the last humans on Earth who would see these things alive.
In summer 2025, the hummingbirds didn't come back, and neither did the whales, which had been so numerous right off our beach the two summers before. Apparently the bunker, the fish they had followed inshore, also did not turn up. Stories turned up in my newsfeed of emaciated, starving whales, their corpses washing up on Long Island beaches. Other whales were found which had died of propellor cuts.
Humans can't (thank the System Operator) affect the stars, but have ruined their visibility. There are now, due to light pollution, few nights when I can faintly detect the Milky Way from my back deck, when it used to blaze out vividly. I am now surrounded by mini-mansions, built in the last ten years, with blinding electric lights which turn on, for no reason, even off-season when their owners are in Manhattan, Atlanta or Paris. There is more light from East Hampton, Montauk, and from Connecticut.
When I got my first telescope, in 1967, and started sky-watching, there was a number (TR 7-0101, I think) you could call at the Museum of Natural History, to access a recording which would tell you that at 9 pm, for example, a particular satellite would pass over; we would go out and watch (with our “naked” eyes, not the scope) the tiny, unwavering, nonblinking point of light,traveling in an absolute straight line. There were a few every week. Tonight, I can't do Wallace Astronomy without seeing satellites, most of them Elon Musk's, crossing the field; nor can I lean back and look for meteors, without, some nights,seeing twenty or thirty satellites, following each other in a line. I have seen observatory photographs of the deep sky, ruined by all their tracks.
I never dreamed that Pennekamp would actually die in my lifetime. Then that our civilization is trying its best to kill the Numinous, and has largely succeeded. That just seems a harbinger of its own death, which may not bring back the corals, whales or hummingbirds, but will at least the stars. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.
This was a Coral-Shiva.