Do you have submechanophobia, Charlie Brown?

I never knew about a thing called submechanophobia until we traveled to Hawaii in 2021, and The Daughter reacted very strongly against the idea of going to the Pearl Harbor Memorial and seeing the Arizona. The idea of looking down at a sunken ship freaked her out. I looked it up and I learned that this is very real.

Here’s a video I saw online today:

Apparently this is a shipwreck off the shore of Tobermory, Ontario. Tobermory is a town at the end of Bruce Peninsula, which extends into Lake Huron, and from what I have found out, there are around twenty shipwrecks in those waters. (We may have just finished noting the power of Lake Superior, but there are four other Great Lakes, and each one has done in its fair share of ships.)

I’ve never found myself looking down at a shipwreck in clear water before (we couldn’t even visit the Arizona! there was a problem with the docks for the boats that go over to it), so I don’t know how eerie I would find this, but while I do not suffer from the phobia in question, I can certainly see why it’s a phobia. Human-made stuff isn’t supposed to be down there, after all, and human-made things in the incorrect context can be creepy indeed…plus it’s a reminder that there’s a whole part of our world, that comprises most of our world, that we can’t visit without help and for small amounts of time.

I remember one such instance when I was a kid. My parents started canoeing heavily when I was 10 or 11, and I often accompanied them on these expeditions. One favorite waterway was the Allegheny Reservoir, which is a large lake in both New York and Pennsylvania, created by the erection in 1965 of the Kinzua Dam near Warren, PA. The reservoir is over 20 miles long, and it flooded valleys and caused the ends of a number of hamlets and villages as it filled.

One afternoon we were canoeing at Willow Bay, one of the reservoir’s many inlets. Since the Allegheny had been dammed at Kinzua in 1965, my father had been through the region before its flooding and remembered it. Thanks to a sign near the boat launch indicating the former site of a village, my father knew that he had driven through the place where we were paddling…and minutes later he looked down to see, just a few feet below the water, a road.

And that road is still visible today on Google Earth. Here is Willow Bay. Note the road, what’s left of it, emerging from the woods overgrowing it and then plunging, straight as an arrow, beneath the waters of the artificial lake.

What have you seen in the water?