MY (RELUCTANT) TRIP TO THE TITANIC

In 2023, the submersible Titan imploded on its way to view the famous sunken ocean liner. A year earlier, our author—a sitcom writer—took the same trip. Here's what he saw.

- Mike Reiss

I'VE SPENT 37 YEARS working on The Simpsons as a writer, showrunner and producer.

I've written jokes for Johnny Carson, Joan Rivers and—no joke—Pope Francis. I've met two Beatles and one president (Biden). Despite all that, I'm most famous as “that guy who didn’t die on that sub.”

“That sub” was the Titan, which imploded almost three years ago, killing all on board.

One year before that happened, I rode the Titan 2½ miles down to see the wreck of the Titanic.

Let me begin by saying that my wife, Denise, and I like danger. And by “my wife and I,” I mean just my wife—not me, not even a little. Our friends know this, so one called from Seattle to tell us, “A guy in my neighborhood is building submarines to go to the bottom of the ocean.”

I replied, “That sounds like a fun way to get killed.” I would be right, but that was still years away. This was the first we'd heard of Stockton Rush.

They say name is destiny. Martin Short really is short. Fats Domino was pretty fat. And Cedric the Entertainer ... looks like a Cedric. So when your name is Stockton Rush, you can’t become a dog groomer; you are doomed to a life of adventure. Mr. Rush was as handsome and suave as a soap opera doctor. He had a smooth voice and a bottomless supply of quips, like “You’re never too old to be an idiot” and “Clint Eastwood once told me, ‘Don’t drop names.” He’d had every career an 8-year-old boy could dream of: inventor, airline pilot, aerospace engineer testing F-15 fighter jets, and now a submersible captain. We were hooked.

We took two trips with Capt. Rush. The first, in 2020, left from an exotic port off a mysterious island known as ... Staten. A hundred miles off Staten Island is Hudson Canyon, an underwater chasm the size of the Grand Canyon. We were going to dive it in the