By NICOLE SANTIAGO
Capt. Edward J. Smith, of the Titanic, the most experienced captain on the seas, retired to his cabin on the evening of Apr. 14, 1912 not realizing his ship would soon rest on the bottom of the ocean floor.
'I could not conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel, modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that,' Smith said previous to Titanic's departure.
Almost 100 years later, the tragedy of the Titanic hasn't been forgotten. For Mark Lach, the tragedy has become a human connection he feels responsible to share with others.
Just as Capt. Smith didn't understand where stepping aboard his adventure would lead him, Mark Lach, vice president of creative and design for RMS Titanic Inc., never imagined that saying 'yes' to design the 'Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition' would take him to the bottom of the ocean floor.
'It was so exciting; it was an adventure I never thought I'd be on,' Lach said. 'It didn't take long for that excitement to really turn into a real sense of an emotional human experience.'
Not just anyone is allowed to dive to the Titanic. In 1994, and reconfirmed in 1996, the United States Federal Court granted RMS Titanic Inc., the rights to recover the artifacts from the wreck site of the Titanic.
On a bright, sunny, beautiful day in the summer of 2000, Lach dove into an almost Caribbean blue ocean, aboard the submersible Mir 1.
'We were pulled away from the vessel, and then we started to descend,' Lach said. 'Within 15 minutes that bright blue very slowly but surely faded to black, and for the next two hours we were in the dark. It was like that moment of excitement you get when you go to a play and the house lights go down, except this was two hours of that expectation.'
The pilot, co-pilot and Lach were aboard Mir 1 for 12 hours. With the submersible no bigger than the front seat of a small car, Lach laid on his side with a one-foot-thick plastic porthole in front of him providing a window to the ocean.
'There was a gage over my left shoulder counting up in meters,' Lach said. 'At 3,844 meters, we very lightly touched down on the ocean floor,' Lach said. 'The pilot turned to me and said, 'Mark, we're on the bottom and we're right at the bow.''
Looking out into the black from his porthole, Lach waited for the exterior lights to illuminate the bow of the Titanic.
'The bow of the Titanic was towering over us,' Lach said. 'What really felt like flying, we went right up the bow stem passing the enormous anchors that still hang from either side of the Titanic, and then we came up right over the bow railing. I thought, 'Are you kidding me?' It was so exciting.'
The Titanic's wreck site is located 963 miles northeast of New York and 453 miles southeast of the Newfoundland coastline. It lies 2.5 miles beneath the ocean surface with 6,000 pounds per-square-inch of pressure.
'I'll never forget going out to the site,' Lach said. 'We were at our wreck site for three and a half weeks for the expedition.'
The wreck site is available to only a few manned submersibles in the world. Since 1987, RMS Titanic Inc. has conducted six joint expeditions by the United States, France and Russia.
Lach's expedition was from the most recent. He worked aboard and lived on Russia's research vessel, Keldycsh, and dove to the wreck of the Titanic in the submersible Mir 1.
'My dive was 13 of 14 dives with two submersibles each,' Lach said. 'Not being superstitious at all, I thought, 'Oh, fantastic, if something's going to go wrong, it's going to be 13.''
Each submersible costs about $25 million to build. Made from titanium and high-grade rolled steel, a submersible weighs approximately 18 tons and includes a crew department measuring seven feet in diameter.
During the expedition, Mir 1 traveled past Capt. Smith's cabin.
'It looks kind of like a movie set, but it's not, it's the real thing,' Lach said. 'And as you're looking over the cabin, there is his bathtub and what's left of his bed.'
At this point, Lach experienced a connection with the captain, recalling a story about how at 11:45 p.m. on Apr. 14, 1912, Capt. Smith was in that cabin. The captain had given up his command at about 9 p.m. to retire for the evening.
'Your mind starts to pick things about the inside of story. It was that kind of human connection for the next eight hours as we were on the bottom,' Lach said.
The company recovering the artifacts wanted Lach to dive to the wreck site on one of the expeditions.
'They thought it would be good part of my education for me to go down and see the Titanic first hand,' Lach said. 'I feel a real sense of responsibility now for these artifacts.'
Lach was asked to help with this display three times before he considered getting involved.
'When they asked if I wanted to get involved I said no because I didn't think I could do it,' Lach said. 'I had never designed a museum exhibition before. I saw the movie Titanic, knew that it sank and that was the extent of my knowledge. The third time I was asked to do it I said, 'Yes.''
Now, six years later Lach has been doing nothing but Titanic everyday and traveling the world with his designed exhibition.
There are five exhibitions on display around the world, three nationally and two internationally. Locations and future destinations of the exhibition include Tampa, Fla., Philadelphia, Pa., Manchester, England and Shenghi, China.
The 'Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition' opened in Salt Lake City May 29, welcoming aboard gallery visitors with a reproduction of a White Star Line boarding pass. The exhibition presented by the Utah Museum of Natural History is on display at the Annex in the ZCMI Center through Jan. 8, 2005.
'Everybody should experience this,' Bonnie Larson, a resident of Salt Lake City said. 'Because not many times do you have the chance to walk through history. You can read about it but very seldom do you get to walk through it.'
Upon entrance to the exhibit, containing more than 292 artifacts recovered from the resting place of the Titanic, gallery visitors are given a boarding pass with a name of an actual passenger and information about them. The brief background includes where the passenger sailed from, destination, reason for traveling, age, hometown, class distinction on the Titanic and other passenger facts.
An iceberg is part of the display. Visitors are invited to touch a sheet of real ice as a representation of how cold the early morning waters of the North Atlantic were Apr. 15, 1912.
'It's a story, although 92 years old, that speaks to us more powerfully than ever,' Lach said. 'It's one of those stories in history that stays with us because it speaks to the human side of life and how we value our family and friends.'
At the end of the exhibit is a memorial wall for gallery visitors to discover if the person on each boarding pass survived. Personalizing the exhibition, visitors do not like to leave until they found the name of their passenger.
'My passenger didn't survive,' said Ruth Lutz, from Malad, Idaho.
As the Titanic lies rusting on the sea floor, the tragedy isn't forgotten. For Lach, the story is more than a memory; it's a responsibility.
'Traveling 2.5 miles to the ocean floor, and seeing Titanic face to face was the adventure of my life,' Lach said. 'While looking at the ship through the Mir's tiny porthole, I felt a powerful connection to everyone involved in her construction, sailing and loss. More than ever, I feel a tremendous responsibility to tell the story of Titanic in a way that brings dignity and honor to those who lost their lives, and to those whose lives were forever changed.'