I’m a big fan of mystery stories, and I’ve read a lot of the genre’s major writers, from well-mannered Brits like Doyle, Christie, and Chesterton to hard-hearted Yanks like Hammet, Chandler, and McBain. A lot of their stories begin with a disappearance (even if they end with a corpse), and though in fiction the Great Detective always solves the case, in real life many disappearances remain unsolved, which makes them the most baffling mysteries of all. That may be why people still debate the fate of Judge Crater, search remote islands for a trace of Amelia Earhart, and argue over whether the New York Giants snap the ball over the remains of Jimmy Hoffa.

I don’t spend much time worrying about those folks — what really bothers me are the people who disappear on the internet, without Hercule Poirot or Philip Marlowe ever so much as lifting a finger to find them.

It happens every day, and if you’re part of an online community, you know this to be true.

Now before going any further, I have to admit that there was time when I rolled my eyes at any mention of “online communities.” I didn’t believe that such virtual congregations were really communities. Perhaps that’s because I was in my late thirties when the internet appeared out of nowhere and swept all before it like a horde of hungry Visigoths, which makes me one of those awkward amphibians who were shaped by and lived the first half of their lives under one paradigm, but have had to live the second half under a radically different dispensation.

Or maybe I’m just a natural contrarian, a sour so-and-so. I’ve heard that more than once.

In any case, I eventually adjusted to the new reality, and my views on online communities eventually changed. A lot of things brought that about, the biggest one being Black Gate.

I’ve been a contributor here for twelve years and was a daily reader and commenter for a few years before that. If you spend that much time somewhere, you inevitably get a feel for the place, whether the location is physical or virtual, and you come to know the people there.

Of course, we’re all here because we have certain shared interests — we’re not reading and talking about fly fishing or fantasy football, after all — but those interests and the things we say about them (and the way we say those things) allow us to get to know each other quite well, especially over time, and the result is that there are some folks here at Black Gate that I feel that I know almost as well as I know the people that I work with every day.

Certainly, face-to-face and virtual relationships have significant differences. I’ll never get a phone call at work from any of you like I did from my neighbor Francisco, the day he heard my wife hollering and pounding on the garage door as he was walking by (she had locked herself in there). I’ll never ask any of you to bring a dessert to one of my annual Cruel Yule celebrations, where my friends and I gather to watch terrible Christmas movies. None of you will ever put a new floor and toilet in my back bathroom like my brother-in-law just did for me.

It’s the lack of that sort of in-the-flesh contact that originally made me dismiss the idea of online communities altogether, but over time I came to see that while the differences are very real, that doesn’t automatically disqualify online groups, doesn’t put them beyond the pale of genuine community; each kind of relationship is better in some ways and worse in others, but both can be just as valid. Black Gate is a true community, and it’s one that I am proud to be a part of.

However, there is one major difference in the two kinds of community that I can’t accept so readily, even after three decades of living increasingly online, as most of us probably have, and it’s this: virtual communities have a tendency to suffer unsolved disappearances to a really alarming degree; sometimes the internet is a kind of Bermuda Triangle (if the Bermuda Triangle were a real thing, which it isn’t).

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently because of a blog that I visit regularly called First Known When Lost. It’s a one-man operation run by a retired attorney named Stephen Pentz (for his profile image he chose a picture of Ulysses S. Grant standing in front of his tent at Vicksburg, which made me like him right away), and the blog is devoted to reflections on the passing seasons in the Pacific Northwest where he lives and to the nature poetry that he loves, mostly by classic English and Japanese poets. (He especially favors Edward Thomas and Bashō.)

I discovered the blog by chance several years ago and I drop by frequently to read and comment, usually sharing a poem or two that I find relevant to Pentz’s theme of the moment. He always responds with gracious appreciation and enthusiasm. First Known When Lost is a place of beauty, tranquility, and wisdom, and my life would be poorer without it.

And I think it might be done.

Stephen Pentz has never been an every-day blogger. His meditations are long and finely wrought; you can tell that he thinks and writes, not hastily, but carefully. Though his pieces appeared more frequently in Fist Known When Lost’s early years (he started the blog in 2010), for the past half-decade he’s averaged a post a month, and a slower pace is only natural for an older writer whose theme is the long, slow changes of life. Then last year, in 2024, six, eight, or even ten weeks would sometimes pass between posts; clearly, things were beginning to wind down.

In a few days, it will be five months since Stephen Pentz’s last post; it was still winter when he wrote about the cold December moon, which prompted me to send a comment that included my favorite moon poem (“Aware”) by D.H. Lawrence. Since then, winter has ended, spring has come and gone (an entire season with all of its subtle changes) and now we are almost a week into summer, and my comment still has not appeared, nor have any later ones and there have been no new postings or any other activity on the blog since Pentz’s reply to a comment on February 3rd.

For the moment, at least, Stephen Pentz has disappeared. I have poked around online to see if I could find out anything, but people who blog about old poetry don’t enter or exit places noisily, and I’ve come up empty. I very much hope he’ll be back any day now with some observations and poems about the summer of 2025, but I’m beginning to think that’s not going to happen.

If Stephen Pentz were a friend who lived down the street from me and he just disappeared, I’d very quickly know about it and I’d know who to talk to — his relatives, neighbors, the hospital, the police — but because ours was “merely” an online relationship, I’ll likely never know just why he vanished. That bothers me.

To bring it closer to home (this home, anyway), for several years we had a faithful reader around here named Smitty. From his frequent comments, we knew that Smitty was a retired English professor and a widower who lived in Ohio and loved the “good old stuff.” His lively comments on my pieces and on those of other Black Gate writers were unfailingly appreciative, insightful, and good humored. Smitty was a valued member of our community, and not many days passed without us hearing from him.

It was probably a couple of years ago that I realized that it had been quite a while since I had seen Smitty comment on anything, and now it’s been almost three years since his last comment. For eight years he was a friend and a neighbor, even if only an online one. Then one day, he wasn’t, and because of the peculiar, disembodied nature of the internet, it took too long for me to even notice that he wasn’t around anymore.

Smitty and Stephen Pentz can stand for many others, writers and commenters, who have come and gone, here at Black Gate and at many other places in the Brave New World. Most are probably just fine; the shifting currents of life have simply carried them somewhere else, to new interests and different communities, and some even reappear long after you’d given up ever hearing from them again. But many are gone for good, usually without your ever knowing why. It’s an aspect of online life that we have to accept, I suppose, but I wish it weren’t so. I wish I knew what happened to Smitty.

All we can do, I guess, in this world of screens where people can go missing without even being missed, is to make an extra effort to try to notice and appreciate them while they’re still around, so that they’re not, in the wistful words of the Edward Thomas poem that Stephen Pentz named his blog after, first known when lost.

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Thomas Parker is a native Southern Californian and a lifelong science fiction, fantasy, and mystery fan. When not corrupting the next generation as a fourth grade teacher, he collects Roger Corman movies, Silver Age comic books, Ace doubles, and despairing looks from his wife. His last article for us was Movie of the Week Madness: The Horror at 37,000 Feet