Moby-Duck (48 page)

By 2100 hours—nine o'clock—we will reach our destination, just west of Greenland's continental shelf, and therefore have a decision to make: deploy the mooring tonight, in rough seas and darkness, or wait for daylight. “The weather is the driving force,” Ostrom says. “If the weather's going to blow up before tomorrow morning then it makes sense to do it now.”

For the first time since we left Woods Hole six days ago, the
Knorr
's captain, Kent Sheasley, appears in the main lab, along with first mate Mark Maloof. Sheasley, age thirty-six, is young for a captain. A man of few words and few displays of emotion, he dresses casually, in tattered khakis and an old rugby shirt. Maloof spreads out the latest weather maps on a workbench and we gather around. There's a low-pressure system in the area. The winds right now are blowing 31.5 knots out of the north—out of, that is, the Arctic. Through the portholes we can hear them scream. By tomorrow morning, according to the forecasts, the winds will be forty knots—gale force. “At least we know there'll be no terrorists trying to come aboard,” Ostrom cracks.

Since the
Knorr
has to make Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, in just three days, there's no time for us to heave to and wait out the storm. This is Sheasley's recommendation: we deploy tonight, as soon as we reach the mooring site.

“You okay with that?” Bower, determined but worried, and looking at him askance, maximizing her vision, asks Ostrom.

“Look, it's crappy out there,” Ostrom says. “But this is what you're going to see for the next three days. The sooner we do this the better. This sea state's just going to keep filling over the next five hours. I mean it's not going down.”

Later, up on the bridge, looking out into the rainy mist, Captain Sheasley says to his third mate, “Once we're on station, we've got to check the motion. These guys are going to be out there setting things off the stern. We don't want these guys out there pitching, getting stern slapped.”

On the fantail, Ostrom, Valdes, and Sutherland, all bundled up in parkas, start loading the yellow floats into the SALPs. Ostrom has on a red, fur-lined hunter's cap. “Fascinating isn't it,” he says of the SALPs in a tone of utter boredom, his cap's earflaps flapping in the wind. “Ninety percent of science is appearance. Doesn't work, but hey, it looks cool. No data, but that sure was cool.”

In the main lab, Bower posts an audio postcard on the website for the visually disabled: “Two hours from the mooring site,” her podcast begins. “We're in a race with the weather.”

 

 

At 2200 hours, up on the bridge, Captain Sheasley instructed the helmsman to idle the engines and turn on the exterior lights, which gave the aft deck a theatrical brightness. Beneath the A-frame crane there gaped an opening in the bulwarks. Until an hour ago, a safety chain had stretched across it. Now the chain had been undone, and there was nothing between the deck and the sea; walk through the A-frame portal of the crane, step into the yawing darkness, and you'd fall into water two miles deep. Every so often a wave came crashing up over the stern, glazing the deck with a slippery veneer that went rippling out the scuppers. This was the stage, the turbulent precipice, on which the night's action would play out.

It was raining, not heavily, but painfully—a cold, needling rain. The deckhands all wore rubber boots with steel toes, and hard hats and orange, insulated waterproof jumpsuits decorated with hi-viz reflective tape. I wore a hard hat too, and waterproof pants that I'd purchased from an army surplus store on Cape Cod. I had on my Sitka sneakers, and my yellow PVC slicker over another raincoat made out of recycled plastic bottles, and under that, an insulated coat, and over the slicker a life vest, and on my hands, gloves, and under the hard hat, a woolen one. The gloves, it was now painfully clear, weren't waterproof.

Bower stood by, in the lee of the main lab, helping Kate Fraser enter data into the mooring log—“the diary of the balloon.” Will Ostrom was in charge now. Even Captain Sheasley was under Ostrom's command. In the staging area between the winch and the stern, Ostrom transformed into an angry dynamo of action, darting about the heaving deck with the agility of a gymnast, barking out orders and flashing crane signals to the deckhands manning the ropes and rigging and heavy machinery with which, expensive instrument by expensive instrument, meter by meter, the mooring would be assembled and unspooled: “Tie that down!” Ostrom shouted at Dave Sutherland, who was manning a slip line. “Hold it fast! Clear it! I said clear it!” He pointed at me: “You! On the winch!” I climbed up to the control panel and watched Ostrom through a grid of steel, there to protect me from the backlash of a snapping cable. “Pay it out! Pay it out!” Ostrom boomed, pointing down. With cold fingers I pushed the little toggle forward, and with a diesel-electric moan the wire on the drum began to unspool. “Stop!” Ostrom commanded, flashing a fist, but I was slow to react. “For fuck's sake, I said stop!”

Over the next several hours, I would come to appreciate that cartoon depicting Ostrom as a devil in a jumpsuit, and why it was Sutherland had called that photo “will_overseer.” There was, nevertheless, something beautiful about Ostrom's grace and expertise. He seemed like a conductor with his symphony in full swell, or a chef in his kitchen, or a quarterback in motion. He was an adept of improvisational physics, judging by sight the weight of an object that had been hoisted into the air, anticipating its swing.

We began with the great yellow sphere that sat on its trellis by the starboard rail. It measured sixty-four inches across. Its buoyancy would exert 2,832 pounds of upward pressure. Atop it, at its north pole, was a satellite transponder and a beacon. Sutherland climbed up on the trellis and switched the transponder and beacon on. The latter began to flash, once every ten seconds. Deckhands undid the sphere's lashing. From the winch, the cable now ran up through the A-frame's block and then out around the starboard rail, where the bosun cotter-pinned it to a grommet at the sphere's south pole. Sutherland, obviously better at this job than me, took over on the winch. My new job was to keep the line from fouling on the rail. As I leaned against the cold steel, and stretched my arms out over the water in a seemingly beseeching gesture, cable slack across my numb and pruning palms, the waves heaving past seemed close enough to touch. They had been gray all day long, but here, up close, in the glare of the deck lights, they were turquoise and crystalline, shot through with light, and tempting somehow—so close, so beautiful, so cold, so deep. Out beyond the edge of the light, a glaucous gull floated contentedly on a swell, a white dot of sentience in the icy dark.

Now a deck crane lifted the yellow sphere into the air, dangling it like a colossal Christmas tree ornament or the yo-yo of a god, then swung it over the side, and let it fall. The splash was tremendous, a great diadem of droplets bursting from beneath it. The cable came alive in my hands, and I pulled it taut. It felt as though I'd hooked an enormous fish, an enormous, yellow, spherical fish. The sphere drifted out and then aft, and I drifted with it, following it to the stern, keeping the cable clear of the rail, until Ostrom gave the yell, “Let it go!” and I set the cable free. Away the sphere went over the waves, its beacon flashing, and my heart leapt with a curious exhilaration. Its yellow form was bright against the blue waves, which is why, of course, oceanographers paint their floats and buoys the color of a rubber duck, the color that in the gray-green welter of the sea is easiest to spot. It was the only bright thing out there, the only symmetrical thing out there, the only human thing—or at least the only human thing visible to the naked eye.

Measured in meters and minutes, the night slowly unspooled. My hands grew numb, the sphere's flashing beacon fainter and fainter as it receded behind the intervening waves, a distant star that you had to wait to catch a glimpse of. And then it was gone, and with it went the last remnants of my exhilaration. It was impossible to stay warm and dry. The cold rain and the cold wind sneaked in at my collar and cuffs. Besides the rain, there was the spindrift. Everything was wet, and blurry. Water blurred my vision, fatigue blurred my mind. I wished I'd taken a nap that afternoon.

A foot or two from the stern's edge, the men in jumpsuits wrestled instruments onto the black cable—the current meters, the thermometers, the SALPs loaded with yellow floats—and then coaxed them overboard one by one. It seemed a wonder that none of them tumbled after. Every so often, Ostrom would yell commands in my direction—“Donovan, man the air tugger!” “Donovan, up on the winch, give Dave a break!” “When I point down, you pay it out, goddammit!” These were the easy jobs, but in my numb, sleep-deprived inexperience, they seemed plenty hard, and grew harder as the night wore on. At the winch, I stood braced with worry, muttering to myself, “Down means out, down means out,” trying my best to keep my mind from wandering when all it wanted to do was wander off to sleep.

Late—how late exactly I don't know, at three in the morning, or maybe four—Ostrom pointed at a rope and commanded me to take it over there, to the corner, behind the deck crane, and coil it up, neatly, the way he'd shown us that sunlit afternoon our second day at sea. The rope was a tangled mess, and that corner of the deck was slippery with grease. I hydroplaned around in my boots. Time seemed to slow, and the world to diminish, until there was nothing but me and that damn rope, my adversary, locked in slippery battle. It took me forever to untangle the thing. I kept falling down, stumbling into the crane, or into the starboard rail, where the waves no longer seemed tempting, but menacing. I was shivering uncontrollably by then, feeling the first symptoms of hypothermia. At last there lay before me on the greasy deck something resembling a coil—a mess, a sloppy pile of only vaguely concentric circles. Fearful of Ostrom's wrath, like some marlinspike Sisyphus, I started over again. My second attempt improved only slightly on my first. Good enough, I decided. But what was I supposed to do with the rope's tail? There was a trick Ostrom had showed us. You wrap it around the coil two times, or was it three? Then what?
Fuck it.
I gathered the sloppy coil into my arms, dropped it into the wooden chest where the ropes were kept, and deserted to the mess for a mug of hot coffee.

Unlike the rest of us, Amy Bower remained exhilarated throughout the long night. In the lee of the main lab, in turtleneck and parka, happily sipping hot cocoa from her mug marked with a knotted rubber band, she asked Fraser questions—“The second SALP is over now?”—and Fraser, as best she could, narrated the action playing out before Bower's blind eyes. I was standing beside her, sipping my coffee, when Bower made a chipper remark: “Look at that,” she said. “It's first light!”

She was right. Without my noticing, the sky had gone from black to charcoal gray. A moment later you could begin to distinguish the grayness of the water from the grayness of the sky. I was cold as ever, tired as ever, but when Ostrom commanded me to take another turn at the winch, I didn't mind as much now that day had begun to dawn. When, a little before 0600 hours, the mooring's anchor tumbled overboard, there was no sense of finale, only relief. Ostrom continued to shout commands: coil that rope, pick up that wrench. At last, he dismissed us, and the moment he did he underwent a kind of metamorphosis. A devil no more, he became his former amiable if curmudgeonly self.

Out of gratitude and pride, I stayed up to help Bower enter data from the mooring log into her computer, reading it aloud. The winds were now gale force, just as the forecast had predicted. Under steam again, the
Knorr
was rolling more steeply than ever. When the portholes in the main lab filled, it took a surprisingly long while before they began to empty. Even there, inside, I couldn't stop shivering, and my head had begun to throb. Bower was chipper as ever.

“I think I need to sleep,” I told her, and she apologized for keeping me.

For the first time on that rocky voyage, I stumbled to the head and vomited. Then, fully clothed, I crashed onto my bunk and slept fourteen hours straight. When I woke up, the storm was mostly over, and it was night again.

 

 

Our last day at sea, we found our elusive Irminger Ring, or so Jason-1 and an expendable bathythermograph alleged. The discovery was anticlimactic. The seas had calmed. And yet below us, if the data were to be believed, there raged a watery storm. We human beings are such visual creatures that for a semi-scientifically literate layperson like me, believing in invisible if observable phenomena—mesoscale eddies; rising CO
₂
levels measured in parts per billion; rising sea levels measured in millimeters; electrons, dark matter, quarks; the waves through which cell phones and satellites communicate—requires a leap of faith, or at least a leap of trust.

Out there on the fantail of the
Knorr
, on the last day of our voyage, in seas far less stormy than they'd been the day before, trying in vain to perceive some trace or sign of the watery storm below, I couldn't help but feel a bit envious of the naturalists of centuries past, those scientific voyeurs who, with microscopes and telescopes, made discoveries everywhere they looked, perceiving ecosystems in drops of water, cosmologies in the dying rays of intergalactic light. Several years ago, reading Darwin's
Journal of Researches,
I was struck by how anachronistic—how innocent, even—the god-toppling biologist's exuberant curiosity seemed. His journal entries were rhapsodies of descriptive prose. Forms of the words “interesting” and “surprising” toll among his sentences like a refrain of wonderment. “I was much surprised to find particles of stone above the thousandth of an inch square, mixed with finer matter,” he writes of a handful of dust.