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Sea of DreamersBy Phil TruppEXCERPT FROM SEA OF DREAMERS |
Chapter One: "Bottomography"
As a child I recall standing at the shoreline of an Atlantic beach and thinking it was like
being at the edge of a world more mysterious than the dark side of the moon, more
powerful than imagination--a world that shaped the grand concoction of the universe.
And from the Atlantic I would return my home overlook the inner harbor of Baltimore
City, to our balcony above the wide oily skin of the harbor. I watched, fascinated, as the
big ships moved over the surface, silently retreating from a world at war. They were, to
me, wanderers from that mystical ocean I always carried around inside my head.
At night I turned by wobbly tin telescope to the sky. The unknown, I thought, above and
below; sea and sky intimately joined, yet I always returned to the shore of the Atlantic to
ponder what was out there, hidden beneath the gray mass rolling away to the horizon.
Someday, I told myself, I would know the truth. I would touch the unseen and bring it to
the page and make it live in the mind and in the imagination. Two decades later, I would
begin to realize my ambition.
I came into the ocean world in the early 1970s as a journalist/diver/explorer, a
combination that provided "wings" with which to roam the planet. Over a period of two
decades, I traveled from the oil rigs and shipwrecks of the North Atlantic to the warm
coral reefs of the Caribbean and Latin America. It was just the beginning. By 1978, I
was leading the first team of American divers into the waters around Castro's Cuba. The
following year, I headed the first team of journalists to live and work on the sea bottom
in America's only underwater habitat, Hydro-Lab I. From there I went on to the Pacific,
the Indian Ocean, the Java Sea, and the Coral Sea. But it was Hydro-Lab, living the life
a man-fish, that truly changed my perceptions.
It occurred to me that my true obsession wasn't confined to the great liquid inner space;
in large measure it focused on the shape of the submarine universe. I wanted to see and
to understand the size and shape of the floor of the sea, this virtually unexplored planet
within a planet.
Hydro-Lab was situated at the head of Salt River Submarine Canyon off the north coast
of St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The canyon itself was a deep V-shaped gash
leading into the open Caribbean Sea. Isolated from the world above, I fell in love with the
submarine geology. I loved the majesty of it, was awed by the raw power the towering
limestone cliffs covered with living coral. Here was a place preserved in time, a place as
young and as wild as the fictional Jurassic Park.
Day and night we'd venture out into our sunken Grand Canyon, swimming past the
limestone towers reaching up toward the sun. We'd leave our little yellow cylindrical
habitat far behind, and because our bodies were saturated with nitrogen we could dive
very deep for a very long time, defying the ordinary laws of physics. We were, in every
sense, citizens of the deep. The world "up there," the world of sun and sky, was now
deadly territory. If we rose to the surface without an arduous sixteen hours of
decompression, the nitrogen would bubble out into our blood like warm, uncorked
champagne. Locked into the deep, we realized the vastness of our surroundings and our
aloneness in the sea.
The canyon was in every way otherworldly. I'd swim down the sloping bottom to the
edge of the canyon, where the cliff face dropped a mile straight down into the seemingly
vacant abyss. Weightless as a space traveler, I would hover above the empty void staring
through the column of thick clear liquid. The water changed color from emerald to
cobalt to black. Hundreds of feet below, the slanting rays of the sun seemed swallowed in
the zone of eternal darkness, the black diamond of the deep sparkling at the roof of the
bottom of the world.
I would sometimes venture out at night, alone, against all the rules, and stare into the
opaque curtain of blackness. I could hear the sounds of sand hissing along the bottom,
and the click-click snapping sounds of shrimp; there were strange random noises, grunts
and whistles, which, to this day, I can not identify. In the perfect darkness I felt the walls
of the canyon looming on either side, imagined the face of the cliff at the foot of the
canyon, how the floor of the canyon suddenly vanished into deeper territory, and how the
ocean bottom spread out from there. I have never felt more alone or more challenged.
More than anything I wanted to know the shape of this terra incognita. I invented a word
for it: "Bottomography," the art (and occasional science) of describing the face of the
world's seas and oceans much as a geologist sees the shape, form and meaning of the
earth's high and dry territories.
It was in Hydro-Lab that I discovered Maurice Ewing, a man with whom I shared this
obsessive desire to "see" what the basement of the planet looked like. My introduction to
Ewing came from a biography I had brought with me into Hydro-Lab, The Floor of the
Sea, by former New Yorker staff writer, William Wertenbaker. If Ewing and I shared a
singular vision, I did have one rare advantage: I was able to live on the bottom while
Ewing, a geologist, had to view it via electronic instruments while steaming over the
surface.
I turned the pages, spellbound, imagining a voyage launched by Ewing more than a
decade before we entered Hydro-Lab. The year was 1966: Port of embarkation, Dakar,
on the west coast of Africa north of Sudan; destination, Hudson Canyon, New York. It
was a three thousand mile wide swath of mystery. Soundings had been made, but mostly
these were rough sketches, vague maps with many of the major features missing or
blurred by unanswered questions. For the world-ranging Ewing, the floor of the Atlantic
was an irresistible challenge.
Ewing cut an odd figure of a scientist whose passion was almost exclusively confined to
rough and tumble field work. A rumpled, Nemo-driven geophysicist, he could be brusque
and impatient, his intensity traced line-by-line over a broad face pulled taut by full, firm
lips. His big hands suggested the life of a third mate at the bitter end of a career at sea.
And in many ways this white-haired professor, who held down the Higgins Professorship
of Geology at Columbia University and later founded America's leading geophysical
think-tank, the Lamont-Doherty Geophysical Laboratory, was a volatile mix of ancient
mariner and scientific loose cannon. He could not be pegged or pigeon-holed, couldn't be
pinned down to place or time. He was a teacher and an explorer of world-class stature,
yet he enjoyed it when his students called him by his incongruously ordinary nickname,
"Doc."
Ewing reveled in wanderlust and curiosity. Waiting wasn't his style. A born Texan, and
he had the big Texas style of doing things now. He was fond of flying off to obscure
ports-of-call, hopping onto any available ship (never mind if it was a rust-bucket) and
making his way across the surface of the sea--any sea--flinging dynamite over the rail to
gauge the ratio of depth by measuring how long it took for the echo of the explosion to
bounce off the bottom and register on his sounding devices.
Ned A. Ostenso, former head of the National Sea Grant College Program, was a close
friend of Ewing. "He was a powerful and very forceful figure," Ostenso recalls. "An
absolute workaholic who expected everyone to emulate his habits, which wasn't easy."
Scholars credit Ewing with "institutionalizing" ocean data, gathering massive amounts
of it, and producing wonderful, dedicated students. He could be hard-headed,
not-so-tactfully tough-minded. Yet he was open to new ideas and even radical ones,
however grudgingly. For instance, when the concept of sea floor spreading emerged in
the early 1960s, Ewing was openly skeptical. To him, the notion of continents adrift on
huge subsea "tectonic plates" was "simple-minded." To counter the theory, he published
a paper on sedimentation that concluded sea floor spreading wasn't possible. Ostenso
confronted him, prepared a rebuttal, which he submitted to Ewing as a professional
courtesy.
"Oh, he was furious," Ostenso says. "How did I have the gall to contradict him? That
sort of thing."
Ostenso's paper was published. It was followed by others which backed the spreading
theory, which was a cutting edge concept at the time. Ewing continued to argue against
the vision of continental drift sea floor spreading; it just didn't make sense to him, it was
too "easy." Yet several years and many voyages later, he became a convert and he used
Ostenso's data to make his points.
"He was always man enough to change his mind," Ostenso says.
Like Darwin, Ewing lived with big seas and made them his most prolific laboratory. The
sea, he insisted, was the real laboratory; buildings on dry land were places where one
stored paper. He seemed impervious to mal du mer as he shouldered his way through
what Kipling called the "roaring sapphire thereunder." You could see the obsessive
determination in "The Ewing look": small blue eyes behind silver-rimmed spectacles, a
mane of white hair blown across a stolid, weathered face, big rough hands from years of
hauling tackle and lines, of hanging tight when the seas rose up like gray mountains to
snatch away his sounders. Until his death from a stroke in May, 1974, a few days before
his sixty-eighth birthday, Ewing consistently pushed his corporeal envelope. He was
sturdy and tough enough to shape a new vision of what the world was really like--this
despite the frightening rebuffs of angry seas.
What truly separated Ewing from his roughneck exterior was his renaissance vision. He
insisted that the bottom of the world, nearly three-quarters the planet, held the clues to
larger mysteries of existence and the unseen. He was amazingly gentle in stating his ideas
but noticeably frantic (some said "desperate") in his search for raw data. He would
attend conferences where distinguished oceanographers complained about the perversity
of the sea and the unreliable ways of the early depth-sounders. Ewing often infuriated his
colleagues by suggesting that they ought to learn how to handle ordinary tools and
simple soldering irons. "They didn't like it one bit," said a former associate.
Ewing, however, carried his badges of persistence with him into what was then a very
genteel scientific arena. He walked with a limp, the result of being swept overboard
during a winter gale in 1954, and he could be as moody as the sea which had damaged
his body. He was stooped, tired-looking, kept very late hours, meeting with graduate
students at night until well past two. He seldom slept for long stretches at a time; it was
his style to catnap, grabbing a few minutes of sleep here and there in an otherwise
frenetic schedule.
Charles Drake, a prominent geophysical researcher, tells a story of his student days
when Ewing joined his research vessel at Nassau, Grand Bahama. He said "Doc"
appeared utterly exhausted, so the younger Drake gallantly volunteered for the first
watch, allowing Ewing to catch some sleep before standing the second. But Drake,
assuming that "Doc" was too worn-out to handle his watch, allowed him to sleep
through it. A few hours before dawn, Ewing exploded onto the deck, enraged. "Don't
ever do that again!" he roared. It was his ethic to never delegate his share of the
unavoidable grunt work of a life at sea.
Three quarters of the planet is more than two miles deep, and "Doc" thought it absolute
folly to believe that the remaining third of earth's features, the world of sun and sky, the
tableau "up there" beneath the blue ocean of air, held the only significant expressions of
scientific and/or geologic meaning. Perhaps intuitively he understood and visualized what
other researchers could not. Like a clever writer of science-fiction, he plotted the big
picture, foresaw the shocks and thrills and twists of plot that would open our minds to
the earth-shaping dynamics of the oceanic landscape.
Ewing might have enlisted the best and brightest of the graduate students at Columbia
University. Instead, he picked very special people, those who reflected is own obsession
with the unseen. In Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp he saw the potential to share his
particular vision. To have found them was a bit like meeting strangers on what you
believed to be a deserted island. Suddenly, by complete surprise , you aren't alone any
longer; you are whole again. Ewing knew there was no way around hands-on time at sea.
For months at a time he ventured out, took the pounding, never complained. And this
was a quality he sought in his assistants: the willingness to take it with an underlying
assumption that nothing good comes easy.
Sea of Dreamers is available for purchase from Amazon.com and Fulcrum Publishing.