Maybe you wouldn’t think it but a submarine is a beautiful thing.
My first job after college was as a submarine officer. A submarine – now there’s a panoply of exciting stuff. It’s a whole underwater city with comforts (few), people to manage (too many), hydraulics, electrics, weapons, a million – no, five million parts all finely-machined and needing to work together with no grain of sand between them. Outside millions of tons of water looking for a way in, so there is emotional drama as well. Fear, excitement. And mind-numbing boredom on long submerged transits.
At times we ran on the surface and those were my some of favorite times. I loved the morning watch in heavy weather when we were on the surface. The morning watch rolls from 4am – 8am, through sunrise. In heavy weather I’d make my way to the top of what Americans call the sail, Canadians call it the fin, and I’d sit up on top of it, my legs braced around two steel struts, bundled in my heavy-weather jacket, binoculars tucked inside my jacket, out of the spray. Heavy, solid, military Zeiss binoculars tucked out of harm’s way. Only one lookout with me, located about ten feet astern, invisible. I felt alone and the submarine rode the waves like a monstrous dark horse in the gloom, the bow sonar dome a hundred and fifty feet ahead of me, shuddering down into the troughs and disappearing under steel grey mountains of ocean wall. Explosions of ice-cold white water bursting in huge arcs towering sixty, seventy feet into the air and the submarine rising relentless, driving through them, delivering me into them, the smash of the salt spray like broad hands pushing me back, stinging my face my face and eyes, making me laugh in loud exhilaration.
Other times were quieter and differently beautiful. One fall we crept up into the Arctic to follow a Russian submarine who we had trailed up from his station off Bermuda. We wanted to see exactly where he went for his under-the-ice transit back to his home, his vodka, his wife and son. We wanted to be able to kill him if he came back the same way under different circumstance, by surprise if at all possible. At some point, I don’t remember why, we were running on the surface through open water headed due north. It was early in the midnight watch and I was in place in my steel saddle on the fin. The weather was calm, the sky clear and black but for brilliant green living stars splashed in sudden surprise onto the night. And then, from nowhere and everywhere ahead, Color appeared. Not one color, but Color himself, bleeding down in rich layered ripples, pouring from above, every hue known to man in rippling, waving, damn-near tangible planes. And as I sat open-mouthed, Ivan completely forgotten, Color moved towards me, crept over the sonar dome, whispered down the blacker-than-night length of the hull, enfolded me, wrapped me in his existence, pulled me from my own, enchanted me, stole me. And then ever so slowly, slowly the submarine moved through him, carried me through him, and he fell silently astern and faded to black.
Damn, that was a panoply if ever there was one.
One more. Dived, in the deep ocean, hundreds and hundreds of feet down in the night, doing long, slow sonar searches. The boat was an Oberon class submarine built for the single purpose of hunting other submarines, a shark designed by god to eat other sharks. A silent submarine, everything in it shock-mounted on rubber to keep it quiet, so quiet. A football field long, every foot down either side studded with sonar transducers, passive, listening, listening, listening. To operate them we would find the sweet spot on the bathy, the depth at which sound waves would be trapped between temperature layers and travel undiminished for thousands of miles. We’d find the sweet spot, trim the boat into near-perfect balance, shut down one motor and make minimum revs on the other, eight revs a minute, one turn of the giant screw every seven and a half seconds. Everyone who wasn’t on watch lay down silently, not talking, just listening, rigged for silence. Then we’d turn hours-long, slow circles, listening, listening to three hundred feet of perfect sonar transducers, and we would hear everything for thousands of miles. A merchant ship, two screws, four blades, churning up the coast of Africa, a nick in one of the blades singing out its name and port of registry for us thousands of miles away, to note in our log before drifting slowly, implacably to a new bearing. Ship, ship, whale, power plant on the Connecticut coast, ship, whale, something unidentifiable. Listening always for single screw, five blades, turbine reduction noises, what we most wanted to hear, most feared hearing.
My first job after college was as a submarine officer. A submarine – now there’s a panoply of exciting stuff. It’s a whole underwater city with comforts (few), people to manage (too many), hydraulics, electrics, weapons, a million – no, five million parts all finely-machined and needing to work together with no grain of sand between them. Outside millions of tons of water looking for a way in, so there is emotional drama as well. Fear, excitement. And mind-numbing boredom on long submerged transits.
At times we ran on the surface and those were my some of favorite times. I loved the morning watch in heavy weather when we were on the surface. The morning watch rolls from 4am – 8am, through sunrise. In heavy weather I’d make my way to the top of what Americans call the sail, Canadians call it the fin, and I’d sit up on top of it, my legs braced around two steel struts, bundled in my heavy-weather jacket, binoculars tucked inside my jacket, out of the spray. Heavy, solid, military Zeiss binoculars tucked out of harm’s way. Only one lookout with me, located about ten feet astern, invisible. I felt alone and the submarine rode the waves like a monstrous dark horse in the gloom, the bow sonar dome a hundred and fifty feet ahead of me, shuddering down into the troughs and disappearing under steel grey mountains of ocean wall. Explosions of ice-cold white water bursting in huge arcs towering sixty, seventy feet into the air and the submarine rising relentless, driving through them, delivering me into them, the smash of the salt spray like broad hands pushing me back, stinging my face my face and eyes, making me laugh in loud exhilaration.
Other times were quieter and differently beautiful. One fall we crept up into the Arctic to follow a Russian submarine who we had trailed up from his station off Bermuda. We wanted to see exactly where he went for his under-the-ice transit back to his home, his vodka, his wife and son. We wanted to be able to kill him if he came back the same way under different circumstance, by surprise if at all possible. At some point, I don’t remember why, we were running on the surface through open water headed due north. It was early in the midnight watch and I was in place in my steel saddle on the fin. The weather was calm, the sky clear and black but for brilliant green living stars splashed in sudden surprise onto the night. And then, from nowhere and everywhere ahead, Color appeared. Not one color, but Color himself, bleeding down in rich layered ripples, pouring from above, every hue known to man in rippling, waving, damn-near tangible planes. And as I sat open-mouthed, Ivan completely forgotten, Color moved towards me, crept over the sonar dome, whispered down the blacker-than-night length of the hull, enfolded me, wrapped me in his existence, pulled me from my own, enchanted me, stole me. And then ever so slowly, slowly the submarine moved through him, carried me through him, and he fell silently astern and faded to black.
Damn, that was a panoply if ever there was one.
One more. Dived, in the deep ocean, hundreds and hundreds of feet down in the night, doing long, slow sonar searches. The boat was an Oberon class submarine built for the single purpose of hunting other submarines, a shark designed by god to eat other sharks. A silent submarine, everything in it shock-mounted on rubber to keep it quiet, so quiet. A football field long, every foot down either side studded with sonar transducers, passive, listening, listening, listening. To operate them we would find the sweet spot on the bathy, the depth at which sound waves would be trapped between temperature layers and travel undiminished for thousands of miles. We’d find the sweet spot, trim the boat into near-perfect balance, shut down one motor and make minimum revs on the other, eight revs a minute, one turn of the giant screw every seven and a half seconds. Everyone who wasn’t on watch lay down silently, not talking, just listening, rigged for silence. Then we’d turn hours-long, slow circles, listening, listening to three hundred feet of perfect sonar transducers, and we would hear everything for thousands of miles. A merchant ship, two screws, four blades, churning up the coast of Africa, a nick in one of the blades singing out its name and port of registry for us thousands of miles away, to note in our log before drifting slowly, implacably to a new bearing. Ship, ship, whale, power plant on the Connecticut coast, ship, whale, something unidentifiable. Listening always for single screw, five blades, turbine reduction noises, what we most wanted to hear, most feared hearing.
And then we found something awful. We found the screaming of a terrified woman in the night, screaming and screaming and screaming across a wide swath of bearings, obliterating every other sound, every other thought, just screaming and screaming at night far down in the ocean, the sonar trace of it pouring like bright green blood across the screen, the sound of it reverberating through the hull, through your teeth, through your hair, through your guts. And as we swung in our slow, lazy, terrified circle it gradually faded out and we never heard it again. A panoply of sound and emotion unaccompanied by anything else, understanding least of all.
