round rhetorically for assent. A deputation of girls plods off to the lab to comfort Sue, who has taken refuge among the charts and plotters of her disgrace. ‘Right, then. I’m off to the bridge to kick ass. Anyone coming?’
Presumably each expedition becomes characterised by its own catchphrase. This cruise has acquired two, one of them written up on the lab’s steel bulkhead in bar magnets, ‘Yee Haa!’: a cowboy’s yell which flew one night out of the drunken Oily-Boily Bar. The other phrase is ‘Kickin’ ass’, which has recurred on surely every one of the video movies we have sat through this last fortnight – movies about cops and cops and cops, winsome black cops and shitty white ones, Marine sergeants and top gunners – so that suddenly the whole of American culture seems embodied in a catastrophic anger. It is with these furious heroes we are supposed to identify, these men with their scratched biceps and bared chests and 400-word vocabularies; so that a mild geologist from Godalming, put out because he may not make Honolulu on time and hence his flight back to England for Christmas with the family, says ‘I’m off to the bridge to kick ass.’
During the next day, though, things look up. With all the equipment safely back on board the Farnella is able to pick up speed. The chief engineer, himself due in New Zealand for Christmas, is coaxing every last revolution out of the engines. (‘All right for him,’ says his junior. ‘He’s retiring after this trip. I’m the poor bugger’s got to put in new piston rings over the holiday.’)
In the event we dock at 6 pm on Friday after all and nobody misses their flight. Sue is back to being one of the boys. GLORIA is back in its cradle. The rolls of printout, the reels of computer tape which are the only tangible evidence of the invisible seabed we have been criss-crossing for the past two weeks are safely packed up. It has all been a great success, is the verdict. No equipment lost, nobody swept overboard, unlike the luckless oceanographer who had disappeared recently one stormy night in the Bristol Channel. In fact, acushy number all round. Even the sea has a satisfied look to it as it mulls around the pilings of Honolulu harbour. It has so simply kept all the secrets it had which were worth keeping.
Cabs arrive on the quay to take the scientists on a last-minute shopping spree before their flights next morning.
‘Off to Hilo Hattie’s to get a really crucial pair of shorts,’ is Roger’s valediction. They vanish in a cloud of exhaust. Stuart appears at the rail next to me, slightly mournful in shore kit.
‘Do you know Rosalyn Tureck’s performance of the “Forty-Eight?” What do you think? Total contrast with Gould’s reading, I guess. Some of his tempos seem downright crazy but God, I remember when his first Goldberg came out in the 50s. We’d never heard Bach playing like it. Nobody had. The energy! Everyone thought the Goldberg was dead, academic, cerebral stuff, you know? But it wasn’t. It was alive .’
He stares down at the crack of water between wharf and hull. His voice is more animated than at any time in the past fortnight.
* Asdic: Allied Submarine Detection Investigation Committee.
* The extremest pull is, of course, when the Sun and Moon are perfectly aligned, as in the total solar eclipse of July 1991. Astronomers observing this phenomenon from the top of Mauna Kea, an extinct volcano in Hawaii, noticed a minor eruption in nearby Mauna Loa, believed until then to be equally extinct. This is considered highly suggestive of there being ‘tides’ in the Earth’s crust as well as in its seas.
* Philip Henry Gosse, A Textbook of Zoology for Schools (London, 1851), p. 220. Gosse was later criticised by his son Edmund in Father and Son for having seen ‘everything in a lens, nothing in the immensity of nature’. Yet his descriptions were both lyrical and accurate. That his sense of wonder served to reify an avowed
Presumably each expedition becomes characterised by its own catchphrase. This cruise has acquired two, one of them written up on the lab’s steel bulkhead in bar magnets, ‘Yee Haa!’: a cowboy’s yell which flew one night out of the drunken Oily-Boily Bar. The other phrase is ‘Kickin’ ass’, which has recurred on surely every one of the video movies we have sat through this last fortnight – movies about cops and cops and cops, winsome black cops and shitty white ones, Marine sergeants and top gunners – so that suddenly the whole of American culture seems embodied in a catastrophic anger. It is with these furious heroes we are supposed to identify, these men with their scratched biceps and bared chests and 400-word vocabularies; so that a mild geologist from Godalming, put out because he may not make Honolulu on time and hence his flight back to England for Christmas with the family, says ‘I’m off to the bridge to kick ass.’
During the next day, though, things look up. With all the equipment safely back on board the Farnella is able to pick up speed. The chief engineer, himself due in New Zealand for Christmas, is coaxing every last revolution out of the engines. (‘All right for him,’ says his junior. ‘He’s retiring after this trip. I’m the poor bugger’s got to put in new piston rings over the holiday.’)
In the event we dock at 6 pm on Friday after all and nobody misses their flight. Sue is back to being one of the boys. GLORIA is back in its cradle. The rolls of printout, the reels of computer tape which are the only tangible evidence of the invisible seabed we have been criss-crossing for the past two weeks are safely packed up. It has all been a great success, is the verdict. No equipment lost, nobody swept overboard, unlike the luckless oceanographer who had disappeared recently one stormy night in the Bristol Channel. In fact, acushy number all round. Even the sea has a satisfied look to it as it mulls around the pilings of Honolulu harbour. It has so simply kept all the secrets it had which were worth keeping.
Cabs arrive on the quay to take the scientists on a last-minute shopping spree before their flights next morning.
‘Off to Hilo Hattie’s to get a really crucial pair of shorts,’ is Roger’s valediction. They vanish in a cloud of exhaust. Stuart appears at the rail next to me, slightly mournful in shore kit.
‘Do you know Rosalyn Tureck’s performance of the “Forty-Eight?” What do you think? Total contrast with Gould’s reading, I guess. Some of his tempos seem downright crazy but God, I remember when his first Goldberg came out in the 50s. We’d never heard Bach playing like it. Nobody had. The energy! Everyone thought the Goldberg was dead, academic, cerebral stuff, you know? But it wasn’t. It was alive .’
He stares down at the crack of water between wharf and hull. His voice is more animated than at any time in the past fortnight.
* Asdic: Allied Submarine Detection Investigation Committee.
* The extremest pull is, of course, when the Sun and Moon are perfectly aligned, as in the total solar eclipse of July 1991. Astronomers observing this phenomenon from the top of Mauna Kea, an extinct volcano in Hawaii, noticed a minor eruption in nearby Mauna Loa, believed until then to be equally extinct. This is considered highly suggestive of there being ‘tides’ in the Earth’s crust as well as in its seas.
* Philip Henry Gosse, A Textbook of Zoology for Schools (London, 1851), p. 220. Gosse was later criticised by his son Edmund in Father and Son for having seen ‘everything in a lens, nothing in the immensity of nature’. Yet his descriptions were both lyrical and accurate. That his sense of wonder served to reify an avowed
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