The Last Word On Nothing

About the same time I was laid off from my last magazine job, I found out that I’d gotten a gig in the Bering Sea. A photographer, Chris Linder, had a National Science Foundation grant to go on a series of voyages to very cold places and he needed a writer to go with him. He picked me. I was thrilled. The money wasn’t amazing, but the experience was pretty special–six weeks on a Coast Guard icebreaker, the USCGC Healy, crashing in and out of the ice on a research cruise.

The scientists on board were hoping to catch the so-called ice edge bloom, when the ice recedes, the sun’s light first touches the dark Bering Sea waters after the long, icy winter, and algae responds with a bloom. I hoped to recover my reporting and writing mojo after a soul-crushing job experience.

The ship left port on April 3, 2009 and stayed out until the middle of May. Both objectives were met. The scientists managed, by careful monitoring of satellite imagery and chlorophyll levels, to catch the ice edge bloom. I interviewed people and wrote a story every day, whether I felt like it or not, and learned that I still knew how to write. (Whew.)

Best of all, though, was this: Once, I got to drive the ship.

The Healy was commissioned in 1999. She has a science mission; on my cruise there were 80 crew and 40 in the science party, including Chris and me. We covered the work of the scientists and also the operations of the ship daily. Right now the Healy is the Coast Guard’s only big icebreaker, and I was told that the tradeoffs between science and icebreaking meant that she wasn’t really the best icebreaker around. The Coast Guard has been saying for a while that it sure would be nice to have a new one. Russia has several that are nuclear-powered and are a lot more powerful.

One day, Chris and I decided we wanted to write about breaking the ice. We’d seen the Master Chief Boatswain’s Mate instructing many a younger boatswain’s mate and freshly-hatched officer in the proper method of breaking the ice, so I asked if I could get the lecture myself.

We climbed up to Aloft Conn, a little window-encased box more than 90 feet above sea level. Those windows make a great whiteboard, the kind where you can read the words and watch the ice in front of the ship at the same time. He drew arrows and ice floes and wrote numbers and instructed me in the most important principle: don’t break the ship. “In general, it’s not good practice to hit things with a ship,” he told me. If you can go around the ice, go around the ice. Go around marine mammals, too. And don’t break the ship.

Then he pointed me at the controls. This I had not expected. I put one hand on the wheel and one on the throttle and suddenly I was in charge of a very large ship.

If you’re a 30-something woman who’s been experiencing a crisis of confidence, I highly recommend that you find someone to teach you how to drive a very large Homeland Security asset. There was ice, floating around in the Bering Sea, and then I hit it with a 30,000-horsepower ship, and boom—the ice broke. I could hear the ship’s enormous generators through the open hatch behind me, speeding and slowing in response to the moves of the throttle.

Being in Aloft Conn reminded me of one of my favorite passages in Moby-Dick, when the narrator describes climbing to the top of a mast:

There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves.

It is possible to break an icebreaker. Hitting the ice too hard can do it. If you aren’t careful backing up in the ice, you can mess up the propellors. But not to worry. I was not actually in a position to wreck the ship. There were two burly crew members watching me closely. As we approached an ice floe—always at a right angle, so there was no risk of sliding up on it sideways and tipping the ship—the Master Chief asked questions. I was driving, not taking notes, but it went something like this: “What do you think about your speed?” “I think I should slow down.” “Yep.”

I drove the boat for 45 minutes, as we went through stretches of open water and ice floes. I always hit the ice at the right angle and the right speed, and I went around ice when I could. But as for going in a straight line through water—well, I can’t even steer a canoe. When the next watch came up to relieve us, they made fun of me for the S curve I’d left through the ice chunks behind us. (My instructor assured me that this takes a long time to learn.)

But I drove that ship. And it was awesome.

Photo: Chris Linder, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution