Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Touching History
On 26 October 1967, John McCain flew off the USS Oriskany on his 23rd bombing mission of the Vietnam War. He was shot down that day and was a prisoner of war until January 1973.
By the time you read this, I will be in Pensacola, Florida. Well, no, I guess that’s not totally true. I may be back from Florida by the time you read this. Maybe the flight will get rerouted to Cleveland. Hell, by the time you read this my children’s children may be long gone; we’ll just see how solid the data integrity of the modern hard drive is.
Let’s start over.
I’m going to Pensacola, Florida. The fella who owns the shop where I work also owns a boat down in Ft. Lauderdale, which he has repositioned up to Pensacola for the entire month of May to run three-day liveaboard trips to the USS Oriskany, and I will be on the crew for the next couple of weeks.
The Oriskany was a flagship carrier in the US Navy through the late Korean and entire Vietnam wars. For a few decades, she’s been sitting in a shipyard in Texas, slowly succumbing to the elements with no particular purpose. Last year, however, she was cleaned and stripped in accordance with artificial reef guidelines and sunk off the coast of Pensacola to serve a final tour, for as long as the ocean will have her, as a marine habitat. At 911 feet long, she trumps the USS Speigel Grove as the largest artificial reef ship in the world.
I’m psyched.
Naturally, crewing a dive trip isn’t quite the same as just taking a dive trip. You’re busting hump a pretty good deal of the time making sure that the guests have as great a trip as they possibly can.
For some, it’s easy: Single-tank air divers who are perfectly contented as long as they have dry towels and a good salad with dinner.
For some, it’s hard: Techies with trimix on their back and a couple of stage bottles, all 200 pounds of whom you need to drag back onto the dive deck before spending the next two hours running the calculations to fill their tanks for the next challenging dive.
For both, it’s fun: You get to meet all sorts of people from all over and help them have a good time. People on vacation tend to be people at their best and there is something comforting and inspiring to see people enjoying themselves so much. It is satisfying to know that just being friendly and say, getting someone’s fins for them, adds to a memory they’ll carry, happily, with them for a long time.
If only it were so easy in day-to-day life to be so genial to one another as a species and to maintain a positive general atmosphere for us all. Though I do suppose if I just walked through Midtown offering to help people put their fins on, my day would be cut abruptly short by men in white coats.
Did I mention it’s an aircraft carrier? Yeah, there’s that too.
I’m something of a history buff. I hate war. All war. All fighting, in fact. I’m a hippie-ass pacifist who believes that if the abovementioned geniality were extended as completely as it ought to be by all men, there wouldn’t be a need for fighting. Of course, I know well enough that there are jerk-offs out there who wouldn’t know geniality if it came and shoved a flower up their ass, so I know there have been necessary wars, the histories of which deserve our attention and memories. Far more abundantly, there are unnecessary wars which I think the study of history should allow us to learn from our mistakes. So history intrigues me.
Most mesmerizing to me are the personal histories of war. It’s hard to remember, after drolling hours of high school history and even drier History Channel shows, that wars aren’t dates and places. From the Peloponnesian Wars to the constant death in Iraq today, they’re people. People who had favorite colors and happy birthdays and things they hoped to do before they died. On both sides of the lines, wars have always just been people. That’s why I like wreck diving so much.
Sorry, not much of a segue there at all. Allow me to explain.
There’s a naval shipyard (joke for word nerds: naval shipyards… kinda redundant, huh?) right by 95 in Philadelphia that I’ve passed a thousand times since I was a kid. I always glanced out the window at it with only a passing interest. Until I started diving. Then I started glancing out the window at it with a passing interest and the thought, “Those would be really interesting if they were underwater.”
It was a long time before I realized why shipwrecks are more interesting to me than floating iron tubs. It’s because the floating iron tub shows no sign of life at all. At best, there is seagull shit on everything. But the wrecks… between fish, corals, hydroids, crustaceans, sponges and so on, they’re the among the liveliest places on the plane. And for me, the liveliness of all those little life-cycles draws out the stories in the wreck. It is no longer just a movable place of welds and rivets, but a home where people lived and ate and worked and loved and fought and often died.
To touch a shipwreck is to touch history. In a few days, I’ll be floating around in a ship’s pilothouse, where hard decisions were made. They were made by men whose names I’ll probably never know. They were surely and too often decisions so hard I hope to never, ever have to make anything like them.
Sure, I could go to visit the yards in Philly and wander around without having to deal with the flights and the baggage over-weight charges and the gear, not to mention the potential dangers of wreck diving. But there isn’t anything on those ships but tetanus and ghosts. On the Oriskany, there is history.
Perhaps it’s the fish and the corals that show up, nature reclaiming the iron for herself and carrying her message. “Life goes on.”
Perhaps it’s being in a dangerous situation where so many dangerous events took place and coming back safe and sound. “Life goes on.”
Perhaps it’s being on a boat with other divers with whom you can discuss how close you’ve gotten to where so many stories took place, and to trade some new ones. “Life goes on.”
OK, I’m off.
I’ll let you know if there are any pain-in-the-ass guests on the boat when I get back in a couple of weeks. If you are one of those pain-in-the-ass guests, I will talk about you on the internet… but first I’ll go get you a different towel. Yes. One without a little stain on it. Yes. I’ve asked the captain to stop the boat from rocking three times already, he’s promised to do it by dinner.
For some interesting reading on the USS Oriskany visit:
http://myfwc.com/marine/ar/OriskanyReefDive.htm
http://www.ussoriskany.com/id18.html
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-o/cv34.htm
By the time you read this, I will be in Pensacola, Florida. Well, no, I guess that’s not totally true. I may be back from Florida by the time you read this. Maybe the flight will get rerouted to Cleveland. Hell, by the time you read this my children’s children may be long gone; we’ll just see how solid the data integrity of the modern hard drive is.
Let’s start over.
I’m going to Pensacola, Florida. The fella who owns the shop where I work also owns a boat down in Ft. Lauderdale, which he has repositioned up to Pensacola for the entire month of May to run three-day liveaboard trips to the USS Oriskany, and I will be on the crew for the next couple of weeks.
The Oriskany was a flagship carrier in the US Navy through the late Korean and entire Vietnam wars. For a few decades, she’s been sitting in a shipyard in Texas, slowly succumbing to the elements with no particular purpose. Last year, however, she was cleaned and stripped in accordance with artificial reef guidelines and sunk off the coast of Pensacola to serve a final tour, for as long as the ocean will have her, as a marine habitat. At 911 feet long, she trumps the USS Speigel Grove as the largest artificial reef ship in the world.
I’m psyched.
Naturally, crewing a dive trip isn’t quite the same as just taking a dive trip. You’re busting hump a pretty good deal of the time making sure that the guests have as great a trip as they possibly can.
For some, it’s easy: Single-tank air divers who are perfectly contented as long as they have dry towels and a good salad with dinner.
For some, it’s hard: Techies with trimix on their back and a couple of stage bottles, all 200 pounds of whom you need to drag back onto the dive deck before spending the next two hours running the calculations to fill their tanks for the next challenging dive.
For both, it’s fun: You get to meet all sorts of people from all over and help them have a good time. People on vacation tend to be people at their best and there is something comforting and inspiring to see people enjoying themselves so much. It is satisfying to know that just being friendly and say, getting someone’s fins for them, adds to a memory they’ll carry, happily, with them for a long time.
If only it were so easy in day-to-day life to be so genial to one another as a species and to maintain a positive general atmosphere for us all. Though I do suppose if I just walked through Midtown offering to help people put their fins on, my day would be cut abruptly short by men in white coats.
Did I mention it’s an aircraft carrier? Yeah, there’s that too.
I’m something of a history buff. I hate war. All war. All fighting, in fact. I’m a hippie-ass pacifist who believes that if the abovementioned geniality were extended as completely as it ought to be by all men, there wouldn’t be a need for fighting. Of course, I know well enough that there are jerk-offs out there who wouldn’t know geniality if it came and shoved a flower up their ass, so I know there have been necessary wars, the histories of which deserve our attention and memories. Far more abundantly, there are unnecessary wars which I think the study of history should allow us to learn from our mistakes. So history intrigues me.
Most mesmerizing to me are the personal histories of war. It’s hard to remember, after drolling hours of high school history and even drier History Channel shows, that wars aren’t dates and places. From the Peloponnesian Wars to the constant death in Iraq today, they’re people. People who had favorite colors and happy birthdays and things they hoped to do before they died. On both sides of the lines, wars have always just been people. That’s why I like wreck diving so much.
Sorry, not much of a segue there at all. Allow me to explain.
There’s a naval shipyard (joke for word nerds: naval shipyards… kinda redundant, huh?) right by 95 in Philadelphia that I’ve passed a thousand times since I was a kid. I always glanced out the window at it with only a passing interest. Until I started diving. Then I started glancing out the window at it with a passing interest and the thought, “Those would be really interesting if they were underwater.”
It was a long time before I realized why shipwrecks are more interesting to me than floating iron tubs. It’s because the floating iron tub shows no sign of life at all. At best, there is seagull shit on everything. But the wrecks… between fish, corals, hydroids, crustaceans, sponges and so on, they’re the among the liveliest places on the plane. And for me, the liveliness of all those little life-cycles draws out the stories in the wreck. It is no longer just a movable place of welds and rivets, but a home where people lived and ate and worked and loved and fought and often died.
To touch a shipwreck is to touch history. In a few days, I’ll be floating around in a ship’s pilothouse, where hard decisions were made. They were made by men whose names I’ll probably never know. They were surely and too often decisions so hard I hope to never, ever have to make anything like them.
Sure, I could go to visit the yards in Philly and wander around without having to deal with the flights and the baggage over-weight charges and the gear, not to mention the potential dangers of wreck diving. But there isn’t anything on those ships but tetanus and ghosts. On the Oriskany, there is history.
Perhaps it’s the fish and the corals that show up, nature reclaiming the iron for herself and carrying her message. “Life goes on.”
Perhaps it’s being in a dangerous situation where so many dangerous events took place and coming back safe and sound. “Life goes on.”
Perhaps it’s being on a boat with other divers with whom you can discuss how close you’ve gotten to where so many stories took place, and to trade some new ones. “Life goes on.”
OK, I’m off.
I’ll let you know if there are any pain-in-the-ass guests on the boat when I get back in a couple of weeks. If you are one of those pain-in-the-ass guests, I will talk about you on the internet… but first I’ll go get you a different towel. Yes. One without a little stain on it. Yes. I’ve asked the captain to stop the boat from rocking three times already, he’s promised to do it by dinner.
For some interesting reading on the USS Oriskany visit:
http://myfwc.com/marine/ar/OriskanyReefDive.htm
http://www.ussoriskany.com/id18.html
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-o/cv34.htm
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