Coastal Borders: Mysterious Science

I worked in Maine once. I found it a singular borderlands. Native speakers have a language of misplaced Rs. Stories and their tellers wait just behind every grimace, every sigh. Maine was another country to me, somewhere between Carolyn Chute and the Boston Symphony. You might run into characters from either down any road.

I once did a story about a little-known lab at McKown Point in Boothbay Harbor. I posted it over on the Walk the Lines, Tell the Tales sister blog. [SINCE I WROTE THAT I HAVE TAKEN IT OFF WALK THE LINES BECAUSE IT WASN'T A TALL TALE, IT WAS TRUE] Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Science. That was 1989. It's still there, still doing ocean science perched on the coast of a place of such beauty it makes you hurt.

There was a guy there, a scientist, who didn't make it into that '89 story. He had a grant from the Navy to study ocean calms. You look out over a big expanse of water - a lake or reservoir say - and you see ripples and waves and you see those places where it is smooth as glass. Those are calms, places where the water doesn't seem affected by the wind or currents. On Chuckanut Drive between here and Bellingham, you can park and watch these calms shift and dance like bubbles in a lava lamp.

Well, this guy, this scientist, had a grant from the U.S. Navy to study calms. He was going to find out what caused them and how to predict where they would start and where they would go. He would find out if maybe they resulted from a convergence of currents, or maybe the sea floor topography, or upwelling of warmer water, or whatever.

He had a small office in the upstairs looking out over the bay. When I met him he had been looking out his window through a pair of binoculars. When he put them down to talk with me he rubbed his temples with his fingers and then placed the heel of each hand over one eye and just held it there for almost a full minute.

"I've got to push my eyes back into their sockets," he said. "Damn magnification sucks 'em right out of my head."

Finally I got around to asking the question.

"No, fuck no," he said. It's not a dumb question. Satellites can track a nuclear sub very easily in an ocean calm. Their propellor cavitation leaves no footprint in most conditions but they travel through a calm and they pop out like flashing neon. So the Navy would like to know how to predict and avoid them. They are paying me to find out. The Bay bottom is mapped to the centimeter. I've deployed instruments for temperature and currents. I can tell when a lobster wiggles its butt. I'll find out.

So here was a guy - a plainspoken, clear, concise scientist - and looking back I can't even begin to count how many borders he was looking at through those big glasses.

He also did much of his research in the Gulf of Maine so asked him if I could tag along with him one time. He said sure. But I never got around to getting back to him before I left Maine and returned west.