Back to Blue

Another Snoopy image, yes. As I've told those who know me, I think Snoopy is the coolest cartoon character of all time, and by such a wide margin that there's really no second place. You've got Tigger and Hobbes vying for third. So I had to lead off this post with the maritime Joe Cool.

Quite a few changes since even the last post. Kate and I are still married, and she's still alive, though you wouldn't know it from her posting. She's just too busy, I guess, like busy napping right now. Though to be fair, Eva's finally gotten round to sleeping like a newborn, waking up every two hours or so at night requiring varying amounts of milk and affection. Kate's got plenty of both but it leaves her kind of dragged out during the day. Last I checked this afternoon, the baby was awake and quietly playing in her pack & play, while Kate was passed out alongside on the couch.

We're in Maine, spending the summer in Greenwood with Kate's mother and her husband Dave. This had been our developing plan for some time, though it initially included selling the Rhode Island condominium first. That has yet to happen, but we wanted to be with family anyway, so here we are. I'm getting back in touch with my inner landscaper and gardener, and Eva's showing real fascination with rabbits, chickens, pigs (just today, at a petting zoo) and cats. She's been especially impressed with a large and dominant rooster, a real paragon of masculinity, who used to strut around the yard at home until Dave smacked him with a rake and drove him off down the road. But Eva felt his power, certainly. He'd walk right over and confront her, and I had to keep the bird away. Though Eva doesn't so much pat animals as whack at them, so we'll have to bring her along slowly.

I'm not such a hopeless cat fanatic that I'd devote an entire webpage to one, but I could start a kind of Jasper Chronicles, detailing how my suburban cat is adjusting to life much nearer to the big woods, and just toss in the occasional vignette on how he's awkwardly getting by. Basically, after nearly three weeks, Jasper's still kind of freaked out. He knows the house, he knows where his food and litter box are, and he knows we're here. He has several favorite sleeping spots. He regularly invades my personal space again. But especially outside, he's still pretty freaked out.

His tail is usually bushed out, and he doesn't so much stroll lazily like he did around the condo grounds, as stalk, creep or almost run for cover. The noises and smells on all sides are kind of overstimulating him, I think, and he might even sense the occasional predator. He acts like it, close as he normally stays to the house. But it tickles me inside to see the presence of nature starting to bring out more of his feral qualities. Most housecats do nothing more natural than claw a piece of furniture and tear around every now and then. Rarely one might climb a screen or a drape. Jasper certainly did things like that. But now he's falling into more of an always-hunting mode when out of doors, always alert for signs of prey, and, more charmingly, frequently overreacting.

I'm getting up very early these days. Another long and dull blog post could be wasted on the fact that I have colitis (actually, I think I've already wasted one on it), a manageable chronic condition. The upshot is, in the aftermath of a fairly serious episode a month or so ago, I'm on steroids. Steroids...they do things to a body, even the weak ones in small doses like I'm taking. I average about three hours of sleep a night. Great for my reading--I think I mentioned getting to know the Greek classics again--not so good for Kate when she wants company. But it also means that I'm usually up before the cat. Some mornings he comes down the stairs with me, and is--why, here he is now (as I type it's late afternoon), angling for a spot on my lap--come on up, cat--some mornings he follows me down the stairs is gung-ho for dawn patrol. Other days, like today for example, he's crapped out till ten in the bathroom.

But on the dawn patrol days, he ranges out onto the deck, and sits there. For a while, like maybe a half-hour or so. Within ten feet of the door, and then asks to be let back in (by walking over to the glass and staring straight through). If I let him in, he nibbles a little food and then goes back out. And then his routine really begins. There's a small in-ground garden box, bounded by railroad ties, off the western side of the house, visible from the glass deck door. I've dug out the weeds, so right now it's a patch of dirt. The cat walks up onto one of the railroad ties, and stares ahead into the trees, listening intently as he sharpens his claws on the wood. At this point he's on full alert so he's easily distracted, and a burst of bird noise behind him will make him stop and look around. He scans with his ears, eyes wide, looking in any direction where he hears a fresh burst of sound. He continues in this confusion, sharpening his claws and then not, until he feels compelled to make the garden into his litter box. Then it's up onto another railroad tie, where he begins making his professional assessment--which grove for hunting? The northern grove, up the slope and much larger, or the southern, smaller but just a few feet behind him downslope...after sitting indecisively for several minutes, listening and looking, this morning he launched himself uphill, stalked into the brush of the northern grove, and was gone.

Probably went to sleep fifteen minutes later under a bush. He's just following his bliss.

Eva is a real lover of being outside, and of the water, and of animals. It's easy to tell when she's stimulated, because she starts kicking and flailing, or at the very least, murmuring rhythmically, "aeehh...aeehh....aeehh...aeehh..." with wide, slightly entranced eyes, and slight smile. The yard rooster, as I mentioned, held her entranced at his lordly approach, head haughtily atop an erect neck, bobbing purposefully with every step, sharp beak punctuating his motion as he walked straight toward her. He stopped only when I warded him off with my hand, two feet from my little girl's face. He stood there, staring into Eva's eyes and she into his, before I pushed him off further and he returned to the bushes. On several occasions in the yard, they had similar confrontations, and I was just as fascinated with Eva's reaction to the rooster, as she was with the rooster himself.

She likes the rabbits. Ande and Dave have at least eight, one of which runs loose. Bold little critter too, unafraid to be underfoot like a cat and doesn't even try to avoid you when you step around him. His name is Houdini. Today for the first time Eva touched him, kind of punched him on the nose, actually, and he was as startled as you might expect, but he only jumped back a few inches. He crept forward again and she whacked him again. (She's only eight months old, so the whole "be gentle with animals, especially when they're your size or larger" thing is still coming along. I mean, the rooster was taller than Eva is.)

And it's also easy to tell when she's been stimulated mentally by something, because afterward, when we go inside, she's quiet physically but very verbal. She kept a regular pace of "da-da-da-da" after we walked inside, although...it sure seemed to me when I walked into the living room, with Kate brushing her teeth in the next room over, Eva said, "na-na...da-da..." Kate heard it too. Where is the line between babble and intended words? We're not sure, but we're more willing to believe what we hear is intentional with every passing week.

Kate herself, though I don't want to tell her story BECAUSE SHE SHOULD, is immensely enjoying being in Maine with her family. It's been a return to an earlier portion of each of our lives that we're especially enjoying together, along with the chance to show our daughter more of our own childhoods (even though she's just an infant). Every time Eva gets excited at something, I hope her brain is holding onto a bit of it, as coloring for the rest of her life, even if the specific experience is lost from memory. We discovered a local town beach at Lake Penneseewassee not far from here, and took a chance (on a hot and somewhat rainy-to-sunny afternoon) that the water wouldn't be freezing...and Eva loved every bit of it. She's a natural swimmer, virtually doing a breaststroke when she gets keyed up.

Heck, we may even go native and spend an evening or two down at the Oxford Speedway. Never seen a real race live, just the amateur iceracers back on Holden Pond in Moultonboro. Bunch of doofuses ramming into snowbanks and each other on a frozen oval (a high school classmate of mine once took his mother's station wagon out there and nearly flipped it). At least this track has a real grandstand and sells beer.

But the other side to our life up here, aside from relaxing into domestics and other local particulars, is carrying on with our occupations and retooling for the future. I'm likely to look for a new graduate program, or switch advisors at URI again, as I migrate back to a more mathematical approach to coastal geology, and inflect my work with engineering. So I'm cracking the calculus book again and looking at a few New England-area programs where I can viably carry on. Our family economics dictate that I most likely won't start until next spring at the earliest, so I'm of course looking for work while I'm still on unemployment.

Enter the horrendous oil spill down in the Gulf. Admittedly, as much oil is likely spilled annually in the Niger delta, but that doesn't excuse the magnitude of this. And the spill amount was first estimated at 5,000 barrels a day, but recent evidence points to rates between 50,000 and 100,000 per day--that's up to 4 million gallons a day, or almost three supertankers a week. The leak will continue, despite attempts to capture it, until one of the kill bores (two presently being drilled) is made to intersect with the open well and concrete can be injected to seal it off permanently. Then at last, fresh oil won't be welling up into the Gulf of Mexico from 18,000 feet below the sea floor.

Until then, we need to track the oil that comes up, so we can monitor what happens. There's little we can do about oil in the water. The debate over dispersants is mostly academic, since it's industry standard to toss them at almost any spill (within certain conditions). The dispersants, which simply break oil up into tiny droplets like dish detergent breaks up grease, are themselves quite poisonous, and in spreading the spill out, encourage more microbes over a wider area to digest the oil. This itself is not bad, but the microbes use up oxygen, which suffocates other animals and plants (those which were not poisoned by the oil). There is no solution to pollution like this. We can try to skim some oil off the surface, but evidence points to most of the oil being below the surface still (only the lightest fractions rise to the sea surface immediately--and there are heavier, asphalt-like substances in many crude oils). We can protect the coastline with booms--long, narrow floating barriers--but these have limited effectiveness, and it's better to be selective about where and how we use the boom, than to just toss it in the water and hope for the best. News isn't encouraging about how the available boom is being used.

But in the name of science, and of at least learning more about the effects we have on our own planet, we need to track and study the progress and fate of this spill. There are gigantic plumes of oil below the sea surface, floating and spreading in various directions with the subsurface currents (which are not the same as the surface currents). It's possible to detect these plumes with chemical samples, but that work doesn't give you a large-scale idea of the plume's shape, size and movement. Some sort of remote sensing--and in the ocean, that means sonar--is called for.

I've been working with sidescan and sub-bottom sonars--taking pictures of the sea floor and layer-cake views below the sea floor, respectively--for years now. Just last year, in Alaska, I was introduced to multibeam sonar, a method of bathymetric survey which gives a high-resolution three-dimensional image of the sea floor. I find the science and the applications (especially to archeology) fascinating, and I thought that it might be possible to use this kind of sonar to detect the oil plumes. It's a bit like using radar to find clouds, which is done regularly, only the density difference between open air and clouds is greater than the density difference between water and oil-plume-filled water. And with sonar or radar, it's all about the density difference. Radar can see an incoming plane because the metal of the plane is much, much denser than the air around it. Radar can see clouds because the water droplets--if there are enough of them--are quite a bit denser than air. But oil floating in water is fairly close in density to the water itself--in other words, comparatively invisible to sonar.

Still, it turns out that a group of scientists working with NOAA is trying to do exactly this. I read about their efforts a few weeks ago and thought, "Damn, that's my idea too, I want to be out there with them!"

Well...

Two weeks ago I got a mass-blast e-mail from a GSO student mentioning a company looking for help with monitoring and remediation of the Gulf spill. I got Kate's permission (of course), then forwarded my resume to them. Last week they called back and hired me, told me to get re-certified in a bunch of safety classes, and to prepare to move out. Done and done. I thought I was heading down to count dead crabs, or shovel oily sand, or clean pelicans...but today I got a call from their mission control in Houma, LA, and was told that they're helping staff the NOAA R/V Thomas Jefferson for its ongoing multibeam mission to locate and describe underwater oil plumes.

In the words of the philosopher, hot diggity dog.

I feel some guilt at being thrilled at an opportunity made possible by a terrible disaster. Life on the Gulf Coast--in terms of fisheries, ecosystems, tourism, the entire economy--may never be the same. The people there may never recover. Millions are now in mortal fear for their basic way of life. Uncertainty, dread and anger, with the certainty that 2010 is already lost, are the basic mindsets. This enormous calamity is my opportunity, and I am seizing it. To the extent that I can help matters there, even if right now only in helping identify the scale of the problem, I will. I've been reading up on Nigeria's situation with respect to oil and I'd like to help with that too, but that's an entire nation virtually at war with itself, and with the larger economy of the world. I'm one man and for the moment I'll be learning my new job and doing what I can to protect my family.