The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013
After Pevek, there were just 300 miles until we emerged from the ice and rendezvoused with our sister ship, the Nordic Orion, but these were the slowest miles of all. It took us two long days to cover them, and the crew entered a kind of fugue state. There would be short periods of reprieve, and then the ice would appear before us again, looking like a jetty or even a coast. One morning I woke up at around five because it seemed to me that we had stopped. I went up to the bridge, and sure enough, we were trapped amid several large ice floes. The Vaygach had turned too sharply and we hadn’t been able to follow. Vadim and the ice pilot and the captain were all on the bridge; they looked exhausted but also, somehow, relieved. One of the worst things that could happen to a seaman in the Arctic—we were technically beset—had just happened, but it wasn’t so bad. Not far from here, in 1879, the American Jeannette expedition, which sought to reach the North Pole, became trapped in the ice. It then drifted northwest on the ice for a year and a half before finally being crushed: “It looked like a staved-in barrel,” one witness said. The crew of thirty-two men managed to get off the ship and onto the ice, with three small boats and some provisions, and then made their way to the Siberian mainland, but one of the boats sank, while the two others became separated, and only thirteen crew members survived. This would not happen to the Odyssey. The Vaygach turned around to extricate us, but we kept our 20-foot propeller going, and eventually our immense mass got the better of the ice, which slipped off to the side. I wondered what the crew of the Jeannette would have made of us.
Late in the evening on July 21, two days from the Bering Strait, there was a radio message from the Vaygach that I didn’t catch. The ice pilot was on the bridge, and he moved quickly to pick up a pair of binoculars. He said, “Bear.”
At first, we couldn’t see it. Then there it was: a small bear, not a cub but not fully grown either, about the size of a very large dog, and a little more beige than I’d expected. The creature was running along the ice, occasionally falling into the little ponds that formed in it, then getting back out again and running some more. It was at the most vulnerable age for a bear, weaned off its mother but not fully proficient at hunting. It was not yet fat.
Once in a while, it turned to face the Odyssey and opened its jaws wide for a roar. We couldn’t hear it from where we were—especially not over the sound of our own engine—but it was definitely roaring at us. And it was running away.
At noon the next day, the Odyssey finally emerged from the ice. Waiting for us, on schedule, was the Nordic Orion, which was on its way to Murmansk to pick up iron ore and return with it through the Northern Sea Route to China. Also waiting was a Swedish oil tanker headed for Finland and a Chinese ship, the Xuelong, which was on a scientific expedition into the Arctic. It would be the first Chinese trip through the Northeast Passage, and it would raise fears of Chinese encroachment on the Arctic. The vessel itself was a Ukrainian-built cargo ship.
The Vaygach sent a small motorboat to ferry Cherepanov, the ice pilot, aboard the Orion, and then the Odyssey continued on its way. Toward evening we ran into a school of whales. They’d come up, spray water into the air, and then, with a flash of their big black tails, dive down again. It was a joy to watch. We saw probably fifty whales. American whalers had first gone through the Bering Strait and then east into these waters in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but it seems they didn’t get them all.
The end of the ice and the sendoff from the whales made it feel as though we had bid farewell to the Arctic, but the Arctic had not yet bid farewell to us. Early on the morning of July 23, we saw what looked like land due east. This would have to be Alaska. But Alaska was more than 100 miles away—too far to see. “It’s not Alaska,” Vadim said. It was a mirage. The water was still cold, but the air was considerably warmer, and the result was a “superior mirage”: we saw the dark line of the horizon twice, both where it actually was and at a phantom place above it. The mind interpreted the top image as land. This kind of mirage can happen anywhere but is particularly common in polar regions. The mirage was not something you could look away from, then look at again to find that it was gone. It was in its way a physical fact, and it kept up for hours. We never did see Alaska.
Around midmorning we reached the easternmost edge of Russia, which is also the easternmost edge of the Eurasian landmass: Cape Dezhnev. It is a sheer rock cliff, as dramatic and definitive as Cape St. Vincent, in Portugal, the southwesternmost point of Eurasia. In 1728 Vitus Bering had come through the strait from the south, rounded this cape, and then, running into ice a few miles farther along, decided to turn back. At the time, because he didn’t continue to St. Petersburg, some people didn’t believe him that there was a Northeast Passage. But he was right.
And so to China. We had, it seemed, been through so much, and yet we were only halfway there, still more than 3,500 miles from our destination; at our average sea speed, the remainder of our journey would take between eleven and twelve days.
We set our course southwest and turned the ship back on autopilot. Life returned to its pre-Arctic routines. When a ship is in port, it gets scratched and scuffed in a hundred different ways. It had been too cold and wet in the Arctic to do anything about the damage, but now the crew could begin repainting the winches and windlasses and greasing the chains that the salt water and the air had begun to rust. A day south of the Bering Strait, the crew saw the sun set for the first time in three weeks. It didn’t go very far that first night and continued to project a dim, hazy light over the ocean, but the next night was as dark as any. The bridge crew started drawing a heavy blue curtain across the bridge to separate the illuminated section from the front, where the lookouts needed total darkness to see into the night.
The crew experienced boredom. What is boredom? Boredom is staring for hours at the smooth, mirrorlike water, hoping to catch a glimpse of something, anything. Boredom is deciding to create a tea strainer from a soda can, going down to the galley, cutting a can in half, poking holes in the bottom with a knife, and then cutting one’s finger, pretty badly, on the aluminum. Boredom is not just showing up exactly on time for the nightly Ping-Pong tournament but holding a clandestine practice session during the afternoon. Less productively, boredom is playing Spider Solitaire on the computer in the rec room. Boredom is watching other people play Spider Solitaire in the rec room. The ship’s champion was Vadim. He played on the third, most difficult level, and he won a quarter of his games. But he took no joy in it. “Motherfucker,” he could be heard muttering at the computer. “Motherfucker.”
As the days stretched on, people became grumpier. Discipline relaxed. Vadim may have stopped either showering or doing his laundry, because there was a slightly sour smell wafting from him. He also complained that his feet hurt. During a test of the emergency generator, Dima, the electrician, accidentally cut off all the electricity to the bridge, causing most of the instruments to shut down and every possible alarm on the bridge to sound. There was an immense racket, matched only by the yelling of the captain at the electrician, who yelled right back.
One morning I went up to the bridge at around six to find Vadim sitting with Able Seaman Generoso Juan watching American music videos on the chief mate’s laptop. Vadim was delighted to see me. “Do you know this band?” he said. “It’s called Blink 182. They play a form of music called ‘punk rock.’” He proceeded to DJ a series of songs about Odessa, including the Bee Gees’ “Odessa”: “I lost a ship in the Baltic sea. I’m on an iceberg running free.”
Mads Petersen still had not informed the captain of our destination in China, and the men discussed which port they’d prefer. Shanghai was the favorite—the city wasn’t too far from port, and the girls were friendly—but it was unlikely we’d be going to southern China with iron ore, given that steel was mostly manufactured in the north. Maybe it wouldn’t much matter where we ended up. Chinese ports are busy, and if the time in port is too short no one would get off anyway. Some of the men said they wouldn’t go ashore
even if there was time. It was expensive and possibly dangerous. Ordinary Seaman Alvin Piamonte said the Mafia had taken root in China, and he wasn’t going ashore unless he had two or three guys with him, which could be impossible to arrange, given everyone’s schedules. The ports the men most loved—the ones in Brazil, Australia, Vietnam—were friendly, warm, and relaxed. They used to like American ports, but after 2001, as part of the Global War on Terror, the United States abrogated centuries of international practice by severely restricting foreign seafarers’ ability to go ashore. The men of the Odyssey always became agitated when discussing this. The only country as restrictive as the United States, they said, was Saudi Arabia. In the words of the second mate, “It has taken the little happiness we had and made it less.”
The only way to cheer the men at such points was to remind them of Bangkok. In Bangkok, as soon as you arrive, a boat comes alongside and disgorges a portable bar, a restaurant, and many friendly young women. If you pay in advance, a woman will move into your cabin for several days, sleep with you, and get up in the morning and iron your shirts—all for about thirty dollars a day. In some ports the authorities turn a blind eye to this sort of thing. In Bangkok, according to Vadim, if you try to kick the party off your ship, your cargo simply won’t get unloaded. For this reason, seamen love Bangkok.
In the last days of July, we passed by the disputed southern Kuril Islands, off the northern tip of Japan, and then we entered the Tsugaru Strait. After weeks of silence, the radar screen bloomed with hundreds of ships, of all different sizes, heading in all sorts of directions: container ships, the rectangular blocks stacked high on their decks like Legos; oil tankers, the pipes tangled on their decks like snakes; and small fishing boats, looking for tuna.
At last Mads Petersen informed us of our destination: a new port in northern China called Huanghua, 140 miles southeast of Beijing. Mads said that the port’s maximum draft was 42 feet, and at first this caused consternation. “I did all the calculations,” Vadim told the captain heatedly, “and even if the bilges are empty, and we’ve burned seven hundred tons of fuel, we’re still at forty-three!”
“Stop yelling,” the captain snapped.
Vadim became quiet. “Was I yelling?” he asked. The captain nodded.
But the crisis soon passed; Huanghua Port was expanding, and the authorities told us that 43 feet would be no problem. On the other hand, a port this new could hardly be expected to have much infrastructure for entertaining seamen or even much of a town. The men were disappointed but not surprised, and the second mate even offered the hypothesis that because the port was new the girls might be even cheaper—twenty dollars, he said. On the evening of August 4, we arrived at an anchor spot in the Bo Hai Gulf, 25 miles from the port, and, with a tremendous noise, dropped our 7-ton steel anchor. We were three days behind schedule, which, considering the unpredictability of the route, wasn’t bad.
For four days we sat at anchor with nothing to do. The Bo Hai Gulf is less a sea than an oil-and-gas field with some salt water on it; not far from us, drilling platforms burned excess natural gas in the air. The only marine life that seemed to flourish in so dirty a sea was jellyfish, and we watched them float by our ship, hour after hour. By this point, we were out of flour and sugar. On the third day at anchor, we broke our last Ping-Pong ball. The crew had no maps, no friends, no guides to the city they were about to enter, and no way of getting them. All they knew was that the Chinese authorities had sent a very strict checklist of things that must not be aboard the ship when it came into port, including bugs. The ship had been entirely bug-free until entering the Bo Hai Gulf, which was in fact quite buggy. “It’s their bugs!” the captain protested. Nonetheless, each day the crew would sweep the upper platforms, and Michael Arboleda would stalk around the corridors of the accommodation with a fly swatter, killing everything in sight.
On the morning of August 9, we were cleared to enter the port. It was hard at first to grasp how big it was. The Bo Hai Gulf in general—and this port in particular—was shallow, so the Chinese were dredging. By picking sand up from the bottom and moving it elsewhere, they had managed to make a canal that a ship like the Odyssey could travel through with room to spare. To protect the canal, they had constructed miles of breakwater. And still they were reclaiming land from the water, constructing a new pier several miles into the harbor. “Molodtsi,” the captain said. “Bravo.” What seemed from a distance like the outlines of a town was in fact an array of warehouses, processing plants, and cranes. Later I read that during the reconstruction of the port, large bribes had been paid to the port company’s chairman, Huang Jianhua. A court had sentenced him to death. It was an impressive port.
Two tugboats steered us to our pier next to a row of big red cranes. Vadim gave the order to open our cargo holds, and we all looked inside: the iron ore was there just as we’d left it in Murmansk, black, heavy, unshifted, and dry. We lowered our gangway to the pier; Michael and Alvin became security guards; and then we waited. The first person to visit us was our agent in the port, a tall young man who spoke halting English with a slight British accent. The men threw themselves upon him. They had gone on and on about the girls they were going to screw, for between twenty and fifty dollars, but now all they wanted was SIM cards for their phones so they could call home and Internet cards for their computers so they could Skype. Dima came onto the deck with his laptop to see if he could catch a free Wi-Fi signal, but there was nothing; he’d have to wait and pay.
The surveyors were next. There were three of them, all well dressed, thin, and friendly, and wearing what looked like expensive designer eyeglasses. They didn’t speak much English, but they were shepherded into the ship’s office and someone went to look for Vadim.
The last few days of the trip had seemed really to wear on Vadim. In addition to his smell, he looked tired and growled more than usual at Spider Solitaire; because his feet hurt, he’d started breaking his own rule against open-toed footwear on the bridge and wore sandals. Now, after making the Chinese surveyors wait, he tromped into the ship’s office. He wore a white jumpsuit, its top five buttons unbuttoned so that his chest and a gold chain could be seen. He looked as if he hadn’t slept, shaved, or showered in weeks. He looked angry. But I had stood with him that morning as we pulled into port and he recited the various differing qualities of ports worldwide, and I knew that this was the part of the trip he most enjoyed. I even wondered if he’d been preparing for this moment, like a great actor preparing for a part. The Chinese surveyors, who looked as if they all had degrees in mathematics, must have been frightened at the sight of him, and also relieved. This creature was unlikely to be able to read, much less out-math them.
Vadim then proceeded to get the better of the surveyors in at least three ways. First, after boarding a small boat and traveling around the perimeter of the ship, he bullied the youngest of them into accepting all his readings of the depth of the draft. “Thirteen twenty-three?” the surveyor would offer, and Vadim would snap, “Thirteen twenty-six! Absolutely!” I thought the surveyor would be offended by this, but he quickly grew accustomed to Vadim and laughed at everything he said. When it came time to measure the water density, Vadim dropped the hydrometer down to the very bottom, where the density would be greatest. As all this was going on, one of the younger crew members was walking around with another surveyor measuring the water in the bilge tanks. The less water he measured in the tanks, the more cargo we had, and the young crew member had been instructed by Vadim in the proper technique of bilge measurement. “Was I born in Odessa or not?” Vadim said.
After all the numbers were added up and multiplied, it turned out that he’d gone too far: we now had 200 tons more iron ore than when we left Murmansk. Vadim slapped his forehead and explained to the surveyors that he’d suspected the water-density readings had been off in the port of origin. Would the surveyors mind just signing for the lower, original number? The surveyors didn’t mind. What were a few hundred tons of iron ore when you were
receiving 50 million tons every month? China was going to swallow our little shipment and demand much more.
There were a few more formalities to take care of, and in the meantime some port traders came by and offered SIM cards and other small favors. There was no question of any girls coming on board, and there would hardly be time for a shore visit. The ship had never felt more like a prison. How long would it even be in port? The cranes were very large. The cargo holds were open. In the next two months, the Odyssey would go back to Murmansk and then back to China, then travel across the Pacific to Vancouver to pick up a load of coal, which it would take back to Hamburg via the Arctic route. Mads Petersen would meet the ship again in Hamburg in late November. “She looks basically the same as when I saw her last time,” he would tell me. “I was actually a bit surprised that the effects were not greater.” During the summer of 2012, the Arctic ice would set a record for melting, while the ships would set a record for cargo taken through the route. But that was in the future. For now, toward evening, exactly a month after we’d left Murmansk, one of the cranes swooped down from above, like an enormous red hawk, took the first pile of Russian iron ore, and deposited it on the Chinese pier.
STEVEN WEINBERG
The Crisis of Big Science
FROM The New York Review of Books
LAST YEAR PHYSICISTS commemorated the centennial of the discovery of the atomic nucleus. In experiments carried out in Ernest Rutherford’s laboratory at Manchester in 1911, a beam of electrically charged particles from the radioactive decay of radium was directed at a thin gold foil. It was generally believed at the time that the mass of an atom was spread out evenly, like a pudding. In that case, the heavy charged particles from radium should have passed through the gold foil with very little deflection. To Rutherford’s surprise, some of these particles bounced nearly straight back from the foil, showing that they were being repelled by something small and heavy within gold atoms. Rutherford identified this as the nucleus of the atom, around which electrons revolve like planets around the sun.