feet down and discovered bizarre organisms improbably well adapted to the infernally hot, infernally sulfurous environs of volcanic sea vents—giant albino clams, giant albino mussels, giant albino crabs, giant albino tube worms growing in thickets, like Martian bamboo, red obscene tulips of flesh blossoming from their tall white stalks. Some scientists speculate that it was not at the stormy surface of the ocean, or in Darwin’s lightning-struck pond, but out of such volcanic vents—black smokers, they’re called—that life first arose.
In the previous two years alone, the Knorr’s itinerary had included stops in San Diego; the Galápagos Islands; Valparaíso, Chile; Buenos Aires; Reykjavík; the Caribbean (Bermuda, Martinique, St. John’s); and Nuuk, capital of Greenland, which is where the first leg of voyage 192 would officially end. Tourist maps from these ports decorated the hallway outside the ship’s mess—“Feel the warmth and softness of the Icelandic wool,” enticed an ad for Helga’s Wool Market on the map of Reykjavík. Now nearing retirement, the Knorr was nevertheless a beautiful ship, high-prowed like a navy cutter. Its hull, 279 feet long, was the deep blue of the ocean on a world map, its upper decks, white as a wedding cake. A light-blue stripe beribboned its single white stack, and the white faceted sphere of a satellite antenna rose amidships.
On the Knorr’s fantail, beside the starboard rail, looming above Bower’s shoulder as she posed for photographs, appeared another, smaller sphere, painted the yellow of a rubber duck. The size of a wrecking ball, made of syntactic foam interlarded with hollow glass orbs, it sat atop a big steel trellis. Across its northern latitudes, in black block letters, the following message ran.
IF FOUND ADRIFT CONTACT
MOORING OPERATIONS GROUP
WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC
INSTITUTION
WOODS HOLE, MA 02543
The photo shoot over, Bower extracted from her black leather pouch a collapsible cane. With an expert flourish of her wrist, like a magic trick, she made the cane spring forth and went tap, tap, tapping up the gangway.
The week before, I’d driven to Cape Cod in a rented Chevy and checked myself in to the Sands of Time motel. After a fitful night beneath a floral print bedspread in the motel’s basement suite, my mind sluggish with caffeine withdrawal but abrim with boyish curiosity, I’d made my way on foot to what had once been a church of the classic New England sort—white siding, white bell tower adorning a peaked roof. From outside it resembled a Puritan chapel whose cross and steeple had been dismasted by an atheistic wind. The interior of the building conjured forth altogether different associations.
Up front, where perhaps a preacher in a black cassock had once detailed the dangers awaiting sinners in the hands of an angry god, there now protruded the flukes of a whale. The beast seemed to have been snared in Sheetrock while attempting to escape. From a nearby computer mounted on a pedestal emanated the otherworldly ululations of humpbacks, and in a glass case beneath a window could be seen replicas of the tube worms that thirty years ago scientists on the Knorr had discovered growing along the sea vents of the Galápagos Rift.
The former church now serves as the gift shop and exhibit center of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, whose initials, WHOI, its employees charmingly pronounce HOO-ee. Woods Hole, I learned during the week I spent there, is a marvelous place, a veritable distillery of marvels. Passing through it on your way to catch the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard, you’d never suspect that this sleepy seaside village—also home to the Marine Biological Laboratory, a Coast Guard station, and branch offices of both NOAA and the U.S. Geological Survey—had once been the Houston of deep-sea exploration and the Los Alamos of submarine warfare.
With remote-controlled vehicles resembling torpedoes, Woods Hole oceanographers have looked for cracks and leaks in the forty-five-mile-long network of aqueducts that deliver drinking water to New York City. Some can read the history of the planet in tubes of sediment, thousands of which are kept, carefully archived, in a climate-controlled warehouse, a sort of library of dirt, whose contents date back decades and may well contain auguries of decades to come. With a mass spectrometer, they can analyze the isotopes in a baleen frond and tell you that the whale to whom it formerly belonged wintered in the tropics and summered in the Arctic. Others are experts on sand, which is more interesting than you’d think.31
I hadn’t come to Woods Hole seeking wonders, however. I’d come seeking a guide, some wayfinding oceanographer willing