at home, where her daughter strews toys in her path and her husband misplaces the remote control. On a ship, everything is where it’s supposed to be. She navigates the corridors with her cane, detecting the thresholds of the watertight doors. She memorizes the number of stairs between the main deck and her cabin on the upper decks and counts them carefully off as she ascends and descends. We’ve all been assigned a labeled coffee mug—mine is labeled SCI 6, since I’m the sixth and lowliest member of Bower’s team—that we are responsible for washing; around hers, labeled SCI 1, Bower has snapped a knotted rubber band so that on the wooden rack in the mess where the mugs are kept she can find it by touch.
When Bower first learned that she was losing her sight she felt foredoomed to darkness and to failure, to a life of dependence and disability checks, and in another century, she would have been. Even in another discipline she would have been. Marine biologists, for instance, have to see the specimens they dissect. Paradoxically, since physical oceanographers study invisible phenomena, since all physical oceanographers are in effect partially blind, Bower’s blindness proved less disabling than she’d feared. When it comes to looking at the ocean, her vision is far superior to mine. The papers she’s published are filled with colorful maps and charts that make watery winds and storms as visible as atmospheric ones. She has, with the help of her expensive instruments, acquired aqueous powers of perception, a sense of oxygen, a sense of isotopes, a sense of current, a sense of salt.
As we pass through the Strait of Belle Isle and emerge from the shelter of Newfoundland’s lee, we’re struck, and rocked, by northwesterly winds. The first mate pipes instructions from the Knorr’s bridge: we are to lash down or stow all belongings. Rough weather ahead. Rough weather and icebergs, forty-one of them, according to Canadian ice charts. Seated before an array of glowing screens in the main lab, on which various data appear, spectacles perched on the tip of his nose, the chief technician, Robbie Laird, says of the officers on the bridge, “They can see icebergs fine. The only thing we have to worry about are bergy bits.” Silly as it sounds, “bergy bit” is the technical name for a little iceberg, a molehill rather than a mountain of ice. “A bergy bit probably wouldn’t sink this ship,” Laird says, “but it could do some damage and end this cruise.”
On the bridge two ABs begin standing watch instead of one, scanning the seas with night-vision goggles. Night-vision goggles work best in total darkness. Second officer Mark Maloof passes through the main lab, extinguishing the portholes. The other night, in the mess, while I was trying my best to explain my weird quest to a table of mariners, Maloof said, “Kind of like Moby-Dick!” He, too, had fallen under Melville’s spell. Now whenever we pass each other in the corridors or in the mess, he greets me with Ahab’s famous question: “Hast seen the white whale?” To which I reply, “Hast seen the yellow duck?” He hasn’t, but some of the other mariners on the Knorr have heard the tale. In fact, one afternoon on the bridge a balding piratical seaman named Kevin, who sports a hoop earring and a handlebar mustache, decided to share with me an incredible tale. He commenced to recount the legend of the rubber ducks lost at sea. Interrupting him, I brandished my yellow duck and explained why I was here. When Maloof has finished clamping shut the metal lids of the portholes in the main lab, he moves on to the mess. The lit windows of the Knorr wink out, one by one, and the ship moves stealthily through the dark.
Overnight, autumn turns to winter. The temperature drops from 55 degrees Fahrenheit to 41 degrees. In an icy rain we wallow through gray swells marbled with foam. Fearful that her experimental mooring might fail, Bower has made a change of plans. She’s decided to keep one profiling float in reserve. Before or after we deploy the mooring, depending on the weather, we’ll investigate Irminger Rings the old-fashioned way, the Swallow way—by hunting one down and hurling a float into it. Hunting for Irminger Rings, I’m pleased to hear, requires a good deal of fancy detective work. “If you just go out and poke around looking for an eddy, you’re not going to find one,” Bower