Shallow Impressions

(I only wish this picture was mine, this is from the Wikipedia Commons... but I stood where the sailor in the photo is standing)

1/14/11

After almost 3 days, the sun has come out and the clouds are in rapid retreat. The island of Oahu is passing to the north at my left hand, and the light breeze is being amplified by the steady speed of the warship I am riding. I am untethered, so I remain safely in the sheltered bridge while younger, trained men crouch alertly atop the sail in harnesses. There is only a railing around their perch to define their post as the "flying bridge". The photonics mast, one of the feathers in this ship's cap, stands overwatch several feet above their heads. I ask the young lieutenant with binoculars whether he or the remotely controlled cyclops locates contacts first. "Sometimes I get it first" he says casually, modestly, not hiding that "sometimes" are to be enjoyed with pride. Motivation and enthusiasm have run high so far.

None can match my enthusiasm, though. I have been permitted a rare opportunity; riding in the bridge of a submarine. I am over 20' above the water, and the only things obscuring my view of the horizon are a small radar mast and Oahu's volcanoes. The sea continually surges up the bow, then is sundered by it. The ship is indifferent to the small swells accosting it, but even the thousands of tons of steel I stand on shudder occasionally under the beating. Each wave eventually exhausts itself into a protesting foam scattered into a defeated wedge in the ship's wake. The colors of the water are amazing: blue, green, and white with no mixing somehow. It is stupefying that a machine so complex can only be described in the simplest of terms. Awesome.