After the beginning of my day, when I had fretted about my place, the fragmented understanding, the tedious chafing of the daily weight, and the time cascading through the gut of my own little hourglass, and having driven six bags of trash to the dump, I had this, at least, to ruminate upon:
My acquaintance at the dump is an ex-machinist's mate, diesel technician, dive-rated submariner in the days of duty dashing around in pitch-black water, playing chicken with the Soviets, tapping into telephone cables, surfacing through ice, and descending to test-depth pressure at 1300 feet, where some of his 106 fellow souls must have begun to sweat despite the controlled atmosphere of a Cold-War nuclear boat.
Today you could take a large object, let us say a towering stone obelisk in a city square, or a diesel locomotive, or for the sake of martial comparison, an F22A Raptor jet (length 62'1", wingspan 44'6"), and fuel and arm it to its maximum takeoff weight of 83,500 pounds, and then place this aircraft so that its whole weight pressed onto a single square foot of the surface of a Sturgeon-class submarine, as if it were submerged to 1300 feet, below 39 atmospheres, below sunlight, below rescue.
Or, working by the more proper square inch, and in a more maritime theme, stand a 225-horsepower Suzuki V6 outboard engine on its skeg on the surface of the sub, or place an average-sized female northern Steller sea lion on her nose there, then multiply those 580 pounds by every square inch of surface area of the USS Whale (SSN-638, launched 1966, length 292'3", beam 31'8", draft 28'8", decommissioned and recycled, 1996), which was the submarine in question, and consider the pressure then exerted upon the whole vessel, causing the monstrous black rubbery skin to compress, the precisely welded steel structure to creak, and small fittings to wheeze and ping and dribble.
Then you might disregard your little woes, take a look around the luminous day, and, like the man who waves the citizens of this town into the transfer station, greet the world consistently with a thumbs-up, a knowing word, and a merry eye.
~~~
Doug Logan
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