Grasping Mysteries Read online

  In the basement of the Lamont Geological Observatory,

  she and Bruce set up a seismograph,

  which measures the strength of waves always moving

  under land or sea. He says, A lot of the work Doc and I did

  at sea was looking for places where earthquakes broke

  the ocean floor and rubble piled into mountains.

  She hears the electric pen scratch across rolling paper,

  recording seismic waves: forces under the earth

  or the sea’s surface started by earthquakes or volcanoes

  no one expects here in New Jersey. She wants

  to understand the ways the earth is always speaking,

  hinting at how its shape may change.

  Division

  Everyone at work cheers when the observatory wins

  a big contract from the phone company.

  Before new cable lines are laid undersea, one man works

  at the desk by Marie’s, studying temperatures

  at the ocean floor, which could affect the transmissions.

  The phone company wants to know

  why old telegraph lines snapped where they did.

  One theory is that underwater earthquakes broke them.

  Howard Foster, the third person in Marie’s office,

  starts to chart the thousands of places

  where earthquakes began in the North and South Atlantic.

  He turns locations of earthquake epicenters

  into a lengthening row of dots on a map.

  It’s a rote sort of work that doesn’t ask for wonder,

  the kind of task Marie is grateful not to be assigned.

  But she’s asked to help with it and other men’s work,

  not put in charge of her own. She looks at the rolled maps

  leaning against a bare wall. She’s not the only person

  here who can handle thumbtacks or tape.

  Let somebody else hang these.

  If

  Back from a research ship, Bruce and Doc spread

  photographs that look speckled with salt. Marie catches

  her breath at the glimpse of urchins, octopuses, sea spiders,

  snails, and other creatures that scuttle or swim

  near the ocean floor. As the men talk about undersea life,

  Marie interrupts. I want to go out on a research ship.

  It’s not all great, especially when it rains.

  Bruce is a large man who wears gaudy shirts

  and black-framed glasses. The food is terrible.

  Don’t tell me you believe that old superstition

  that women at sea bring bad luck. Her hope snaps.

  Don’t take it personally, Bruce says. A fellow wants

  to burp and fart or talk without worrying

  we’ll offend a lady. We all share one toilet.

  Women aren’t allowed onboard navy ships,

  Doc interrupts. We can’t change the country’s rules.

  Marie gazes out the window past trees to the river.

  For four years she’s filed other people’s papers,

  checked the facts on their reports,

  copied maps instead of drawing her own.

  Each time she organizes information she didn’t collect

  feels like weight put on her shoulders.

  She tells Doc, If I don’t get a project of my own, I’ll leave.

  The Question

  Bruce and Doc lug cartons into the old bedroom.

  Doc nods at Howard, who is deaf, and the other man,

  who keeps working. Marie reaches into one carton,

  unrolls sheets of long paper marked with records

  of the sea’s depth at particular places. These soundings

  are made when an electric ping is shot down from a ship,

  while a machine onboard records how long it took

  for the sound to bounce off the bottom and back.

  We’ve been collecting soundings for five years,

  covering thousands of feet of the ocean floor.

  Bruce pushes up his thick glasses.

  He smells a bit like a beach.

  We don’t know what to do with them What do you think?

  I don’t know. Her answer sounds like an end

  but can be a beginning. Finding

  out more could take a long, thoughtful time.

  Searching

  Before Marie can look for secrets in the soundings,

  she must put them in order. She starts with some

  from the Reykjanes Ridge off Iceland,

  then moves south, calculating longitude and latitude

  to mark where the soundings were taken.

  She matches wavy and straight lines

  showing depths, the way she once fit together

  stripes on cloth for the seam of a skirt.

  She makes crosses to mark the sources of soundings.

  Some were taken recently from ships with sonar

  and some are old, collected by sailors

  who dropped weights tied to knotted ropes,

  then pulled them back up and counted the knots.

  Her map is the same scale as Howard’s map,

  with one inch standing for about eighty miles.

  Some of her work will help determine the size

  of the undersea phone cables:

  long enough to pull over peaks, but not wasted on plains.

  She might find secrets no one has thought

  to look for in depths no one has seen.

  Discovery

  LAMONT GEOLOGICAL OBSERVATORY, 1952

  A picture of mountains in the middle of the Atlantic

  slowly takes shape under Marie’s pencil.

  The range is longer than that of the Appalachian

  or Rocky Mountains. She measures peaks

  higher than the tallest mountains on land.

  Sketching to show the varied heights, she notes

  a pattern as subtle as a brown feather woven into a nest.

  Others knew there was a mountain range, but not

  the long cavern cutting through the middle of the peaks.

  The cut in what she’ll call the Mid-Atlantic Ridge

  is about as wide and deep as the Grand Canyon.

  She hears the click of the machine wired to the one

  in the basement tracking signs of earthquakes.

  The land seems so still, but all along what’s hidden

  hints at how quickly the earth can change.

  Volatile

  Marie works with more measurements,

  stumbling past blocks and around detours

  to a single certain answer. She depends on math

  as she draws a map, letting curved and crisscrossing

  lines stand for the cavern. She points out the gap

  in the mountains to Bruce, who says, I don’t see it.

  Look harder. Recognizing a pattern is like spotting

  the truth in a trick. She says, No other range of peaks

  has a gully on top. That gap could show where North

  and South America split from Europe and Africa.

  Continental drift? Scientists ditched that idea long ago.

  He shakes his head. There’s no proof.

  This could be evidence. She runs her palm over her work.

  She knows most scientists agree with him

  and change ideas slowly.

  But it seems the earth is alive,

  its crust like sheets of ice that crash together,

  making mountains and leaving gaps.

  Talk like that could wreck your reputation,

  Bruce says. You’d better measure everything again.

  Proofs

  Marie spends more months checking numbers

  that stand for the depth of water, weather, the time of day,

  and the speed of the ship when the soundings were taken.

  Some equations sprawl. Others stick,

  so she circles
back to the beginning,

  which holds what she needs to know.

  Signs of a cavern

  about twenty miles wide and a mile deep remain.

  Science leans on facts, but new ideas begin in spaces between,

  with guesses bouncing between right and wrong.

  Did land pull apart leaving a crevice or break,

  spewing rubble that formed mountains?

  She shows Bruce her maps and figures.

  I think this is where continents broke apart.

  Marie, no one will take you seriously if you talk like that.

  Bruce crumples a wad of paper, then throws it at the wall.

  Don’t shout. It’s bad for your heart.

  She glances at the pocket of his floral-print shirt,

  where he keeps a pillbox.

  Even if the theory of continental drift is sound,

  no one wants to hear it, he says. Nobody wants

  to think of land as something that can break apart.

  That happened millions of years ago, Marie says.

  People shouldn’t worry their houses will drop into the sea.

  Excursions

  Marie and Bruce argue about the canyon and its causes

  over dinner and on weekends, driving up

  rough back roads, stopping at antique or junk shops,

  where she looks for wooden ducks for her collection.

  Both have separate projects now but work together, too.

  One day they paint over the pale colors on globes

  with dark blues, brown, and black to add new findings.

  She rubs off spatters of paint on the side of his neck,

  lets her hand rest a moment under his ear.

  Five minutes later, they bicker about the shade of blue.

  Parallel

  As Marie talks on the phone, pulling the coiled cord

  from the wall, her eyes rest on Howard’s map.

  A band of spots mark the sites

  of earthquakes where cables broke.

  Connecting the dots, she sees a familiar shape.

  Hanging up the phone, she waves her hands

  to ask if she can drape his map over hers,

  which she lays on the light table. As the beam

  penetrates the overlapping papers,

  the places where earthquakes began

  line up with the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

  Marie’s hands turn cold. She shouts with joy.

  As Doc and Bruce run into the room, she says, The force

  of all those earthquakes could have split continents.

  Maybe, Bruce replies.

  We’ll look into this more, Doc says. And meanwhile

  keep it quiet so no one thinks we’re crazy amateurs.

  Matching Shores

  In the Lamont Observatory kitchen, Doc talks

  about scientists who discovered that the types and ages

  of some rock on opposite shores of the Atlantic are similar.

  A certain kind of snail is found only on the northern coast

  of North America and Northern Europe.

  That snail can’t swim across the sea.

  A rare species of spider

  was found on lands now an ocean apart.

  Mathematics also shows how continents

  almost surely shifted.

  Euler’s theorem is used to calculate

  the rotation of continents’ edges

  and show how the lands once fit together.

  At last Bruce and Doc agree to make these findings public.

  When Marie picks up their report on continental drift,

  her face gets hot. Why isn’t my name here?

  It’s the information that’s important, Doc says.

  Bruce and I have collaborated on other reports.

  Our names are better known,

  so this will get more attention.

  I’m not looking for fame, but fair is fair.

  As Marie feels her voice shake, she raises it.

  This is my work too. Don’t forget that.

  The Floors of the Ocean

  1959

  Marie draws up many charts. Her ideas are added

  to those of Doc and Bruce for the first book

  that scientifically describes the bottom of the sea.

  All their names go on the cover.

  Water

  Bruce offers to care for Marie’s dog when she returns

  to the farm where the earth makes room for her father.

  In the old house, she packs his arrowhead collection,

  his favorite blue coat, and her mother’s sewing machine.

  It must have rained sometimes, but all she remembers

  are blue skies over the fields where she and Papa walked.

  When she gets back home, she winds thread

  around the bobbin the way her mother twirled

  her hair before pinning down the spiral.

  She patches her father’s coat with yellow and red threads.

  Adding money he left in his will to her savings,

  Marie buys a house near work and Bruce’s home.

  She fills it with a leopard-skin-print sofa,

  a carpet patterned with green waves, her collections

  of carved ducks, beautiful masks, rocks, and globes.

  She’s close enough to the Hudson River

  to hear small waves lap the riverbank in summer,

  see ice glisten in winter.

  Finding a Way

  Every map is a compromise.

  Road maps might leave out creeks.

  Most city maps don’t show houses.

  Maps depend on the lean art of subtraction

  and geometry, starting with one point and a line.

  A round earth on flat paper demands distortion,

  so Marie uses spherical trigonometry to

  account for the curve of the earth.

  Drawing, she begins at the edges of continents,

  the way that when working on puzzles

  she starts at the borders.

  The symmetry of the Atlantic makes her hum.

  Her grip on her pencil is attentive and tender.

  She shifts the pencil tip with the earth’s rise and fall,

  makes thick lines to show steep slopes

  and slender lines for underwater plains.

  Her thick-thatched lines show where masses of land split,

  their edges piling against each other in mountains

  that fill most of the center third of the Atlantic.

  The intricate, accurate drawings take a long time.

  Figuring out what to draw takes still longer.

  She fills in some spaces first left dark or dappled,

  treating the data with respect, but guessing

  about shapes between known parts of all oceans,

  which cover almost three-quarters of the world.

  Marie marks where the Atlantic ends

  and the Indian Ocean begins, though she dislikes

  suggesting borders when clearly it’s all one ocean.

  The map won’t be truly finished until

  the entire seafloor is known, which may be never.

  Every map marks places

  where another journey might begin.

  First

  Numbers and symbols wash across Marie’s wide desk.

  Finding order within equations that warp

  into new problems, she gets weary.

  But beauty lies hidden under her hands.

  So others might see what’s bold as the sea itself,

  she works another hour, another day, another year.

  Marie maps a range of mountains beginning near Iceland,

  running through the Atlantic. As more information

  is brought in over a decade, she sees

  that the mountain range continues around Africa,

  across the Indian Ocean,

  and through the Antarctic and Pacific Oceans.

  All alo
ng, connections were waiting

  to be noticed by the astoundingly patient.

  What they called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge

  is part of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge.

  No one before has connected these mountains,

  which run for about forty thousand miles around the world.

  No one has accurately drawn

  this much of what’s under the sea.

  Sunday Morning

  NYACK, NEW YORK, 1972

  Standing in the kitchen pouring coffee,

  Marie wears a white shirt and a skirt she made

  by cutting her father’s blue coat into strips

  that are wide at one end and more narrow

  where she sewed the waistband.

  She and Bruce quarrel over some questions

  from the publishers at the National Geographic Society.

  Bruce talks about going out on a submarine.

  Marie feels a pang of jealousy. She gives a treat to her dog,

  then unfolds a newspaper and reads about a new law,

  Title IX. It means that girls who can throw a baseball as well

  as boys can’t be kept off teams in public schools.

  And it seems that women who can do science

  and work with a crew shouldn’t be kept off ships

  that belong to the country.

  Marie puts down the newspaper and picks up the phone.

  Partings

  ICELAND, NEAR REYKJANES RIDGE, 1977

  Waves sweep in, turning blue to green and white.

  Bruce will be one of twelve men on a submarine,

  sleeping in shifts on four bunk beds and sharing one toilet.

  Marie touches the side of his face, his rumpled shirt,

  printed with palm trees. The left pocket swells

  with mechanical pencils and his heart medication.

  If she were his wife, and she’s mostly glad she’s not,

  she’d have to remind him to take those pills,

  ask if he packed everything.

  Our map should be back from the printers when we return.

  We’ll have champagne and cake.

  Bruce wraps his large hand around hers.

  We couldn’t have found a bigger or better job.

  Not on this planet. Marie looks up at the wide sky.

  She kisses Bruce, will miss him. But norms and laws