It pained Mike to remember the sadness in his parents’ eyes when they urged their children to not think about going to the bathroom until they got to the safety of their own house; just to avoid the uncertainty and impulsiveness of white shop owners. Growing up Asian in the fifties and sixties in the United States meant you weren’t included, not by the whites nor the blacks.
But this changed dramatically for Mike from his first days at the University; Mike had been immersed in a culture that his ancestors in China would have never understood. The Grounds of the University of Virginia, as the faculty and students referred to the campus, were perhaps the most beautiful thing that Mike had ever seen when he arrived at the school in the fall of 1962.
A favorite memory of his last days on the Grounds was the signing off of radio stations in the early morning hours — alone in his room on the Lawn, the original student quarters designed by Mr. Jefferson in the early eighteen hundreds and continuously used by students ever since. Mike treasured the memory of the orange glow from the dying embers in his fireplace casting flickering shadows on his walls as he labored under the benevolent dictatorship of Professor Fred Morris, his teacher and friend. The memory was embedded in his mind as was the slow haunting refrain of “Dixie” floating over the air as the radio stations signed off, the drowsy ethereal nature of that tune played as it was meant to be played; not the jangling strident march that had been adopted by the Confederacy during the Civil War and segregationists thereafter. He could never understand how that sweet song could have been turned into such a vehicle of hate.
What Mike treasured most about Charlottesville was a sense of finally belonging. This sense of belonging was important to Mike particularly given the isolation he felt while growing up in segregated Washington, D.C. Mike was fighting his own subconscious war against a society that seemed to give aid and comfort to obnoxious racists, who would use whatever skills they had to put others “in their place.” Here he could be himself, and not the stereotyped Chinese, meant to be placed in a corner and ignored as his father and other Chinese had been before him.
It was an auspicious moment when he was commissioned an Ensign in the United States Navy following graduation in 1966; a sense of finally arriving. After graduate school, Mike was assigned to the Special Projects Office at the Naval Construction Battalion Center. He considered himself to be downright lucky to have been further assigned to work with Bob McHugh on such an interesting engineering problem. He had heard about Bob McHugh and looked forward to learning a lot about oceanography from this warrior-scientist.
The only hesitation Mike felt as he drove to Annapolis was the nagging questions. What would he do if he accidently saw Corrine?
1967: Found
Captain George Vander, U.S.N., put his binoculars down and turned to what seemed to be his thousandth cup of hot black, acrid coffee. The latest link in his chain smoking habit hung from his lips and the bluish smoke lazily reached toward the overhead of the bridge.
“Mister Evans,” Vander called without looking back. Immediately, a thin, bespectacled Lieutenant appeared from the shadows on the bridge of the USS Marysville and joined the Captain.
Frederick Evans, a Ph.D. from Caltech, had already established a reputation for geosciences measurement including his duty on the fateful March 20, 1967, flight of the P-3B Orion. Evans had been seconded to the Marysville especially for this mission to search for and locate the mysterious object.
“Mr. Evans, have you ever seen anything as dang fool as that Nematode contraption?” referring to Western Light’s side scan sonar that had been put on-board the USS Marysville.
Vander was from the old Navy, assigned to push around research barges in the twilight of his career. In his day, oceanography meant Seechi discs, and sounding wires. The most exotic items in his arsenal were things like bucket thermometers and Roberts-type current meters.
Having signed aboard during the waning days of the big one, Vander served aboard almost every class of warship in the Navy except submarines. “I like to sleep with my portholes open,” was his standard reply.
High-tech, space age gizmos were better left to the eggheads like Evans. Vander could drive his boat and put her exactly wherever the scientists wanted her. Despite his rough hewn exterior or, maybe because of it, Vander was an expert mariner.
“Sir — that contraption may look awkward, but it has some of the fanciest electronics any ocean going instrumentation package has ever seen.”
Vander continued staring out over the bow of the Marysville, oblivious to the techno-jargon that Evans was engaged in. Evans, sensing that the Captain’s interest was probably out of boredom, rather than a thirst for knowledge, turned to the ship’s navigator who stood at the map table and started plotting transits that would coincide with his route on the over flight of the Lockheed P-3B Orion many months before.
Finally, the Nematode was ready to be deployed and with a splash, Nematode was committed to the deep.
“Here’s hoping it ain’t Russian,” whispered Sevson to himself.
The sound of the sonar systems filled the darkened instrumentation room on-board the U.S.S. Marysville as she maintained a straight heading under the skillful watch of Captain George Vander.
Up on the bridge behind Vander, Evans poured over the charts with Vander’s navigator. Using dividers and rulers to plot their current position, Evans satisfied himself that their course was exactly the same course the Lockheed P-3B Orion had flown months before. The task was not that easy.
Consider trying to remotely tow a car using a cable deployed from an airplane over three miles up and several miles ahead. A rather formidable job that challenged even the time-tried skills of Vander, cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth and a steaming cup of hot black coffee in his weathered left hand.
In the instrumentation room, several levels below deck, designed to be at the center of gravity of the vessel, Mike, McHugh, and Sevson crowded behind the Western Light sonar technician. The only moving thing in the tight cabin was the greenish trace on the cathode ray tube as it displayed the line by line return of the side scan sonar.
The only sounds other than the “blips” made by the sonar in the darkened room were the scratchy noises made by the pen registers as they recorded the images now being laid out on the cathode ray tube or CRT. If it weren’t for the soft rolling of the Marysville, there would have been no indication that Mike was even at sea.
The trace on the sonar’s oscilloscope held steady, a faint greenish line followed the brighter green dot that ran left to right across the circular screen. Except for occasional jiggles of the trace, which could be accounted for by changes in the local magnetic background of the ocean bottom, nothing unusual had occurred.
“Any more theories on the magnetic anomaly, Bob?” asked Sevson.
The ever present half smoked cigar dangling from the corner of his mouth, McHugh was absorbed in thought. The stale cigar smoke competed with the sweet smell of “Barking Dog” tobacco emanating from the corn-cob pipe in the corner of Sevson’s mouth. The tinfoil packet from which Sevson constantly refilled his pipe had the subtext, “Barking Dogs Never Bite.”