Water, Ice & Stone. Bill Green
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chloride ions know no peace, chatter constantly at their moorings, yearn like the ships of Greece to be off and wandering. When a drop of water presses against the crystal face, it is as though a great tide had washed ashore. The ions are loosened and borne away, swept up in a flurry of molecules whose charged ends are turned just right for the task. The solid dissolves into invisible navies of charge, dissipates, diffuses, becomes a homogeneous mixture against which the forces of gravity cannot prevail.
Yet all of this talk about physical properties says nothing of water’s dynamism, its splendid life upon the Earth—its swift turning in storm and fog, its movement through rivers. No matter where it is, water is moving. It is always in passage, wanting to be elsewhere. Thus water evaporates from the sea, blows over the lands, hovers, condenses into spheres, falls, evaporates again, or trickles downward through the Earth into waiting reservoirs deep among the folded rocks; or runs off the land and back into the sea. We know the times, too, of water’s passage. We have measured these things: nine days in the atmosphere, a few years in lakes; a few hundred years in groundwater; a few thousand years in oceans; more than ten thousand years in the ice cap of Antarctica. Always moving. Yearning to be somewhere else.
We have a million names for water in passage, so many forms does it take. The forms are a kind of poem, a line through our lives: lake, river, stream, cataract, waterfall, ground fog, ice, shower, downpour, meander, deluge, spring, font, runnel, marsh, bog, fen, inlet, bight, bay, wave, billow, and swell. And many more. It is like a chant, each word a memory.
It is no wonder people have given their lives to water, to be on it, to use it, to take from its bounty. Sea captains, farmers, shell fishers, river pilots, singing gondoliers, painters, and poets must all know its moods and its ways. No less the limnologist, the geochemist, the oceanographer, the hydrologist, the engineer, the solution chemist, the teacher, and the writer.
No less N. Ernest Dorsey of the U.S. Bureau of Standards and Measures, who provides us, in 1940, with more than six hundred pages of data, equations, tables, and graphs. All on water. Much of it curious and fascinating. In one of Dorsey’s entries we find that two inches of ice will be strong enough to hold “a man or a properly spaced infantry,” and that four inches will support a horse and rider, as well as light guns. Ten inches of ice is sufficient to accommodate “an army, an innumerable multitude,” and fifteen inches will suffice to hold railroad trains and tracks. One astounding entry claims that “twenty-four inches of ice once withstood the impact of a loaded railroad passenger car falling sixty feet through the air,” but, alas, broke under the impact of the locomotive and tender.
Some of Dorsey’s most intriguing information is on color. Lord Rayleigh believed that the blueness of natural waters was most likely due to the reflection of the sky. But a colleague of Darwin, J. Y. Buchanan, took exception to this opinion, noting that “when quiet water, as in the screw well of the research vessel Challenger, is viewed vertically under such conditions as to exclude reflected sky, it appears to be of a beautiful, dark blue color.” In 1936, E. Petit solved the mystery when he determined that the blue of Crater Lake, Oregon, arises from light scattered by the water itself. But the most convincing report was written by Charles W. Beebe on his bathysphere descents into the open sea. At fourteen hundred feet, long after the blues of the sky had been lost, Beebe wrote exultantly that the “outside world was, however, a solid, blue-black world, one of which seemed born of a single vibration—blue, blue, forever and forever blue.”
There is surely enough beauty in the mere facts of the world. They are ten times over and more, a surfeit. Enough to go round and round. To burden us forever with delight. And yet, even breathless with this, we somehow need more. We must have more. Perhaps it is our tragedy, perhaps our hope. Whatever, we must know why, we must know what is behind it all. Behind the snowflake, the water strider’s dance, the lake steaming at dawn, the looming iceberg on the sea scrolled with death—just the sea itself, its very presence and being, that it is here on Earth at all, that it speaks, that its brilliantined surface blinds. And the life of the sea, life in reeds and tubes, a dense matting around the Earth—what unites these? The world is not just pieces and fragments, not just glowing embers of fact, surfaces, baubles and trinkets and gold doubloons, marvelous though these surely are. It goes down and down, deep into dark wells below our seeing, into mystery and dream, then opens in chambers of startling light. Thales knew this. And Lucretius. And Dalton. And Bohr. But who are we, that we must enter these secret places far below the surface of things? The god of the wind, the god of the mountain, the god of the crops, the god of the light-filled sea. Who is the God behind these, the God from whom all these others come?
THREE
Rutherford’s Den
Matter sings. In its spinning and tumbling, its locked vibrations, its translatory leaps, it sings, but we cannot hear. Beneath the most placid surface—a water drop from Acton Lake, a table at Christchurch, the glacial erratic on the shores of Vanda—there is a ceaseless, sibilant whispering, a kind of delicate rustling and turning, unattended sounds so profligate and spendthrift, so seductive, that if they did not lie forever beyond us, we would be held totally in their thrall.
THREE HOURS OUT OF AUCKLAND the sun rose. The clouds were columns and cliffs in a three-dimensional sky. In time the North Island appeared, sparse in settlement, the bays of Auckland flecked with sails against the brown headlands. We had been more than twenty hours in the air. Had passed from winter into summer, and back again to spring. We had crossed the equator, the dateline near Fiji, had moved ahead an entire day of calendar time. When we landed, there was such relief, such loud applause. It went on for nearly a minute.
We left for Christchurch in early afternoon. The day was clear, and New Zealand lay below, a land of scattered lakes and glaciers, forests and bays. In Christchurch we stayed at the Windsor Hotel, a small bed-and-breakfast in Armagh Street. Old, but open and airy and smelling of spring, it faced onto a large public garden. The curtains of my window billowed in the afternoon breeze and sunlight fell through onto the bed.
I unpacked and went outside: the scent of franjipani, the poinsettias in window boxes against the green lawns. We were in the southern hemisphere now, far away from the sleet and cold of Ohio. We were where water drains clockwise, where it’s mostly ocean, where you can feel the Earth tilt inward toward the sun, leaning you obliquely into the face of its warmth instead of away. I hadn’t been in Christchurch for more than an hour, and I felt as though I had been living there a decade, an expatriate. It was easy: lounging on the park grass in short sleeves; queuing up at the street vendor’s two-wheeled cart for ice cream; sitting on the banks of the Avon River where it wends under poplar and willow, my feet dangling in clear water; sitting in the town square listening to the Wizard, in his starry cape, preach to the pigeons. Even the marble statue of Robert Falcon Scott, in white tunic and polar gloves, looked warm and content.
I did not know how long we would be in New Zealand. Maybe a day, a week. You had to wait until the “Herc,” the LC-130 Hercules, was ready to fly, until the weather at McMurdo was good for landing. Sometimes you’d leave Christchurch, fly for a few hours, then turn around. They never told you why, although there were always rumors. I was anxious to get to the lakes now. Here time moved so slowly. There it would just race, carry me along like a swollen stream.
Our flight had been moved back indefinitely. There were storms over Ross Island: whiteout and seventy-knot winds. Williams Field was closed except for emergencies. Word came that there had been a terrible crash at Siple, out at the recovery site. One of the LC-130s had hit a crevasse, had jackknifed over its nose onto its back. There were rumors of deaths and of many injuries. You could feel a heaviness in the air every time you stopped by the clothing warehouse. People almost whispered when they talked. We were put on alert, advised to stay close to our hotels, to call in every hour, just in case the weather broke.
Morning. There was no plan of action. We