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
Grasping Mysteries Page 7
