by Hope Jahren
Two mornings later Kelen stood outside a cinder-block schoolhouse on Aur that the chief had offered as a dormitory, looking up at an overcast sky and weighing again—as he had when he first met Genz—how much of his knowledge to share in order to keep it alive. Now in his late 40s and newly a grandfather, he had lived his early childhood on the atoll nearest Rongelap, Bikini, where the hydrogen bomb and dozens of other nuclear weapons were exploded. Later, as part of a program to test the effects of radiation on humans, American officials told the people from Bikini and Rongelap that their islands were safe to resettle, so they returned for several years. During this period Kelen’s father taught him to sail in a traditional canoe made by Kelen’s grandfather. When Kelen was 10, the Americans finally evacuated the islanders to Kili, an uninhabited island bedeviled on all sides by violent ocean swells too rough for the canoe, which rotted away.
Eventually Kelen’s parents moved to Majuro, home to half of the nation’s 50,000 citizens—an urban hub compared with the outer islands. They sent Kelen, a top student, to boarding school in Honolulu. There, when he was 19, he went with his class down to the docks to watch the world-famous Hokulea return from a trip to New Zealand. Later he came back to Majuro as a young man and dedicated himself to the preservation of fading skills, like weaving and canoe building. But he felt tremendous ambivalence about what gaining resources to preserve his culture, or any native culture, seemed to require: allowing outsiders, whether academics or reporters, to commodify it. Secrecy and hands-on training are integral to the tradition of wave piloting; explaining the di lep would disrupt those features of it even while immortalizing it in books and journals, perhaps inspiring more Marshallese children to become ri-metos.
The tide was on its way out as the sailors and scientists began to load up for the 70-mile journey back to Majuro. The villagers sang again and prayed for their safe return. They laid another feast and stocked the canoe with provisions, packed in woven pandanus baskets, and handicrafts, including a toy sailing canoe, a perfect imitation, small and light as a bird. Until now, because his crew and canoe were untested, Kelen had deemed it unsafe to have any passengers aboard the Jitdam. One more person could fit, however, and he invited me onboard.
“Youp, youp,” called Binton Daniel, the master builder who had supervised the construction of the Jitdam, and the sail shot up. The sailors waved in overhead arcs at the people on the beach. The people waved back. Gradually the sound of swells rushing against the coral rim of the lagoon grew louder. With a thunk, the bottom of the canoe hit the top of the reef and slid across, and we were out in open water.
Daniel eased the mainsheet and let the boom swing out. The first mate, Jason Ralpho, a stern-looking man in gray socks who worked with Kelen at the Ports Authority, and Ejnar Aerok, a plump, professional karaoke singer, secured the line to a cleat. The youngest, Elmi Juonran, lifted a lid off one of two hatches and, muttering, disappeared to boil water for ramen in a big silver teakettle. “He says he’s the only one who knows the password to these doors,” Kelen said. Juonran’s cousin, Sear Helios, named for the department store his parents visited on a trip to Honolulu, steered from the stern of the canoe with a 50-pound wooden paddle.
Kelen leaned back against the mast and looked at the front of the outrigger float and the back, estimating our speed. He checked his wristwatch. The wind was coming from the northeast, and the current, he said, would take us farther east that night. Ostensibly he was dead-reckoning—to do that you must know where you started, where you’re going, how fast you’re moving, and in what direction. Wave piloting, if Genz, Huth, and van Vledder are right, is more precise; theoretically, a wave pilot dropped blindfolded into a boat in Marshallese waters could follow a set of seamarks—waves of a particular shape—alone to land.
“Majuro should be that way,” Kelen said, pointing. “I’m closing my eyes and looking at the wind. This is a very short distance. Again, I’m only a student. I’m entitled to a few mistakes.”
Swells glided, smooth and gentle, beneath us. Sunset cracked yolk on a puffy lavender sky. The horizon appeared infinite and also very near, as if we had fallen into a mixing bowl. Around us the crew faded into shadow. Ralpho lit a cigarette, and its tip burned orange in the dark. The sail luffed.
“This is kind of scary smooth,” Kelen said. “Does it feel like we’re moving anywhere? That’s not good. We have to move or we’ll drift away from the islands.” Yet he didn’t sound worried. We lay back. The sky was foggy with stars.
As a young man, Kelen said, he spent some time on the West Coast, picking strawberries in Oregon, working in a turkey plant, then driving a Rent Town USA truck up and down Highway 101. He described long days of sweet berries, of cutting the necks of birds, of truck-stop sloppy Joes and giant cups of coffee. We lost sight of the Jebro and missed three call-ins. Kelen could still remember fishing as a child on Bikini, its long white beaches. In his memory, everyone there was happy. Periodically a government ship brought provisions, and men in white lab coats tested him and the other islanders with a huge machine. When the ship came to take them away for good, Kelen thought they were going for a ride.
Aerok began to sing in a high, lonely tenor. Ralpho added baritone harmony. “It’s kind of like a country-music song,” Kelen said. “ ‘I see you as beautiful as a sunset, and I cry when I leave the beach that you stand on.’ It’s kind of like a sailors’ leaving-home song. It’s a song when you start singing it, everyone knows it.”
I closed my eyes. The sounds of the canoe—creaking, sloshing, rippling—traced its shape like fingers moving over a face in the dark.
I awoke to Aerok and Juonran singing about Majuro, another sad song. The sky spilled radiance onto the water. Beside me, Kelen was awake too. “Every time I look up at heaven, I wonder, how many Earths are out there?” he said. “How many planets like ours? There’s millions of galaxies. There must be something.”
We saw one star drop, then another. “Every time I see a falling star, I make a wish and I don’t tell nobody,” he said. “I don’t believe very many things, but this is something that makes me feel good, even if it isn’t true.”
By 9:30 the next morning the sun was high and the sailors had grown quiet. Kelen rested his shoulder against the mast, peering into the distance. If we didn’t see Majuro by 10, he said, the current had pushed us too far to the west. At 9:50 Juonran pointed, and everyone else followed his finger to the faintest of tints on the horizon. Kelen swatted him on the butt. The sailors laughed.
“Another good guess,” Kelen said to me.
All maps are but representations of reality: they render the physical world in symbols and highlight important relationships—the proximity of one subway stop to another, say—that are invisible to the naked eye. If storytelling, the way we structure and make meaning from the events of our lives, arose from navigating, so too is the practice of navigation inherently bound up with storytelling, in all its subjectivity.
“When I was young, we had canoes,” Kelen told me one afternoon on Aur. “We didn’t have TVs. In evening time my father would open his arm, like this, and say, Lie there”—he tapped the inside of his elbow—“and he would tell me the legends of sailing. Some people have those heroes, like Superman, and they’re picturing they are Superman. When my dad talked about sailing, I was on that canoe.”
To teach way-finding, the Marshallese use stick charts, wood frames crosshatched like dream catchers to represent swells coming from four cardinal directions, with shells woven in to symbolize the position of the atolls. These meant nothing to the first European explorers to see them, just as Mercator projections meant nothing to the Marshallese. Even today local schoolchildren visiting the historical museum in Majuro are sometimes baffled when they’re told that the blue-and-green pictures on the walls are pictures of where they are.
If “where” is both subjective and physical, what do you need to know, precisely, to figure out where you are? From the moment our nomad ancestors wandered out o
f Africa until a few decades ago, locating yourself required interacting in some way with the environment: following the stars or a migrating herd of wildebeests, even reading a compass or a street sign. Then, in the time it took to transition from rotary phones to smartphones, we became the first unnatural long-distance migrants, followers of step-by-step instructions that obviated the need to look around at all. Over the last several years, organizations like the United States military and the Federal Aviation Administration have expressed concern about their overwhelming reliance on GPS and the possibility that the network’s satellite signals could be sabotaged by an enemy or disabled by a strong solar flare. The United States Naval Academy has once again begun training midshipmen in how to take their position from the stars with a sextant.
As researchers urgently explore what GPS is doing to our minds, wave piloting—a technique that seems to involve the subtlest environmental cues a person can detect—is slipping, virtually unnoticed, from human consciousness. Even if Huth and van Vledder could figure out how it worked, they admitted, it didn’t mean they could feel it or teach others how to do so.
Back on Majuro, they spent several days typing notes and crunching data, barely emerging from their rooms. Huth created a preliminary map of the route and approximate wind and sea conditions to show Korent Joel to see if he could identify a pattern that might be the di lep. But when they arrived at his home again, they learned that he had checked into the hospital the previous afternoon. Several weeks later he was flown to Honolulu, where surgeons determined that his leg was gangrenous and amputated it below the knee. In his absence, Kelen and Genz helped Huth and van Vledder quiz Joel’s Rongelapese uncle for stray clues to di lep’s features, but learned nothing they recognized as epiphanies.
Until November, when van Vledder visited Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he and Huth sequestered themselves in Huth’s office. As they mapped the coordinates Huth had recorded atop van Vledder’s model of sea conditions, they found that the path they had taken was exactly perpendicular to a dominant eastern swell flowing between Majuro and Aur. And at places where the swell, influenced by the surrounding atolls, turned slightly northeast or southeast, the path bent to match. It was a curve. Everyone had assumed that a wave called “backbone” would look like one. “But nobody said the di lep is a straight line,” van Vledder said.
What if, they conjectured, the “road” isn’t a single wave reflecting back and forth between every possible combination of atolls and islands; what if it is the path you take if you keep your vessel at 90 degrees to the strongest swell flowing between neighboring bodies of land? Position your broadside correctly, smack in the di lep’s path, and your hull would rock symmetrically, side to side—in a manner that would turn a loose cabbage into a pendulum and teach an anthropologist, a physicist, and an oceanographer a hard lesson about the human gastrointestinal system’s adaptation to life at sea. In other words, it was as Joel’s uncle had, it turned out, told them: the di lep feels like pidodo, diarrhea. We might have been riding it all along.
NICOLA TWILLEY
The Billion-Year Wave
FROM The New Yorker
Just over a billion years ago, many millions of galaxies from here, a pair of black holes collided. They had been circling each other for aeons in a sort of mating dance, gathering pace with each orbit, hurtling closer and closer. By the time they were a few hundred miles apart, they were whipping around at nearly the speed of light, releasing great shudders of gravitational energy. Space and time became distorted, like water at a rolling boil. In the fraction of a second that it took for the black holes to finally merge, they radiated a hundred times more energy than all the stars in the universe combined. They formed a new black hole, 62 times as heavy as our sun and almost as wide across as the state of Maine. As it smoothed itself out, assuming the shape of a slightly flattened sphere, a few last quivers of energy escaped. Then space and time became silent again.
The waves rippled outward in every direction, weakening as they went. On Earth, dinosaurs arose, evolved, and went extinct. The waves kept going. About 50,000 years ago they entered our own Milky Way galaxy, just as Homo sapiens were beginning to replace our Neanderthal cousins as the planet’s dominant species of ape. A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein, one of the more advanced members of the species, predicted the waves’ existence, inspiring decades of speculation and fruitless searching. Twenty-two years ago, construction began on an enormous detector, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Then, on September 14, 2015, at just before 11 in the morning, Central European Time, the waves reached Earth. Marco Drago, a 32-year-old Italian postdoctoral student and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, was the first person to notice them. He was sitting in front of his computer at the Albert Einstein Institute, in Hannover, Germany, viewing the LIGO data remotely. The waves appeared on his screen as a compressed squiggle, but the most exquisite ears in the universe, attuned to vibrations of less than a trillionth of an inch, would have heard what astronomers call a chirp—a faint whooping from low to high. This morning, in a press conference in Washington, D.C., the LIGO team announced that the signal constitutes the first direct observation of gravitational waves.
When Drago saw the signal, he was stunned. “It was difficult to understand what to do,” he told me. He informed a colleague, who had the presence of mind to call the LIGO operations room, in Livingston, Louisiana. Word began to circulate among the thousand or so scientists involved in the project. In California, David Reitze, the executive director of the LIGO Laboratory, saw his daughter off to school and went to his office at Caltech, where he was greeted by a barrage of messages. “I don’t remember exactly what I said,” he told me. “It was along these lines: ‘Holy shit, what is this?’ ” Vicky Kalogera, a professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University, was in meetings all day and didn’t hear the news until dinnertime. “My husband asked me to set the table,” she said. “I was completely ignoring him, skimming through all these weird emails and thinking, ‘What is going on?’ ” Rainer Weiss, the 83-year-old physicist who first suggested building LIGO, in 1972, was on vacation in Maine. He logged on, saw the signal, and yelled “My God!” loudly enough that his wife and adult son came running.
The collaborators began the arduous process of double-, triple-, and quadruple-checking their data. “We’re saying that we made a measurement that is about a thousandth the diameter of a proton, that tells us about two black holes that merged over a billion years ago,” Reitze said. “That is a pretty extraordinary claim and it needs extraordinary evidence.” In the meantime the LIGO scientists were sworn to absolute secrecy. As rumors of the finding spread, from late September through this week, media excitement spiked; there were rumblings about a Nobel Prize. But the collaborators gave anyone who asked about it an abbreviated version of the truth—that they were still analyzing data and had nothing to announce. Kalogera hadn’t even told her husband.
LIGO consists of two facilities separated by nearly 1,900 miles—about a three-and-a-half-hour flight on a passenger jet, but a journey of less than ten thousandths of a second for a gravitational wave. The detector in Livingston, Louisiana, sits on swampland east of Baton Rouge, surrounded by a commercial pine forest; the one in Hanford, Washington, is on the southwestern edge of the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States, amid desert sagebrush, tumbleweed, and decommissioned reactors. At both locations a pair of concrete pipes some 12 feet tall stretch at right angles into the distance, so that from high above the facilities resemble carpenter’s squares. The pipes are so long—nearly two and a half miles—that they have to be raised from the ground by a yard at each end, to keep them lying flat as Earth curves beneath them.
LIGO is part of a larger effort to explore one of the more elusive implications of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The theory, put simply, states that space and time curve in the presence of mass, and that this curvature produces the effect known as
gravity. When two black holes orbit each other, they stretch and squeeze spacetime like children running in circles on a trampoline, creating vibrations that travel to the very edge; these vibrations are gravitational waves. They pass through us all the time, from sources across the universe, but because gravity is so much weaker than the other fundamental forces of nature—electromagnetism, for instance, or the interactions that bind an atom together—we never sense them. Einstein thought it highly unlikely that they would ever be detected. He twice declared them nonexistent, reversing and then re-reversing his own prediction. A skeptical contemporary noted that the waves seemed to “propagate at the speed of thought.”
Nearly five decades passed before someone set about building an instrument to detect gravitational waves. The first person to try was an engineering professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, named Joe Weber. He called his device the resonant bar antenna. Weber believed that an aluminum cylinder could be made to work like a bell, amplifying the feeble strike of a gravitational wave. When a wave hit the cylinder, it would vibrate very slightly, and sensors around its circumference would translate the ringing into an electrical signal. To make sure he wasn’t detecting the vibrations of passing trucks or minor earthquakes, Weber developed several safeguards: he suspended his bars in a vacuum, and he ran two of them at a time, in separate locations—one on the campus of the University of Maryland and one at Argonne National Laboratory, near Chicago. If both bars rang in the same way within a fraction of a second of each other, he concluded, the cause might be a gravitational wave.
In June of 1969, Weber announced that his bars had registered something. Physicists and the media were thrilled; the Times reported that “a new chapter in man’s observation of the universe has been opened.” Soon Weber started reporting signals on a daily basis. But doubt spread as other laboratories built bars that failed to match his results. By 1974 many had concluded that Weber was mistaken. (He continued to claim new detections until his death, in 2000.)
