03 June 2010
Rust Never Sleeps
(USS Olympia back in the Day. Official Navy Picture)
For me, it is getting on to one of those calendar moments that force one to take brief pause.
I was conceived, best I can determine, in the fall of 1950. The Korean war was raging, and Dad was probably sweating the idea that he would be called back to active service and fly Skyraiders against the North Koreans who had the ROKs and the US Army pinned down in the Busan pocket.
By the time I got around be being born, he powers that be had determined that all Naval reservists east of the Mississippi would be retained for the European contingency, and our little family stayed put in Detroit. Still ahead was all the turmoil that killed the grand old downtown and transformed my birth-city to a science fiction wasteland.
I mention that only because this is not a round number in the sum of a life, but uncomfortably close to one. I would take stock, if I were a thinking man, but on the whole I think I will chose to contemplate something else and ignore the process of entropy, regardless of how it manifests itself in creaking joints.
Any stability in this life is an illusion. Entropy always wins. We live in the moment, the eternal now, and hence are surprised at the unfamiliar figure in the mirror each morning. The physical manifestations that linger as the flesh fades can last much longer.
Big Pink is 46 this year, youthful in the grand context. Things made of stone without moving parts can last millennia. A fiberglass sculptor and roadside visionary named Mark Cline is building a full-sized replica of the monoliths of Stonehenge down by Natural Bridge, Virginia.
His will not last as long as the original, since it is made of Styrofoam. The more whimsical works of man are like that. Like ships of war. Intended to intimidate or destroy, impress or dismay, they are actually quite fragile manifestations of national delusion.
I have argued before that ships of steel are only a snap-shot in time of iron oxide’s successful attempt to return to that granular form.
The USS Olympia is a case in point. She shares something with the mighty Missouri, now a memorial in Pearl Harbor, in that a moment on a steel deck galvanized a nation and became the symbol of an expansionist United States.
From the moment of her launching in 1892, Olympia was the Queen of the Fleet, which is what makes things so sad now. She was 344 feet, length overall, with a beam of 53. She displaced almost 6,000 tons and could drive her proud prow at 22 knots, her boilers gobbling more than 600 pounds of cola a minute at top speed. She was a marvel then, and her need for coal, and coal for the larger fleet, is what drove America’s maritime policy around the world.
She had no sisters, and today is the world’s oldest floating steel warship and the sole surviving naval ship of the Spanish-American War. In addition to being a National Historic Landmark, Olympia is also a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark, on the National Register of Historic Places, and part of the Save America’s Treasures program.
Entropy doesn’t care. What did Neil Young say? “Rust never sleeps?
Olympia is alongside the pier today in the harbor at Philadelphia. She has been the
pride and headache of the Independence Seaport Museum since 1995. Tourists with an interest can stand on the very place where Commodore George Dewey turned to Captain “Steve” Gridley, and told him he could fire, when ready, against the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay.
(Captain "Steve" Gridley)
Gridley had graduated in 1864 from the Naval Academy in 1864, in the bottom half of his class, but 34 years later, his Olympia swept the enemy before him without loss of American life. Gridley himself demonstrated the fragility of the human experience, and at the zenith of his professional career passed away later the same year.
Admiral Dewey lived another nineteen years and became an American icon, as did his flagship. The hero of Manila Bay passed in 1917, as America prepared to enter the war in Europe, and Olympia served with distinction in the brief but violent period of intervention in the War to End Wars.
She was selected to carry the body of the Unknown Solider back here from France to lie in eternal honor at Arlington. Time and technology passed proud Olympia by, and she was stricken from the active list in 1922.
A ship with fame like hers remained government property. The disposition of fighting ships is a prickly business. Many are sold to allies when their work with the active navy is done; others are scrapped; some are laid up in a state of preservation against the needs of the next conflict.
In the end, entropy wins unless there are heroic efforts to fend it off. Olympia was last out of the water in 1945. Barnacles had been growing for six years by the time I was born.
Normally, steel ships should be dry-docked every couple decades, and the price of deferral is thinning hull and loss of integrity. She is a fragile thing there at the pier, and all the paint and shiny bright-work cannot deny the imperative of the brackish water.
The Independence Seaport Museum Board may be bluffing about sinking the proud ship, and they may not. They have run out of good ideas to fund a dry-dock availability, and the twenty million it would cost to save her hull is quite beyond the gate receipts of a little private museum.
I resent the campaign. I resent the fact that the Navy whose history and glory is part of those steel decks is absent without leave. I encourage you to send them a check, though of course a momentary donation will not stop entropy.
I am going to go stand on the deck this summer, since the decision point is in September. Reef or museum, it is up to us to determine if she is worth saving. If anything about where we came from reflects where we are going, you might want to drop a note to the Independence Seaport Museum Board at seaport@phillyseaport.org.
Rust never sleeps.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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