| 13 November 2006 Stuck in Big Muddy Aircraft carriers are not metaphors for failed policies. They are enormous aggregations of steel and brass and electrical cable. The ex-USS Intrepid, a carrier of the WWII Essex Class, is in trouble. Not only is it hard aground in the muck of the Hudson River, but it is being held up as an example of the successful works of the Greatest Generation being ruined by the incompetence of the pygmies who run the present. Unlike metaphors, aircraft carriers are made of adamant steel. which seems quite solid to us. It is, in reality, a fluid, just like the medium in which the heavy substance is made to float. If we had perspective and time enough, we could see the aircraft carrier as a stream. Flowing from the great Mesabi Range in Minnesota, iron ore would travel in bulk on rail cars to the big lake freighters, and down to the blast furnaces in Pittsburgh, and then by iron rail again to the Newport News shipyard in Virginia. There the great ship would rise, from keel to towering mast. The people who built her would be invisible, hurtling about their tasks as swiftly as Mayflies, too tiny and quick to be observed. Intrepid was the third of her class, keel laid down just six days before the attack at Pearl Harbor. Rushed into service ny mid-1943, she was an impressive ship: 898 feet long, 42,000 tons of sculpted steel, containing 1,600 hatches and 20,000 miles of electric cable. There were dozens of aircraft carriers thrown into that conflict, all filled with now invisible men. Almost all of them have melted away, turning once more into the red rusty powder wrested originally from the bosom of the Minnesota earth. If you have to search for a metaphor associated with Intrepid, it would only be that the greatest works of man, bridges and buildings and aircraft carriers, are simply masses or steel returning naturally to iron oxide. Neil Young once observed that “rust never sleeps,” and all he had to worry about were the flanks of his limousine, not 42,000 tons of steel suspended in salt water. But I digress. Intrepid served the United States Navy for 31 years, and was an illustrious bearer of the flag. She served in World War II, and but missed Korea, since the Navy realized they needed platforms for the new high-speed jets that were entering the fleet. Modified and ready, she steamed in the blockade against Cuba in the Missile Crisis, as a NASA recovery vessel for the Mercury and Gemini space missions, and on Yankee Station off Vietnam. After the Paris Talks which secured Peace with Honor in Vietnam, and the year before the North Vietnamese rolled their Russian-supplied tanks into Saigon, Intrepid was paid off for the last time. She was slated to be dissolved into high-grade iron oxide to be utilized in the production of razor blades and Ford Pintos like all her sisters. Enter Zachary Fisher, a prominent New York real estate developer and major philanthropic benefactor. A native Brooklynite with bald pate and twinking eye, Fisher worked in construction since he was a teen-ager, and a work-site accident crippled a leg and prevented his service in WWII. He and his brothers owned more than five million square feet of commercial office space in New York at the height of their influence, a good chunk of a city that is only a little less mutable than aircraft carriers. Harnessing his wealth to a desire to honor those who had served, Fisher began a project to contruct temporary family residences near military hospitals. He also identified Intrepid as a suitable project for preservation and display in Midtown Manhattan. He formed the Intrepid Mueseum Foundation in 1978. By1982, the ship was refurbished and open for business at Pier 86 on the Hudson River as the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum. Conveniently located at the foot of 42nd Street, the old warrior is billed as “the world's largest naval museum.” There is easy access to the Circle Line pier next door, and the Consulate of the People's Republic of China. Just in case, there is a Maine Corps recruiting station located onboard. Management of the museum is well aware of Neil Young's observation. Even aircraft carriers that don't move continue to disintegrate, and so do the piers next to which they rest. Last week, Intrepid was to be towed from Pier 86 to a dry-dock in Bayonne, NJ, for a $55 million restoration and preservation project. Management hoped to open up more spaces on the ship, and show what it was like to live in one of these vast machines. A week ago, all was ready. VIP guests were present and helicopters hovered above. Six-hundred tons of ballast were pumped off the ship to lighten her, and the highest tide of the month added buoyancy. A fleet of six civilian tug-boats with a combined pulling capability of over 20,000 shaft horsepower took up the strain. Intrepid lurched15 feet before twenty-four years of accumulated Hudson sludge snagged the 16-foot propellers and brought the enterprise to a standstill. It was back to the drawing board. Failure to accomplish the mission is out of the question. Experts have been consulted to formulate a new plan of attack. The Navy will rush additional salvage support at a cost of about $3 million, since allowing a historic icon to turn into an eyesore is counterproductive. The Army Corps of Engineers will study the best way to dredge the seventeen feet of muck away that snuggles around the keel. The mission is well defined, and experts know how to do these things. Sufficient resources will be employed, and the next time they try to move Intrepid, they will undoubtedly succeed, since failure would cause everyone concerned to look like incompetent dolts. The only danger now is that Intrepid will be construed as a metaphor. She is not a short-hand way of saying we are stuck in the mud, and cannot extricate ourselves. She is actually an enormous chunk of steel, as insistent on her obligation to return to iron powder as we are to demonstrate that we are in charge of this world, and that she may not. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |