01 August 2007

Shark Week


It is August in Washington: hot and humid and the air shivers when you look through it, a little like gelatin. Time was when sensible people were at the Shore to cool off, at Rehoboth, Ocean City or Virginia Beach. Since the invention of air conditioning and year-round government though, there is the pleasant fiction that we are supposed to be working.

Maybe because of the jumble of vacation and simulated work, it is also Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. It is a big deal around here, since they decorate the headquarters of the cable network to resemble a giant shark. It is quite striking when you drive by.

There has been a huge response to the week-long celebration of the cold blooded killers. It first aired in 1988, and has since entered the popular lexicon as an analogy for corporate conventions. Twenty four-seven this week we had images of sleek gliding monsters with triangular ripping teeth.

Some of them, have them, anyway. The narrators are quick to point out that most sharks are perfectly harmless, just like attorneys.

But we don't like gentle sharks any more than you want a gentle attorney. You root for the ones with the sudden thrust of the glittering white teeth, the tearing sudden motion of the powerful neck, and the flow of bright blood into the water.

Vicariously, that is exactly what we want in our legal professionals, with the blood of the evil-doers spreading on the floor of the courtroom.

I know that traditionally they schedule Shark Week for this slack time in the year. I know some people who can spend the day watching, and go well into the evening, watching scenes of the most dangerous predator in the world, the Great White Shark.

Jaws was the tipping point in the legend, I suppose, the movie that focused the legend from all the sailors who ever went down to the sea. Formally known as Carcharodon carcharias, the Great White also has the endearing nick-name of White Death. They can be twenty feet long and weigh five thousand pounds.

I have only seen one of them in person. It was a long time ago, in the Northern Arabian Sea. Our ship had been operating there for months, and I had a chance to go fly around in a helicopter. When you temporarily live just north of the Equator, the days blur into one another under the blazing sun and glittering waves. A change is as good as a vacation. Donning a green Nomex flight suit, helmet and survival gear is as much fun as flip-flops and a Hawaiian Shirt at Ocean City.

I had not been out of the ship in weeks. Usually our great gray ship traveled majestically from point-to-point with expeditious purpose. I blush to say it in these more correct environmental times, but the standard practice of the day was to collect the trash of our floating city and march the trash-bags to the starboard sponson aft, and hurl them overboard.

Normally they would float off behind us and disappear over the horizon. Driving endlessly in circles as we had been, waiting to pounce on the Iranians, our trash remained with us, slowly dispersing with wave action. Over time, the white dots of the trash became almost equally distributed all across the gentle swells, from horizon to horizon.

I was wondering what the ocean floor was going to look like when the bags failed, or what distant beach was going to eventually get our garbage when I saw something quite remarkable.

A bag was being thrown from the ship, and no more than had the lazy arc been completed and the sack hit the water than there was a disturbance in the blue water like a pot coming to boil. Suddenly, White Death erupted from the surface and hit the bag with mouth gaping.

We were low enough that I could see the snap of the thick neck and the garbage fly in all directions, as it once more disappeared below the surface with its prize.

As hot as it was in the bay of the SH-3, it was enough to make you shiver, thinking about what was really happening just fifty feet below. By extrapolation, it was happening all the time below the keel of the ship, not shark week, but shark universe.

Maybe it is coincidence that they run Shark Week at this time of the year, but the image is powerful. This is the anniversary of the sinking of the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis, which had just delivered key components of the Hiroshima atomic bomb to Tinian Atoll.

The cargo she carried meant that the war was just about over, though no one recognized how suddenly and dramatically it would conclude.

Indy was torpedoed by a Japanese I-class submarine as she traveled alone as she often did, en route Guam and operations supporting the invasion of the Home Islands.

She was out of the Navy reporting system, due to the sensitivity of her mission, and no one realized she was missing for a week. Only 316 out of 1,196 men survived the sinking, though many more of them were alive in the shark-infested waters.

The stories of the survivors are on Shark Week. You might want to watch, if you get the chance. It is one of the reasons I restrict my swimming to the more placid waters of the pool at Big Pink.

Here, we only have to worry about the occasional Attorney.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com


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