Chemistry of Fire Read online

  Ballard has fallen silent as we drive out toward the spot on the Connecticut River where he is building a new house for his new life. The Mercedes enters Old Lyme, gliding through forests and horse farms. “The family comes first,” he says. “I’m allowed five weeks a year at sea. I don’t have any family, so it’s all my wife Barbara’s family.” He drives more slowly as we approach the house. Periodically he stops to admire the beauty. Their new house is surrounded by a nature conservancy. “These fields can’t change,” he says, as if casting for one fundamental truth that will remain constant instead of becoming an ever-shifting dream.

  As Ballard turns onto a mud two-track and cuts through woods, we catch glimpses of a huge edifice through the tangle of black branches. As we get out, Ballard says, “I’m going to grab a tree” and vanishes into the woods muttering, “Too many Cokes.”

  Construction debris is everywhere, and workers dance on the roof. Ballard returns from his errand, and I attempt to follow as he runs from place to place, vaulting up stairs, naming the rooms. The inside of the house is barely framed up. Everything smells of pine sap and fresh concrete.

  A separate, smaller house is attached to the big house through the garage. He seems like the kid at school who is so unsure of himself that he has to work overtime to impress you. “Wait’ll you see my office,” he says, as we climb a plank on which rubber treads are nailed. “Then you’ll see that I know what I’m doing.” It commands a view of a marsh, where a silvery channel of water dips through a swale of reeds below the house. “Barbara’s lap pool will be down there,” he says. “This is her project. She’s on budget and on time.”

  We crawl through a hole in a wall and wind up in the main house, where he shows me what he calls “the kids’ play area—as far away from my part of the house as possible.” Ballard has a five-year-old son, Ben, and a daughter, Emily, who’s one and a half.

  Down another level, the bare concrete basement breathes a cold humidity. He shows me the locations for the building of the gym, the family theater, and what he calls his Yankee workshop. “I’m a homebody,” he says. “I love to stay home and fix up the house.”

  We climb back to the main level and stand in the family room, looking down to the head of the estuary. The sun etches a mandala of yellow light on the dusty plywood floor. “I have completely retooled my life,” he says, thoughtfully. “But I think I got it right this time. I have a new wife, a new family, a new job—everything.”

  We drive back toward Mystic through dappled sunlight and shade. He is quiet, introspective. He speaks of collecting wine, and of the upcoming Thanksgiving dinner with Barbara’s old-line Connecticut Yankee family, and of a life he envisions in which he is connected to the world electronically and never has to leave his house. “When fiber comes down Route 156, I’m building a teleconferencing center in the basement. This is the future. I think the internet is reinventing the family, the old days when Mom and Dad were home. I spend more time with my wife and kids than ever before, and my productivity is up. What’s wrong with this picture? It’s a great adventure. Ben woke up melancholy this morning, so I got him all snuggled up in my arms, and we lay on the couch and watched the sun come up.” He smiles. “Pretty good stuff,” he says. “Pretty good stuff.”

  Ballard slouches in the leather driver’s seat, flicking through the turns with one finger. “This new career will take up the rest of my professional life. So there’s no question of ‘I wonder what I’m going to do when I grow up.’ I’m happier than I’ve ever been, and I’m nicer than I’ve ever been. Barbara calls me the ‘kinder, gentler Bob.’ I don’t have anything to prove. I’m done with impressing the world.” He sighs. “I feel I’ve dropped anchor for the first time in my life.”

  He drives on in silence, and after a while he seems to forget what he’s just said. I can see his eyes go far away, and he comes back sharp and focused. He paraphrases Joseph Campbell to preface the thought I can see developing. “Life is the act of becoming,” he says. “One never arrives.”

  He straightens up in his seat and looks at me. “I want to be the father of deepwater archaeology,” he announces. “I’m going to have to earn that. Let’s roll up our sleeves and get at it!”

  There had been other expeditions to find Titanic. In each case, they had laid down search lines less than nine hundred feet apart to avoid missing her hull. Titanic was 882 feet, 9 inches long. That constraint meant staying on station a month. A month at sea costs a fortune, and those searchers were inevitably driven off before they could finish.

  On August 12, 1985, a year after surveying Thresher, Ballard was poised to set sail for Titanic. But he raced to the site of Scorpion instead. The nature of the mission was secret from everyone on board except a few key people who had to know. Steve Gegg, the navigator, said, “Whole areas of the vessel were closed off. The control vans were secured. Big red signs were put up that said, ‘Restricted.’ Any displays of our position were shut off.”

  In sending Ballard to scenes of disaster, the navy was interested not only in getting good pictures. It was worried about radiation leaks from the subs, particularly from the Scorpion’s plutonium warheads. In addition, the cause of Scorpion’s demise was still a mystery.

  Argo mapped the site in four days. Then Knorr raced toward Titanic’s resting place, arriving on the twenty-fourth in good weather.

  Thresher had shown Ballard the secret. Since 1912, everyone had held the same mental image: a nearly nine-hundred-foot-long hull, lying in two thousand fathoms like a model in a vitrine. Ballard had imagined it that way, too. But Thresher had opened his eyes and put Titanic within his grasp. To find a deepwater wreck, you don’t look for a hull a few hundred feet long. You look for a trail of debris a mile or more long. And when you find it, it will take you directly to the heaviest debris, the ship itself. You didn’t need to “mow the lawn” over small areas of the bottom to find a single locus of wreckage. You could scale a search to cover much larger areas, needing only to spot part of a long debris trail.

  Ballard calls this discovery his Rosetta stone for finding Titanic. And because it was classified top secret, he kept his new technique to himself. Thresher had taught Ballard that his search lines could be almost a mile apart. Argo could cover the whole “box” in ten passes.

  Ballard bet everything on this theory. The good news was that it would take him only six days to search the hundred-square-mile box. The bad news was that there wouldn’t be time to try again if he failed. And if something broke, the show was over.

  The control van was at its emotional and physical capacity: jammed with people, filled with cigarette smoke and the aroma of fresh popcorn, pulsing with rock music. The salty sea air drifted in through the door as crew members came and went. Each team member had a specialized task. The captain piloted Knorr, towing the vehicle on its lateral grid, while navigators kept track of Argo’s position with acoustic transponders. Technicians controlled her altitude with a joystick. Sonar operators hovered at their consoles, collecting images of the bottom, while a video monitor displayed images from the camera. Photographers documented the expedition, while Stu Harris, chief designer of Argo, stayed on the computer, solving problems as they arose.

  They worked around the clock. Tension rose as the crew waited, knowing that it was just a matter of time before some component of this Rube Goldberg machine failed. To make matters worse, a storm was approaching. Three interminable days passed as the crew watched nothing but images of the empty seafloor. Malfunctions multiplied. People began seeing things. There was near mutiny when one crew member insisted they backtrack to look at a shadow.

  Ballard began to doubt himself. The comparison with the captain of the Titanic wasn’t lost on him. It was Captain Edward J. Smith’s hubris that had let him steam ahead through the night while other ships were heaved to in the North Atlantic ice fields. Ballard now saw his secret navy life, his brilliant insights, even his clever inventions, gang around to mock him in the night. His more traditional
scientific colleagues disapproved of his “publicity stunt.” If Ballard failed, it could do permanent damage to his career. In fact, finding Titanic would do permanent damage to his career, too, but that was what he wanted: to blow up his life on his own terms.

  Yet as gloom descended, Ballard noticed something on the chart table. A French ship that had previously conducted sonar searches of the box had been blown off course as it laid down its first line. It had missed the northeastern edge of the box—that was the only portion that had never before been searched. It was a triangle five miles long, barely a mile wide—but large enough to contain Titanic.

  It was Saturday, August 31, Labor Day weekend. Ballard checked the weather as the sun was going down. The approaching storm had increased to a force-eight gale, which meant they’d soon have to haul Argo out of the sea and begin fighting for survival. He studied the charts. After this line, number nine, Argo would encroach on the uncharted terrain. It was their last hope. Ballard couldn’t stand to watch. He had a beer and a sandwich and went to bed.

  At midnight plus forty-eight minutes, September 1, Ballard was asleep when a young tech named Billy “The Kid” Lange watched a dark shape crawl across the video monitor and cried out, “Wreckage!”

  Stu Harris hit a switch, lighting up the seafloor.

  The navy sonar officer called, “Hard contact!”

  A tangled pipe slipped beneath Argo’s cameras and crept away across the screen. Once more they stared at emptiness. It was as if it hadn’t happened. Ten agonizing minutes passed. Then a huge section of steel plate heaved into view. The rivets made it impossible to deny: it was part of a ship’s hull. But in a major shipping lane, it could have been any ship.

  Jean-Louis Michel, who was running the French wing of the expedition, looked up and saw that Argo’s ninth line had hit pay dirt in the exact spot where his ship had been blown off course. All at once, tons of debris filled the screen.

  The ship’s cook ran to wake Ballard. Michel calmly opened a book of Titanic’s construction details and turned to a page showing a boiler. Ballard sprinted from a dead sleep to the control van in time to see Michel holding in his hands the same image that appeared on the monitor. Theirs were the first human eyes to view Titanic since she sank.

  Tortured sections of deck railing passed, a bronze porthole, deck equipment, a fragile unbroken lightbulb, dinner plates, wine bottles with their corks pushed inside by the pressure of the sea.

  Unable to contain his elation, Ballard poured a toast. As they drank, though, he realized that they were approaching the exact time of night when more than fifteen hundred people had died horribly in those icy North Atlantic waters.

  The crew followed him up on deck. At 2:20 a.m. the navy sonar officer raised a flag, while the crew observed a moment of silence. Titanic had sunk on a starry night in calm seas, a night just like this one. All Captain Smith would have had to do to avoid the disaster was to stop. But some people just can’t stop.

  As first light fell on the gray and heaving ocean that morning, Knorr found herself in the middle of bombers and P-3-Orion sub-hunting aircraft thundering overhead. Ships cut across the seas, which rolled with the approaching storm.

  It is a stretch to believe that after the ship had been lying on the bottom for seventy-three years, Titanic’s position was discovered coincidentally by a NATO antisubmarine exercise on the same morning that Ballard discovered it using the navy’s own secret underwater search equipment. Craven believes that Ballard was using Titanic as a cover for something else and that the navy was overhead to make sure no Russian subs got close enough to spy on the operation, whatever that might have been.

  “The navy was oblivious,” Ballard insists. “It was complete coincidence the navy was there.”

  Craven said this about what occurs underneath cover stories such as the investigation of Thresher and Scorpion: “We’d also need another cover that’s unclassified. Okay, well, we have the Titanic down there right in that region, and we can do our missions while using Titanic as cover. As we do that, we discover to our shock and surprise that our old buddies from the Soviet Union are out to do the same mission. They’ve shown up with their Mir submersible. Ballard goes out of Woods Hole; Sagalevich, one of Russia’s chief ocean scientists, goes out of the Shirshov Institute, which was the KGB’s oceanographic institution; and nobody is fooled that it’s anything other than top-level spying. The Soviets don’t spend money to hunt for Titanic.”

  Ballard became famous overnight. He had achieved one of his lifelong dreams. But even as he gained prominence from his books, magazine articles, and documentaries, his personal life was suffering. In the summer of 1989, his son Todd was killed in a road wreck. Ballard’s life began to come unglued. He filed for divorce and looked for ways out. Like Cortés, he began to dismantle his ships.

  On our last day together, we drive out to the University of Connecticut at Avery Point in Groton, where Ballard keeps one of Argo’s descendants, a remotely operated vehicle for undersea exploration. Ballard lunges through the glass doors into the old Marine Science and Technology Center and charges down the dimly lit, yellow-painted cinder-block corridor. He points to an office. “Dick Cooper is in there. He’s a pioneer in saturation diving.” Saturation diving. That’s how Craven tapped the Soviet communication cable. We stop at another lab, where Ballard discusses new projects with his colleagues. Then we go back out into the wind and cross through gleaming sunlight toward an old lighthouse and a stone castle, which are situated on the rocky verge of the ocean. Flags snap in the fresh breeze, and Ballard looks at the waves and says, “It’s not a good day to be out to sea. They always say, ‘The storm went harmlessly out to sea,’” he laughs. “You don’t work in a wind like this, you survive.”

  We climb down to the shore. Lobster pots float in the dark water, bobbing in the breakers. Seabirds wheel and cry. We sit in the sun on the stone rim of the sea. There is no sand, the beach is one huge slab of stone as far as the eye can see.

  “It’s beautiful here,” he says.

  We walk the granite shore, and he kneels at a hollow place in the rock. “A tide pool,” he says. “My roots. Where I began as a child. It’s a microcosm, and it changes every twelve hours. The tide comes in and changes out the pool. You might come back and find a fish stranded there. It’s taken out to sea, and then it’s handed back to you. It’s such a neat thing. I love rocks that have been in the ocean.” He looks around, and his face takes on a wry expression. “Some sadist dumped us here. There’s a part of each of us that wants to know about our world.”

  He lowers his hand to the rock shelf and feels its surface. “This is New England granite,” he says. “This rock is probably Ordovician, about four hundred fifty million years old.” He studies the striations, then launches into an impassioned speech. “You see,” he says with quiet excitement, “most people start with the Atlantic Ocean opening, but they’re missing a few billion years, because before it opened, it closed.” He explains that the rock beneath us was continental shelf when North America collided with Africa. One tectonic plate shoved under another, and the rock we are touching was actually thrust into the molten earth’s magma. Suddenly I feel as if we’re handling a meteorite, something that has visited another world and returned transformed by its journey.

  He runs his hand over it, feeling for more information. “Subduction melted the continental shelf and made granite. And then other forces heated it again later on but not enough to melt it. See here? Just enough to bend it.” He shows me the curved lines in the rock face. “Then it cracked, and hot fluids, geysers like the ones you find in Yellowstone, pushed through the crack, and this light line is the result. See how it goes all down the beach?” He points. Chemicals have precipitated out of the fluid and formed a line two inches wide, which flees down the seashore along the angled gray plates of granite.

  Perhaps for the first time, I think, I’m seeing the real Bob Ballard. Removed from his circus, he’s just a kid again, trying to under
stand the story told on these tablets that the ocean has thrust before us.

  We stop in front of a boulder that comes to Ballard’s eye level. He leaps up onto it with effortless agility. He looks out to sea, and after a while he turns completely, standing to his full height on the rock. The waves curl, metallic blue and white. Suddenly he stretches out his arms in a gesture made famous by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie Titanic. And he shouts, “I’m the king of the world!”

  4

  The Zendo, the Dojo, and the Superbike

  UNLIKE THE MOTORCYCLE shops I remembered from my youth, Pro Italia in Glendale, California, looked like a clothing boutique. In fact, half of the shop was devoted to leather suits that could cost up to $3,000, stylish canvas jackets with logos on the back, costly Italian boots, and hand-painted helmets that ran from $1,000 up. Pro Italia was decorated in a spare modern style using subdued colors. The few motorcycles on the carpeted floor seemed more like sculptures than vehicles, capricious by design, with a plastic fluidity that suggested at once motion and an Einsteinian conception of space. Some of them bore price tags above $30,000.

  The display case at the counter was laid out with shining objects. The character played by Lee Marvin in The Wild One could not afford (and would not want) a $395 titanium gas cap. So who was buying all of this?

  Bobby Carradine, one of the notorious Carradine brothers (Keith, David), came in with his producer, Michael Goldstein. Goldstein was trying to decide whether to take up riding again after two years of physical therapy following his horrendous crash on the Crest. The Crest is local parlance for Highway 2, known as the Angeles Crest Highway, which runs from the border of Santa Monica and Los Angeles up into the Angeles National Forest and over a geological formation that takes the form of a crest. The object of going up the Crest is to proceed as fast as possible through a series of sweeping curves to a restaurant called Newcomb’s Ranch. The curves on Highway 2 are not tight. Their slow unfolding beauty invites dangerous speeds. If you can ride the Crest going 120 miles an hour, you are considered competent. But it’s not a racetrack. It’s a street. So there are factors we can’t control. A patch of oil or tar. A minivan crossing the double yellow line.