Playing Fair and Being Kind

WHAT’S HAPPENING?

The question is, “What’s happening?”. It wants to know if any event, gathering, object, situation is in progress and if that item is in the beginning, middle, or final portion of an activity. That is what passed before me last week when daylight saving time was being imposed upon us. This event, the setting of clocks, has been affecting my thoughts about me and my future. I am just into my early eighties and this business of time is more than a passing fancy. Casual references to time are coming fewer and fewer. For my part, time has become more than a casual thought. I pay more and more attention to my days and weeks. Time is important and also necessary for me to accomplish a couple of tasks I’ve set for myself. I’m not panicking by any means. I’m just more aware of its passing.

With the daylight saving time issue, I have wondered if the lone hour we add or subtract ever sits in the mind of the master time keepers of the world as heavily as it does mine. When I add an hour to my day, I think I’m gaining something for free. In the Spring I will, more than not, feel the loss of that hour certainly. What I really have come to appreciate is the hidden power of time in our mere existence. Take for example this fact that is still bouncing around in my head. I learned this when I wrote a bit of poetry regarding Polaris, the North Star. The light from Polaris that we see has traveled for 323 light years to arrive at the surface of our eyeballs. That is an amazing distance, don’t you think? I’m not sure I fully appreciate that number as a distance. At the speed of light, that point of brightness I see is a long ray of light energy, like a string from there to here. It is long. It represents the distance from the group of suns we know as Polaris to this blue ball we call Earth. All the stars we see have this same majestic number attached. The speed of light is one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second. Zip! As some of my southern shipmates from my Navy days would say, “That’s faster than a GTO!”.

I need to mention the shortest time I am familiar with. That is, point one seven seconds. Point one seven seconds is the length of time it takes for an event that is seen by our eyes to reach a meaningful place in our brains. Anything we sense takes point one seven seconds to register in our consciousness. I have concluded that our delayed response renders us unable to enjoy the “moment” of life. Life has passed us by point one seven seconds before we know it.

That has not been a problem for anyone in my life today including myself. Here is where I need to tell you about an event that has bothered me for decades. Many of you know that I was in the Navy and that I served on submarines for nearly fifteen years. My first ride in a submarine was when I was about nineteen years old. I had a shipmate whose name was Rich. Rich left that submarine and went to a new construction duty to build the Thresher. He was so excited to go because it was a brand-new design and supposed to be fast and able to go very deep. Rich was so happy. A few years later Thresher was lost at sea with over 200 people on board. Rich was one of them.

This incident caused me a lot of grief for a couple of reasons. I was still new to submarines and not fully cognizant about their vulnerability, their strengths and weaknesses. I thought all submarines which were not at war or being depth-charged were bullet-proof. Safe as being in your mother’s arms. The loss of Thresher and the subsequent investigations taught me and a great part of the Navy some new facts. The period this event took place was the early sixties, pretty much during an extended peaceful period for the U.S. Now, suddenly, I had to face the fact that the Navy was entering new territory regarding the operation of our submarines. No longer were we operating at depths of only a few hundred feet. Now we were going below a thousand feet. A huge difference. The loss of the Thresher informed us that we didn’t know what the hell we were doing down there. There were immediate measures necessary to better allow the newer submarines to operate safely at these greater depths. We were all a little more cautious now. At this point in time I was also on a deep diving newer submarine and going to sea on a regular basis. Now I was not so confident in the vessel and I was newly aware of the greater pressures and hazards that existed at depth. It was a rude awakening and I was greatly affected.

I packed away this new awareness and lived with it for the remainder of my career. I filed it under “occupational hazard”, part of the job. Once in a while I would think of my friend Rich and what he must have experienced during those last moments when things were going bad on the Thresher while it was struggling to come to the surface during its final moments. Little was known of what was going on in the Thresher or what caused the sinking of it. The Navy investigated what little they knew. The Thresher had been on a test dive and there were other ships in attendance during the event. Over the years it slowly came to light what might have happened and what could have happened and probably what did happen. Of all the information that was promulgated regarding the test dive, the situation, and failed recovery from the casualty one item stood out for me. That was that the Thresher’s final noise transmission was a noise of collapsing.

The Thresher had been in contact with the other ships by underwater telephone for the duration of the test dive and up to a few moments before it was crushed by the depth excursion. The noise was very brief but loud and definite. It was the last noise anyone heard. Later in many years of examination and interpretation of data and all the attendant known actions of record the official determination of the loss was attributed to the Thresher’s lack of depth control and very heavy condition causing it to sink lower than crush depth. The resultant collapse was a telescoping of the aft portion of the submarine into the forward portion so quick that it was a violent slam. The collapse took one tenth of a second to happen. One tenth of a second from the time the submarine was a complete, dry, object to the point where the whole after end was pushed into the front end. One tenth of a second.

Here is where I found comfort for Rich and all his shipmates and other people from the shipyard who were on board during this tragic, catastrophic end. Remember the point one seven second time frame for any event to reach the brain? Rich and his crew mates and others never knew what happened. They were done in before the news reached their brains. The submarine collapsed in one tenth of a second, one seven hundredths of a second before they were aware of it. They were never aware of what happened. That is my relief and my operational base from then on. I kept this information at hand for when I was making deep dives in submarines and later when I was a pilot on a deep submersible that went to very deep places in the ocean.

Here we are near the end of this tale. I have come to trust that time is the most powerful item in this physical existence. The big bang was in an instant. The existence of black holes, dark matter, many mind-boggling physical phenomena. Time is boss. I am happy to report that there is comfort in owning knowledge of physical sciences. Remember. Time is boss.

G. M. Goodwin
November 5, 2020