Fire Drills

(by Pien Huang)

Sundays are for fire drills and steak. They used to be for wine too, but that was axed with the UNOLS (some category that encompasses all university research vessels) Prohibition some four months ago. Everybody still talks about it, but it’s more for conversation than for spirited discussion. It’s one of the few things we have in common. Three weeks in and we are still wary of offending each other, as we’ve got three more weeks to go. The only affable insult is to trash-talk in card games, so we play a lot of cribbage.

We’ve had three fire drills and one abandon ship drill so far. Fire drills are preferable, as they are indoors and less involved. You grab the life jacket from your room, and muster to the main lab. You have to wear a hat, and sometimes the forgetfuls pile sweaters on their heads. I played victim in one of the fire drills, which involved sitting in the bowels of the ship with a fog machine. It was misty and I imagined gorillas. Then I heard footsteps and remembered to call for help.

The weather is warmer, even as the wind and the waves are getting stronger. Our cables are kinking, but nobody knows why. This might be logged into the Captain’s binder of Non-Conformity Reports on the R/V Revelle, which date back to the unfortunate year 2004 when an overloaded winch “frisbeed” across a room, and the main cook stuck his hand in the industrial mixer. Most of their findings prescribe common sense.

The ocean makes me sick, but it comes and goes. Foul weather is coming on. We’re losing time because of cable kinks. At breakfast this morning, Anthony from Helium observed that nothing from his personal list gets done. Procrastinating without Wikipedia is just as easy, but less validating. I live inside my head. Every midnight I crave Ramen, and there is an endless supply. Overall, life is not bad, but never great.