Remembering Uncle Joe

Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak whispers the o'er-fraught heart, and bids it break.      ~Shakespeare

Uncle Joe was a gentle, kind man. His manner of speaking was memorable – slow and thoughtful - he often paused and sometimes closed his eyes when he spoke. I heard it was a stammer that carried over from childhood, but I always thought it was that he had so much to say that his speech couldn’t keep up with him. That didn’t matter, he had a deep, gentle voice and I loved the way he spoke to me, and always seemed delighted – surprised, even – to see me.

He was handsome - not movie-star handsome - more of the refined, professor-type hero from the 50’s sci-fi movies. He had fine features, dark hair and glasses. His eyes, blue and bright, were always thinking of something of in the distance – something the rest of us couldn’t see. He seemed happy with his life. He loved his wife, Lauraine, and his son, Joel, though there was always a certain sadness about him. Looking back now, I realize it was from the loss of his little girl, Janey, who died of a rare childhood disease before I ever knew her.  Her disease, like his grief, incurable.

Uncle Joe seemed so different from Aunt Lauraine, a fiery brunette with a laugh much larger than her petite size 4 stature. Even after years of marriage, he seemed to look at her with admiration, probably the way he saw her when they first met in high school at a dance near Hazleton (or was it Freeland?).  I wish I saw him more often, to hear stories of growing up with my father, Paul, and their little sister, Rosie, in that tall, white house with the cherry trees in the backyard that graced the path to Pop's upholstery shop.  He went to Penn State, became a chemical engineer, an avid photographer, and a good cook. He made baby carrots glazed with maple syrup and butter, and laughed when I said it was the best thing I ever ate. He was devoted father, loving grandfather and, the inspiration for my life’s work.

Concord Lighthouse, Havre de Grace

When I was young. Uncle Joe sent me a postcard of Havre de Grace, - depicting where the Susquehanna River’s 500 mile journey finally reaches the Chesapeake Bay. On the back, he wrote a simple note “Send me a message in a bottle.” I had, in all of my 9 years of life, an epiphany. The Susquehanna – my river – goes all the way to the Chesapeake Bay? I ran to the nearest atlas, and traced my fingers down the winding blue line that ran through central New York, northern Pennsylvania, back to New York, back through Pennsylvania and all the way to Maryland. The rain that fell on our roof, out our downspout, and down the street into the nearby river ended up hundreds of miles away in the sea by Havre de Grace.

All of a sudden, the world seemed so much smaller, so connected, and so independent of the man-made cities, roads, and borders placed on a map – that it would never seem the same again. It was my first inkling of how little I knew and how much I wanted to understand about the world.

Late last year, I called him at the hospital in Baltimore. We talked about his health and coming to Maine when he felt better. But before we hung up, I asked “Uncle Joe? Do you remember sending me a postcard of Havre de Grace years ago?” He replied yes, I think so. Then I told him how I never forgot it and what it meant to me. He paused, and with a voice even deeper and quieter than usual, he said “I never knew that, Suzy, thanks for telling me.”

It was the last time we spoke.

The Titanic and Beyond: Lessons From the Deep Ocean

     On the eve of the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, three hundred  people crowded into a school auditorium in Portland, Maine to learn from the exploration of this century-old ship resting on the seafloor.   The human stories were quietly told in the images shown by deep-sea explorer, David Gallo:  coffee cups and teapots half-buried in sediment, a single shoe and a bowler hat being slowly reclaimed by the sea.   The book unfinished, the telegram never sent and the suitcase unopened – fragments of the many lives which ended on that fateful night.

Dr. David Gallo of WHOI. Photo courtesy of

Elisabeth Caren (NY Times, 14 Feb 2011).

     And if a picture could tell a thousand words, Dr. Gallo could tell a thousand more.

     Gallo spun a tale of ocean life so amazing you thought it was the first time you had heard of animals living in utter blackness and around ocean vents so hot that surface life would be boiled alive.  Chemical seeps so toxic that we would classify them as hazardous waste – yet colonies of life survive and thrive around them. He showed us creatures virtually disappear in seconds before our eyes – all by camouflaging themselves into the rocks and the corals of the seafloor around them.   This former shoe salesman turned scientist could - as they say back where Gallo grew up – talk a dog off a meat wagon, and leave him begging for more.
 

Gallo, a native son of the Finger Lakes, discovered things beneath the sea that we terrestrial types cannot begin to imagine: undersea lakes made up of a dense, salty brine that is as different to the ocean currents flowing over them as freshwater lakes are to the air currents blowing above them.  These unfathomable underwater lakes have shores lined with mussel beds so vast that if Molly Malone could have harvested them – she would have lived like a queen in Dublin's fair city - singing cockles and mussels alive, alive ho.

Dr. Gallo took his audience from the depths of the ocean bed to her peaks - mountain ranges so high and so long they’d make the stark, towering Himalayas look like the worn, gentle Catskills.  He took us out to space and had us look at our planet from a distance, as the men of Apollo first saw it four decades ago - the first time we became aware that indeed, planet Earth should have been called planet Ocean. 

Then, Gallo reminded us of the connection. One he never thought about out as he played on the shores of Owasco Lake in Auburn, New York.   One we forget every day as we call the lawn guy, pour our coffee in the sink, jump in the car and watch another plastic bag blow down the street.  Nearly everything we do on land: ends up in the ocean, affects the ocean or changes it - forever.   Dr. Gallo ended with a quote as simple and profound as his lecture:

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

~ Marcel Proust

Susan Ryan is the President of the Gulf of Maine Marine Education Association, a co-sponsor of this event. Susan served as the Gulf of Maine Outreach Liaison for the Census of Marine Life from 2003-2010. She lives in Cape Elizabeth, Maine with her husband, two children and one betta fish.

The public lecture by Dr. Gallo, “The Titanic and Beyond: Lessons from the Deep Ocean” was presented at Waynflete School in Portland, Maine on March 29, 2011.  Dr. Gallo is the Director of Special Projects of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.  The Titanic, built in 1911, struck an iceberg the evening of April 14^th, and sunk early on April 15, 1912. The ship was discovered by Dr. Robert Ballard of WHOI and crew on Sep. 1, 1985.

The only true voyage...

 

Photo: Cobscook Bay along the Maine/Canadian border (S.Ryan, 2007)


Le seul véritable voyage, le seul bain de Jouvence, ce ne serait pas d'aller vers de nouveaux paysages, mais d'avoir d'autres yeux, de voir l'univers avec les yeux d'un autre, de cent autres, de voir les cent univers que chacun d'eux voit, que chacun d'eux est.

~ Marcel Proust

This timeless quote from French writer, Marcel Proust, inspired this blog. The words have been translated, abbreviated and quoted across the ether, and as expected, have lost some meaning along the way. With apologies to my junior high french teacher, here it is, in its entirety:

The only true voyage, the only fountain of youth, would not be going to new landscapes, but having other eyes, seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them see, that each of them are.

This is, in a nutshell, my quest. To travel the world - in reality and virtually - by exploring the work of scientists, philosophers, writers, artists and friends whose life's work has changed the way we see the universe, and maybe, ourselves.
For, as Proust observed:

 We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us...

Although it's a virtual one, I hope you'll join me on this voyage, and share your own experiences along the way.