![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
If we hadn't dived to ninety feet we'd all be waving yet
My niece loved the USS Albacore. The decommissioned research submarine was a regular feature of my childhood from the first week she opened to the public as a museum ship: I loved her dials and cables and switches and hatches and hand wheels and brass fittings and the typewriters in the radio room and the yeoman's office which visitors were not allowed to try, though we were encouraged everywhere else to climb into the bunks and sit at the mess tables and take turns at the periscope and the controls which looked like the mid-century fusion of a space capsule and the cockpit of a commercial jetliner. She was crowded at every narrow turn with instrumentation and equipment and industrially painted bolts and pipes. Even through my masks, the smell of engine grease and skin oils hadn't changed in thirty years. We were handing off my niece to her father, so my mother rested her knee by the weathering display of the propellers and the other three of us went through the micro-Pullman corridor of the sub which was exactly as I had remembered it except for a mysterious shrinkage of its size around me, which did not prevent me from eeling up onto a top bunk when my niece confidently declared that I wouldn't be able to. Her father who is considerably less built for the close quarters of a submarine heroically joined her in every tight spot she demanded and at one point during their simulation of a crash dive informed her that she had blown all the vents and flooded the boat. I took a picture for my father of the Sperry Mk 19 Mod 3A gyrocompass. I took pictures of schematics and prop shafts and my niece peering over the edge of more than one bunk in her most catlike manner. Afterward there were fried oysters and clams from Bob's Clam Hut and a slight instance of getting lost in New Castle, which provided plenty of salt marsh and coastline. If we are going to keep using Portsmouth as a transition point, I want to take my niece to Strawbery Banke.
no subject
It was! I got up on three hours of sleep, but it was worth it. (And I actually slept a normal human amount last night, thanks to the total absence of the possibility of construction.)