If you’ve never spoken to someone who worked on a submarine, it’s an interesting conversation. Sub-warfare is waged in total darkness and, ostensibly, in near silence. Yet the equipment that picks up outside sounds in the ocean stays busy because the ocean’s depths are a remarkably noisy environment. The water is moving, pulling, pushing, and swirling around, and with it, debris floats and falls, collides, and sinks again. The wreckage of thousands of years of human wanderings, voyages, and wars litters the blackness of the seas. Lost fishing nets will trap objects, drag, pull, and wrap around other detritus, which creates sound, some minute, others not so.

The earth’s crust moans and shifts, sunken mountains have slides of mud and rock, and boulders that have not moved in centuries tumble and crash downward, their journey marked by nothing but sound.

A submariner, blind yet all-seeing, would tell you the ocean is a vast, dark, and dangerous place, filled with its cacophony of its passage and mass. Like Braille, the sounds of the sea can lead the blind and perhaps even assist those who will listen carefully.  

The ocean is a disinterested goddess. Humans live or die, but she cares not at all. They may or they may not pass over the waves or under them; she does not notice.

This is the final word on everything once the salt water is sailed.

Take Care,

Mike