The museum was eerily quiet today. Sarah was standing over a hundred feet from me, crouching at the base of one of the large parabolic “whisper” dishes designed to send and receive sounds over a distance. I stood at the other end of the long hallway, next to my dish. There were no fancy electronics such as microphones, amplifiers, or transmitters to help the signal along. It was unadulterated acoustics. This configuration was quite a step up from the methods from my childhood, where a string linked two empty soup cans. These dishes improved upon that method a thousandfold and only used the air between them as a transmitting medium.
From this distance, it was difficult to establish Sarah’s intentions. She covered her mouth and whispered childish nonsense into the reflector, knowing full well I couldn’t read her lips at this distance. I also crouched, leaning on one knee with my ear inches away from the focus point of the nearly eight-foot-diameter dish just behind me. To listen, I had to place my ear near the small ring defining the point where the captured sound waves converged, squeezing my nose and applying pressure to my eardrum to improve my hearing. Years of live concerts and a few bad scuba ascents had reduced my hearing range, with noticeable dropouts at those frequencies that nearly matched my spouse’s voice when excited. I could clearly recall years ago when my ear doctor, upon examining my eardrum after I had punctured it for the third time, remarked how the surface of the thin membrane resembled an Austrian tapestry. Even at this distance, the dishes were quite effective in transmitting sound, despite my handicap.
I could clearly make out her whispers. “Daddy is giving me a laptop for Christmas,” or “Papa is buying pizza tonight or else…” I could also hear Sarah’s muffled giggling through the ether. There was also a barely audible tap-tap sound, some long and some short, followed by the requisite pauses, entering our communication. She was softly tapping on the disk. The evening discussions about oceans and the men who sailed them had sunk in. I began teaching Morse to Sarah a year ago. In the beginning, we treated it as a game, a form of secret communication between the two of us. Little did I expect her young mind to take to it with such fervor. Her command of Morse code had certainly improved, both in speed and accuracy of her tapping.
I replied to her with both voice and Morse. Despite her young age of thirteen, my daughter possessed a mischievous spirit. I tapped: I want you to clean up your room and then we can talk about pizza. Composing that snippet took great concentration and effort.
Sarah jumped up and feigned indignation, but a smirk quickly appeared on her face. I walked across the long, empty concrete space between us and requested her hand.
“What’s that?” Sarah asked, pointing at a big floor model ahead of us.
“This, my sweet, is a three-dimensional model of our planet’s largest ocean. Can you name it?”
“The Pacific,” she replied with confidence.
Nearly fifty feet on each side and almost two feet deep, the three-dimensional scale reconstruction of the Pacific Ocean was impressive. From the looks of it, they had modeled the ocean floor after available bathymetric data. My guess was that it was constructed out of plaster and then painted different shades of blue along vertical surfaces according to depth. A thick piece of transparent polycarbonate represented the surface of the ocean, allowing one to walk over any part of it. The modeling of the Pacific seafloor was something to behold; Islands, atolls, trenches, and seamounts were carefully detailed. The Mariana Trench appeared, even at this scale, like an unforgivable place. I was also impressed by the reconstruction of the deep waters beneath the Golden Gate Bridge.
“Look at all the islands, rising like dimples to the surface. Amazing to see it in this perspective, wouldn’t you agree?” I asked, to which Sarah responded by nodding. She walked over to the middle and pointed down toward the Hawaiian Islands.
“We’re landing here on Maui, right?” she asked.
“Yes. Can you see the town of Kahului, situated between the volcano and the mountain? That’s where we will land in a few days,” I said.
“What are those small mountains beneath the water?” she asked.
“Those are seamounts,” I answered. “Imagine an island that starts its life as a volcano deep underwater. It rises until it breaks the surface, like Hawaii, and then after some time the volcano dies, and the island sinks slowly back into the sea. Sometimes the volcanos never reach the ocean surface.”
“There’s a bunch of them near the big island,” Sarah noted.
“If you look eastward, you can see a trail of them all the way to Baja, Mexico,” I added.
“Like breadcrumbs.”
“Funny you should say that. There are scientists who say that these ancient islands act as beacons for migratory fish and mammals, like sharks and whales,” I said.
“How?” Sarah asked.
“These mountains might contain special metals or minerals that sea life can detect and use for navigation. And memory might be involved. Do you ever wonder how birds can find their nests after flying some distance away? Kind of the same thing,” I said, explaining as best I could to a young but curious mind. The explanation was slightly more complex, but the comparison made sense.
After we were done with the map, we walked beneath the wings of a large retired Caravelle, a recent addition to the museum’s aircraft collection. With its unique teardrop-shaped windows and characteristic tail, the aircraft was a sweet remnant of a bygone era. Suspended on massive stilts, which left a clearance of several feet beneath the landing gear and the floor, the aircraft appeared as though still in flight. We walked past a loud compressor that pushed clean air into the aircraft’s musty interior.
Cecilia and Amelia were just emerging from an adjacent exhibit, giddy smiles on both their faces. My wife discreetly pointed her finger at her youngest daughter, then pinched her nose with her fingers. Amelia laughed at her mother. The two sisters then ran off to the gift shop near the museum entrance, giving my wife and me a much-needed reprieve. Cecilia grabbed my arm and held me close.
“Your daughter has been crop-dusting for the past half hour. What did you feed her this morning?” she asked, looking mournfully at me.
I raised my gaze to the ceiling and rolled my eyes in fake surprise. “The usual weekend fare: omelet with peppers and onions, and some hash browns with onions and… Did I do something wrong?” I asked innocently.
Cecilia gave me a long look and said, “You realize she reacts quite odiously to onions. Much like a sweet person I know.”
“I had no idea the repercussions would be so severe.”
“You are such a liar, Mark,” she scolded me half-heartedly.
We both blurted out, laughing, startling an older couple passing by. “Let’s get some coffee,” Cecilia insisted.
We sat in the cafe for an hour, watching the girls run around in the museum’s lobby, clearly annoying the lone museum guard on duty. The technical museum lay on the outskirts of one of the many industrial quarters that lined San Francisco. Retirees gathered here on weekends to fix old airplanes and build large train sets. It was a dusty old place, existing on the limited contributions from the public. Looking around, I saw only a few visitors, and it was midday Saturday. The thought that the museum’s days were numbered saddened me. The girls loved coming here and exploring the museum’s vast archive of little-known and desperately outdated mechanical things. The museum was becoming a living embodiment of ennui. Still, the museum and my outings with the family were a lovely distraction from the toil my work had become.
“You look relieved. A penny for your thoughts,” Cecilia said to me.
I turned to face her.
“Yeah, I actually am. It’s the first time in years,” I replied. I was relieved, but in a partially committed way. Old habits die hard. I was still wrestling with work-related problems from the previous week. As my mind replayed the previous week’s turmoil at the office, I could sense Cecilia’s intense gaze weighing on me. I had promised her I would focus on family, and only family, as we were preparing for some time off.
“I’m a little worried that you won’t be able to let go once we’re off,” she added. “Looking forward to leaving this place and traveling with all of you. God, I miss the ocean. A warm one.”
“Me too. I can’t wait. This vacation has been on my mind for weeks,” I said.
“Along with everything else, Mark, I so want to have some time alone with you. And this need of yours to do some diving, is that really necessary? This is our first trip in years.”
Here we go again.
“Honey, we already talked about this. Diving is one of my great passions. It feels like an eternity since I last did it. It’s just two mornings. I mean, you can sleep late and then I’m back for lunch. Is that so bad?” I asked, trying to get her to see my side of the matter.
Cecilia shrugged her shoulders. I could sense her disappointment with my decision, but to my mind, we had two full weeks to spend time together. Why the big deal over two mornings?
The years of financial stress and a substantial workload had taken their toll on both of us. We both cherished the idea of traveling for pleasure, aware that the happiness it brought would be short-lived. The expectation of leaving, however, even weeks before we did so, was wonderful. For five years, my partner Ben and I had been hard at work getting our startup in a state that gave us some confidence that it would survive. I had promised Cecilia this would be my last startup. If this failed, then it was back to some stable outfit, which usually meant a mid-sized or large corporate entity.
This was my fifth startup. My fifth attempt at floating an idea that I hoped would generate a steady revenue stream and the potential of a lucrative sale. I often wondered why I was so willing to repeat the misery of starting a company again and again. There was the challenge of building a company, being your own boss, all of which was an absolute illusion. When you signed off on funding, from that point onward, your illusion of ownership was complete. I supposed the risk and the potential reward drove me and many of my fellow co-conspirators to think irrationally and run off the fiscal cliff like lemmings, with someone else’s money. It’s all about leveraged risk.
This was not the complete story, however. A long time ago, I’d sold the idea to Cecilia that one day, one startup would eventually succeed. We would then be free from worrying about our future. The idea of working into my retirement years and then surviving on a modest pension seemed like defeatism. We were both caught up in the idea of having the means to determine our destiny. Even if I was preparing for a short-term solution to my life, I was always looking at the long game. After Ben and I dumped our last startup, Cecilia began to worry about whether we were just chasing a pipe dream. The hard reality was this: one in nine startups succeed, or more accurately, survive. I was determined to believe that the odds were in my favor this time around.
A stern voice popped up in my brain from time to time, reminding me that the clock was running. Monthly reports, burn-rate fluctuations, performance reviews, inevitable board meetings, long discussions with banks, and just about everything related to running a small outfit consumed most of my attention. I much preferred the banter between engineers trying to solve a problem over bean counting. I honestly couldn’t recall much that had happened these past five years. With work and life intermixed, it was hard to tell where one started and the other ended.
I’d promised Cecilia that I would totally shut down on this trip. No phones or laptops. Maybe just the phone. From the moment we landed to the moment we left, my undivided attention would be with family. That was, at the very least, my plan.
