Reading Machines

by George Slanger

(This was first drafted about 1989 or 90, at a little rented cabin on Lake Meigoshe. Joanne remembers me giggling as I worked on it. It has since been through many revisions.)
 
The Operating Guide for Propulsion Machinery is a slim, neat, pale blue book, as pale and neat as the world it implies. Its official title is Navships POG DD 945G. When I left the USS Edson (DD946), in 1962, after three years in its engineering department, I stole a copy of The Operating Guide because I could not let go of the vision contained in its covers. When I came aboard in 1959, I saw immediately it was a book to inspire to people to put faith in machines and in the authority that designed them. By the time I finished my three-year hitch, it had become an icon for a long process of getting closer to a right relationship among design, books, faith, and authority

Getting that relationship right is one of our major tasks in life, a task I believe many people must undertake between the ages of say, 15 and 25. In my case at least, machines were a sort of laboratory for working it out.
   
I think I can identify four stages in that task.
   
In my first stage, the machine was a Montgomery Ward Hiawatha Flyer bicycle I bought when I was 12 or 13, after saving for a year and dreaming thin the catalog page which described it. Little, by little, over some years, I took that bicycle apart and put it back together until I knew every bearing, every retainer, every nut. I could true a wheel by spinning the tire with a piece of chalk held close to the tire so it made a mark where it wobbled, and then I could use the spoke wrench to tighten spokes and on the side I wanted the wheel to move toward and loosen them on the opposite side till the wheel ran true as a beam of light. I could take apart the front hub, soaking the parts in kerosene poured from the sealed can we kept on the porch to start the wood fire in the stove. I could take apart and reassemble the pedal sprocket and even the set of bearings underneath the handlebars.
 

I am not sure how I learned to do this. I had no book, but I had faith that I was dealing with a rational world--that things taken apart would go back together if I kept the pieces in order. At this stage, I had a kind of faith in design, with books playing as yet no part, and authority residing in the secure world created for me by my parents. I believed, without thinking about it, that the world around me was rational and trustworthy.

 Myfather stood for that authority. He was, among other things, was a fine mechanic. I remember, for example, the coaster brake. At some point in my work, the coaster brake defeated me. Anyone who has taken apart a Bendix coaster brake will know what I mean. At its heart were dozens of thin metal disks, some with notches and some round. I would loosen the outside nuts and bushings peer respectfully in, and then button it up again. One day, on impulse, I took it completely apart. But I failed to keep the parts in order, and when I tried to put it back together, they would not all go. The parts sat heaped in a coffee can full of kerosene can for a week or two until my father put the hub back together and sent me on my way.

I am still not sure how he did that. I do not think it can have been by experience with Bendix coaster brakes, for his childhood transportation was a horse. It must have been his experience with machines in general and a kind of faith in design that told him he could take one tentative step and then look carefully at the result to determine the next step. He had no overall plan, but proceeded step by step with a serene confidence in a rational order. I watched carefully, and, as soon as his back was turned, I took the assembly apart again and put it back together by myself. After that, I was master of that machine, and I rode through my universe on seven-league wheels, singing under my breath, "If it breaks I can fix it. If it breaks I can fix it." It was only a relationship with a machine, but it shed a kind of light on everything else and led me to think that the rest of the world must be a little like my bicycle, complicated, but fixable--if not by me, then by someone.

   
I am not sure when I lost that relationship with machines and so with the rest of the world. It had something to do with the strum and drang of adolescence, a period of time not long enough to be called a stage, but more a violent break-up of a stage. I wept into the Rocky Mountain nights, and could not have told you why I did. Part of it was girls, creatures certainly beyond anyone's understanding or control. Part of it may have been my own body, which I found had a mysterious and terrifying life of its own. Part of it may have been that I began to sense that my parents' lives were not as serene as I had thought.
   
To fight back against chaos, I moved into a second stage, into a world intensely focused on books. Design became disassociated from any concrete reality, and I found ways to live in a world of "pure" design. Authority became for me what my teachers knew and the grades they gave. Between the cool covers of books, I could find solace and power, because I knew I could appease authority by remembering what the books said or by solving problems which they put before me. In high school geometry, Mrs. McColom's face would glow when she would summon me to the board to prove the Pythagorean theorem, step one suggesting step two and so on with increasing momentum until the whole logic of it came crashing together like the last movement of a symphony. I delighted in geometry and in other closed systems, such as professional baseball. My portable radio, my stacks of baseball magazines, my subscription to the Sporting News and complicated baseball table games formed a complete world in which Nellie Fox's or Ted Williams's performance in a given game was more important than the shifting alliances of my adolescent world.
    
When the time came for college, I chose chemistry, for what other discipline has anything like the periodic chart which maps the whole universe onto a single sheet with the elements in neat rows of seven, each column with its precise affinities? I loved formulas, those lovely equations that could be balanced by adding and subtracting theoretical molecules until their mathematical equivalence miraculously told you what should happen if you combined those things in reality. Of course the laboratory was a different story. There you calculated your theoretical yield for a process and then hooked up tubes and beakers to try to make it so. When you weighed the modest powder at the end, it was never what it should be, but the full implications of that (original sin adhering to the very process of reality) did not really sink in. It was enough the equations balanced. Mathematics was even better. Here there was no lab, just the the black marks on the page, each problem somehow containing its own answer which could be unpackaged in neat steps with the same kind of inevitability and elegant logic of the Pythagorean theorem.
   
Outside the classroom and the library, my life was barely endurable. Girls became even more complicated: Some of them wanted to get married. My family was a black chaos into which I descended only at Easter and Christmas, shutting my eyes as much as possible to my father's increasingly terrifying moods, my mother's long-suffering.
   
I had faith only in books and in my own mind. I looked hard for ways to believe that design was the result of impersonal forces disconnected from any animate authority. As most people do, I found what I was looking for. In the 1950's, Someone had just shot electric sparks through a slurry of chemicals and produced long-chain molecules--something like proteins. For me, this was enough to "prove" that life was a random process. Order could grow from chance as long as there was enough time for chance to operate, and in the days before the Big Bang, there was infinite time. It seemed that cold and lonely molecules had bumped up against other cold and lonely molecules for eons, the dead combinations floating off into the void, the workable accidents surviving. Every speck of order we perceive was the result of a billion trials and a billion minus one errors. Order exists, but no principle of order, no beneficent mind, made it so, so its order is cold and remote. The universe is a dream without a dreamer. As I heard it put later, "If things were other than they are, they could not be at all." Design could be severed from authority. Darwin ruled. In the pages of T.S. Eliot and Dostoevsky, I heard some contrary voices, but I shut my ears and sailed on. I had successfully read my way into a secular state of mind. The classroom and the book defined my kingdom, and I was safe within their walls.
   
In that state, I graduated, completed my Officer's Training Program at Newport, Rhode Island, and reported to my ship, a U.S. Navy destroyer, at Long Beach, California, in early December of 1959, where I was assigned to the Engineering Department. The Engineer Officer gave me the pale blue book, the Operating Guide. It fit into my shirt pocket but was dense with charts and diagrams and graphs. It told me, for example, that at 20 knots, the steam flow at the throttle is 34,861 pounds per hour. It does not say "about" or "approximately." For the main turbine, it says the "Guaranteed Steam Rate" at 30 knots is 164,892 pounds per SHP-Hr. SHP means shaft horsepower. I did not fully understand what a shaft-horsepower was, yet I took comfort in that word "Guaranteed." A chart which plots the fuel atomizing temperature in degrees Fahrenheit vs. the viscosity in saybolt universal seconds at 122 degrees snakes across the page with the easy self-confidence of a bullsnake out for a leisurely afternoon in the sun. Each pump is named, its manufacturer given in parentheses, its specifications laid out in neat columns. It contained diagrams of each engine space with each piece of machinery drawn in thin clean lines, uncluttered and precise. It was consistent with the world of books where I had become so comfortable.

    Then The Engineer Officer showed me where each space was and sent me down with a clipboard to make my own diagrams. In fact, he was sending me down into the third stage, into chaos. I saw that the neat cool thin lines on the chart were really fat, whining, shuddering lumps of grey iron, often leaking streams of water or oil into the bilges. The machines were caught in a nest of wires and pipes, covered with the floorplates of walkways, often jammed into corners between heavy ribs of the ship's structure. The pumps were linked with pipes wrapped in thick insulation covered in a rough canvas and painted off-white. I worked hard at my task, sketching on my clipboard the pipes and pumps as they lay and then comparing my twisted, smudged lines with the cool precision of the Blue Book.
   
I struggled to put my hands on the Motor Driven Emergency Lube Oil Service Pump ( by DeLaval) or point quickly to the pipe connecting the Port and Cruising Feed Booster Pump (by Buffalo) to the Auxiliary Condensate Pump (by Worthington. Books were failing me, design had been overcome. There was just so much--so many machines hissing and steaming and leaking, so many sailors each with complicated lives in which I was supposed to offer counsel, so many regulations, so many deadlines, so many numbing midnight watches when we were at sea, so many parties at so many beachfront apartments when we were in port. It was all too much and I simply gave myself over to it.
   
In fact, the title of my first official assignment--Damage Control Officer--struck me as a joke. Normally, I didn't do damage control at all. Normally, I was in charge of the auxiliary machinery, which meant the air conditioning and the toilets (called "heads") and the captain's motorboat (called a "gig"). I would only do real damage control in war time, when I was supposed to control the damage sustained in battle. My battle station was a cramped office deep amidships. During battle drills, I wore ingeniously designed sound-powered headphones and stood in front of a magnificent set of wall charts which showed all the compartments of the ship in many perspectives. Each of the hundreds of compartments on board was numbered according to a code that told how far down it was from the top, how far port or starboard from the centerline, and how many feet it was from the bow. In drills, I would be handed slips of paper saying that a compartment with such and such a number was flooded or on fire or both. I was supposed to instantly identify the compartment, make decisions, and issue orders to crews posted deep in other parts of the ship.
       
An inclinometer on the wall told us how many degrees we were listing to the side. In case we were hit, I was to do elaborate calculations and enter the results on a graph. When one line on the graph crossed another, the case was hopeless and I was to call the bridge on my sound-powered phone and tell the captain we should abandon ship. Only the Damage Control Officer was authorized to advise he captain to abandon ship. I was 21 years old. Before I came on board, I had been an indifferent student of chemistry at a state university and the author of an insipid column in the college newspaper. I don't think I have ever felt more ridiculous than I did in my sound-powered phones, standing in front of those wall charts, being handed slips of paper with mock damage information made up by people from another ship. They would come over on ropes and pulleys to design these drill for us. A slip of paper might say, "You have taken a shell below the water line in compartment 3-42-117. You are taking on water at 4700 gallons per minute. The water is causing a class C fire in the electrical equipment."
   
There wasn't much I could do but call my crew closest to the disaster and tell them to go have a look. I never had the slightest doubt that in an actual battle, the phones would not work, the crews would have all already been gassed, the leak would smash its way from one "watertight" compartment to another, I would never get the information I needed to make my neat calculations, I would never be able to tell the captain when to abandon ship and we would all die messy, terrible, uncalculated deaths, like rats in a hole. All those elaborate procedures and neat pictures seemed to me preposterous frauds or outright lies. Books and charts and formulas, which had sustained my life, were cut off from design or authority and had become dust and ashes.
   
When I moved up from Damage Control Officer to Chief Engineer, I had a leather holster made to hold my Navy standard-issue flashlight, and I would prowl through my spaces shining the light into dark corners, though the lowliest seaman could have told you I didn't not know what I was looking for--or at, much of the time. I was pretty much a bundle of nerves. I had been ripped irrevocably out of my world of books and charts.
   
I had abandoned myself to chaos, yet felt myself responsible for it. I felt that every piece of machinery was connected directly to my viscera. I thought I had to keep those pumps running with the constant exercise of my will, the way medieval philosophers say that God keeps the universe humming. According to St. Thomas, a moment's inattention on the part of God, one stop to scratch, and the whole thing collapses in a heap. That's how I felt. I lived by the sound of my machines. At the top of the range was the high-pitched hum of the forced-draft blowers (19,825 CFM at 5,193 RPM), two of which served each of four boilers. I was told those boilers cost a million dollars each. At full power, each of them would consume 10,410 pounds of oil per hour. At the bottom of the range was the primordial throb of the two main shafts, each attached to solid manganese-bronze, four-bladed propellers, thirteen feet three inches in diameter, that were supposed to turn at 320 RPM at full power, driving a 2700 ton vessel through the water at close to 35 miles an hour.
   
The chief engineer's stateroom was ingeniously--or accidentally, I could never tell which--located so as to magnify the sounds from all the machinery. I could lie in my bunk and estimate the speed of the ship within three knots. Attached to the wall six inches from my head was a telephone which connected to 9 or 10 of the key stations on board. You dialed in the number of the station you wanted and spun a crank, producing an ear-splitting squawk at the other end. When anything of any consequence went wrong in any engineering space, the engineering officer was to be called. I suppose there were nights I slept through, but I don't remember them. What I remember is the squawk splitting my skull, fumbling for the receiver in the dark, hearing something like "low water in one-able boiler," fumbling into my clothes, jamming my flashlight into its holster, pounding down the dark, tiled corridors to the appropriate hatch, swinging myself on to the polished iron ladder and shimmying 15 or 20 feet down into the hold.
   
One typical problem was salty condensers. After the superheated steam leaves the boiler, it drives the turbines, which drive the reduction gears, which drive the shafts, which drive the propellers, which drive the ship. When it has done its job, the steam cascades softly down around the outside of a mass of tubes called a condenser, as big as a bathroom. Sea water circulates through the inside of the tubes and condenses the steam back to water which returns to the boiler to be heated to steam again. If it weren't for leaks--the engineer's version of original sin--you would never have to add water to the system.
   
If a condenser tube develops a leak, salt water gets into the feed. Salt can quickly corrode the inside of the boiler tubes and shorten their life. An electronic saline indicator on the condenser outlet tells the story. Its needle, delicate as a conductor's baton, normally nestles in the green. But the slightest whiff of salt will send it quivering into the red. Certain low degrees of contamination can be tolerated for certain periods of time, under certain conditions. Finding and plugging a bad condenser tube at sea with the ship rolling about is difficult. We did it once, my crew and I, but normally we kept underway, diluting the feed with freshly distilled water to bring the needle down into the lower reaches of the red, limping into port. At first, when we had a salty condenser I wouldn't go to bed at all. I slept on a tool box in the affected engine room, and came up the ladder only to eat, shower, and stand my watches on the bridge. What I thought I was accomplishing by such martyrdom, I am not sure. I remember thinking that conscientiousness was one of the most accessible virtues, and I thought I should practice the ones I could get to.

  
 During this time, the din of chaos would occasionally modulate, revealing something beyond the welter of obligation and confusion where I lived. This something beyond I call a fourth stage, where design reemerged but connected to some kind of authority. I could not have done this without kind and diligent people. Two of them were named, as I remember, Kleinfelter and Rodriguez. They were petty officers in my Damage Control unit who were summoned once in heavy weather when a bulkhead (that is, a wall) in the engine room well below the waterline began to pop and heave like the hood of a car does when you sit on it by accident. Destroyers are nothing but plates of metal, about three feet square, held together by rivets. Obviously, this kind of buckling would loosen the rivets within an hour. Klieinfelter and Rodriguez had been called and had called me, and we were all standing around watching the side of the ship heave and snap. I felt like I was going to cry. They were smiling, which I thought insane. Certainly I didn't believe anything could actually be done. I guess I assumed we would make a run for shore and try to get as close to land as possible before we went down.
   
In the midst of this dismal fantasy, Klienfelter said to Rodriguez, "Well I guess we better get started." In ten minutes, my two petty officers had located some stored timbers and hauled them down the iron ladder. In an hour they had sawed and hammered them into a set of braces and cross braces so tight and tidy it looked as if it would have stopped the moon in its orbit. It looked in fact, just like the pictures in the books we had studied in Officer Candidate School, pictures which had not even entered my mind as I was mentally consigning us to the bottom of the sea. Kleinfelter and Rodriguez had helped restore my faith in some connection between books and design.
    
The other person's name was Jack. I met him when I I was sent away to a three-months Engineering school in San Diego. There I read War and Peace, went to the beach, met a freckled-backed girl who wanted to get married, went to the bullfights in Tijuana, once stayed drunk for three days to see what that was like, watched the Nixon-Kennedy debates on black and white television, and still studied hard enough to learn all that was required of me, which was obviously not much.
   
But the easy curriculum gave me some time to think, which I couldn't remember having before, and I formed my first Navy friendship which was not based primarily on alcohol and work. Jack had studied to be a Jesuit, even taken the vows. Then, at the last minute, he felt called back into the world and had been released from his vows (by the Pope, I remember, and was quite impressed) to join the navy and attend Officer Training School. He knew languages, including Greek, and he seemed to have read everything. He was the first well-read person my own age I had met who was not an atheist or skeptic. Books seemed for him to actually have some connection to life. He read the Bible, which was for me a dark and preposterous book. He knew by heart passages of Tennessee Williams. He talked as if it really mattered what Tennessee Williams had imagined someone saying in Night of the Iguana. For me this was something new. For me the only reason for reading has been to get it right on the exam.
   
We went to movies, pursued girls, and stayed up late on many nights talking about books and ideas and life. He told me about Juliana of Norwich, the 14th century mystic and the first women to write English which has survived. She was called naive and worse for declaring that "All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well." Of course I was skeptical. "Come on," I said, "The century she wrote those words, the plague killed a third of the people in Europe. Where does she get off?" But Jack just laughed. "If she could believe it then," he said. "All the more reason for us to believe it now." His faith seemed to bring design and books and authority together so that life seemed at least as full of mystery and wonder as it did confusion. My sophomoric meanderings about chance and order seemed flimsy and cold beside his quiet glowing faith.
  
Faith, from the Latin fides, has several meanings. To "have faith" means to trust, but it can also mean to practice faith, to "do" faith. So it can mean an emotional state, or an active commitment to a belief system, or both. I was beginning to wonder if the action might generate feeling--if the practice of faith might generate the feeling of faith. The American Heritage Dictionary suggests that the word faith may come from an Indo-European root bheidh-, meaning to trust, to confide, persuade. If that's right, then then it also picks up a third shade of meaning through its relationship to to Old English bidan, meaning to wait or stay, as in our words abide, bide, and abode. That was what Jack had--a kind of quiet tentativeness with a deep confidence and integrity at its center. He could wait. He could probe an idea rather than striving to state an opinion or prove a point. He seemed to feel what I longed to feel: that there are resources are greater than ours, that we can call upon those resources, that something is in charge that means to do us well, that things, on some level, are going to be all right--not faith itself surely, but a basis for faith.
   
It would be many years of practising faith before I could feel faith for more than few hours at a stretch, but Klienfelter and Rodriguez and my friend Jack had helped me find the right path, and I think I can remember one of the early steps. We were a long long ways from land and the condenser had sprung a leak. I was up to my old tricks and had wired the saline indicator directly to my nervous system. I was standing in front of it, watching the delicate needle tell its terrible story while we diluted the salty water with all the freshly distilled water we could afford. We had fought the needle down to the ambiguous border between green and red, between dread and the peace that passes understanding. I read again the technical manual for the condenser (bigger versions of the Blue Book) and saw that I had done all I could, that whoever designed and condenser and wrote the book knew that someday someone like me would be sitting there reading it and pondering.
   
Tentatively, I reached through the book to the designer's mind and felt a great peace. Perhaps the needle would stay were it was until we made port; perhaps it would flare into the red. But if it did, someone would call me on the squawk-box and we would figure out what the next step. Order was not on my side exactly, but it it existed and was no longer remote and hostile. Meanwhile, I was released to dwell in the moment, grab what peace I could, feel the security of greater forces standing with me ready to help me whatever would happen.
   
I had somehow, through pain and time and the example of good people, come at least into the vicinity of where my father was when he stared at the pieces of a Bendix coaster break he had never seen and, one step at a time, figured out how it worked, because that was how it had to work. Suddenly I had the same feelings I did when I rode my Hiawatha Flyer over the gravelled streets of a little Montana town, my heart singing: "If it breaks, I can fix it." But the song was richer for having added to the chant of a 14th century mystic: "All will be well, All will be well, and all manner of things will be well."
   
I told the petty officer on watch to call me if the situation changed and I climbed the warm iron rungs of the ladder and went to the wardroom to have some coffee.