900-Foot deep Mystery

Yesterday's paper said three million gallons of crude oil in the SS Montebello is gone. Vanished during the 70 years the torpedoed ship sat in 900 feet of water off the coast of California. I'm amazed.

Government scientists expected to find a substance the consistency of peanut butter and wanted to know how it would affect the underwater ecosystem if the tanks broke. What they didn't expect to find was: nothing, nada, not a thing, in those tanks. They hypothesize that it  leaked out slowly over decades (I'm reminded that as kids we always got "tar" on our feet when we went to the beach and had to remove it with gasoline or nail polish remover. Yuck.) Or...well, they don't have much in the way of other theories. Apparently, we don't know enough about the effects of that alien world--the ocean--on our landlubber substances to accurately predict what will happen.

Tons of old tires were piled in shallow waters during the 1970s to create "artificial reefs" and attract fish. They attracted fish, all right--but they also released toxins into the water. A lengthy, costly effort is now underway to remove the rubber reefs and replace them with something that won't  decay in salt water (how about rocks, guys?)

Since 1993, various businesses have been experimenting with iron fertilization of the ocean to promote phytoplankton bloom, which is supposed to produce all sorts of biological goodness. One can only hope they learn the side effects before they spread too much iron.

That being said, what did happen to the oil on the SS Montebello? I can think up lots of cool fiction stories with explanations that are probably more interesting than whatever did happen:

• Sci-Fi: Dormant micro-organisms mutated to eat the oil, and now that it's gone they're slithering across the ocean floor, driven by the scent of oil at a nearby refinery...
• Conspiracy theory: There never was any oil on the ship, which was a decoy to fool the enemy because a really important ship filled with [fill in the blank] had to get to [blank] to help create [blank] that was going to help end the war...
• Greed: When the war ended, a military guy who became an oil guy figured out a way to siphon the oil out and sell it...

I know at least one of my writer friends comes up with some very imaginative paranormal stories, maybe he'll weigh in. How about you? Any stories come to mind?

Adikshun

I disconnected my TV cable about a month ago. Feeling pleased with myself, I looked forward to the many hours I would have to write, to think, and to interact with my fellow human beings.

Wrong. Didn't happen.

First, I received a gift of a Roku, an electronic box that connects to your TV and makes it possible to watch certain internet stuff on the beloved familiar box in the living room. I love Roku. I can watch Neflix streaming programming on my TV screen, see news podcasts, listen to music, and generally spend as much time on the couch as I did with cable. This, of course, makes my little dog Oliver very happy; his favorite thing is to snuggle up next to me on the couch, secure in the knowledge that I can't escape without waking him. He falls asleep, only moving when he has those odd little dog dreams that make them "run" in their sleep.

This season I discovered I don't even need Roku to watch a bunch of TV without benefit of cable. Both broadcast and cable networks are putting their shows on the web and you can watch whole episodes--every week. This provides me with even more TV than I had with cable, because my cable subscription was for broadcast stations only--no non-network channels. With my super fast FIOS wi-fi and my laptop, I can now spend my whole week watching TV if I so choose. I don't even have to sit in one place to do it; I can carry my laptop with me from room to room. But I won't, of course--or will I?

Just now I made a list of the shows I'd like to follow. OMG! Twenty hours' worth! NOT good. Hard to explain actually doing that without having to examine one's addictive tendencies. I'd like to get outside and do more things, but my part of the desert has been in triple-digit temperatures since June, with only a brief respite that was supposed to be our shift to the Fall season. It's not summer any more--just a"heat wave."A really long heat wave. The net result is the same: a strong aversion to going outside.

SO, trapped indoors. What to do? Clean out that closet? Organize that paperwork? Or watch pretty, well-dressed people solve all their problems in one-hour increments? I like to think of myself as well-organized and businesslike. So why am I leaning so strongly toward the flickering images on a screen--any screen? Could it be (horrors!) addiction? Is it possible that even when Palm Springs once again becomes that lovely warm winter playground for which it is famous I will still be trapped on my couch (or bed, or chair)? The thought is enough to chill my bones, even on this 102-degree day.

But there it is. That incriminating piece of paper. I really like some of those shows. Others are new and sound fascinating.

And that's how it works.

I think I need to get a life!

A 900-Foot Deep Secret

I was born in the first wave of Baby Boomers. I grew up in coastal Southern California where the leftovers of war were being surplussed and cleared away. New businesses popped up in leftover Quonset huts, hundreds of huge gray ships huddled together in "mothball fleets" in the harbors, and--most shocking to a small girl--constant reruns of the liberation of German concentration camps were shown on TV stations that apparently had nothing else to show between "Victory at Sea" episodes.

Our 1950s homes were the epitome of tiny modernity and everyone's dad had a shiny new car in the driveway. The dads all seemed to work at one of the many local aviation companies. My mother got excited whenever she saw a "Flying Fortress" overhead because she had helped build them. I thought everyone's mom could recognize airplanes in the sky.


I remember seeing piles of huge round black buoys at the Seal Beach (CA) Naval Depot. Boys at school swore they were explosive mines. "If they blew, they'd blow everything to kingdom come!" one male classmate said, eyes shining. I didn't then--and still don't--understand why boys liked to see things blow up.

One day when we were on our way to the beach, I pointed at the dark globes and asked my mom, "What are those?"She said she wasn't sure, but she thought they were floats to hold up underwater submarine nets. Oh, I said. But I always wondered: Did Japanese submarines come to California beaches during the war? It was weird to think about. My mom didn't know. Of course, she was only 14 years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed. She said there weren't any reports in the paper about ships being sunk off our coast. She lived in San Diego, where she and her friends visited the beach as a regular part of their recreation. They were too busy taking pictures of each other in bathing suits to think about Japanese submarines.

As told in an AP Wire story a couple of days ago, the Japanese submarines were there, all right. They even sank a few of our ships, one of which was a very large oil tanker named the SS Montebello. Two weeks after Pearl Harbor, it was torpedoed and sank off the coast of Cambria, near Hearst's Castle. The 39 crew members all survived, thanks to the residents of Cambria, who waded out through rocks and treacherous surf with ropes to help them ashore from their bullet-riddled lifeboat. It was big news in the local paper. But the story never made it to the national news . Why? Because, as the government admitted around 1988, they didn't want to create "hysteria" in the populace. Fair enough. People might have indeed panicked if they'd known enemy subs were close enough to watch through periscopes as they ate their dinners. Even with sturdy submarine nets in place, a couple of miles offshore seems uncomfortably close.

The danger of keeping a secret like that for too long was revealed in the recent news article. It seems the SS Montebello--and its three million gallons of oil--lies in 900 feet of water dangerously close to the Montery Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Government agencies are mounting an expedition to test the oil--which they think is the consistency of peanut butter by now--to see if it's a danger to wildlife if the tanks give way. (My thought is: how would it not be? But what do I know?)

My childhood question has been answered, and I don't like the results. My conspiracy-theorist friends are probably having a field day with this one. I chose to exercise my imagination in a different way: I wrote a short fiction story about a fifteen-year-old girl seeing a Japanese sub off the coast of her beach in 1941. People don't believe her because it wasn't on the news. Maybe I should give her a camera...