The Longest Daydream

The rattle of the cheap rental’s frame clattered as the bike made its way through the tight Amsterdam streets. With more people than bikes, pairs were stacked on, barely balanced, and on the hunt for a public ping-pong table. For the previous two months conference room ping-pong was a bonding activity that brought together both working shifts of the science party, expedition leadership and even an at times a sea sick film crew. Less than 24 hours on land and the hunt was on. “To our left” shouts Lucinda Duxbury, a Phd candidate from the University of Tasmania, from the back of one of the bikes. Sitting squarely in the center of a public park is a grouping of ping pong tables, once spotted the group veered across the road to gather. Games starting forming with much discussion about the size of the tables being smaller than the conference room, comparing the newly acquired paddles and balls with those onboard and how the lack of waves really changes the game. It wasn’t long until a game of round the world began with everyone running around the table, focusing on the rally rather than any sort of win. Gradually the game grew as the park’s location was shared in the science party WhatsApp chat, anyone who hadn’t yet boarded a plane seemed to find their way to the park.

Not sure if it was the sprinting in circles that the game demands, or the lingering land sickness, but I found myself sitting to the side watching the game from afar. The scene unfolding was nothing short of hilarious, inside jokes cultivated over the two months are being shouted at random and phones are being used in place of paddles by those who arrived late. In this moment it feels as if the two months had gone by in a blink, with the city that was once heavy with the pressure of the unknown  to become welcoming and familiar upon return. As I sat and watched it felt like I had woken up from a strange dream, just starting to rub the last bits of sleep from my eyes as the sounds and the smells of the city around me were more pronounced then they ever had been.

Possibly an overused metaphor, a “dream” fits the experience a bit too snug to abandon due to popularity of use. Dreams are a deeply intimate experience. They seem to make sense when we are in them. You don’t need to remember how you arrived somewhere or why, your brain fills in the gaps and in the moment it feels like you’ve lived there your whole life. It’s not until waking up that you realize how bizarre the whole experience was, or how quickly it passed.

Trying to recount much of what actually happened over the two months to anyone unfamiliar has something in common with trying to explain a dream. The significance of small details is difficult to recount if you weren’t in it, whether that be the significance of ping-pong or why puffins are so amazing. The science itself even sounds like something out of a surreal fantasy. Enormous amount of coordination and technology devoted to pulling tubes of mud from the seafloor, added is the lifetimes of specialized knowledge all pointed towards making sense of that same mud. Pointing out the poetic magic of science is in no way an attempt at making light of the precision of the work being done onboard though. It may sound whimsical and surreal but the Expedition did successfully retrieve over 5 kilometers of core, which now is already sitting in a repository in Bremen Germany. The forefront of science may sound surreal, and at times truth can appear stranger than fiction; but mistaking truth for fiction is a losing endeavor when the stakes are high.

With the Arctic’s 24 hours of daylight and Expedition’s overlapping 12 hour shifts the longest daydream would begin to come to an end sometime in transit, when the first sunset appeared. The golden colors hung in the sky for nearly four hours as the sun eventually hid behind a low lying set of clouds, and for the first time in two months darkness arrived. Without coordination or communication, one by one people gathered to see the orange glow eventually get snuffed out into night along the horizon. Conversations came and went, but for the most part people sat in silence and stared out at the sea. Waves tumbled in the distance and for the first time since entering the Arctic Circle, could only be heard. Like the sound of an unwelcome alarm first thing in the morning, the dream was coming to an end.

This though is perhaps where the metaphor falls apart, because dreams are deeply isolating experiences, and this on the other hand, however surreal, was shared. For two months I worked side by side with Women and Men from nearly every corner of the planet. Sri Lanka, India, China, Spain, South Africa, England, Germany, Norway, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Chile, Brazil, Taiwan and the Philippines. The small group of Americans may have also been from separate countries coming from rural Texas, Brooklyn, and Alaska. All of these people working together to better understand our world, and on this particular expedition, to reach back into the Arctic’s past.  Fabricio Ferreira , an onboard marine technician, put it best saying that this ship and the work that goes on is something that is much bigger than any one person:

“Briefly for two months at a time people forget their differences and work together on the shared project of understanding our home, our planet. What more should science strive for if not a deeper understanding of what supports our lives? This is the dream of a better world, and I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own two eyes, time and time again, here at sea, here on this ship” – Fabricio

The sentiment was shared with a heavy heart, as the future of the vessel and the program that made it possible are unclear. This appears to be the last Expedition that the JOIDES will sail under the IODP program.

Still waking up from the dream I think back to Fabricio’s perspective as I sit on the bench and watch the group run around the ping-pong table. The memory is somber, but I couldn’t help but laugh at the scene in front of me. The poetic irony of a group of scientists from around the world, who devote their lives to studying our world, so enthusiastically playing “around-the-world” ping-pong was not lost on me. Still dizzy I admit to myself that I was really the only member of the film crew to get seasickness. Films are probably the closest comparable experience I’ve had to sharing a dream with a large group of people. Perhaps it is fitting then that this is the medium to try and take this dream home with us, so that others may crowd into dark spaces and with the flicker of artificial light share in the daydream as well. For now though I am being scolded for not playing in the game, and with a laugh I shrug off the dizziness to join in ignoring the alarm, and letting the daydream linger just a little bit longer.