At the age of 26, when I least expected it, I fell in love. It’s a cliché, yet that’s what happened.
It was 1998, and I had a freshly signed diploma in art conservation and a lot of student loan debt. I had spent months looking for work, but the economy was strange—somehow both growing yet jobless—and I’d begun to think that four years spent pursuing an insanely specialized graduate degree in an esoteric field had not, perhaps, been the best use of my time.
So my first job in art conservation, frankly any job in art conservation, was something I should have been thrilled about. But when I finally found that job, I felt something more akin to resignation. As relieved as I was to have it, it was not a job I expected to enjoy.
Like many young conservators, I’d entered the field because of a love of beautiful and fascinating art objects. When I began graduate school, I had fantasy visions of my eventual dream job: I would work in a pristine laboratory, wear a spotless white coat, and listen to classical music while I delicately ministered to gorgeous artwork. It would all be very scholarly and refined.
On a scale of one to ten, where ten would be “exactly like this fantasy vision,” and one would be “nothing like it at all,” my new job was approximately a negative three. There were no gorgeous artworks anywhere in sight, and the whole operation scraped by on a shoestring of “soft money” from the federal government. My new workplace was a cavernous warehouse on the elderly and eccentric campus of the Washington Navy Yard.
Do you remember the scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark when the crate containing the Ark is wheeled into a seemingly infinite warehouse full of identical crates? The inside of my new workplace looked exactly like this, complete with crates stacked to the rafters, except it was a lot dirtier. It had been a munitions factory during the 19th century and was contaminated with heavy metals.
But what about the art, you might be wondering? Surely there was some kind of art? But no, there wasn’t. As you might have guessed from the job’s location, my new employer was the U.S. Navy, and my job was in the Underwater Archaeology Branch, a department within the Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC). Instead of beautiful art objects, I worked on wet, rotting ship timbers, encrusted cannons, slimy leather shoes, and all the other miscellany that sank with 18th- and 19th-century warships. The highlight of the collection was a pair of toilets from a Civil War screw gunship, the CSS Alabama, because their ceramic bowls had delicate decorations in blue glaze. These toilet bowls were as arty as it got, and I never even worked on the toilets; their conservation had been completed years before I arrived.
You can also forget about the white lab coat. In my fantasy job, the spotless white coat protected my stylish dress. In my actual job, I wore my oldest, dirtiest clothes. Over these went waders and steel-toed boots. I spent my days rinsing slime off waterlogged wood, scraping corrosion off gun-tracking, scrubbing cannonballs with wire brushes, and chipping encrustations off big guns with a pneumatic chisel. I ordered liquid nitrogen for the freeze-dryer and mouth-siphoned disgusting solutions out of moldering tanks.
To say that this was not the job of my dreams would be a wild understatement. But there were compensations. My coworkers were great, and the vocabulary was fun. All employees, even civilians like me, were referred to as “hands,” the floors of buildings were “decks,” and all time was military. Thus, notification for a morning staff meeting in the first-floor conference room became, “all hands on the main deck, zero-nine-hundred hours,” which—to civilians, at least—sounds exciting, as if maneuvers might commence. Plus, the warehouse/conservation lab was only a few short blocks from the Officers Club, a dark, wood-paneled, brass-bedecked naval pub straight out of a 19th-century novel. Despite the name, it was open to anyone who wanted a drink, and we hands often did.
The job also had a strange side effect. Suddenly I was the most popular girl at parties, because every man I met was instantly fascinated by what I did for a living. They could not get enough of it. Men visited me at work like never before, and never since. The slimy, rotting ship timbers called to them like seductive sirens. The corroded guns whispered secrets of long-forgotten battles.
Or something. I didn’t see the attraction, personally. I grew up inland and had never been in any boat bigger than a canoe. Beyond that, these artifacts of war held little interest for me, and I felt no connection to them. They had nothing to do with anyone like me; they predated women’s service in the armed forces. Why were they being preserved? I didn’t know, and I didn’t much care. I had a paycheck, and that was all that really mattered.
(NHHC UA)
Many of my friends and relations were confused and disturbed by this ambivalence and took steps to counter it. A friend insisted on lending me Master and Commander, the first novel in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series, so that I could learn more about ships and naval warfare and thus come to love my new job as much he did. But I couldn’t get into the book; there were too many battles and obscure sails and masts and guns. My historian father tried to interest me in various naval escapades throughout history, to no avail. My grandfather, who had served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, told me stories about his enlistment, his daily duties, his fellow servicemen, and the special machine he’d designed to load ammunition into big guns faster than ever before. I listened politely, like a good grandchild, but retained almost none of it.
And then, one day, something surprising happened. I was in the U.S. Navy Museum, a few buildings down from the conservation lab, and on my way out I noticed a sign by the front desk. It said, “The Rare and Unusual Submarine Collection is located in Building 70.” This was too odd to ignore, so I walked across the Yard until I found the right building, another cavernous warehouse-type space. Visitors could let themselves in through an unlocked side door, so in I went.
You could wander through the space at will, unsupervised. As advertised, it was filled with submarines, sometimes displayed singly, and sometimes in small groups. The interpretive text was minimal at best, and this had the effect of making me look more closely at each exhibit. Due to the size of the submarines, there were no museum cases. Often there weren’t even stanchions. It was just me and the subs in all their faded glory, up close and personal.
The first was the Intelligent Whale, a Civil War–era iron hulk. She had a charming whale-like shape but also looked pretty damn dangerous, appearing so heavy she would sink like a stone, killing the occupants. I learned that early submarines did have many casualties, although the Intelligent Whale, happily, did not possess a murderous history. She never saw combat yet was a marvel of engineering for her time. She was powered with a hand-cranked propeller and had compressed air and water tanks to control buoyancy. She had a rudder, a conning tower, a depth gauge, and an air pressure indicator. Divers could deploy through hatches in the floor.
Something about the Intelligent Whale spoke to me. By the time I got to the mini-subs, which looked like they’d come straight out of a James Bond film, I’d experienced a St. Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus type conversion. Everything about the submarines impressed me: the amazing ingenuity of the engineering, the materials with which they were made, the increasing intricacy of the instrument panels. Walking idly through the building, you could easily follow the evolution of the technology.
I can’t argue that a submarine is fine art, but they did become, to me, visually appealing. I appreciated the finish of the metals and the complexity of the instrument arrays. And—maybe because they were old and somewhat worse for wear, or perhaps because they often were prototypes—they also looked handmade in a real and immediate way. I could imagine the people behind their design and fabrication and the people who’d operated them. I stopped caring that these people were mostly men, and I realized I’d made a mistake in thinking that naval history was unworthy of my regard. I didn’t need to connect with these submarines on a meta level. They were interesting, and I liked them. That was enough.
I went back to the collection of Rare and Unusual Submarines over and over again, sometimes with friends or a visitor, but often by myself. I couldn’t then, and still can’t now, feel any love for submarine warfare, but that didn’t really matter. It was the unceasing problem-solving that captured my imagination. It was the mystery and possibility of diving deep beneath the sea.
Back in the conservation laboratory, removing corrosion from gun tracking became slightly less tedious. I found myself intrigued by things like grapeshot. I became interested in ironclad ships, an engineering concept that sounds like the worst idea of all time. I reread my friend’s copy of Master and Commander, and then the other 19 novels in the series. And then I read them all again.
I thought a lot about war while I worked for the Navy. I’d never been interested in it before, but in that job, it became part of the fabric of my everyday life. It’s a universally accepted truth that war is horrific, but in the Aubrey-Maturin novels, nothing—and I mean nothing—is as boring as when Jack Aubrey is at home with his wife. The man is a disaster on the domestic front, and it’s easy to see why; terrestrial life is all so much drudgery. As the reader, all you think is, for the love of God, when will he go back to sea? You want the wide-open ocean, the adventure of new lands, the skill required to sail a tall-masted ship. You want, frankly, a really good fight.
Yes, I know the Aubrey-Maturin novels are fiction and not the same as deploying in real life. But I also was surrounded by servicewomen and men on the Navy Yard, and I came to see that there are highly attractive things about military service: the teamwork, the strategy and skill, the technological and scientific advancement, the sense of shared purpose.
Like so many romances, my relationship with the Collection of Rare and Unusual Submarines ended in disappointment. The subs and I were separated and, on my part at least, it wasn’t an amicable split. The collection was de-accessioned and dispersed. There was no warning, no time even for proper goodbyes. One morning I arrived at work, and there was a bunch of huge tractor trailers outside, and the subs were loaded up and driven away, and that was that. Undoubtedly it was all planned carefully in advance, but the subs were part of a different branch within the NHHC, and I was a very junior employee, and if there had been a “need to know” notification tree, I would not have appeared on it. It was rough, the day they all left. It still hurts a bit, the way an old scar will twinge sometimes, reminding you of the injury.
I know where only a few of the submarines are today. The Intelligent Whale, so iconic, was the easiest to trace. She was separated from her sisters and now stands alone, outside in the elements, on a naval base in New Jersey. Not long after she left, I did too, for a job I liked more, but part of me was sad to go.
More than anything else, the biggest gift my first job gave me is the understanding that the occupation many people call “art” conservation is about more than art. We need to retain and carefully preserve the other things too, all the non-arty things that tell us how we got to the place we inhabit today. The Intelligent Whale and her sister subs were never arty, but they did have a special story to tell. It was a rare and unusual tale of technological achievement, and they told it well, converting even a non-believer like me to the beauty of military heritage and the lure of a warship sailing out to sea.
