Love and Hydrogen (20 page)
A Half Mile Down
The time finally arrived for us to clamber back aboard. Around us for miles all was calm. A waterspout twisted and coiled far out to sea. There was a clinking as I slithered through the opening, and I realized that pennies had tumbled from my pocket. In a perfect sphere every loose object constantly sought the bottom. I had my notebook and flashlight in an open pouch around my neck.
Barton and I provided the relevant assurances but otherwise were both silent during the descent, until an enormous luminous medusa seemed to envelop us at twelve hundred feet. It had firefly-like bands on its umbrella and lights at the base of each tentacle. A hundred feet later we saw an entire school illuminated from within with pale green light.
At seventeen hundred feet there was no hint of blue remaining. We had gotten below the level of humanly visible light. With the searchlight off, Barton's voice seemed now as unattached as something coming down the wire.
I had learned to encircle a light with my eyes and on one side or the other I began to be able to detect the body of the organism, and frequently, details of its outline and size. I found that even a momentary distraction, like an instrument check, diminished my visual powers for some minutes very considerably.
Occasionally the head of a fish would appear conspicuously against the surrounding black, illuminated by some unknown source of indirect light. Eyes especially stood out with no definite source of light visible. When teeth were silhouetted I knew it was from a luminous mucus which covered them.
Two lanternfish with pale green lights undulated past. Something else with widely spaced appendages. Here I began to become more inarticulate. Most of what I was looking at had no name; had never been seen by anyone.
The steel of the window-ledge was clammy. The quartz chilled the tip of my nose.
We were surrounded by a host of small unidentifiable organisms, most with what looked like legs. It was like being an entomologist in Hades.
At twelve hundred and fifty feet we encountered a vision to which I can give no name: a network of luminosity, delicate, with large meshes, aglow and in motion, waving slowly past. It seemed too diffuse and multivarious to be some sort of jellyfish, and too otherworldly to be anything else.
Farther down there were glowing explosions, inches wide. We pointed them out to one another and, after a few minutes of watching, speculated. Our wildest guesses were no help whatsoever.
At fifteen hundred feet Miss Hollister requested I take a turn on the earphones.
“I'm so happy for you,” she told me.
“Yes, yes,” I said.
“This is going out over the radio,” she reminded me.
A large fish of an unpleasant white, like oversoaked flesh, something wholly unknown, swung suspended half out of the searchlight. It remained seemingly stationary, sinking with us, with only a slow waving of fins. I dragged Barton to my window to corroborate, and we did our best to describe the thing to Miss Hollister and the rest of America. It was over seven feet long. It had no lights or luminous tissue. A small eye. Long, filamented pectorals, and vertical fins that were huge and all the way back at the base of its tail.
“What will you call it?” Miss Hollister asked, when we'd finally stopped describing it. It still floated before us.
I called it
Bathyembryx istiophasma,
my fractured Greek way of saying, “Ghostly Sailor of the Abyss.”
The Maw of the Saber-Toothed Viperfish
There seem to be three outstanding moments in the life of a bathysphere diver: the first flash of animal light, the discovery of a new species, and the onset of eternal darkness.
At 1:12 P.M. we felt an upward tug and came to rest, gently, at a depth of three thousand one hundred feet. We knew this to be as far as we could go; the cable on the winch was very near its end. A Roman candle of individual sparks burst beside our windows. We realized it to be an abyssal equivalent of the cephalopod's ink-screen.
Now and then my eyes peered into the distance, and I thought of all the lightless creatures forever invisible to me, even right here, before my windows.
I pronounced something suitably explorer-like for the benefit of those sitting around their hearths back home. Miss Hollister called for a check of our oxygen supply. It was fine, I assured her, without taking my eyes from the quartz.
We Emerge Again, with the Grace of Worms
There were days in my life when everything moved swiftly and emotions came hurtling along, one atop the other. From my earliest experiments, at the age of five, I felt at home submerged. It was an ancestral memory, spanning back hundreds of millions of years, from when I sang,
When you were a tadpole / And I was a fish
â
Billions of human beings have looked beneath the surface. Millions have descended to twenty feet. Hundreds to hundreds of feet. But only two to a half a mile.
Those Are Real Stars in the Heavens
Miss Hollister believed that I did what I did out of fellow feeling. That somewhere inside, her spark had reached mine. “I've never doubted your goodness,” she said, the night we spent curled in my berth. “I hope you've found peace where you could,” Elswyth wrote, when concluding her final letter. All those cups of water I absorbed and whirled about in my body were all steps leading toward a goal of final knowledge I'd never reach, and never could. My luck would hold, and maybe finally turn against me. When I died I'd find myself with the other fussbudgets and mote-counters arguing about phyla and condemned to the solution of problems, while the amateurs roamed at will in Elysian meadows, netting gorgeous, ghostly butterflies until the end of time. But I'd look up from my windowless carrel and remember my bathysphere, suspended in the blackness, a bubble of sanity and metal, with Miss Hollister's voice in my ear, saying,
Twenty-eight hundred feet,
saying,
Three
thousand feet,
its breath and its warmth the most durable of illusions.
JOHN ASHCROFT: MORE IMPORTANT THINGS THAN ME
Creative Self-doubt
When people have honest questions about where I stand or what I'm doingâin politics, it happens all the timeâI've learned not to take it as an insult. In fact, I often find that their concerns mirror reservations I might have had on my own. Their honesty helps me clarify the situation. Nobody wins when anyone holds grudges.
Electability
Folks say, “Here's a fellow who doesn't spook moderates, who's actually electable.” That word pops up a lot: electable. Paul Weyrich had some people over one night and we were lounging around out on his porch and he suggested that I was more than just presentable; I was a guy who could go on Jay Leno and play a couple of tunes with the Oak Ridge Boys.
Pessimists claim my only base is the profamily, religious vote. They say, “Where else can he go? The country club? The board-room?” My answer is that those aren't the only places to look. My answer is that I'll take my chances with the American people. I served two terms as governor in a Democratic-leaning state, I had a national profile as a senator, and, yes, I have support among what the media calls the Religious Right. In my gubernatorial reelection I carried 64 percent of the vote, the best showing of any Missouri governor since the Civil War.
My Principles
My principles are out there for everyone to peruse, and always have been. Whenever I get more than four people in a room, I tell them: You examine the record, and let me know if you find anything that's contradictory or troublesome. And if you think you do, you come back to me, and we'll clear it up on the spot.
In the Senate, I fought against national testing standards, activist judges, and the nomination of a pro-abortionist surgeon general.
I forced the first floor vote ever on term limits and had to fight my majority leader to do so. I wrote part of the welfare-reform law allowing states to deliver services through churches and private agencies.
I promoted the defunding of the NEA. The average guy who wants to go down and see Garth Brooks, he doesn't get a federal subsidy, but the silk-stocking crowd that wants to see a geometric ballet in Urdu, they get a break on their tickets.
When it comes to bills, I don't trim and I don't pork things up, whether the doors are closed on the session or not.
And I keep reiterating, wherever I go: It's against my religion to impose my religion on others.
Ethics
I tell people that I know about scandal. During my second term as governor, I had an overeager staffer who, when he heard about my boy's need for some books on Queen Elizabeth for a homework assignment, called the state librarian at home and got her to open the library after hours. The press got ahold of the story, like they get ahold of everything, and I quickly took responsibility. Around the house we call it Homeworkgate and joke that we learned from our mistake. A columnist for the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
wrote about the whole thing that, “If a state ever had a less exciting governor than John Ashcroft, I never heard about it.”
Turning Heads
I hear that I first started turning heads after the charges became public that Monica Lewinsky had turned the president's. Most everyone in my party maintained a code of silence in the early going. I did not. I said publicly in an address to the Conservative Political Action Conference that January, “Mr. President, if these allegations are true, you have disgraced yourself and the office of the presidency, and you should resign now.”
That's what I said. It bears repeating: “Mr. President, if these allegations are true, you have disgraced yourself and the office of the presidency, and you should resign now.”
Atlanta
If I've got one problem at this point in time, in perception terms, it's Atlanta. Atlanta was a nightmare. I dropped the ball there and I'm the first to admit it.
I was nervous. I started right in, once introduced, on principles, and what I stand for, and there was a point a paragraph or two into my notes when I realized that the silverware wasn't going to get any quieter, and flopsweat set in. I was fighting a losing battle with overdone filet mignon for everyone's attention.
It didn't help that Forbes was going on next and that he got about ten standing ovations for saying mostly the same things.
Steve Forbes.
A nightmare. I get the shivers going back over it, I don't mind admitting.
“Shiver shiver shiver,” Janet says, sometimes, late at night, lying next to me.
Ethics
It's fashionable, I guess, for people to talk down Jimmy Carter, but let me say this: Jimmy Carter was an unimpeachable straight-shooter who restored people's trust in the presidency. And don't think the American people couldn't use a little of that particular medicine right now.
The Transports of Love
Hollywood likes to showcase the tyranny of romantic infatuationâ how two people might abandon their friends, family, and beliefs all in the name of an overpowering emotionâbut my father didn't raise me that way. He wasn't a stoic and didn't despise emotion. He believed that delayed gratification was an essential practice for success in life. He always said, “Don't jeopardize the future because of the past.”
A woman from a national magazine wrote that I had a Boy Scout's haircut and a choirboy's magnetic machismo. I wrote her a note explaining that I appreciated the joke, and that I didn't think magnetic machismo was what we needed in a president at that particular point.
Helpmate
Janet says that after God she puts family first, everything else second, and nothing third. During the campaign for the Senate she was asked if she minded being a helpmate. “No,” she said. “The same way I don't mind being a math professor or writing textbooks.”
Sex
Once in a diner, a fry cook said to meâI guess in an attempt to destroy his customer baseâ“I'll tell you one thing: I'm not getting any tonight.” What I should have answered was something I thought as I drove away: that our country was affluent in sex, but bankrupt in love. Prostitutes have a sex life. Animals have a sex life. Human beings should have a
love
life.
The right results come first from working hard to make the right decision, and then working even harder to make the decision right.
Thrift
Missouri remains one of the cheapest places to buy gas in America. My staffers tease me because I've been known on drives home to run the tank down to near empty so I can save a few dollars by filling up on the other side of the Mississippi.
Why I Supported the Death Penalty as Governor
I was the ultimate appeal to correct error, not reward regret, emotion, or even religious conversion. Becoming a Christian removes us from
eternal
penalties.
Public Civility
The original rules of debate for the Constitutional Convention in 1787 did not allow conversation when another member spoke. No reading of any kind was permitted during debate, and no one was allowed to speak twice unless everyone else had spoken once.
Things to Work On
We're all works in progress. I know that I sometimes don't make a sufficiently forceful impression. I know that I can seem to people, as Janet likes to put it, too settled on my own road. There's a little motto painted onto the serape of a toy donkey on my desk: “We're all here to learn from one another.” I look at that motto every day.
Recurring Dreams
Janet notes that I'm thrifty even with my dreams. I tend to have the same one for weeks running. They stay in my head. My most recent one features Barney Thomas, one of my father's oldest friends, who's sick now. My father called him The Judge when I was growing up.
R&R
I give visitors to my office copies of my ten-song tape, “The Gospel (Music) According to John,” which I composed and produced myself.
Friendship
Harry Truman said, “If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog.”
Friendship
When I was state auditor of Missouri, I had seats on the fifty-yard line for Tigers games. When I lost reelection, I couldn't get into the end zone.
As the Seasons Change
Growing up I never imagined that I would one day need a man to work five days a week just to organize my schedule, let alone that I'd have an after-hours recording that goes like this: “Hello, I'm Andy Beach, scheduler for Attorney General of the United States John Ashcroft. If you'd like to request an appointment, please fax your request to the following number . . .”
Ambition
The presidency is like running the mile. You have to run the first few laps, and run them hard, before you know if you're really even in the race.
In 1998 Paul Gigot asked, in
The Wall Street Journal,
“Richard Nixon and Watergate helped make a president out of an obscure Democrat named Jimmy Carter. Can Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky do the same for an equally unknown Republican?”
The Judge
Two months ago he sent a letter I still haven't answered. Usually I'm a bear on correspondence. I haven't even finished reading it.
In the dream, he's as nice as can be. He quotes the first line of his letter: “So, John, the sawbones has come through with the bad news that apparently I've got the lung thing everyone's been worried about.”
Moderation
Do we think a four-time murderer is only “moderately” dangerous? Are drugs in a schoolyard only “moderately” a problem?
In combat, do we want our fellow soldiers to be “moderately” brave?
Are we so sure that “moderation” is always a good thing?
The Long View
Includes the understanding that the verdict of eternity stands above the verdict of history.
False Pride
I'm constantly on the lookout for it.
Losing to a Dead Man
My theory about elections is mirrored in what I hold about all of life. For every crucifixion, a resurrection is sure to followâmaybe not immediately, but the possibility is always there.
Melancholia
I became governor ten years ago. Twelve, I guess. Time flies.
The Hard Road
Like anyone else, there are weaknesses I've had to overcome to get to where I am today. A reporter once said that I speak like I'd rather be gigging fish on the Osage, and I dropped him a note telling him that that was because it was true: I would.
Secret Discouragements
Distractions don't seem to want to leave me in peace when my faith in myself is shaky or my defenses low. Janet calls them The Secret
Discouragements. I think:
âIn a February 1998 poll of registered Republicans in New Hampshire, 0 percent named me as their first choice for the nomination.
âEven John Kasich got 2 percent.
âI'm not a natural self-promoter.
âI don't like the way I look when I eat.
Unfinished Projects
The letter on my computer is entitled
Untitled.
So far it has the address and no date and two lines:
Dear Barney: It was terrible to
hear about your terrible news.
Always on Offense
During my first term as governor, Missouri landed both the Royals and the Cardinals in the World Series. There was speculation as to who I'd be rooting for. I rooted for both. My wife and I made a special hat the night before, half and half, red and blue, with bills on both sides. I flipped it around between innings to the team that was batting. An editorial the day after accused me of indecisiveness or double-dealing or both. But a letter-writer from Hannibal hit the nail on the head: there was another way of looking at it, he said. Governor Ashcroft is just always on offense. And he was right.
John Ashcroft in the Pocket of Big Tobacco
Who pays for years and years and years of government litigation? Who is it that foots the bill so the trial lawyers can pocket billions?
On Being Part of a Persecuted Minority
Most of those who criticize me for my religion haven't even taken the time to discover just what my religion is. The Assemblies of God is a Pentecostal denomination, so I know what it's like to be a part of a minority and mocked for one's beliefs. When the mockers come after me, I refer them to two bumper stickers distributed by AG pastor Fulton Buntain: “It's Never Too Late to Start Over Again,” and “It's Always Too Soon to Quit.”
On Pushing That Liberal Rock up the Hill
I used to tell my son when he got frustrated about his math scores: You know, there are times that maybe God will call us to do something that doesn't have an apparent success about it at the moment.
Learning About Values
My father was a pastor and a college president. I remember as a very young boy hearing his early morning prayers and tiptoeing downstairs to sit beside his knees, so that I was shielded by his body as he pleaded for my soul.
Learning About Values
The day before he died, in the presence of a small group of family and friends, he reminded me that the spirit of Washington is arrogance, and that the spirit of Christ, on the other hand, is humility.
Learning About Values
He was on the sofa, and struggled to get up to help family and friends pray over me. I said, “Dad, you don't have to struggle to stand and pray over me with all these friends.” He said, “John, I'm not struggling to stand; I'm struggling to kneel.” And he left that couch and came and knelt with me.
Why Should We Believe in the Resurrection?
After losing my first race for Congress, I was appointed state auditor. After losing the election to maintain that post, I was elected state attorney general. After losing the election as chairman of the Republican National Committee, I was offered the candidacy as U.S. senator. After losing the reelection campaign for U.S. senator, I was appointed attorney general of the United States.
Learning About Values
My role models are Jesus Christ, Abraham Lincoln, J. Robert Ashcroft, Barney Thomas, and Janet Ashcroft. With no apologies, and in that order.