When I was young I wanted to be like Jacques Cousteau. He spent his life traveling and exploring the waters of the world and bringing us along with him via his television show. I graduated from high school and entered college with the intent of becoming a Marine Biologist like Jacques.
Although we moved a few times while I was growing up, we did not live near big water until my father’s work took us to Michigan where I started and then graduated from high school. Lake Michigan, less than an hours drive away became one of my favorite destinations as a teenager. I knew it was not an ocean but it held all of the same appeal.
My SAT scores and high school grades earned an academic scholarship at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I enrolled there in one of the few Marine Biology programs in the country at a school not located on an ocean coast.
As an undergraduate I sought and was accepted as a lab assistant for a couple of professors on campus teaching and studying in my chosen field. In addition to my studies, I happily began to explore the worlds waters through their eyes.
These scientists studied sediment and sedimentation rates in the Great Lakes. In the colder months I analyzed and recorded data from samples for their trace metal content using a variety of techniques and equipment including a mass spectrometer. This fascinating instrument produced graphs indicating the types and quantities of metals contained in samples of sediment collected from the Great Lakes surrounding Michigan.
In the warmer months I got to travel with them to the lakes and collect the samples. To collect samples we utilized a 60 foot tug boat with the crew and equipment needed to deploy and retrieve the capture equipment or traps as they were called. We would travel around a selected area in the spring deploying the traps on the anchor lines of buoys dropped overboard in a specific pattern around the chosen area. Occasionally, one of the scientists would don a dry suite, the water was very cold, and venture to the bottom to see what was really down there.
A few months later, we would return to find the buoys we had deployed, haul them aboard, gather the traps placed at specific intervals along the anchor line and return them to the lab for analysis in the months ahead.
I was thrilled during those first years. I was constantly learning something new about the world and my chosen field. In the lab I directly contributed to the science. I used what seemed like incredibly sophisticated equipment and techniques. In the field I spent long hours on what seemed like a very large boat compared to the ski and sail boats I had grown up with on the lakes of Michigan.
The tug was crewed by crusty old sailors who delighted in tormenting the delicate constitutions of the scientists they served. I would sit around eating sardines and crackers with them and watch my scientist colleagues turn green and heave over the side. I relished standing in the bow, bouncing across the waves and scanning the horizon trying to be the first to see the next buoy and guide the boat to retrieve its load of samples.
After a couple of seasons, however, the luster began to wear off. The repetition and monotony began to become a chore. The excitement of going to ‘sea’ gave way to the long hours of boredom moving from one location to another. The relatively few moments of camaraderie with the sailors did not make up for the harsh life they seemed to lead.
Most disappointing was when I learned that Jacques Cousteau was not considered a scientist. He was a photographer and film maker. The ‘Calypso’ that Jacques explored the world in, was considered a ‘tug’, much like the boat I spent time on during my summer internships on the Great Lakes, and not that fabulous vessel I looked forward to seeing in every television episode.
These were very exciting experiences that created great memories and stories to last and shape the rest of my life. This time also lead me to question my chosen career path. The life style and routine of the Marine Biologist no longer appealed and I was not interested in making films as a career. A life at sea, while it could be full of adventure, the harshness and long hours of boredom was not what I wanted to do with my life.
So in the later part of my college educational journey I started looking for another career path.