Tài liệu Mastering the craft of science writing part 12 docx

For the next hour the sea is calm, horribly so. The only

sign of what’s coming is the wind direction; it shifts rest￾lessly from quadrant to quadrant all afternoon. At four

o’clock it’s out of the southeast. An hour later it’s out of

the south-southwest. An hour after that it’s backed around

to due north. It stays that way for the next hour, and then

right around seven o’clock it starts creeping into the

northeast. And then it hits.

It’s a sheer change; the Andrea Gail enters the Sable Island

storm the way one might step into a room. The wind is in￾stantly forty knots and parting through the rigging with an

unnerving scream ... By eight o’clock the barometric pres￾sure has dropped to 996 millibars and shows no sign of

leveling off. That means the storm is continuing to

strengthen and create an even greater vacuum at its center.

Nature, as everyone knows, abhors a vacuum, and will try

to fill it as fast as possible. The waves catch up with the

wind speed around eight pm and begin increasing expo￾nentially; they double in size every hour ...

One can imagine Billy standing at the helm and grip￾ping the wheel with the force and stance one might use to

carry a cinder block. It would be a confused sea, moun￾tains of water converging, diverging, piling up on them￾selves from every direction. A boat’s motion can be

thought of as the instantaneous integration of every force

acting upon it in a given moment, and the motion of a

boat in a storm is so chaotic as to be almost without pat￾tern. Billy would just keep his bow pointed into the worst

of it and hope he doesn’t get blindsided by a freak wave.

And that was the start of the storm.

In the same matter-of-fact tone, Junger spends the last

nine pages of chapter 6 explaining precisely what happens

physiologically in a person who drowns at sea, step by step.

Billy Tyne, Alfred Pierre, David Sullivan, Bugsy Moran, Dale

Murphy, and Bobby Shatford are surely dead. The reader sees

them clearly, sinking down and down and down, limp and

open-eyed.

The book continues, however, as it had to. I could diagram

its powerful symmetry just like a Jane Austen novel (though I

won’t). As a whole, The Perfect Storm has the shape of a rogue

wave—up up up up UP ... HIGHER YET ... IT APPEARS TO HANG

... and finally crashes, to be followed by successively smaller

Ideas

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