The ocean has a way of upending expectations. Four-story-high rogue waves peak and collapse without warning. Light bends across the surface to conjure chimeric cities that hover at the horizon. And watery wastelands reveal themselves to be anything but. So was the case for the scientists aboard the USS Jasper in the summer of 1942. Bobbing in choppy seas off the coast of San Diego, California, acoustic physicist Carl F. Eyring and his colleagues, who had been tasked with studying a sonar device the navy could use to detect German submarines, were sending sound waves into the deep. But as the echoes of their tests came reverberating back, they revealed a puzzling phenomenon: everywhere the ship went, the sonar detected a mass nearly as solid as the seafloor, lurking about 300 meters or more below the surface. Even more mysterious, this false bottom seemed to shift over the course of the day.
People had their theories—shoals? faulty equipment?—but apart from registering the anomaly, scientists let the mystery slide. (There was, after all, a war on.) It wasn’t until 1945, when oceanographer Martin Johnson dropped nets into the Pacific to take a closer look, that the culprit was definitively unmasked: a vast cloud of marine animals, most smaller than a human hand, that moved from the deep ocean to the surface and back every day.
I’m a 43-year-old lapsed Catholic who has doubts about any kind of afterlife, let alone a magical pet bridge. And yet, in that awful day when I put down my best friend, and in the weeks that followed, I almost believed my father, and pulled the image of Annie and Sam frolicking in a field across me like a shawl protecting me from the bitter cold of grief.
The staycation, a word Merriam-Webster has traced to World War II advertising, lost any remaining stigma during pandemic lockdowns, with the air suddenly clear of traffic pollution and birdsong audible in one’s own backyard. In The New Yorker last summer, the philosopher Agnes Callard laid out a “Case Against Travel,” prompting a flurry of avid, even angry, rebuttals and calls of “clickbait” from people who enjoy going to unfamiliar places, some pounded out indignantly from the road.
And now lands “Airplane Mode,” by Shahnaz Habib, a lively and, yes, wide-ranging book that interrogates some of the pastime’s conventions and most prominent chroniclers.