On Being Remembered
April 26, 2012
Whose names do we remember? Pythagoras – a2 + b2 = c2, Einstein – E = mc2, Theodore Roosevelt – River of Doubt, Napoleon – Waterloo, Nelson – Trafalgar, Shakespeare – Hamlet, Schmidt – Anguilla, or better still James C. Brevaort (1818-1887), who had a genus of herrings named after him. Wow! Maybe this is how it comes to pass that the grizzly bear has so many varieties described. Perhaps it’s not the bear but the taxonomist we need to look at.
Once upon a time, I too came close, so I thought, I aspired, I wildly dreamt. Recently graduated form a midshipmen’s school as Ensign in the U.S. Navy, I was assigned, after Amphibious training at Coronodo, California, to a ship in San Francisco. My first stop there, naturally, when I arrived in “Frisco” was not in the office of the Naval Port Director or the sip but to the Steinhart Aquarium where I introduced myself and old them that until the Japanese were defeated I would be potting around in the Pacific. Further, that I would command a small group of Amphibious boats and further that I had grown up on the water. Perhaps I could collect fishes for them from those remote shores?
“Oh, yes, that would be great,” was the response. I should dip them in formalin and bottle them in alcohol with labels printed with India ink. The tags and the India ink and the bottles were no problem but the ship’s pharmacy did not stock formalin, so I skipped that step. The alcohol was the same stuff that the Navy used in its shipboard compasses and so again for me there was no problem.
I crisscrossed the Pacific a dozen times, stopping at Eniwetock, Ulithi, Guam, Okinawa and Keramo Retto, the Philippines. Everywhere we stopped, I had the opportunity to take my landing boats to pick up the mil, trade movies, and exercise my landing boat crews. This was often accomplished with hook and line, otter trawl, bait seine, cast net and occasionally with a small charge of dynamite.
Even with my extra-curricular project, the war against Japan progressed quite nicely. Eventually, we got back to San Francisco and the Steinhart. The ichthyologists there greeted me very warmly. I could tell from the welcome that surely I had sent them something new to science, a new species that would be described and perhaps might even bear my name in the Linnean taxonomy or binomial pantheon.
But this dream was not to be. All the preserved material I sent to them was already well-known to science, but…
The alcohol, pure, 190 proof, grain neutral spirits was much desired. Especially, since it contained no formalin, it needed only extract of juniper, some straining through cheesecloth to catch the occasional scale, and the addition of water to bring the alcohol content don to beverage strength of 80 or 90 proof (40% or 45 %). This is gin. Remember, it was wartime and hard liquor was not easy to come by. So, yes I was a hero but not the hero of my dream.
Now the war is over, the boats are gone, the ship is gone, but the memory lingers on and now I drink gin on the rocks with three small pickled onions.
M F Roberts