Dawn Wright: A Good, Old-Fashioned Sea Story

As the only black woman on a two-month voyage, Dawn Wright tries to find her place aboard scientific drill vessel JOIDES Resolution.

Dawn Wright is chief scientist of the Environmental Systems Research Institute (aka Esri), a world-leading geographic information system (GIS) software, research and development company, as well as a professor of geography and oceanography at Oregon State University. Among her research specialties are seafloor mapping and tectonics, ocean exploration and conservation, environmental informatics, and ethics in information technology. Dawn is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Geological Society of America and of Stanford University's Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, as well as an American Geophysical Union Leptoukh Awardee and board member of COMPASS Science Communication, Inc. She is also currently into road cycling, apricot green tea gummy bears, 18th-century pirates, her dog Sally, and SpongeBob Squarepants. Follow her on Twitter @deepseadawn

This story originally aired on our podcast on June 9, 2017.

Story Transcript

So I’m going to try to tell you a good old-fashioned sea story. Or maybe not.  You can be the judge. 

So this story takes place in 1987, in the cold, frigid waters of the Weddell Sea off of Antarctica, aboard the scientific drill vessel known as the JOIDES Resolution.  This is the story that I’m about to tell you about my experience on that five-hundred-foot-long, floating scientific laboratory where we were out in the Antarctic waters for two months.  And we were completely away from our family, completely away from our friends and, to me, it felt like I was completely away from the entire rest of the world. 

This was my first time out there.  It was a fascinating experience.  Out of about a hundred and ten people aboard this floating scientific laboratory only about ten of us were women and only one of us, me, was an African-American woman. 

So on this first voyage for me I was a little fearful, I was a little intimidated, but I was also super exhilarated, super excited because the stakes were really high for me personally and professionally.  I really wanted to make good on this first expedition, and I really wanted to be accepted. 

Now, this scientific laboratory is one of a kind and it’s still out there on the world’s oceans.  It can lower miles of drilling pipe all the way through the entire depth of the oceans and then drill, baby, drill into the sediments and the rocks to go even further. 

And what we were doing out there was we were drilling for science.  We were taking cores for science, not for oil.  And one of the things that we were trying to accomplish out there in the Antarctic was to reconstruct the paleoceanographic history of the Antarctic continent.  That included also understanding when the first ice sheets formed and how permanent they were.  So this was actually a climate change study way back in 1987. 

And because we were trying to retrieve these cores from… we were in water depths of around five thousand meters, or three miles, so we had to be anchored to the sea floor for several hours in order to get those cores.  Now, normally this is okay, to be anchored to the sea floor for several hours on end, particularly if you're working in the mid-latitudes and in warmer, calmer waters, but we were so far south in the Antarctic that we had to have a whole other vessel with us at all times. 

The ship that we had with us was called the Maersk Master, an incredible ship from Denmark.  And what this ship did was to literally lasso and drag out of the way icebergs to save us, to keep us safe.  This ship was amazing to see in action.  It would put down the big, huge rope at one end of the iceberg and it would steam around to the other end, pick up the rope, and then drag that baby out of the way while we were still anchored in the sea floor. 

One of the biggest icebergs that the Maersk saved us from was affectionately called Kyle Field because this particular iceberg was literally the size of the Texas A&M Football Stadium.  Texas A&M was the scientific operator for our expedition. 

And then there was this one guy on the Maersk Master who was an artist as well and he would take the leavings of the sediments that we would core -- there would be some that would drop on the floor -- and he took a scoop of those sediments and he put them into his little firing kiln on the Maersk, and he made a little penguin out of those sediments.  He painted the penguin and then he gave the penguin to me.  So that is one of my most cherished possessions. 

I was supposed to bring it with me tonight to show you, but I forgot.  It’s on Instagram, though. 

Now, getting back to the story, we were working twelve-hour shifts out there on that drilling vessel, and during those twelve-hour shifts, I would get to know the other scientists pretty well.  But I actually spent most of my time with my fellow technicians and with the drilling crew.  This was especially during breaks and then after we would get off duty and we would hang out for our twelve hours off. 

Now, most of the drill crew, there was sort of a town/gown thing going on aboard the ship.  So it was the white-collar, white-lab-coat scientist versus the working-class drilling crew.  And most of those drilling crew were from the Gulf Coast oil industry.  There was one member of the drilling crew in particular, his name was Macel, and he scared me to death.  He was a tall, lean, grizzly, tough-looking guy from Mississippi, sort of the seagoing equivalent of a Clint Eastwood.  He and I couldn’t have been more different. 

He was from the deep segregated south. He had been to sea for decades on ships like that. This was my first voyage.  I was just out of graduate school, and I was raised in the melting pot of Hawaii.  He was white, I was black, we still are.  He was a man of few words who didn’t seem to really want to get to know anybody else different from him.  There's so many things about him that actually frightened me because he was so different.  He would also just sit in the same part of the galley all the time with his other grizzled sea dog friends. 

So I would say to myself, Well, I’m going to stay clear of him for the next two months.  So I'll stay out of his way.  I’m not sure what he thought about me. But one day, one of the friends that I had made on the drilling crew who was a younger, gregarious, sort of a free spirit, he said to me, “Well, Dawn, why don’t you come over and sit with us?  Just sit down during the break time this time and just hang out with us.”  And Macel was there at the table.  And he looked at me as if he wanted to eat me for lunch and I thought, Oh, my goodness.  Here we go. 

So I went over there and I sat down with the group, with Macel there.  And Macel proceeded to tell all of these great stories about his other adventures at sea, just fantastic stories.  We were really enjoying them.  And he was telling all these great jokes, and the jokes, they were clever and they were clean.  We were just having a good time listening to his stories and his jokes. 

Then he started asking me questions.  He asked me about where I was from and what I had been studying in school and how did I like being out there for the first time at sea with them.  So it turned out that Macel and I would spend a lot more time together on these coffee breaks in the galley.  We started to hang out together.  And even after we got off shift, we would go and watch movies together.  I learned to like the kind of movies that he liked, which were, of course, the tough-guy, action Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, because there was no way that we were going to watch my Disney movies.  That was not going to fly. 

So people saw this unlikely friendship that was forming between us on the ship and it actually helped to broaden the circle of friends that I had, that I was making on the ship.  So that was a wonderful experience.  It was great to see the fear that I had of this man turn into a friendship, and to be rewarded for stepping out of my comfort zone to get to know somebody who was so completely different from me.  I think he was rewarded as well. 

Then there was this other part of our relationship, which was really fun, which was our common love of practical jokes.  So he would think of all of these great practical jokes and then he would let me in on it.  He would say, “Dawn, I’m gonna do this.  You just sit back and watch.”  And I can’t do a Mississippi accent to do it justice, but that’s sort of like the way he was talking.  “Now, you just sit right there and you watch what’s gonna happen.  It’s gonna be good.” 

And the nice thing about this is he was the one doing the jokes.  So if there was any retribution I didn’t have to worry about a thing because it wasn’t me doing it, but I was in on it. 

Our favorite joke together was the old rubber-snake-in-the-ice-machine-in-the-galley joke.  So he would take this long, rubber snake and he would put it in the ice machine and then he’d say, “Okay, Dawn.  Sit back and watch the action.  This is gonna be good.” 

And we would sit back and have the best time watching these big, burly drilling guys who were coming to get ice for their big, burly mugs that they were going to take out onto the drilling floor with them, open the door and then jump back five feet scared to death because of the snake in the ice machine.  And that was good.  That was fun. 

So in terms of my broader circle of friends, because of my friendship with Macel, that circle went all the way up to the top, to the captain of the ship.  So the captain of the ship would let me actually sit in his chair on the bridge.  So that was real honor because absolutely no one was allowed to sit in the captain’s chair while he was on the bridge, and yet I was afforded this great honor and was able to sit in the captain’s chair and to chat with him as we saw the icebergs float by and watched the Maersk Master drag them out of the way and save our lives. 

And he also cheered with delight when I was chosen by the crew to be the ship’s Santa Claus, because we were out there at sea over Christmas.  So we couldn’t go home for Christmas and we still had a few weeks to go until we were going to be able to see land.  That was not going to be until around mid-January and we were going to be going into port in the Falkland Islands, which is another story. 

But at any rate, just imagine the only African-American woman anywhere in the southern ocean being chosen to be Santa Claus, complete with a Santa hat that they gave me and a Santa coat and a big pillow so I could have a little Santa belly.  Then I had the most wonderful time going all around the ship as Santa giving away my little gifts to all the people on the ship. 

So I just wanted to share this story about overcoming fear of someone who is completely different from you.  I thought about telling this story particularly in the wake of the U.S. presidential election and so many of us are thinking about these kinds of things these days. 

Now, when I got off the ship after that first expedition, I was way more confident, I was way more aware of different kinds of people, I was even more adventurous.  And I would see Macel several more times over the course of about three years as I continued to work on that scientific drill vessel. 

But after I left working on the vessel to go back to school for my PhD, I would never see Macel ever again.  I've not seen him again.  But that first friendship with him taught me so much.  It was so special, gave me so much confidence, and it has actually stayed with me throughout my entire professional life.  It’s been a real, real treasure and of course it will continue to stay with me.  And so it can be for those of us who go down to the sea in ships for science. 

I thank you very much and wish you happy holidays.