A Whirlwind Ride to the Deep End of the Ocean and Back

“Blue Frontier,” by David Helvarg, is about everything oceanic, and it rolls along at a pace that would do justice to the fastest fish in the ocean, which is probably the bluefin tuna. The book opens with Helvarg describing a California surfing experience in which he gets whacked in the neck by a longboard, goes to the hospital for a CT scan, thinks that 50 really isn’t too old to be surfing but realizes he’ll miss it and the Pacific because he has to move to Washington “for work and other reasons.”

The “other reasons” seem to be interviewing absolutely everybody who has ever had anything to do with the ocean, any ocean, from Elliot Richardson (on the subject of “The Law of the Sea”) to Don Walsh (co-pilot of the Trieste, the submersible that set and still holds the record for deep diving--35,800 feet to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in 1960) to Julie Packard (whose father, David, built the Monterey Bay Aquarium), and that’s only in the opening chapter. The subtitle of the book is “Saving America’s Living Seas,” and Helvarg addresses that subject (and myriad others), but before he does, he takes us on the ultimate wave, cresting and carrying us at breakneck speed, introducing one subject after another, bound together by two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen. It’s a fast, watery ride, and you’re going to get wet before it’s over.

By Chapter 2 (“From Sea to Shining Sea”), we meet the pilgrims who landed at Cape Cod, John Paul Jones, New England cod fishermen, Yankee whalers, California gold miners, Walter Reed, J.P. Morgan, Clarence Birdseye, Ed Ricketts, William Beebe, Harry Bridges, FDR and Helvarg’s grandmother. Does all this meeting and greeting have a purpose? It probably does, but the landscape is going by so fast (sorry to mix terrestrial and marine metaphors) that you can hardly ever see the forest for the trees, or the currents for the waves.

Helvarg’s high-speed chase is actually useful, for the problems of the oceans are pressing, critical and universal. It’s not clear to me what his visit to the Antarctic Peninsula has to do with “America’s seas,” but he recognizes the inter-connectedness of all oceans, and he writes, “Antarctica’s Southern Ocean and America’s Blue Frontier are more closely linked than we imagine.” Two weeks after his Antarctic adventure, he is in New York, at a meeting of the Alliance of Small Island States (Fiji, Samoa and Micronesia), discussing rising sea levels, and he quickly brings the good ship “Blue Frontier” about and fetches up in Miami. Give us a chance to dry out, David.

No such luck. We’re off to California, Chesapeake Bay, Sea Bright, N.J., Savannah, Ga., and Washington, D.C., so we can talk to various congresspersons about what they’re doing about the ocean’s problems, and then we’re in Seaside, Fla., where the Jim Carrey movie “The Truman Show” was shot, “although it was altered [by computer graphics] for the film.” It seems that Seaside survived Hurricane Opal because the houses were built behind the dunes, unlike many older, more traditional beach houses, which are often washed into the sea.

Your eyes are also going to glaze over from acronyms. Much of what he discusses is either military or governmental, and you know how those folks love their acronyms. You already know about NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency), but how about SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System)? ROV (Remote Operated Vehicle)? LOS (Law of the Sea)? EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone)? And JAMESTEK? (It’s actually supposed to be JAMSTEC, and it stands for Japan Marine Science & Technology Center.) Obviously, acronyms are useful; you wouldn’t want to have to read “National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency” every time, when NOAA (pronounced “Noah,” by the way) would do, but the profusion of capital letters on virtually every page only increases the frenetic feeling you get reading the text.

Helvarg finally brings us ashore at Point Lobos State Park south of Monterey. As he looks over the ocean from a cliff, he writes, “Our waters remain rich in potential adrenaline jolts and revelations, in waves that call to be ridden, winds made to snap a sail, shells newly tossed upon the shore, sunsets not to be believed.” Yes, they do, but they also offer tranquillity and the opportunity to contemplate what we’ve done and where we’re going. For all its rushing hither and yon, “Blue Frontier” introduces the problems, the people and the acronyms that we should all be concerned about. But meeting an admiral, an engineer, a shark researcher, a fisherman, and a conservationist, or recognizing that Winslow Homer was “perhaps America’s greatest maritime artist,” does little to hammer home the essential point: The oceans have produced us, and in the oceans lies our salvation. We bespoil our salvation at our peril.

Richard Ellis is the author of “Imagining Atlantis” and the forthcoming “Aquagenesis: The Origin and Evolution of Life in the Sea.”