But when I was seventeen, he was still a mystery, more remote than even my father. And somehow that book—that miserable, dull, wonderful book—had encompassed him, too.
“Your brother Greg even went to Greenwich to see the clock,” he said.
“He did what?”
Asking my father to repeat himself is always a risky venture. He will usually do so but with an increase in volume and exasperation. I was fairly certain I’d heard him right the first time—still, I wanted to hear it again.
“HE WENT TO GREENWICH,” my father yelled into the phone, “TO SEE THE DAMN CLOCK.”
At that precise moment, I made a promise to myself. I was going to take a page from that magnificently droll book our father loved, and I was going to go to Greenwich to see that dreadful clock. I was going to walk the same path that my brother Greg had, and then tell our father about it.
And I was going to love every excruciating minute of it.
My motivations had nothing to do with Harrison’s clock. I just wanted to feel a connection to my dad and brother. I wanted the three of us to be tied together by something besides our tendency to scowl, and this clock offered me that opportunity. I was determined to make us all part of the same story. Even if it was the most boring story in the damn world.
It would take me a while to get there. Rand’s work often brought us to London, but we’d be preoccupied with other obligations or would just be stopping through.
But on a chilly fall day in 2009, deluded by my own sense of determination (and my recent excursion to Roosevelt Island, where I did not die), I decided that I would see John Harrison’s clock. With singular focus, I marched out of our hotel with my camera, a London Underground pass, and as usual, a dim understanding of precisely where I was going.
Remember: Google had yet to take dominion over the known world. I didn’t have GPS tracking or a satellite-enhanced layout of the city—I just had a handful of hastily written directions scribbled on hotel room stationery, which is a daunting prospect for anyone and a potentially disastrous one for me. I considered leaving Rand a goodbye note, decided that was too melodramatic, and instead ate an entire package of cookies the conference organizers had left for him in our hotel room. This gesture would serve as my farewell to the love of my life, in the event that I never made it back.
Supposedly, the clock was in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, which, according to their website, is “only 8 minutes by train from London Bridge.”
Over the next two hours, this claim would mock me repeatedly.
Despite this boast about how damn close the museum was to central London, I found very few additional directions on the National Maritime Museum’s website. It does not help that, for an American, most English addresses are a woefully confusing string of ridiculous phrases and random characters.
Behold:
4 Butthole Lane
Shepshed
Loughborough
Charnwood
Leicestershire
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
LE12 9BN
(This is, I kid you not, a real address.)
Add a bit of jetlag, and you’ll see why I considered it a coup that I managed to make it out of my hotel room.
The maps at the Tube station closest to my hotel were equally unhelpful, but I noticed that the last stop listed for one of the lines was “North Greenwich.” Since I knew that the museum was in Greenwich, I figured it was a safe bet to head in that direction.
I will now bestow upon you an important piece of information, one that I did not have before my trip began. North Greenwich and Greenwich are not, in fact, the same place.
Remember that, will you? It will come in handy later.
If you’ve never traveled on London’s subway, it’s not unlike being a gerbil run through a maze, except there’s no one there to hand you delicious pellets when you go the right way. At least, I don’t think there is. I’ve never done anything but go the wrong way down there, so positive reinforcement has never been a factor.
I took the train from Tottenham Station, transferred at Waterloo (ensuring that the ABBA song of the same name would be stuck in my head for the next three years), and hopped on a second train that would take me to North Greenwich.
I arrived there without incident, which would have been wonderful, had I been in the right place, but the lack of people wearing commemorative “John Harrison’s stupid clock” hats soon told me that I was not. I consulted a schematic on a nearby wall and found that once you reach a certain spot on the line, the map changes and suddenly includes a whole bunch of other, previously unlisted stops.
Among them was a stop marked “Greenwich.”
To get there, I would need to get back on the line I was on and take it one more stop to Canary Wharf, where I would transfer to something called the DLR. That, eventually, would take me to Greenwich.
Of course, all this was resting on the assumption that the museum was actually at the Greenwich stop.
I suppose at this point, it would have been wise and rational to ask someone for help, or buy a proper map, or do anything, really, besides turning around and jumping back on the train from which I’d just stepped off.
But I’d gotten this far without being wise and rational, and it seemed a risky venture to start now. So I climbed back onto my train and took it one more stop to Canary Wharf. The name brought up thoughts of adorable little birds and, phonetically at least, one of my favorite Star Trek characters, but let me be the first to share the disappointing news that neither is present in this place.
It is, for the most part, a rather desolate Tube stop in a very corporate area. I walked through it, looking for the connection to the DLR, which I soon found out stood for “Docklands Light Railroad,” a train service whose official slogan is, I’m fairly certain: “Located nowhere near Canary Wharf.”
I walked across several long plains of cement, looking for the DLR. There was not a soul in sight, and as I wandered, I started to wonder, as I often do. What would happen if I never made it back home? Is there irony in losing time to search for a clock?
Just as my worries began to reach a fever pitch, I caught sight of the DLR stop and was able to catch the next train. My confidence was renewed.
That feeling lasted for approximately ninety seconds, until a voice over the PA system announced that the car I was presently sitting in needed to be repaired, and we had to vacate it at the next stop.
Really? NOW? It couldn’t make one more stop without falling apart?
At this point, I was beginning to suffer the sort of break with reality that happens to all tourists, that causes us to think that paying $18 for a gelato is totally reasonable, or that we really, really need a foam cheddar top hat.
It was in this fragile state that I stepped off the train and watched it lurch on, empty, as I and a few other poor souls stood stranded at a wayward, aboveground stop.
Do you remember that part of Return of the Jedi where Vader tells Luke that he’s his father and chops off his hand? (My apologies if I just included a decades-old spoiler there, but seriously, what have you been doing with your life?) And Luke’s just dangling off of some piece of metal at the bottom of Cloud City, and the audience sort of collectively thinks, “Welp, you’re screwed, Skywalker. That is not a highly trafficked area.”
It felt a little like that.
By the time the replacement train slid up to the station, I was somewhat delirious. I took it to Greenwich.
Which was not the right stop.
Turns out that the museum is actually at Cutty Sark, which is directly before the Greenwich stop. There is an incredibly useful map that indicates this (and even includes a cute little icon with a tiny boat on it) but, for reasons that totally escape me, it is only posted at Greenwich and not before. It’s a charming way of saying, “Congratulations, you cocked up.”
So I found the DLR heading in the opposite direction, went back the way I came, and
got off at Cutty Sark, a shell of the person I once was.
There were, conveniently, signs everywhere indicating that I was in the right place.
I stopped by a small bakery and got a snack, a preemptive move against any low-blood-sugar-induced crying fits, and asked the man behind the counter where I could find the museum.
“Just follow that road,” he said, pointing at an unspecific path in the distance. “You can’t miss it.”
I very much wanted to grab the front of his shirt and hiss, “Sir, you have no idea how easily I can miss things.”
Instead, though, I just nodded and took a bite of my focaccia, which was excellent.
Miraculously, he was right about the path in addition to making totally decent bread. I followed the road he’d indicated, turned a corner, and there it was: the National Maritime Museum. The building was massive, white, and stately, with enormous columns in front and giant anchors flanking the wide walkway to the front door. It was a lovely place, I thought, for Harrison’s clock to reside.
I walked through the front doors and found an information desk behind which a pleasant-looking older woman sat.
“Could you please direct me to John Harrison’s clock?” I asked, trying my best to conceal both my excitement and exhaustion at the odyssey that had led me there.
“Oh, I’m afraid it’s not here,” she said.
Now, I suspect that in the history of Maritime Museums, there have been relatively few instances when a guest has become entirely unhinged and has gone around smashing exhibits, kicking interactive displays, and making some very graphic threats involving sextants, but there, on that day, I came very, very close.
The woman must have read my expression—a mix of incredulity, disappointment, and constipation (after all, we’d been in London for a few days by then)—and quickly explained that the clock was located not far from where we were, at the Royal Observatory.
“You can’t miss it,” she said.
Exhausted, I roamed around the museum for a bit. It has all manner of objects and artifacts pertaining to British Naval History. (It mostly tells the story of old white men in boats. If you can’t make it there, don’t fret. There are 286 other museums in the UK that focus on this exact same topic. Seriously.) I wandered around for twenty minutes or so before the realization hit me that I could, indeed, miss it: I had no idea when the observatory closed.
Petrified that I’d have traveled all this way only to meet a locked door, I ran out the front doors and up the adjacent hill, at the top of which stood the Royal Observatory and, supposedly, Harrison’s clock. But all this was hypothetical: at this point in time, I believed nothing and trusted no one.
The hill was deceptively steep, and I rushed up it so quickly, I noticed that a few heads turned as I passed. I looked like someone who needed astronomy, very urgently.
I reached the top, gasping for air. I was there. After two hours and numerous trains and not nearly enough of an intake in calories, I had arrived. And just in time, too. I paid my admission and reached the front door just as a guided tour was beginning—the only one of the day. I stood sweaty and disbelieving my timing could have been so perfect.
Everyone had been right. I couldn’t miss it.
The guide, a blonde woman with a square jaw and twinkling eyes, seemed genuinely delighted with her work. We began in the courtyard out front, which was bisected by a line laid into the cement—the Prime Meridian. This was the home of Greenwich Mean Time.
She led us into Flamsteed House—a large, tawny, brick structure, with a dome observatory in the center of its roof and told us the history of the building. Parts of it dated back to 1675; it was built by order of King Charles II. One massive octagonal room had been designed with the express purpose of observing astronomical events and planetary movement, but it was never used as such. The builder had failed to align any of the walls with a meridian, making positional observation impossible from its vantage point.
It was in this lovely and useless place that she told us the history of John Harrison. It had been more than a decade since I’d read the story, but I was amazed at how many of the gloriously boring details came back to me. How Harrison had created five timepieces in total, and how the second-to-last one—the H4, as it was called—kept extraordinary accuracy, running slow by less than a second over the course of an entire day. How the Board of Longitude kept insisting that the success of Harrison’s clock was a fluke and refused to pay him the reward money. How they kept the H4 for so long that Harrison got fed up and built a fifth and final clock. How the king himself eventually stepped in and awarded the prize to Harrison, who by then was in his seventies.
Every. Boring. Detail. It all came rushing back. I hadn’t felt that sort of wonder and ennui since I was seventeen.
At the end of the tour, we entered a small gallery, and there he was on the wall—or a portrait of him, at least—the same one that had graced the cover of my schoolbook all those years before.
And even further in were all of Harrison’s clocks. The early iterations, giant rectangular contraptions of gears and springs and cogs, looking like Industrial Revolution–era cuckoo clocks. And lastly, I saw the H4, the clock that won the Longitude Prize, humbly resting in a glass case. For reasons of preservation, it was not wound but was perfectly still and silent.
That fucking clock. It was just sitting there.
After such a long, strange trip, I suppose our meeting could only have been uneventful. Unsure of whether to laugh or scream, I took out my camera, and despite the many, many signs to the contrary, I snapped a few surreptitious photos before I was scolded by a security guard and pretended not to understand English.
And then I left.
The trip back to the hotel was relatively short. I almost knew where I was going and at no point did my train randomly stop, leaving me stranded in some forgotten corner of outer London. I dozed a little, jet lag finally catching up with me, and I managed not to miss my stop.
As I walked backed to the hotel, I found that my mood had fallen with the denouement of my adventure. I shouldn’t have felt disappointed—I’d gone looking for a clock, and I’d found one. The problem was that I wasn’t as impermeable as I’d imagined. I’d inadvertently forged the belief that somehow, upon seeing the clock, the piece of my life that was my father would fall into place. That he would be transformed into someone happy and affectionate who wore sweater vests if I just tried hard enough and went far enough and looked at that clock long enough. That once I made my pilgrimage, he’d be transformed into someone he was not, someone he could not be.
It was the same lesson that I’d been struggling with all along: I needed to accept things for what they were. The clock wasn’t there to fix my life or to heal the longing that resided in my throat any more than falling in love could cure depression or give me six-pack abs. It’s a clock. If you demand more of it than that, you will invariably be disappointed.
Ultimately, I was able to regard it for what it was: a rather remarkable invention in its own right. It had helped detect true longitude and changed the way humans circumnavigated the globe. This clock helped travelers find their way. When viewed in that light, it was nothing short of incredible.
Later than evening, I met up with Rand and some friends of ours. They asked me about my day, and I told them the saga of the subway, of my father and John Harrison and that wonderful, horrible clock. And as I sat there, obviously boring them with irrelevant details about ancient timepieces, it occurred to me that the thing I’d wanted since I was a teenager—to have my father be part of the mundanity of my everyday life—had happened. In that instant, he wasn’t remote or distant. He had been the catalyst for my travels across London, for my being haunted by a timepiece for a decade and a half.
In light of this, when I was asked whether the clock was worth seeing, my answer was an unequivocal yes. For me, it certainly had been worth it.
“You just have to accept it for what it is,” I said.
If you do that, you’ll never be disappointed.
6
YOU TAKE THE GRENADE MY MOM BROUGHT TO DINNER; I’LL BOOK OUR FLIGHT—FINDING BALANCE IN RELATIONSHIPS
NONE OF IT WOULD HAVE happened—not the blog, not the family connections, not my pitiful but still valiant attempt at understanding cardinal directions—without Rand. It’s no surprise he was the one who gave me the guiding ethos to make me less afraid of travel, and of the world in general. He brought a sort of harmony to my life that wasn’t there before. I don’t really remember what things were like without him. When I try to think of it, I mostly picture screaming and burning buildings and wild dogs.
He taught me that a good relationship requires balance. A certain give-and-take between two people who find that the world makes more sense when they are together than when they’re apart. When I perform autopsies on my failed love affairs, it becomes apparent that balance was missing.
A lot of other things were missing, too. Empathy. Patience. A shared understanding of what the word “monogamy” means.
Then I met Rand. He is the perfect counterpoint to all that I am.
As you may have gathered by now, I am not a calm person. If I ever look distracted, it is because I am planning out an escape route in case whatever building I am in spontaneously combusts, or I’m looking for something to cling to in the event that gravity suddenly reverses itself. At times I am neither rational nor logical because fear and anxiety have taken over. It’s as if my brain is a frightened, angry baboon. You cannot get the baboon to relax, because it will lunge for your jugular. You do not tell it to calm down, because baboons do not tend to understand English. Instead, you give it a snack, and if you have enough presence of mind, you lace said snack with THC. And then you carefully back away.
Stoned baboon is the best we can hope for.
I am a neurotic worrier. I obsess about things. I hold grudges. I’m basically Larry David, if he were raised by Don Corleone from The Godfather. (Just when I think I’m out… I need to run back inside and make sure I didn’t leave the iron on.) If I married someone like me, our tombstone (after years of nervous, panicked marriage) would read: “DID YOU REMEMBER TO PAY THE ELECTRIC BILL?”
All Over the Place Page 8