A Fateful NIght

As this last Thursday began to turn into yet another day with nothing to do, I decided to make a trip up to Long Beach. One of my stops was visiting the Queen Mary, which is currently featuring an exhibit of artifacts from the RMS Titanic. I haven't been to the Queen Mary since I was nine or ten, so I was looking forward to seeing the ship again. I started out in the Engine Room of the Queen Mary at the Titanic Exhibit. At the beginning you are given a boarding pass, and on the back is the name and info of a passenger who was on the Titanic the night it sank. Mine belonged to a 22 year old girl whose name was Helen Ragnhild Otsby, who was traveling with her father. They were on their way home from a European and North African tour, and most recently Egypt. They were both in 1st class. It also said that the pair always traveled on the ships of the White Star Line, and were looking forward to comparing the Titanic to the other ships they'd been on.

So, I began wandering the exhibit. There was all sorts of artifacts like port holes, a giant iron wrench that was all eaten away, nuts, bolts and all sorts of tools. There were pieces of jewelry, some clothing, an old leather trunk, and a lot of porcelain dishes and glasses. There was a whole display of money that was recovered, coins from all over the world and a really interesting array of paper money from various places, but mostly from the U.S., both federal and privately printed bills. The standardization of paper money in the U.S. didn't come for a couple more years after the Titanic sank. The most astonishing artifacts they had were two bottles, one of champagne and the other of an unidentified liquid. Both bottles were sealed and full.

There was a room in the exhibit that really freaked me out. It was an open room, with a walkway that went around three sides, and a smell of salt water. I glanced over the rail of the walkway....and saw a giant propeller. Some people might not know this about me, but I am terrified of depths. I have a very very hard time looking at pictures of shipwrecks or thinking about things like the Marianas Trench. The movie "The Abyss" actually didn't bother me much, but the movie "Titanic" did at the parts where they showed the ship breaking up under water and sinking into the depths. I think that it is the only thing that scares me more that spiders. I took one look at that propeller and freaked out. I stared at the wall next to me and ran through the room to the next room. This next one was only slightly better after a shock like I'd had. It was very dark, with simulated stars all over the ceiling and a giant slab of ice against one wall. You could walk up to it and touch it. It was like standing on the deck of the Titanic and touching the iceberg as it slid by.

Well, I finished up the exhibit finally and at the end was a wall with the passenger manifest, both the survivors and those lost when the Titanic went down. I found Helen Otsby on the list of survivors. Both she and her father made it back to New York. I kinda felt relieved, but still freaked out by the whole experience. When I left the exhibit and went around to the entrance for the tour of the Queen Mary, I saw that it went back down towards the engine room again. I decided to go home. My revisit with the Queen Mary will have to wait till another day. I now have a deeper appreciation for the fate of the Titanic and the folly of its creators in thinking that they could possibly conquer the sea.