I Can’t Take the Pressure Anymore…
Full disclosure: I’ve been a ‘Constant Reader’ of Stephen King ever since I first gobbled ‘Salem’s Lot in 1976 (it’s still the only book that’s kept me awake at night). I find that as I finish my novel (Marker Bed) and try to convince myself that yes, I might actually be able to write something of value, I find that I’ve been re-reading many of my favorite authors — Clavell, Tolkien, Michener, Herbert (Frank and Brian), Adams (Richard), Clancy… and King of course — in the hopes of gaining a bit of understanding of how a story can — and should — be told. Probably a fool’s errand in my case, but so it goes.
I’m going through The Langoliers again (a short story in Four After Midnight), and just hit the part where the destruction of Craig Toomy’s psyche is compared to a fish rising from the depths of the ocean; ultimately exploding from the loss of hydrostatic pressure on its body. As usual with Mr. King, it’s a graphic and vivid image. Try as I might, I’ll never get anywhere close.
As a lad, my father — an avid fisherman — used to take me out to the lake or the pier or the boat to snag whatever was available. He excelled at (almost) everything he tried to do, and decimating fish was no exception. I could go on and on about the quantity of trout and catfish we pulled from the lakes of Nebraska where I grew up — one overflowing washtub of each was the usual catch my mom got to clean after her boys got home from a long day on the water. (The 50s mindset was surely different, but — IMHO — equality and respect are both so much more appropriate in these “woke” days of modern times.)
Be that as it may, after we moved to the west coast his love for anything that smelled like fish continued unabated. One of my clearest memories from my early teens is of the deep-sea rock fish pulled onto the ‘Party Boat’; eyes bulging from their faces and their guts coming out of their mouths — I can remember wondering how they ever found girlfriends or boyfriends looking like they did.
Pressure (and/or the lack thereof) affects us in much the same way, and while few of us dive deep enough to experience the potentially uncomfortable reality of water pressure, we do get a chance to feel it in the air. Consider the popping of your ears when going over a 14,000-foot pass in the Rockies, or how a bag of potato chips — usually sealed much closer to sea level — will puff up like a swollen ankle with even a small increase in elevation.
As a practical lesson, I used to give each of my Hydrosphere students a balloon before leaving for our yearly Spring field trip to Crater Lake. Their assignment was to blow up their balloon (at an elevation of 960 feet in the science building at Grants Pass High School) with just enough air so it would expand and pop when we got to the rim (at just over 7000 feet). Whoever’s balloon exploded closest to the top would get a 5-point Free Question Coupon. (These were eagerly coveted by one and all — I was accused of giving tough exams, yet it’s amazing how many made it through with an A or B.)
(As an aside: High school kids surely get a bad rap. In my experience, I found that all it took was getting them into the room, and then treating them with the same level of respect that we all hope to get. The respect part was surely challenging at times, but getting them to show up was easy — I made it my mission to act as crazy and unpredictable as possible. The idea was that they’d say things to each other like “What’s that idiot going to do today?” as they decided where to go next. If I could get ‘em inside the door (instead of skipping out to Dutch Bros.), the biggest part of the battle was already over.)
Anyway, we have air pressure of 14.7 pounds per square inch at sea level (called one (1) “bar”). This is from the weight of the atmosphere (it may be invisible, but the gasses still have mass). So, if you go up in elevation there are fewer air molecules above you and therefore less pressure beating on your body. It’s the same if you go to a lower elevation — think Death Valley or the Dead Sea. Now there are more air molecules above you, so the atmospheric pressure is greater.
Most of us have taken some sort of flight into the upper atmosphere, and appreciate the necessity of a pressurized cabin (even if we don’t listen as the flight attendant demonstrates the use of the air bag). Many of us have also seen “Goldfinger” with Sean Connery (still the only Bond, at least in my mind), and can graphically understand what happens when the internal cabin pressure is violated.
It’s even more exciting in space, where there is no air at all — consider what happened in “Outland” (again with Connery, but he wasn’t a James in this one), when a pressure suit is breached and the inside of the glass helmet turns a vibrant shade of red.
(Another teachable moment in Hydrosphere, and a traditional ten-point essay question on the final: Two guys — one on Mt. Everest and the other in Death Valley — are making some Mac ‘n Cheese. Who gets to add their noodles to the boiling water first, and who ends up with the tastiest meal? And — for full points — explain why, of course. I could answer this one for you, but I think I’ll let you figure it out for yourself. Comment me with the right answer and I’ll slide you a Free Question Coupon.)
But you can puzzle this out on your own time — for now, let’s head back to the beach. This whole pressure thing works the same way in water, but the effects of ‘hydrostatic pressure’ are ever so much greater, simply because water weighs more than air does.
(B.T.W.: Hydrostatic means that the water pressure is equal in all directions. So… going to great depth won’t “squash a man as flat as a windowpane” (as suggested in The Langoliers — sorry SK, you got this one wrong, although I still think Udaman), but there’s still a cost: hydrostatic pressure would shrink you into ‘Mimi-Me’, just like in Austin Powers. In rocks, a similar type of confining pressure is called ‘lithostatic’, and in the air this “equal in all directions” stress is simply called ‘atmospheric pressure’. It may sound and look weird, but this is the way nature does it.)
As it turns out, for every thirty-three feet in depth, the water pressure goes up by one (1) bar. So, at thirty-three feet below sea level there are two (2) bars of pressure on your body — one from the air and another from the water. Dive another thirty-three feet and now you have nearly forty-five pounds of pressure pushing on your eardrums.
You will likely start to feel this — probably not debilitating yet, but dive down another thirty-three feet. Now at a depth of one hundred feet, you are surrounded by nearly sixty pounds per square inch (and you’d better believe that you’d feel this one). How about the bottom of the ocean in the Challenger Deep? Its depth of 35,994.1 feet translates into just over 16,000 lbs/in2… and there are things living down there!
Consider a whale. Since they’re mammals, they need to access the top of the water to breath, but they have an incredible pressure range and can dive between breaths to some pretty extreme depths. (If you’re into records, a pod of Cuvier’s beaked whales off California were reported to have reached a depth of 9816 feet. That’s a change from 14.7 lbs/in2 at the surface to 4387 lbs/in2 when they started back up. I don’t care whether you credit God or Darwin, but nature sure is amazing!)
As you might suspect, we humans just aren’t designed to survive such a broad range of pressures. Ask any SCUBA diver about what’s called “the bends.” The short version is simple: as a diver goes deeper, the increasing pressure squeezes the nitrogen and other gasses dissolved in their blood. As they ascend and come back towards the surface, the gasses (especially the nitrogen) expand and put pressure on the surrounding bones and tissues.
Since the blood is everywhere and most constricted in the joints, a diver’s arms and legs start to twist as the pressure builds (hence the name). In extreme cases, the soft tissues — including the brain — can become affected. So, an experienced diver will always try to rise back to the surface gradually so the expansion can take place slow enough to save them the agony of “decompression sickness.”
If they rise too fast (for whatever reason) and begin to feel the bends attacking their joints, a diver can elect to crawl into a “decompression chamber”, return to depth, re-compress the nitrogen, and then ascend at a safer rate.
If you want a graphic example of how this works, read Without Remorse by Tom Clancy. About halfway through the book, the “good guy” tortures Bobby — a drug dealer who murdered his girlfriend — by putting him into a decompression chamber and playing around with the depths. Not a pretty result, but Mr. Kelly was really pissed, and probably for good reason!
Back to Craiggy-weggy one last time before the Langoliers have him for lunch. Poor Mr. Toomy. Pressure comes in many, many forms and from even more places. Some are easy to measure; others, not so much. Craig Toomy’s came from an abusive father and a general susceptibility to madness. Pressure on pilots and astronauts comes from elevation and a reduction (or total loss) of air molecules. Pressure on the whales and rock fish — and SCUBA divers — comes from the water.
Where does yours come from?
