In Cold War years this submarine slid through the ocean with a crew of around 60. Later she became a training ship, and now she's a museum at Portsmouth, NH. The shell looks smooth until you notice the slight concavity of the hull plates, pressed against the ship's skeleton by thousands of tons of water.
The submarine seems huge until you squeeze through the oval door and descend the narrow ladder to crawl between pipes and pumps and machinery through the interior. This ship was not built for humans. It's full of engines and equipment and filtration machinery. Passageways are narrow. The crew's bunks are stacked six high between pipes and posts and gauges, where men slept in a space the size of a coffin with the ocean pressing down on them.
A young officer leads us through the metal maze, and I can barely scrape through the narrow passages. I get the impression that the lower decks are even more cramped than where we are. We are told that when the ship is submerged, the air is circulated endlessly, for weeks and months on end. Right now, it smells of oil and metal and old, unused machinery.
We see the radar equipment, and the head, and a tiny shower, and pass more clusters of bunks, squeezed between the entrails of the ship. “It takes a special type of person to be a submariner,” the young officer says, and we all agree. Finally, we are at the rear of the boat, where we squeeze into the sunlight and the salty air of Portsmouth. I breathe deeply and walk away from this black ship that roamed the oceans for twenty years.
