The Engine Room at Full Noise

Big Kev took me down again, and this time we went the whole way, all the levels, right down to the bottom plates where the shaft runs aft into the dark.

I had ear defenders. They helped in the way an umbrella helps in a hurricane. The noise down there is not a sound you hear so much as a condition you are inside of. It arrives through the plates, up your legs, into your chest, and it flattens every other sense. You cannot talk. You cannot think in full sentences. You communicate in gestures and eyebrows and by being pointed at things.

He pointed at a lot of things.

The main engine is fourteen cylinders and roughly the size of a suburban house laid on its side. You do not stand and look at it. You walk along it, the way you walk along a building. Each cylinder head is above head height. The connecting rods, when you see them through an inspection port doing their slow enormous stroke, move at a speed that feels wrong for something that large.

The turbochargers are the part I came for. He had promised me a turbo the size of a cathedral, and while that was hyperbole, it was not by as much as you would think. Each one is taller than I am. I once fitted a turbocharger to a Mazda Miata in a garage over three weekends and was extremely pleased with myself. I described this to Kev in the engine control room afterwards, over coffee, with the door shut and the noise reduced to a hum.

He listened, nodded seriously, and said, "so, a little one."

Two hours below. Deaf for an hour afterwards. Would go again tomorrow.