Sailor’s stories are often full of adventure and high drama, hell, that’s why we like to read them. Think of Shackleton and Bligh or the novels of Melville, Conrad and Jack London to name just a few. What isn’t always talked about (though I believe I have addressed in the past) is the hum drum day to day that is the reality of most working seamen. The days that bleed seamlessly into one another, each virtually identical to its predecessor and its successor. Where time becomes elastic and viscous and, as Raymond Chandler, that great master of anthrpomorphization once described, the minutes go by on tip toes with their fingers to their mouths. There is nothing wrong with this other then it is not particularly riveting to read of second hand and, as we have just had a run of days like these, it is possible for those living them, to get lulled into a certain sense of complacency which is dangerous on a ship, where, as we all well know, shit can go south in a hurry.
The weather has been complicit in casting this miasma of ennui upon us. Out on Lake Superior the first mate Maks showed me the logbook within which we must make hourly entries, and the barometric pressure had remained unchanged at 1021 mbar’s for over 30 hours.
‘I’ve never seen that before,’ he said. I hadn’t either. In my experience Lake Superior has always been, if not the most temperamental of the Lakes, certainly the most violent. Yet the last few days she’s been a pussycat. No wind. Pleasant temperature. Even out in the middle, where a chill usually descends, it was warm enough for me to run shirtless up and down the deck while the water’s surface remained flat as a goldfish pond.
What should have been a quick discharge of coal (we only had 16 000 tons on board, not a lot for us) turned into a marathon 40-hour unload in the Soo, as the ground crew at Essar Steel milked the unload for all it is was worth over the holiday long weekend, thereby earning themselves double, and on the Monday, triple pay. Staring into the cargo hold and watching the powdered coal run out through the open gates below I couldn’t help but think I was staring into an an enormous time piece that measured time not in minutes or seconds but in excruciatingly slow hours. Down in the tunnel, the belt which runs the cargo off the ship was running at only 30%.
‘I can walk faster than it,’ said one of the deck hands, laughing.
We were at the mercy of the dock personnel as we can only run our belts as fast as theirs are ashore. Our coal runs off our boom into a hopper abeam of the ship (think of an enormous funnel) which then drops the cargo onto a belt and runs it one km’s distance to the coal fields.
‘Let them milk it,’ said another crew member, ‘we can stay all month for all I care.’
‘No, it smells here,’ said another.
‘Typical union guys,’ said another, ‘get paid more money to do less work.’
‘Fuckin’ Soo-billies,’ he added.
We finally got out of there and made a trip across Superior for iron ore and now we’re bound for Meldrum Bay followed by an unexpected and rare trip up the Saginaw River in Michigan.
The queen is dead. Strange words to write when not in relation to my favourite album by the Smiths. Yesterday, news of the her death dominated the TV screen in the crew mess and will continue to do so in the days to come. Whatever my feelings, throughout my life, throughout all our lives, she has been a constant. Time, and ergo history, are a train. We get on once, and we get off once, and if we’re lucky we get a decent ride and to hopefully forge some close relationships and choose something meaningful to do along the way. The Queen got off at her stop yesterday after a long, long ride, and while as the possessor of Canadian, Maltese and British citizenships, I UTTERLY reject the institution she stood for, I have to admire and respect the dignity and poise she maintained throughout her reign, throughout a life which she did not choose for herself but was instead, foist upon her.
As my friend Sadie Hasler wrote:
‘She did what she felt it was her duty to do, for decades, and I doubt anyone distrusted her belief, her intentions or her constancy. I’m not sure many people born into such extreme privilege could have borne or used it quite so well.’
Later, on the navigation bridge, it was a particularly black night. We were downbound on the St. Marys River. There was none of the usual banter which helps pass the time and it was mostly silent except for the mates helm orders and the usual VHF chatter. A wave of lethargy seemed to have overtaken us all and as if to confirm it a yawn cascaded down through the ranks, starting with the captain, then the mate, followed by me at the wheel. This drowsy chorus continued for the duration of my watch.
At any time at sea, fallow or fair, I look forward to going to bed in a way I never would ashore. I can remember many of my old bunks on other ships as I remember old friends, my favourites being the most enclosed, the most coffin-like, as on sailing vessels they often are. The tighter the walls are around me the more secure I feel and the sounder I sleep, however perverse that may seem. I recall freezing hours out on deck or being slammed around in mountainous seas in the middle of the Atlantic or worked to the point of exhaustion, when what kept me going was the excitement of retiring to my bunk. Even now, it is no different, and I can’t wait to crawl into my bed and wrap myself in a carapace of company-issued quilt. To lie there safe and warm and listen to the main engines thrum, to feel it’s vibrations judder through the hull and the constant motion of the sea beneath me. To unpack my days and eventually let my eyelids slide closed like the blinds on a passenger jet’s windows,
‘To sleep, perchance to dream…’
And my, what a lively collection of glimmering beauties I have gathered lately. Good, for the most part, with the exception of last night’s in which Tom Waits and I were looking for a home to shelter the menagerie of animals that had taken to following us. Dogs, cats, squirrels, skunks and racoons, had all joined our merry retinue, and we were their benevolent pied pipers. We found a prospective home, a dilapidated old brick number which seemed suitable until I went up a spiral staircase off of which was a bedroom with unmade bunk beds, dirty sheets and a blue shag carpet. The room was dim, lit to a crepuscular glow. There were no eviscerated bodies here. No gore, nor ghost or ghoul but inside that room I felt the most oppressive and powerful evil I have ever felt. It drove me from it as like-poled magnets repel one another. I woke up nauseous and soaked in sweat.
‘Ay, there’s the rub!’
This discomfiting episode could be attributable to my having just read Joyce Carol Oates disturbing latest “Babysitter’ as in the following dream I was the lackey to a post-colonial African dictator and I have just taken up Chinua Achebe’s ‘Anthills of the Savannah.’
I have been lucky in my life to have been given advice on writing by some very talented and successful writers, most of which I have assiduously followed but for one morsel which was,
‘don’t write about your dreams, they’re only interesting to you.’
Perhaps this is true, and if so, I apologize, but as my dream life is so rich out here, and there being little else to report, and as the act of writing these dispatches is by its very nature a solitary and often solipsistic exercise, I am unable to resist.
Soon enough, the weather will turn, and the days and the work will grow harder. Complacency is the devil in any workplace but let us hope that any serious drama eludes us. While it might not make for good copy it certainly makes for steadier nerves. My mother had a colleague years ago at the Toronto Zoo, who even in summer wore a glove on her left hand. I asked my mum why this was and she told me it had been this woman’s job to feed the lions. Every day she would follow numerous safety protocols in dishing out the food until one day she bypassed one of them and, despite the iron bars that separated them, a lioness took her left hand.
‘In a way it is nice to know that they are still wild and their instincts are still there,’ said my mother rather candidly, though not lacking compassion, her sympathies lie firmly, as mine do, in the lions corner.
Meanwhile, for now, this is the life I have chosen, for better or for worse.
Wizened, not wise-end, each morning the sailor makes his bed. Each night he can’t wait to lie in it.