I have of late – but wherefore I know not – lost all urge to write, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition as a goodly portion of my self worth is tied up with the simple act of putting pen to paper. The wherefores are unclear. I worry that perhaps I may have broken, or somehow altered, the chemical composition of my brain with SSRI’s and ADHD meds (I have not been taking either for some time), leaving it a sterile promontory, bereft of the words and sentences that used to appear so effortlessly and unannounced from out the ether, when now they must be dragged, kicking and screaming onto every page. It is also possible that after five years of writing dispatches from the ship, detailing the drudgery, the mundanities, the highs and lows and occasionally the excitement of shipboard life, that I am wrung out, uninspired, a vessel – as Auden wrote in his elegy to Yeats – ‘emptied of its poetry’ – it is worthy of note that it is the 26th of May, 2025 and I have not written a poem in over a year. As any of my regular readers will know, I have upped my running game considerably in the last year, quadrupled my weekly kilometers, and I wonder if that effort is taking away from the mental discipline required to sit down and compose. Of course, it could just be a case of good ‘ole fashioned writers block, and after five years of a maintianing a disciplined writing regimen maybe I deserve a bit of a break – not every writer writes all the time afterall – but I am not one to go easy on myself and instead I feel an oppressive weight of the all too familiar guilt. In a moment of comical desperation I expressed my concerns about this writing drought and further neurosies to Chat GPT. Later I messaged a friend,
‘Is it bad to save money on therapy by using Chat GPT? I just expressed some existential concerns and it gave what I thought were very plausible answers.’
‘I think you know the answer to that,’ was her terse response. ‘Therapy isn’t about plausible answers,’ she continued. ‘Its about understanding the bits in between.’
———-
A writer friend of mine Whatsapped me last March,
“You’re in an interesting position [at] this strange moment in history: running back and forth [on the ship] along the border,” he wrote.
It was a week before April 2nd, the date when America’s sweeping tariffs were due to take effect. As a result we were in a hurry to deliver a split load of oats and grain to Toledo, Ohio and Buffalo, New York respectively and it was up in the air as to whether the cargo would be accepted at all if we arrived after the deadline.
Many of the sailors in my industry had made no secret of their admiration for the man down south in the run up to the election. This was not surprising given the mostly unabashed conservatism prevelent across the fleets. After november 4th I watched as some of their comments appeared on social media,
‘AMERICA IS SAVED’ or ‘YAY FUCKIN CANADA NEXT’. I’ve never been under any misapprehension that, as the son of immigrant parents, who grew up solidly middle class in a downtown Toronto neighbourhood and has spent half of his adult life in Europe, that my background wouldn’t inform my sensibilities in comparison to most of my collegues who come from elsewhere in the country, mostly smaller, rural communities. What did surprise me however, was the relish in many of my friends and workmates voices – an enjoyment, an implied unkindness. The man down south seems to appeal to the bro-ier instincts of men, sure, but while they cloak their support in legitimate concern over migration, the economy and identity politics, I fear it’s sometimes just a trojan horse that only conceals deeper prejudices.
At fit out in March, these voices were conspicuously quiet. They were instead replaced by very vocal concern, fear even, for our jobs.
Early into that first rotation, some of the crew were gathered in the mess – a bigger crowd than usual. All eyes glued to the television as the talking heads of economists, politicians and pundits on MNSBC unpacked and discussed the loss of trillions of dollars from the stock market that occurred in a matter of seconds after the man down south’s introduction of international tariffs. I thought it rare to see everybody watching. So silent and with such rapt attention. It felt like a liminal moment. Like we were seeing history actually unfolding in real time before our eyes.
T__ -the off-coming officer of the watch, provided commentary, attempted to provide some positive spin on the tariffs, but despite his pedagogical instinct for pedantry, not even he seemed convinced of the specious claims he was making.
The news feed changed to Kamala Harris who was seen giving a speech to a group of black women in California. Interest in the television began to wane. Chatter flared up.
‘Courage is contagious…’ I overheard her saying above the din of conversation. Just then M____ whirled in like a hurricane off the deck.
‘What’s that fuckin’ bitch doing on TV?’ he said as he plopped down heavily on the sofa.
———
While it may be the aim of the writer of narrative non-fiction to extract drama from the banal, I don’t think I’m being (unnecessarily) dramatic when I say I’m concerned about some nut job with an AR15 picking those of us on deck off, one by one, as the M______ navigates the narrow Maumee River through Toledo, Ohio. I said as much to Denver the first mate.
‘Have you ever thought about it?’ I asked him.
‘Oh I’ve totally thought about it,’ he said. ‘I’ve even thought about what I’d do…I’d dive into one of the cargo bays.’
Denver is as level-headed as they come – a farm kid and a gun owner of solid Presbyterian stock – so it’s a telling fact when mass shootings are so common in the United States that his thoughts are in accordance with my more histrionic notions. For Christ’s sake, shootings are practically a national past time for disgruntled white men down here, and there seemed to be no shortage of them, as our ship sailed upriver with a load of Canadian oats to the odd jeer and chants of
‘USA! USA!’
I looked at the inescapable gauntlet of tall buildings that crowded the north side of the riverbank and the sections of the south bank that were raised and heavily treed. The perfect cover.
‘We’d be sitting ducks,’ I said.
‘I don’t get it,’ said another shipmate later. ‘We’re bringing them food. Why the fuck are they booing us?’
———-
So much has polluted our news cycle since those incidents occurred over a month ago, that it feels like ancient history now. Other than the initial, tenuous weeks of genuine concern, our trip lists and cargoes remain largely unchanged. The cargo flows in a near unstaunched stream through our holds and as ever, we pick it up in the USA and take it to Canada, or vice versa.
Alot of sound and fury… signifying nothing.
———
Tariffs aside (is there a more tired word in the English language right now?), it was a hell of a start to the 2025 season. 20 nautical miles west of Buffalo, New York we started to see ice. At first it was loose brash ice, almost like the translucent fat that rises to the surface of a pot on the boil. Then, the pieces grew larger and whiter in colour. The floes ranged greatly in size, from city block-sized to slabs roughly the size of a car’s bonnet. The ship cut through them easily. Some of the floes had smoothe, beviled edges that from up high on the bridge resembled soggy cornflakes. Others had sharp edges and described geometric forms, parallelograms or modernist shards. As we progressed the ice thickened and our speed slowed. Soon we were struggling, crunching through the two-foot ice pack that spanned the entire eastern region of Lake Erie. Our speed decreased like the seconds of a countdown timer. Eventually, we were strangled to a standstill.
‘That’s all she’s got in her’ said the captain. The engines were shut down and we waited for the ice breaker ‘Griffon’ which was due on the scene the following morning. Ice spread outward in all directions from the vessel like an unbroken Arctic tundra with just the ever-narrowing umbilicus of water astern of us that led back to the open lake from whence we came. The ice’s surface was unsmooth from weather and shipping traffic and from being broken apart and then frozen together again. It resembled a vast relief map of some mountainous and inhospitable alien land or perhaps more reasonably, an endless white desert.
The Boat Nerds knew of our predicament within minutes. The Boat Nerds are an active community with thousands of conscripts. Whenever we transit rivers, pass through piers, under bridges or tie up, there will likely be a group of them watching, waving or snapping pictures. Some of them are exceptionally talented photographers and in recent years drone technology has enhanced their art form. There are many publications, websites and fanpages devoted to this hobby. Know Your Ships, Ship Junkies and boatnerd.com to name a few. Almost immediately I saw a post on the ‘ship junkies’ newsfeed on Facebook.
‘M_____ Stuck in Ice Off Buffalo…Again’.
They were referring to January, when, after delivering our last load of the season, the ship was trapped in ice not far from the very spot we were in. Only then there were still a couple of months of winter left and the ice was thickening not melting. The M______ was stuck in ice for five days before a convoy of four ice breakers came to her rescue. Her plight made the New York Times and CNN. I had a plane to catch and with all the weather and ice delays we had already incurred that month, the chances of making my flight had diminished rapidly so I was given special dispensation to disembark early in Buffalo. I can’t say I didn’t feel a small sense of survivors guilt in the following days, as I ran in 20 degree weather beside the blue Mediterranean, while many of my shipmates thousands of miles away were still held fast in the ice, uncertain of when they would be getting home, or if they would be getting home at all.
Buffalo was once the largest city on the Great Lakes until into the 20th century. With its proximity to the Erie canal (which was completed in 1825, and joins Lake Erie to the Hudson River) it became an efficient hub for the transportation of goods inland from the Atlantic coast. Hundreds of thousands of European immigrants boarded passenger steamers here, bound for their new lives in Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota. In the 17 and 1800’s many thousands died in wrecks on Lake Erie, Lake Huron, Lake Michigan and Lake Superior. Being on the border of the two nations, Buffalo has always had a close relationship with Canada. Canadian’s come across to shop and young American’s cross to take advantage of Canada’s legal drinking age of 19. Friend’s I know from Buffalo grew up listening to Toronto’s alternative music radio station 102.1 the Edge and visiting the Canadian city, which is just a two-hour drive away, for concerts. The M______ visits Buffalo nearly every month, delivering grain from Thunder Bay to the ADM elevator about an hour up the winding Buffalo river. To get there we must navigate in extremely tight quarters. After our most recent departure, in April, following the unplesentness in Toledo, I was pleased to see an elderly couple huddled on the shore waving a Canadian flag for us.
I will never forget departing Buffalo, last year on a particularly hot day in August. Towards the mouth of the river there are a number of floating, finger docks and a sailing school is located on the south side of the river. There was a group of 15-20 children, girls and boys aged 8-12 years old. They were wet and wearing life jackets and swim suits and they crowded together at the end of one of the docks to watch the long ship pass by so closely. They began giving our captain the old up and down gesture with their arms, the universal signal to blast the horn. He did not disappoint and he gave them the age-old nautical salute, one long and two short blasts of the deafeningly loud ships whistle. As he did so the children descended into paroxysms of the most exquisite excitement I think I have ever witnessed. They screamed and laughed and jumped up and down and fell about themselves in such a display of giddy childish joy it made me feel almost tearful. I turned to the captain standing before his controls.
‘I think you just blew those kid’s minds,’ I said.
——-
If I had my choice, what I would really like to write about is running. I might tell you my reader, how on a whim the last time I had leave, I flew to the UK to surprise my old college buddy on his fiftieth birthday. I would describe the look on his and his wife’s faces when I walked into the pub in Boscombe and how on the following day I ran a stretch of white sandy beach up to wind swept Hengistbury Head near Bournemouth on Britain’s south coast. And then I would detail how in the following days I stayed for one last time at my aunts old country cottage in the Barfords, and ran past the enormous, ancient dead oak tree which I’ve admired for much of my life and on through fields and pasture. I would tell you how I ran 6kms up to the Oxfordshire village of Deddington where I did a circuit through its churchyard, skirting centuries old tomb stones that tilted at odd angles and caught the early morning suns gaze on their tarnished, smoothe stone surface and between which a couple of terriers zig-zagged and yapped ecstatically. I would remark on how nice it would be to have dogs playing o’er your bones while in Canada you would surely get a fine for letting your animals run rampant on the dead, and that this is one of many stark cultural differences between these nations. Then I would reveal how in the following days, I ran past Highgate cemetary, where the bodies of Karl Marx, George Eliot, Malcom McLaren and Christina Rossetti are interred and around Hampstead Heath in brilliant sunshine. And it was in that unseasonable warmth, at London’s highest point, that I thought about how nice it is to have and enjoy friends and family such as I do and I looked out over the urban sprawl and caught myself then, suddenly, so happy.
——
What is it with the CSX coal dock in Toledo and birds? Five years ago, after loading there I wrote the following poem:
He Promises Not One More Poem About Birds
He promises not one more poem about birds.
No more over-wrought high sentence or hyper-
bolic phrase describing their aspect or their
flight. No anthropomorphisms or verbs like
swoop, soar, wheel, dive, glide, or hover. No use
of the adjectives wondrous, majestic, magnificent
or regal and mentioning birdsong will be a
big no-no from here on in, despite its soothing
qualities in these troubled times. (There’ll be
no more mention of troubled times either).
No tweets, squawks, chirps, or trills. No
metaphoric inference, no similes, no rhyme
or meter. No syllable counts, and yes, dactyls
are definitely out, ptero or otherwise. There’ll
be a strict moratorium on mention of osprey,
sparrow, seagull, bald eagle, gold finch, pigeon,
red-tailed hawk, Canadian goose and humble
mallard. Even his beloved raven must go on
this shit-list, painful though that might be.
No more lengthy, sonorous discourse on
flying and feathers and their petroleum
sheen or the way the sun catches the under-
side of the wing of a bird in flight and for
that matter there’ll be no more use for
the anachronism ‘wing-ed’ in his poems or
prose for the foreseeable future.But seriously,
these swallows are taking the piss. Here he is,
a merchant seaman trying to load coal on a
ship and they’ve descended by the dozen and
the goddam buggers just won’t quit. And then,
you’ve got to be kidding, across the slip he sees
a great blue heron, elegantly stalking the seawall.
And with each of its aqueous, muted movements
he feels the resolve seep from him like a medieval
malady with a course of leeches. And in its
beatific silence a question posed, an ascetic’s
koan he’ll never answer but could spend his
lifetime trying to decipher. And of course,
he relents then and thinks, perhaps there’s room
for one more. Just one more poem about birds.
I was pleased with the poem at the time and I still am. I think it is pretty emblemmatic of my style, self-aware, treading the tightrope I like to walk between gallows humour and the deadly serious. It came quickly, rather then my having to wrestle with it for months. I wanted to subvert poetic intention by creating a mock-manifesto that is eventually unravelled by the very tropes it is trying to place a moratorium on. (I also think my ‘dactyls’ joke is one of the best I’ve ever come up with, even if it is only funny to people who are familiar with poetic form.) Now, in the current slump I’m in, it seems as though it was written by a different person, but I thought of that poem last week, at dusk, when we tied up at the CSX dock again. How could I not when, as I walked aft to check the stern wire I found a Great Blue Heron perched on one of our flood lights. I was able to get to within ten feet of it. Up close it was astonishing. Three feet tall and such a profile! An impeccible arbiter of the sublime – its pale feathers seemed to glow a luminous blue, similar to the light a full moon casts. And then it burst languidly into flight, and I noticed another blue heron, and another, and another. Some in flight and some on the sea wall. And then a shadow passed over me and I looked up and saw a bald eagle and, I am not kidding, another one, flying within a stones throw of me on the stern. The slow, powerful beat of their wings keeping them buoyed in the updraft. And there were, as always, dozens of seagulls squalling. And swallows everywhere, flickering in their erratic flight. And then one red wing blackbird that cut a swathe through all the hubub. I smiled- I couldn’t help myself- at this ornithilogical display of multiculturalism haloing the ship as we reversed into our berth.
——
In early April the mail boat in Detroit delivered the following letter to the ship.
Dear Freighter Worker,
Hi, my name is Coralee. I am twelve years old, and in the seventh grade at St._____’s middle school in M_____, Michigan. I have a dog, cat and chickens. My favorite subject is science and I like to play or hang out outside in my free time. Wanna hear a joke? What did one ocean say to the other? Nothing, it just waved. Haha! Anyway, recently I got to go to the Great Lakes Museum in Toledo, Ohio and I loved it. We got to go to the Schoonmaker Museum ship. I had a lot of fun going on the boat and learning about it and the Great Lakes. If it’s OK I have some questions for you about your job.
My first question is what do you eat? I have wondered this because you can only get limited supplies on the boat. Another question is do you have to share a room or bed? I saw some rooms with little beds for a lot of people. Also, do you have technology to watch TV? The next wuestion is do you get breaks like a Christmas break? Another questionis what do you do for fun, do you fish or play video games? Finally, do you get to see family?
Thanks for reading my letter and if you have time I would love to hear back from you.
Thanks
Coralee
I realized lately, or should I say I’ve known for a long while, but only recently vocalized, that I feel happiest when I’m workshopping my writing or someone elses. Discussing writing and books. Or even better, editing a piece I have written.
“That means you’re overlapping your blueprint” my friend from the first paragraph said. My first instinct was to laugh in her face, as it always is when I perceive someone as being too earnest or overly hippy dippy. But it occurred to me that this was my cynicism talking and that cynicism, schadenfreude and barbed remarks, while being my stock in trade, have not gifted me with great happiness or satisfaction in my near half century on this earth. And when I began to really think about those words,
‘overlapping your blueprint’,
I found that they made the most remarkable sense.
Dear Coralee,
My name is Nick, and I am a wheelsman aboard the Canadian vessel the MV (motor vessel) M_____. My job is to steer the ship when we are in the rivers and canals and when we are arriving and departing from a dock. I also help with the loading and unloading of cargo. The M_____ carries cargo all over the Great Lakes, often between the USA and Canada. We carry grain and oats, iron ore, coal and stone which is used for construction
There are anywhere from 18 to 22 of us on board at a time and we all have our own cabins. In the old days there were almost double the number of sailors on board these ships and they often had to share a room. Each cabin has a TV with a satellite receiver, so we can watch television whenever we want, even when out on the water. We also have internet, though admittedly, this is famously unreliable.
The crew enjoy playing video games and watching sports in the crew mess (where we eat our meals). I like to read, and I always bring a pile of books out with me whenever I join the ship. There is lots of time to read out here!
We have fishing gear aboard and in some of the ports we visit someone, usually Cam who is one of our deck hands, might throw a line over the side. We are not very good fishermen though, as we seldom catch anything. A few days ago, in the middle of Lake Huron, Cam got out his golf clubs and practised his swing by firing golf balls into the water.
There is a gym on board so the crew are able to exercise in their down time. I am a runner, and I like to go out on deck and run up and down, up and down, up and down the length of the ship for an hour.
We all work one month off/one month on throughout the year. The boat runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and when we are on board there are no days off. Unfortunately, the ship works through Christmas and any other holidays, and it is the luck of the draw as to whether we will be home for them. Many of us have families and pets, but unfortunately we can only see them in person during our time off.
You asked what we eat on board and the answer is EVERYTHING. We have a very good cook who prepares three hot meals a day, plus all kinds of snacks. Because we are on the lakes and not out on the big ocean, we are able to receive supplies regularly, so our fridges, freezers and pantry are always well stocked. Occasionally we will run out of eggs or bread or milk, but this is rare. Our chef’s name is Kyle and at home he has two pet ducks who live on a pond in his garden. Their names are Leonard and Rupert Murduck.
I like animals too and we are lucky to see a lot of wildlife from the ship. Bald eagles, all kinds of songbirds, peregrine falcon, geese, ducks, cormorants, seagulls, redwing blackbirds, grackles and lots of ravens and crows (they’re my favourite). One time I saw a bear walking along the beach near Port Inland, Michigan.
A few years ago I rescued a pine warbler (a small songbird) who was tired out after a storm in the middle of Lake Superior. I found him slumped and shivering on the deck in the rain and wind and cold. He lived with me in my cabin for a spell, where he rested and ate small insects which I caught for him. When he regained his strength, he flew off and I was sad to see him go.
We also see some spectacular sun rises and sun sets and, in the fall, we can see the leaves on the trees in the woods up north changing colour. In the winter the lakes begin to freeze over and occasionally we get stuck in the ice. At night, out on the ocean and the lakes, the sky is full of more stars than you can possibly imagine, and it is amazing to look up and watch them. Often, I’ll see a shooting star and occasionally we’ll glimpse the northern lights shimmering on the horizon.
I would like to thank you, Coralee, for your letter. It has been a long time since I’ve put pen to paper and it was my genuine pleasure to answer all of your questions. Shipboard life can be hard work, but we get to visit many places and see some interesting things, and so, at times, it can be very rewarding. There are plenty of opportunities – for young people, particulary those, like yourself, with a head for science and mathematics – to work at sea, should you wish to, when you get a bit older and are thinking of choosing a career.
Say hello to your dog, cat and chickens from me and the crew of the MV Manitoulin.
Sincerely
Nick Tabone (Freighter Worker)
