Looking for a Ship (15 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Looking for a Ship
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Whatever Peewee may be thinking when he crosses the equator, he concurs. “We don't owe nobody,” he explains. “We got it made.”
David Carter, the deck and engine mechanic, drives north to Charleston from his home in Jacksonville in a Dodge van that is more than ten years old and shows a hundred thousand miles. But he, too, may have it made. When he is not on the ocean, he buys and refurbishes houses, in one of which he lives, with his wife, Peggy, a hospital record keeper, and their two sons. In the escalating process of buying and selling property, he has acquired six acres of pondfront and canalfront land under laurel oaks and cypress in a lovely section of Jacksonville that attracts the lust of yuppies. The zoning is quarter-acre. Quarter-acre lots in the area are selling for sixty thousand dollars. Twenty-four times sixty thousand is one million four hundred and forty thousand. He will not realize that much, but less will do.
Meanwhile, the Carters live in Neptune Beach, some blocks from the water, in a small place with six banana trees and a neighbor who poured paint thinner on their garden plants. David says dreamily, as he barbecues a chicken, “I was tempted to skin his dog and hang it to his front door.” One of the schools David taught in is around the corner. He is a graduate of Tulane and taught for ten years—math and social studies as well as Spanish—before he discovered that he could make four times as much painting valve wheels at sea as he could teaching children on land. His great-uncles were Norwegian merchant seamen. His mother has
a family tree that is littered with phrases like “buried at sea,” “died at sea,” “lost at sea.” At home, as on the ocean, he studies engineering, preparing himself to come up the hawsepipe. “In the engine room, the four-to-eight watch is usually everybody's last choice,” he remarks. “You get stuck with a lot of maneuvering. You are always arriving or leaving port on the four-to-eight. But when I get a ship I ask for that watch. The second is always pumping oil, testing water, et cetera, leaving the demac to do many things a licensed engineer would ordinarily do. You learn more.”
In the captain's home, across town, the numerous religious calendars are outnumbered by the golfing trophies he has won in the pro-am tournaments of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Some of the condos in his neighborhood stand like ships in sculpted bayous. Outside the Washburns' sliding doors is terra firma. Routinely, a neighbor's cat comes into the house and sits beside the captain while he eats. The morsels he slips to the neighbor's cat are by human standards attractive. Just outside is a small ornamental tree. Squirrels linger beneath it, because they, too, are fed by the captain. Suddenly, the cat shoots out from under the table and mortally wounds a squirrel. Captain Washburn himself is almost mortally stricken. The goodness of his heart has caused the death of a squirrel. Repeatedly, he leaves his bacon, his eggs and grits, and goes out to observe the squirrel, barely clinging, swaying, on a branch of the ornamental tree. As the cat is fully aware, the captain's benevolent guilt does not end there. He attracts more birds than St. Francis, because he feeds them, too.
(“Tell him to be my guest, then, if the horses prefer wood. Tell him I'm sorry I don't have barley or oats.”)
In the captain's car, we go for an evening drive with Jackie, his wife, and Tinker, his visiting daughter. I have asked to see the place where Harriet Beecher Stowe grew oranges. Captain Washburn, at the wheel, requires the assistance of a mate. Jackie guides him toward Mandarin, every turn. To his dismay, she becomes absorbed in some talk about oranges with me. He says, “Jack, if you don't pay attention to where we're going, we're lost, because half of us are always lost.” He is confessing the artless truth: ashore, he has no sense of reckoning, dead or alive. On the road, he has no idea where he is going. By his own description, he gets hopelessly lost in his own driveway. Looking for an interstate highway, he ignores the numbered shields. He goes right past the huge green signs. In the confusion of the moment, he refers to a nearby two-door car as a two-car door.
I think of him in the Panama Canal. Given his distaste for terrestrial navigation, you might imagine that he would be only too happy to turn things over to professional pilots for a fifty-mile trip through a jungle. But this was a ship, not a Chevrolet. He would not be unconfident as he moved south and east to get to the Pacific. From lock to lock, from sea buoy to sea buoy, he was right there fussing all the way across the continent. He wore his dress blues with shoulder boards, which tended to suggest that he was in charge, but he was not. The pilots were in complete command. Most of them were still being provided by the United States Merchant
Marine. Thaddeus Kowal, of New Orleans, for example, was a former chief mate of Sea-Land vessels and had been a Panama Canal pilot for sixteen years. As he tucked the ship into Lower Gatun Lock, I thought, New Orleans? Kowal? Saul, Sheldon, Stewart, Stephen, Stanley Kowal? I asked him if a little something might be missing in his name.
No, he said. He was a Panama Canal pilot, not a character in a play. “
Kowal
means ‘blacksmith,'” he went on. “
Ski
means ‘son of.' My father used to drink it up, and say, ‘We
are
the blacksmith.'” Balder than a monk—in cowboy boots, silver-rimmed glasses, a sky-blue sateen guayabera—Kowal was sixty-two.
“Left twenty,” he said.
“Left twenty,” said the helmsman.
“Midships.”
“Midships.”
“Dead slow ahead.”
Kowal killed a mosquito. Captain Washburn killed a mosquito. Captain Washburn sprayed himself. He had a can of Off marked “BRIDGE.” To carry a can of insect repellent on the bridge of his ship was no less repellent to him than it was to the insects. In half a century of trips through the canal, he had only in recent times encountered his first mosquito. After so many chemically antiseptic, pesticidally bugless American years, to Captain Washburn the mosquito's sting was deeper than the length of one proboscis.
“Port twenty,” said the pilot.
“Left twenty,” said the helmsman.
“Hard left,” said the pilot.
“Hard left,” said the helmsman.
“Hard left,” said Captain Washburn.
After the quartermaster, at the wheel, repeated the pilot's commands, the captain, as if in need to be a part of things, sometimes repeated them, too. The pilots used “left” and “right” to conform to Coast Guard rules for helm commands on American ships. Occasionally, they forgot themselves and threw in a “port” or a “starboard,” the helm commands used on the ships of the rest of the world. Signs hang in wheelhouses to remind officers and sailors to say “left” and “right” when giving and acknowledging helm commands, for “port” and “starboard” are used throughout the ship for every other purpose. American sailors on sweet-water ships (on the Great Lakes) say “left” and “right” wherever they are—and “floor,” “wall,” and “kitchen”—but not on ships of any gross tons upon oceans.
One of our pilots was Jonas Thorsteinsson, a fountain of sea stories and the author of the basic Icelandic text on celestial navigation. He is a naturalized American citizen, and, like all the other canal pilots, has four weeks of vacation for every six weeks he works. His home and family are in Pensacola. As skipper of a research vessel in the North Pacific, he once dropped an anchor that took nearly half an hour to reach bottom. He said all these things as he moved the Stella Lykes from lock to lock, easily juggling his stories with his commands to the helmsman. He told
me about the Icelandic child Snorri Thorfinsson, who was born on an island in the Delaware River, quite near the site of Philadelphia, in June, 1002.
“Hard right.”
“Hard right.”
“Slow astern.”
The baby's father was Thorfinnur Karlsefni, Jonas said. The baby's mother was Gudridur Thorbjarnsdottir. Jonas had read Thorfinnur's logs at the National Library in Reykjavik. After three years, Thorfinnur and family had left Philadelphia under pressure from unfriendly natives. The family returned to Iceland. In 1021, Pope Benedict VIII learned of these adventures and invited Thorfinnur to Rome. Thorfinnur was sick and could not travel, but Gudridur went to the Vatican. She told the Pope about the birth of her child and her life on the island in—as it was then called—the Lenape River. Such stories were common in eleventh-century Iceland, Jonas said. In 1491, or earlier, Columbus went to Iceland to be briefed.
Southbound and northbound, we went through the canal with an aggregate of sixty-six ships. Only two others were flying the American flag. Southbound, in the entire day, we were the only vessel of the United States Merchant Marine. We crossed Gatun Lake under a full moon that shuffled light through scattered low dark clouds. The lake is artificial, but now that it is there a nature conservancy would want to preserve it. The channel picked its way through countless jungled islands. The fixed green stars were
range lights, the blinking green stars were buoys. At night, the jungle cools, the cool air flows to the warm canal and makes a strip of fog.
Northbound, we tied up in fog in the locks of Pedro Miguel. A Panama Railroad train, old and decrepit, went by with its windows open. The air-conditioning had broken down in the railroad's newer cars, the captain said. The old ones were in use “so that the people inside can at least open the windows.” He said the tracks were loose. He said that Gatun Lake was silting in. “Eventually, there won't be a Panama Canal,” he continued. “Anywhere in the world, if you fool with Mother Nature she's going to get you. This is not a political statement. It is just a fact.” He slapped his arm. “We're back to the yellow-fever days,” he said. “Back to the jungle. There won't be any streets. There won't be anything. It will be like North Africa when the Arabs took over—all those beautiful condominiums with goats in them. I wish you could have seen this twenty-five years ago, when we ruled the ocean, when we were the elite.” It had all been neat and trig and spruce. It had been a clean swath across the tropics. Now the concrete was becoming rubbled. Steel drums and other detritus were strewn about. In the Gatun locks, a pilot said, “See that dirt laying there where they're working on the mule tracks? Come back ten years from now and that'll still be there.”
Another pilot said, “Anyone who thinks the Panamanians can run this canal is a dreamer. The Japanese will run it. The Japanese bank is the only one that didn't close when others did.”
Captain Washburn said, “We can get along without this canal. Japan and Russia can't.”
Pairs of men in rowboats tied lines from the ship to lines from locomotive mules. The mules helped to pull the ship through. The mules whistled like trains. Panamanian canal seamen in hard hats worked the fantail. One kept saying, “Sex book?” Another flashed a packet of white powder in the palm of his hand.
The Miraflores locks had broken down. One of the pairs of gates that meet in the middle was not meeting in the middle. The pilot said, “The gates weigh seven hundred and forty-five tons but are so perfectly balanced they can be turned by hand.” They were indeed being turned by hand. It was the only way to close the lock. The captain rolled his eyes and shrugged. He said, “Another day in the life of Walter Mitty. Heavens to Murgatroyd, we're stuck in the lock.”
In Balboa, a crippled dying fish went round and round in circles between the ship and the dock, swimming beside the corpse of a thick-bodied snake. The tropical fresh water was stiff with plastic flotsam. Victor Belmosa said, “You could drink the water in years gone by. The dock here you could eat off of in years gone by.” These remarks notwithstanding, Victor was fishing, on the offshore side—Victor, with his zirconia ring in his left ear, his tattoos on both arms, his goatee, dropping a hand line for red snapper. Victor had also caught yellowtails, eels, catfish, and corvina there, off the side of the ship in Balboa. More than a third of the sailors fish off the ship. To improve their luck, they
hang floodlights over the side. “There's forty-five feet of water here,” Victor said. “Sometimes we have seventy fish on deck here.” Duke Labaczewski had fished in the locks themselves. He said, “Saltwater fish go with the ship from lock to lock, you can see them.” In the open sea, when the ship slows down, Duke has caught bonito and dolphin and barracuda, and Spanish mackerel four feet long. If barracuda come into Balboa, he said, their mouths will become green and their flesh poisonous. From an old Cuban fisherman Duke learned years ago to cut a hole in the side of a barracuda and insert a silver coin. If the coin turns black, the fish is no good. If the coin continues to shine, cure the barracuda with salt and call it bacalao. In the Guayas River, Duke has caught what he describes as “big big catfish with heads like basketballs.” David Carter, on another ship, once fished in the ocean using parachute shrouds for a line. He caught “huge fish” and reeled them in with the ship's winch. He has no idea what they were.
Washburn in the Caribbean, this man who could not find his way around a traffic circle, had to dodge—outwit and outmaneuver—a tropical storm. The National Hurricane Center was issuing advisories. The route he had planned would often be close to islands, banks, and shoals: Cayos del Este Sudeste, Isla de Providencia, Roncador Bank, Quita Sueño Bank, the Northwest Rocks of Serraña Bank—a seascape blooming with wrecks. At first, the water was flat calm. The Caribbean air, as usual, was thicker than the jungle air of Panama, heavy as a rubber blanket. (I have never understood why anyone would pay for it.) While
Tropical Depression No. 7 was dumping seven inches of rain on Puerto Rico in as many hours, Washburn took as constant its course (285) and speed (fifteen knots) and stepped off on a chart its future positions. The predicted winds were “sixty-five miles an hour and developing.” The term “developing” included but was not limited to “explosive deepening.”

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