Slowly, over a 24hour period, from across this nation great and wide, crew trickle back to the ship. Some come alone, others in groups of two or three or four. They arrive at the M____’s winter berth in Sarnia, Ontario in rental cars taken from Toronto’s International airport and from small towns in the province’s southern regions. I am one of the first to arrive back at a few minutes past noon on a Saturday. I park the car at the foot of the gangway and pop the trunk of the dodge. I pause a second and turn my head to the left and the right to take in the fullness of the M______’s 630’ length. With all the ballast water out of her she sits abnormally high in the water. Her thick steel skin is pocked and battle-scarred like the hide of a tired, old bull sperm whale. I think about the six full seasons I’ve spent aboard this ship and the thousands of nautical miles that have passed beneath her hull and the hundreds of cargoes we have carried in that time. I ponder this and all of the days’ work that a seventh season might bring and then I shoulder my expectations and my sea bag and make my way up on deck.
In the crew mess I find a few engineers -who have remained on the vessel during the winter months to perform much needed maintenance-, our new captain (new to the ship but a veteran of the fleet), the head of cargo maintenance and my old (actually very young) sailing buddy and the first mate of the M_______, Denver. Hands are shook. Pleasantries are exchanged. Inquiries into one another’s time at home and the health of various family members are made. Eventually, I head up to my cabin, unpack my gear, throw on some work clothes and set about the business of fitting out.
Fit out is, generally, a two-day period whereby the ship is brought out of her winter hibernation and made ready for sea. It is a busy time. Provisions are brought on board, the main engine is rolled over, the generators are tested. Safety equipment – by way of life rings, life rafts and their hydrostatic releases and the ship’s EPIRB (Emergency Position Information Radio Beacon) -are placed back out on deck. Each arriving crew member is issued a life jacket and an immersion suit which they are to stow in their cabins. There is a lot of heavy work to do not least the removal of the soft lines, (thick nylon hawsers which are put out to further secure the ship in her dormant months) I volunteer to go ashore and cast them off. Not out of a spirit of largesse, mind you, but simply because they are very heavy, and my back can no longer accommodate the bending over at a fair lead and heaving with all ones might that is necessary to bring these bastard lines in. I enjoy being ashore, running to and fro. I feel in my element here. It strikes me that the qualities for which I was celebrated when I was a young tall ship sailor, i.e. speed, agility and daring, I am still well in possession of even on the cusp of 50, but here, they could easily get me cautioned or fired for violating one of the many health and safety criteria that ball and chain our every movement. Of course, these rules are of great importance in an industry such as this one with its higher rate of crew attrition due to injury than that of the sailing world, but sometimes, when I see a young deck hand ambling down the dock to cast off a line or get back aboard for departure, I think enough is enough and I must restrain myself from shouting ‘Run Goddammit!’
Once the generators are on line, it is time to remove the shore power cable. This is no ordinary plug. It is an exceptionally heavy, 1.5 inch cable 400’ long capable of delivering a 440v load. It must be brought aboard and spooled on a drum that sits on the upper aft deck. Nine crew members huff and puff and take 20 minutes to haul her aboard.
The final job is to single up the mooring wires. As our departure time grows nearer and expectation mounts but the ETD vacillates according to progress in the engine room. It is Sunday. We are told it will be at the earliest Tuesday morning, the latest, Tuesday evening.
As ever, I run. We have not yet been put on a watch rotation, and having only arrived in the country less than 48 hours ago, I’m still on European time. I wake up early on Sunday morning and decide to catch a quick 10km run before the sun comes up. I have been running most days in my time off, often long ones where I would circumnavigate the 500 year old baroque city of Valletta. Skirting its high fortified walls, flanked by the Mediterranean, with sweat streaming in the high sun is one of the great joys of my winter life in Malta. A far cry from the sub zero temperatures I’m about to light out in. I dress and disembark while the rest of the ship’s compliment sleeps.
I have to run on a kilometer and a half stretch of road before I can reach a path which will take me along the river and through a downtown park. I realize I am not wearing any reflective clothing. I am in fact, besides my bright blue Hokas, clad entirely in black, and therefore almost invisible to any traffic in the dim of the predawn, but thankfully, only two cars pass. Nonetheless, I keep to the muddy shoulder where possible, and as each footfall in the diminished light is a crap shoot, I find myself tripping on its muddy hummocks and potholes before reaching the safety of a lit path. I am jet-lagged and sore from and my exertions the day before and my pace is duly hampered by this and a frigid wind howling off the lake. Running is of existential importance for me as I have so often soliloquized in my writing. It is a great time to think and also, when necessary, to suspend all thought in my over-active head. Today’s is a thinking run, and of course, with the ongoing newsfeed there is much to think about. It is -2 and the sun is not up and everything is painted in greys and blacks. Sinead O’Connor appears on my playlist and her voice provides a poignant soundtrack to my run and these unprecedented times.
“Everyone can see what’s going on.
They laugh ‘cos they know they’re untouchable,
not because what I said was wrong…
Maybe it sounds mean
but I really don’t think so.
You asked for the truth and I told you…
Through their own words
they will be exposed.
They’ve got a solid case
of the emperor’s new clothes.”
Not long after, with the ship in sight, the final song I hear is the Go-Go’s rousing 90s punk rock romp Whole World Lost Its Head ,which seems even more apropos than Sinead.
“I read it in the papers,
I see it on my TV.
Has the whole world lost its head?
(Or is it just me?)’
I sing along loudly at six in the morning and I punch the air above my head and my feet pound the final kilometer down the empty road to the M_____ as the suns first light begins to disperse the lugubrious dawn.
***
1300. Sunday. The crew is massed in the ship’s mess for a meeting. The new company president is aboard to introduce himself and have an informal chat with the crew. Our last CO was relieved of his duties suddenly when two security guards entered his office and escorted him from the premises in Port Dover. Apparently, this is a common tactic in the corporate wold and further reason why I am so mistrustful of big business. The president is a lean, fair-skinned man attired in the sort of corporate/casual wear that is de rigueur on the golf course and at fraternity reunions. Refreshingly, he seems to know how to talk to a ship’s crew (not like some of the other buffoons who have darkened our gangway and spoken in tone deaf platitudes) and he begins by cementing his pedigree, which is substantial. Not in business, but in actual boots on the deck ship work. He is from the American office in Buffalo and hails from NYC originally. One can hear evidence of this in his accent. The company has an American fleet and a Canadian one and the crew are concerned by the shrinking of the latter, which has lost six ships in the last eight years and by the unstaunched hemorrhaging of solid, licensed crew the company has experienced recently, something similar to the brain drain that small towns and countries experience when their youngsters leave to seek better employment options elsewhere.But in this instance, it is because many do not see a future, in what to even untrained eyes, appears to be a company in free fall.
The presidents words seem honest and he does not pander or try to gloss over the difficulties and uncertainty the company faces.
‘Do you have any questions for me?’ He asks when finished his spiel.
‘Tariffs!’ More than one person shouts.
‘Oh God!’ he says and smiles. ‘Don’t ask me about that crazy man in Washington.’
But in the end he does address the bloated orange elephant in the room.
‘The truth is clients are worried…and the S_______ [one of the other vessels in our now small fleet] is fitting out a month later than usual for this reason.’
We will soon learn that our first cargo is to be grain from Thunder Bay, Ontario to Toledo, Ohio and Buffalo, New York. There is a great rush to get it there before April 2nd when the tariffs are due to take effect.
(Has the whole world lost its head? Or is it just me?)
***
Ship work is paramount, and what pays the bills, so one can’t grow too maudlin or sentimental about the absence of old shipmates. As a sailor, one becomes used to the comings and goings of bums in seats, but it is always sad to see an old veteran absent at fit out. Shortly after I arrive I learn that our chief Engineer Matt has gone to seek fresher pastures. I will miss his firecracker wit and sarcastic one liners overheard in the ship’s mess, many of which have made it on to the pages of these dispatches over the years.
Another conspicuous absentee is Captain John Carlson, known affectionately to his crew as JC (the aptness of these initials is not lost on me, or any who sail with him). He was the commodore of our fleet for over 20 years and the M______’s long serving/suffering skipper since he sailed her from China ten years ago. Over the past seven years it has been my great privilege to sail under him. When I came to this industry from the sailing world, I was fairly ignorant and not a little cynical about the world of merchant sailing and the caliber of seamanship I might find within it. I was certain I would never encounter talent and chutzpa like I had seen sailing Tall Ships across the globe. At first, I wondered why it was that people fawned over JC so much. He seemed gruff and laconic in my first weeks aboard, but slowly, as I grew more comfortable in my duties and he more used to my presence I was able to observe him closely and I realized what a formidable ship handler he was. Over the years I have overheard him on long cell phone calls, coaching other captains throughout the lakes on how to make certain docks, not a shock, as he has trained a great many of these captain’s too. He possesses a forensic memory and has a head for numbers that is simply staggering to an arts and humanities type like me. I was not surprised to learn that he once possessed a full physics scholarship to the university of Toronto, but left it in his second year to pursue a career at sea. Early on he learned that I was curiouser than most in the seemingly banal details of weather pattens, ship handling and the flora and fauna we glimpsed from the ship’s bridge and he would deliver me long dissertations on them as I steered. JC can also tell a story. The world could be falling apart, and this would not detract him from spinning a yarn. Alarms might be going off and near hurricane force winds buffeting the vessel and he would not miss a beat in whatever tale from his storied career he happened to be recounting. He does not like confrontation, but woe betide the man who pisses him off. Making docks in the dead of night with just myself and him up in the darkened wheelhouse he would give me play-by-play descriptions of what he was doing, not for training purposes -I am a wheelsman and have no intention of moving up in the ranks- but because he liked to teach and he knew I liked to listen. He got a kick out of my left-leaning politics and was never short of a wry quip regarding them. While I too found some of his politics and beliefs not to my liking, this in no way affected my estimation of him, which is in and of itself a valuable lesson to learn in these divisive times. It was expected of the wheelsman on watch to prepare coffee for JC before he came up to the bridge. Some would smart at such a menial and subservient duty , but I don’t and never did. I made him that coffee and I took pride in it as I would any other task. Because I looked up to him and liked him, sure, but mostly, because I respected the absolute hell out of him. If ever I do compile and publish my writings in a collection, I will likely owe him royalties for all the information he has given me which I have regurgitated, and for all the appearances he has made in its pages.
***
I have been back on the ship not even 48hours and I’ve already seen about a mile of unwanted ass crack.
‘It’s been in two-to-six-inch increments…but they add up,’ I tell Linder, a fellow wheelsman and another longtime employee of the company. We are taking a brief breather from the hullabaloo of fit out and D____ , a tall, puppy-faced deck hand, in low-slung skinny jeans is assembling a new BBQ, fresh out of the box, nearby. He bends over to examine the instructions which are spread out on the deck among assorted shiny, black pieces.
‘A mile and four inches,’ I think to myself. It is my experience that with the exception of D_____, the more expansive the waistline the greater the offender. This hasn’t escaped Linder’s notice either.
‘This ship has a crack problem,’ he says.
D____ is a good hand. The first night back on board he confides to me and a few others that he has split up with his fiancé. We express our commiserations. I tell him he was too young to get married anyway. (He is 24.)
‘She’d been building a relationship with an older man while I was away,’ he tells us. A____ our resident dab hand and jack of all trades nods.
‘Pussy is a powerful thing,’ he says with wisdom of one much older.
***
I am in my cabin on Tuesday evening when I feel the engine below my feet spark up and shudder like a flatlining ER patient being defibbed back to life. As the time of departure grows nearer its juddering becomes more pronounced. I go out on deck to watch. I can see the deck hands on the dock standing by the wires and awaiting the word. When it is given, they throw their wires off the bits and scamper back aboard. For the first time in two months the ship is underway. She inches astern and out into the swift-moving current of the St.Clair River, where she straightens up, points north and steams out onto the greatLake: Huron.