Eons ago, a glacier furrowed this land like a planchette moved indiscriminately beneath the hand of a Great Creator. Even the hard pre-Cambrian and metamorphic rock of the Canadian Shield was not immune to its ministrations for it carved out the rugged topography I glimpse now through the thumbnail frame of a DeHavilland airplane’s window. Rocky outcrops and mesas – those broad bottomed, decapitated mountains this region is famous for. Winding rivers and valleys. Swathes of scrub and boreal forests that somehow stubbornly cling to the loose, shallow soil of the Shield. Hundreds of lakes, which, from this high vantage, wink silver in the sun. Up here the land looks primordial, almost elemental. But then the plane banks right and turns south and there is a field, a silo, a barn, a home. The trans-Canada highway, stretching westward towards Winnipeg, cars like tiny corpuscles crisscrossing it. There’s the north shore of Lake Superior and it’s cold, inimitable blue. More homes, now side by side on streets. Neighborhoods laid out in grid pattern. Buildings and bigger, taller buildings: municipal offices, apartment blocks and lake-side condos. Parks and parking lots. And then, as the small plane descends through a wispy stratum of cloud, the whole small city is revealed. Thunder Bay.
Five of us incoming crew, our baggage collected, take a dilapidated taxi from the airport to the ship. I look out the window at strip malls and the skeletal frames of housing developments on the outskirts of town. New growth forests who’s autumnal colours seem drab now compared to their brilliance when viewed from above. Their reds and oranges, down here, leeched of vigour.
We shoot the usual shit crew shoot when the shits not been shot in a month. How our shore time was spent and as ever the parlous shape of the fleet, which in our time home had another vessel sidelined, when its rudder sheared off and dropped to the bottom of Whitefish Bay.
‘That makes the third ship we’ve lost this season’, someone says.
The company’s season, thus far, reads like a litany of nautical mishap from a Joseph Conrad novella:
The first ship was taken by fire at her winter berth before the season even began. It was the second fire that she had experienced in less than a year, but this one was catastrophic. Mercifully, no one was harmed. The ship was nearly 80 years old, which, though long in the tooth for a freshwater vessel, with the proper care, is not so unusual. It is salt water and its attendant corrosion that drastically reduces the life span of ocean-going vessels where 20 years is considered well past the sell by date.
The second ship had just taken a load of iron ore from Two Harbors, Minnesota, when, eastbound across Lake Superior the crew heard a deafening crack like a cannon shot as a twelve-foot fissure opened up in the steel hull below the waterline amidship. She took on thousands of gallons of freezing water and began to list dangerously to starboard. The Coast Guard was called, and most of the ship’s complement were evacuated, leaving only a skeleton crew to man the pumps. They managed to arrest the ingress of water, and the vessel was towed to Thunder Bay and then back across the lake to Superior, Wisconsin where she awaits repairs and will purportedly be back in service next season. It is sobering to consider how volatile Lake Superior can be at the best of times and that had the conditions not been fair as they were, the outcome would have likely been very different. The tragic legacy of the Edmund Fitzgerald, another ore boat, still looms fresh in the minds of great lakes sailors, and anyone familiar with Lake Superior herself will tell you just what a close call this incident was.
Iron ore is heavy. The heaviest cargo we carry. When cargo is loaded ballast water is expelled and to do this incorrectly can cause a ship to sag – when the midship section dips lower than the bow and stern, like a shallow U – or sag – when the bow and stern dip lower than the belly, like a small letter n. The idea is to keep the ship as straight as possible.
‘Imagine a beer can grasped at the top and bottom,’ someone explained to me. ‘Bend it back and forth and eventually the aluminum in the centre will weaken and split. Well, that’s exactly what happened to the __________. Loading iron ore non-stop for years on end puts immense strain on the hull. Don’t do any preventative maintenance, and this is what you get.’
In the past ships have broken apart at the dock when loaded badly or the stress on an aged hull became too great. I did three weeks training on the stricken vessel at the beginning of my time with this company and walking down the side tunnel in bad weather – a straight, 400-foot tunnel that runs the length of the ship below deck from bow to stern –I couldn’t see the (normally visible) door at the end of it for the frantic corkscrewing of the hull.
One of these days she’s gonna snap in two,’ was a refrain I became used to hearing in the years since my time here.
Our company has an elder fleet and tends to skimp on the upkeep of the ships in it. Projects the crew say are urgent are deemed non-essential by the office and postponed. Entreaties for crucial spare parts ignored. The vessel I’m on is relatively new compared to other ships in the fleet, but it’s littered with post it notes on various pieces of equipment and appliances which read NFG – a shipboard acronym for ‘No Fucking Good’. To be fair, most of these items are not essential to the safe running of the vessel but it is symptomatic of the parsimony and short-sightedness of the company higher ups and it projects a rather laissez-faire attitude to the welfare of the crews and the safety of the ships.
Indeed, there is an element of hubris to this company’s management style, and their precipitous decline in fortune seems almost worthy of a Greek tragedy, albeit the first act of one, before the shit really goes down.
When I started work for them there were 10 vessels in the fleet. Seven years later and we are down to three, working ships. Dozens of crew have been laid off. Guys who possess invaluable experience, who have kids and mortgages and car payments and up to 15 years of service to the company under their belts – unceremoniously dismissed.
‘What’s going to happen when they bring the ________ back into action next year?’ I hear someone say. ‘There’ll be nobody left to run her.’
‘Nobody will want to,’ says another.
We are known among the other fleets that operate in this region as ‘the cowboys of the lakes’. This is partially due to our gung-ho, go anywhere and get ‘er done attitude and perhaps because we are non-unionized, but more tellingly it is for the company’s safety record, which is sketchy at best.
‘Transport Canada has a hard on for you guys,’ I was told by one inspector in an interview after an accident which took most of the hearing in my left ear, and very nearly, my life.
The cowboys of the lakes. But even cowboys look after their horses unless they wish to walk.
At this point I’m an old hand, and while I may still grow terse and jittery before shipping out, returning to the ship is almost like coming home in that it is so familiar and because I generally always want to be where I am not. I slip easily back into a routine. For me this consists of standing my watch twice a day and when the conditions permit (they have been surprisingly compliant) running a minimum of 10kms up and down the deck or ashore when possible. The rest of my time is spent sleeping, smoking rollies, reading, writing and this time round, re-watching The Wire for the fourth time. It is especially important I maintain some kind of discipline because it’s easy to slip into lassitude when idle, and that is when the blues set in. Because they do follow, don’t they? Even when out at sea.
For a wheelsman spending long hours steering the vessel through the rivers and canals of the Great Lakes region, the best one can hope for is a captain who likes to chat, and I have been mostly blessed in my wheeling career with just that (sailors in general are great at spinning a ‘yarn’ or two and enjoy any opportunity to do so, especially when among other sailors). The current captain I am sailing with is a cruise ship veteran and we’ll often swap deep sea stories when I’m at the wheel. There are days when I miss the ocean – its intractable vastness, the taste of salt on my lips, the long transits from A to B – and as few sweet water sailors have any ocean experience, it is nice to reminisce with someone who knows the language as I do. The captain is an animated storyteller. He tells me about white-knuckle navigating ice fields in Greenland on a cruise ship with the ‘unwanted knowledge’ that the steel at the bow was just 7mms thick. Or how in some bad weather a forklift broke loose in the loading bay and slammed about from side to side, eventually puncturing the hull with one of its tines. When confronted with such an immense display of physics’ immutable and intransigent laws, all the crew could do was stand by and watch. Wait helplessly until the weather abated enough for them to resecure it.
I tell him how humbled I was when early in my career we took a big greenie amidship that snapped the heavy-duty nylon straps securing our 21-foot zodiac and flipped it like a playing card. But more impressive – and terrifying – than that was how the wave stove in the stanchion railings as though we’d been in a collision. I had assumed that something with so little surface area would be impervious the seas attention. I was wrong.
‘No matter how well you secure a vessel for sea it is never enough,’ one captain told me.
On another turbulent transit in the north Atlantic I carefully stowed my cabin for sea. I placed all my books in a cardboard box and lashed it to the top bunk. I lay there trying to sleep as the ship pitched and rolled in the enormous swells. At random, a book would leap out of the box, fly across the room and smash into the opposite bulkhead as though flung by an angry ghost.
Equally, one mustn’t underestimate the lakes, nor is any veteran of her waters fool enough to do so. A few years ago, I was on another vessel in the fleet, when the ship lost power in a winter gale on Lake Erie. It was a black and freezing night in January and without propulsion the ship moved broadside to the wind. I was at the wheel, which without any forward momentum was useless. We began to roll dramatically. Gunnel to gunnel. One moment I’d be staring down at a 45-degree incline to the starboard bridge wing and then a moment later the port side would be below me. The captain braced himself at his conning station at the front windows while the heavy steel drawers of the chart table slammed open and shut behind me. I fought to keep my balance and half swung, half lurched around frantically trying to save items from destruction.
‘The coffee pots are usually the first to go,’ the captain yelled at me over his shoulder above the din (despite having to raise his voice, he remained utterly composed throughout the ordeal). I made my way to the small dinette, grabbed the glass pots and placed them on the floor.
‘OK they’re safe’ I shouted just as the aluminum garbage can beside me fell over and smashed them like the hammer in a game of whack-a-mole.
In the final hour of my watch, our stories told, the captain and I fall into a brief silence as dusk falls. Just one more turn before Detour light and then I can lock her down (place the ship in autopilot). A pale moon, full and unusually huge rises above the islands of the Turkey Trail, a thin belt of cloud girds its waist. The sky it sits on a lambent blue.
‘Wow, look at that,’ says the captain. He is not looking forward but astern. I step away from the wheel for a moment and glance where he’s looking out the aft facing windows. There, the sun flares an intense and flaming red in the moments before it dips below the horizon, casting the bridge in a soft pink hue. I step back to the wheel, phantom coronas of incandescent light still baffling my eyes.
The days go by and the work remains the same as one season makes way for the next and the leaves on the trees glimpsed from the deck turn and fall. We wonder what kind of a winter is in store for us. It feels like we are owed a doozie. The crew worry for their jobs, their future. Whether there is even a future with this outfit. But sailors are a hearty bunch. It’s a testament to the spirit of the guys on board that even with the sword of Damocles dangling on an ever unravelling thread above them, they remain in good humour. At lunch time I catch the end of a bawdy conversation between two of them which culminates with one cautioning the other,
‘Just as long as you can look St. Peter in the eye when you reach them pearly gates.’
‘Fuck that,’ was the response. ‘I’m going through blindfolded.’