If ever there was a ‘damp, drizzly November in my soul’, this was it…

The first sentence of Nick Tabone’s next personal essay appeared in his head as he stood a-deck the MV M_______ and watched the taconite pellets slide out of cargo hold three onto the ore dock in Sault Sainte-Marie.  It was an easy birth.  A no-brainer really.  After all, it was raining and it was November, and as the election hotted up down south and another birthday loomed like a misshapen gargoyle on the precipice of a fresh year, he felt a growing kernel of despair take root in his gut.  

But that first line.  How many times could a sailor/writer safely quote from, paraphrase or allude to Moby Dick? He’d lost track but just the first paragraph alone, with its immortal opening line, had given him endless mileage.

He thought on this question as he eyed the cargo and hunched protectively over a rolling paper and pinch of tobacco (the locus of his attention), his back to the bully wind, a filter pursed tight in his lips.  He was about to lick the adhesive strip and seal the deal when a drop of water rolled off the brim of his orange hard hat. Destroyed those hard-won makings.

‘Motherfucker,’ he said aloud.  He glanced up as though he might catch someone playing a trick on him. But there was no one.  Just a lachrymose Northern sky and the grim black stacks of Essar steel lined up like grave, grave-side mourners.

Could there be such a thing as a drop of water with a manifest destiny?  Because the way that drop splotched so emphatically in the centre of his cigarette…well, it seemed personal – too purposeful to be purely random.  

The thought of a greater power singling him out, what with everything else going on in the world, proved too distressing to contemplate, so he returned to his original line of internal discourse – Moby Dick.

How old was he when he first read it?  29?  Maybe 30?  He’d tried once in his teens but set it aside about 100 pages in.  At the time he was put off by the dense, Victorian prose and the sheer size of the thing.  Reading was a matter of urgency for him then (it still was), when he finished one book he would immediately take up another, so why bother doing all that legwork when he could plow through a half a dozen slender Herman Hesses in the time it would take to get through that one whale-of-a-tome. (Terrible pun, even so, he would scrawl it down in his notebook later if he remembered it.)  This was no criticism either.  How many other novels had he abandoned only to return to them in later years and fall in love?  From the top of his head he could think of at least two – Gatsby and the Leopard – and they were among his favourite reads now.  Books he returned to again and again.  He hoped one day to give Moby Dick a second go and, assuming he lived the average lifespan of a Caucasian male in his part of the world, and the ciggies or the sea or a hundred other things didn’t get him first, there was a chance he would.  He liked to re-read books.  He found they took on different significance according to the decade of his life in which he read them.  We retain so little of them in the first place, he thought.  He had a friend who tried to take on Proust’s ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’, unsuccessfully, more than once in her adult life, only to pick it up in her 70s and read all seven volumes effortlessly and in succession.  

‘It was the right time,’ she said.  ‘I loved it.’

Funnily enough, what had put him off about Moby Dick in the first place is what he so admired when he finally got through it.  That prose!  It’s King James-y cadence.  Almost rhythmic. Like Shakespeare without the pentameter.  And Ahab.  He’d read Harold Bloom’s introduction to Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote, where he states that “[Melville] blended Don Quixote and Hamlet in Captain Ahab (with a touch of Milton’s Satan for seasoning).”   That seemed about as perfect a summation as one could make.  As much as Ahab is the quintessential anti-hero, there is something so human about him.  He is vengeful and grossly irresponsible when it comes to the welfare of his crew, sure, but Nick never thought of him as evil.  Puritanical and obsessed.  Repressed – but wasn’t everyone back then?  There was a part of him that thought all Ahab needed was just a really big hug. 

Perhaps perversely, for a sailor, his favourite work of Melville’s was one of the few that doesn’t take place at sea.  Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, about the titular copyist at a New York law firm who would ‘prefer not to.’  He’s read it at least six times.  Modernism before such a thing existed.  A sure steppingstone for Kafka and the French existentialists and a protagonist as memorable as Ahab or Mersault or Gregor Samsa.

His literary disquisitions tapered off.  He rolled another cigarette and successfully lit it.  The cargo flowed through the gates.  He stared down into the hold.  The ore sat on top of gates which were opened in sequential order, stern to bow, to discharge the cargo.  From above, the holds were divided up like an egg carton.  The gates side by side, port and starboard, running a length of approximately 500 feet from cargo hold five to one with gates 39 to 1 beneath them.  The shifting of the taconite in its enormous piles was mesmeric.  The small pellets, those rust-coloured, imperfect marbles, sounded like waves crashing on a beach as they ran out the gates in their millions.  So loud it was almost quiet, if that made any kind of sense at all.  

‘You can move up to 15s both sides,’ he said into his radio to Cory, his watch mate, who was ensconced in the control room up forward.  ‘Starboard first…Dump your 17s…Slow dump port.’

‘Move up 15s, dump 17s.  Roger that,’ said Cory.  His watch mate’s nasal voice cheered him up.  He laughed to himself thinking of their discussion on the previous evenings watch as they were crossing Lake Superior beneath a particularly black sky. Cory – being bald-headed, bespectacled, stocky and pale, or ‘chicken legs with a paunch’ as he described himself – was a Newfoundlander and he told Nick that a fellow islander (one from Newfoundland or ‘the rock’ as it is referred to by those from there) the ship’s Chief Engineer, had once called him ‘a poor man’s Vin Diesel.’  Nick choked on his Yorkshire gold tea when Cory told him that.  Goddamn did he laugh.  Had him giggling for the rest of the watch.  He still was.  He could read two hundred thousand books a year and never come up with a line as good as that one.  

‘It’s good to laugh,’ he thought.

He had written that in a dispatch last year.  It was called ‘Steering the St. Mary’s at Sunrise. Memorable only because he wrote the piece in the second person in an attempt to freshen up the form.  It was fun writing that one.  It came easily and he had been pleased with the result, which was seldom the case with his work.  Nevertheless, he liked the act of writing.  When he was on a roll time just disappeared. Even better was the editing.  Watching a work take form.  Paragraphs rearranged or discarded.  Adjectives pulled at the eleventh hour.  Commas inserted and removed and inserted again.  Daring to insert a semi-colon, or a Hail Mary semi-colon as he called them as he really had no idea when they should be used.  The dozens of drafts he went through.  Whatever the outcome, he got tremendous satisfaction from the process.  A sense of purpose that was absent in the rest of his life where he often felt he was not doing what he had been put on earth to do.  Lately it had been tough.  He worried he’d worn out his shtick. The merchant sailor/writer thing.  The brief blocks of prose he’d upload onto his website and social media.  The I’m-a-sailor-look-at-me-woopty-fucking-doo bullshit that more and more digressed into woe-is-me-solipsism.  What was the point?  

Why did he feel so angry all the time?  He had to check himself often, to keep from lashing out.  He had whole arguments in his head. He hated how worked up he got about the man down south.  He understood the politics.  Really he did.  The economy.  Immigration.  Even if he didn’t agree with them, he got it.  But what he could not reckon with, what he could not fathom, was how people, anyone, could align themselves with such an indecent man.  What ever happened to being ‘presidential’?  The man down south didn’t have a moral bone in his body.  He was not ‘presidential’, but ‘pestilential’.  

He had to relax a little.  Never a forte the old relaxation.  A friend, she of the conquering of Proust fame, told him he should meditate.  She gave him tips.  Sit comfortably, eyes half closed.  Breathe in and out.  Count up to 10 and back down to 1.  Take a breath with each number.  He could get up to 10, sometimes, but the furthest he had made it was 7 on the way down before getting lost on some tangent.  For the life of him he couldn’t do it. Was he losing his mind?  He’d become so forgetful.  He couldn’t remember things that once came so easily.  The other day he found himself struggling to remember the name of the guy who killed all those poor young gay men in Chicago in the early 70s.  Or the woman’s name who directed Wendy & Lucy and Meek’s Crossing.  Two films he adored.  He’d hear the opening bars of songs he knew by heart, yet it would take what seemed like ages to sort through his skull and place them.  He couldn’t leave his house, or his cabin when at sea, these days without forgetting something.  Someone close to him told him he wasn’t funny anymore and that had knocked him flat too – a real sucker punch.  He had had to reassess what he was projecting.  What the world perceived of him.  Because while this turmoil might occur in his head, at least (he thought) nobody could see it, and after all, he could and did laugh and often.  Christ.  His sense of humour, being able to laugh easily, that was his only cachet.  Take that away and he was just another namby-pamby Debbie the fuck Downer.  

‘Crack your starboard chase gate a little more,’ he said into the radio mic that clung to a bandana round his neck as a rivulet of cold water breached his neckline and wriggled down his spine.He paced back and forth in the bay between the hatches.

‘Starboard chase.  Roger that,’ said Cory.

Roger that. His next blog piece, his next exercise in creative non-fiction, if he wrote it [there is always lurking the fear that he will never write again. For him, writing can’t be forced, it must be coaxed like a skittish foal, occasionally it just arrives unannounced at the door and those are the best of times], would be about the use of the word ‘roger’ and other shipboard nomenclature, and maybe about the amount of cussing that goes on aboard, because there is an element of truth to the stereotype (there often is some truth in stereotypes) of the swearing sailor.  He would call it:

‘Who the Fuck Was Roger and Why is He so Popular?’  

Truth be told the title had been in his notebook for some time.  

‘Roger’ used to be ‘R’ in the American phonetic alphabet until ‘Romeo’ usurped him in the 1950s, but he was still ubiquitous in radio communications.  Roger meaning received.  I have heard you.  If, on board the MV M______, you were to take the words ‘Roger’ and ‘Fuck’ and made them combatants whose strength was based on the amount of time they were used in a 24-hour period, then there would be a good chance that ‘Roger’ would wallop the fuck out of ‘Fuck,’ and as any Great Lakes Freighter sailor will tell you, that is fucking saying something.  

He learned to sail on a tall ship in his teens.  They took nautical nomenclature seriously there.  Any lapses in the correct terminology were punished with pushups.    Fore, aft, aloft, bulkhead, deck, hatch, companionway, belay etc.  The names of the various rigs of sailing ship: brigantine, brig, barquentine, barque, schooner et al. The sails on the small square rigger: outer jib, fore staysail, topsail, coarse etc. They sounded so wonderfully arcane.  They would play a game called rigging tag whereby the first officer would shout out a piece of rigging and two people would race to touch it first.  This might mean climbing the mast or shimmying out to the end of the main boom or bow sprit.  

He re-read Conrad’s the Shadow Line recently and was struck by just how heavy on the nautical lingo it was.  Some pretty technical descriptions of sail maneuvers.  Surely that would be a turn off to a non-sailor.  And yet, he knew for a fact that this was a favourite of Louise Erdrich (a writer he greatly admired) and he was willing to bet that she had little to no experience sailing on traditionally rigged sailing vessels.  

Nick liked words.  The way they sounded together.  He liked using nautical nomenclature in his writing, knowing that most of his readers might never have darkened a ship’s deck.  He felt it invested the prose with an authority he would find it hard to otherwise muster.

He liked swearing too.  People had said to him, 

‘You have a good vocabulary, why do you need to swear?’  He didn’t, but they were entirely missing the point and not just a little condescending.  Sure there was a time and a place but nothing beat a well-placed expletive.  An apropos ‘motherfucker’.  Or a ‘cocksucker,’ elongating the awwwww of the ‘ock’ into ‘cawwwwwwk’ for emphasis. Said through clenched teeth in frustration.  He used to enjoy watching Inside the Actors Studio.  At the end of each interview the host, James Lipton, would ask his featured actor a number of stock questions.  One of them was ‘What is your favourite curse word?’  Jodie Foster’s was ‘cocksucker’.  The way she said it.  Magic.  Even his respectable, elderly, upwardly mobile parents would admit (though they would strenuously deny it in public and were much more sparing in its use) that in certain situations, only an ‘F’ bomb would do.  

He was half-Maltese and the Maltese are great ones for swearing.  A favourite over there is ‘għal Madonna’, a blasphemous invocation of the virgin Mary, used to express frustration or surprise – Malta being a predominantly Catholic country. The għal pronounced like ‘Uhhl’.  He once worked on a film set in Malta.  Coincidentally, a film version of Moby Dick.  A joint German/American/Canadian production starring William Hurt and Ethan Hawke.  There was a Canadian crew member, a runner, who in the course of her days on set overheard many of the local crew conversing in their native tongue.  At the end of the shoot she asked him,

‘Who’s this Al Madonna I hear everybody talking about?’

He hated getting old.  He ran to escape it.  Minimum 10kms a day.  It helped with the anxiety and kept him in fighting shape, though only he could turn something good into an unhealthy habit by not taking rest days and allowing himself a cigarette for every kilometer he ran (not during the run, after) which is why he ran so many.  Those days when he was on land he could do 15 to 25 kms.  Then he could really go to town with the ciggies.  He lived in fear of loose flesh. Flab. He liked that his skin was stretched tight around the rickety scaffold it hung on. He had a haircut recently and had to stare his own face down for 30 minutes as the barber went about his business.  Not a pretty picture.  ‘Cruel mirrors should be banned’, he confided to a friend later.  Every second of every year was etched into a line on his face and revealed in that forensic light.  The fag end of his forties, he thought.  Another of those alliterative sentences of which he was too fond.  Should he put it in his notebook?  No, the rain would just smudge the ink. Later. He was a vain man with an inferiority complex.  He observed closely the thinning of his hair.  He combed it in the shower and then after he toweled off decanted the hairs from the teeth of the comb onto a paper towel and counted them. He missed his stream. The powerful, chest high arc of urine he used to be able to project over the ship’s railing.  Now his piss just took a sharp right turn at the end of his urethra and dribbled south.

‘We can move up to 14’s now Cory,’ he said.  ‘Dump your 16s.  Full dump.  Both sides.’

‘14s.  Roger that.’

He has a childhood memory.  His family taking a train from Rome to Lausanne, Switzerland.  They had booked their own six-person compartment but when they got to it there were other people inside.  A conductor was called.  There was a lot of shouting and eventually some shoving and at some point, a suitcase fell from the overhead rack and landed on his head.  He likened the inside of his head, his internal monologue, to that cabin.  A small space with too many people and a bunch of shouting.  Lately, with these pills he’d been prescribed for ADHD, it was quieter.  The Italian men were gone.  Instead, it felt like the Rothko room at the Tate Modern Gallery in London.  A quiet place, warm with rich, arterial reds, a static hum and plush carpeting, but full of an oppressive sadness.  He missed the Italians; he stopped taking the pills two weeks ago, but they had not returned.

He remembers being frustrated as a kid.  Worrying.  Always so full of questions.  He longed to be a grown up.  They had it all figured out.  The most disappointing thing about adulthood, this whole aging malarkey, was that he was left with more questions than ever.  And few, if any, answers.  

When he finished his watch he would go to his cabin and write.  That would make him feel better. He wanted to have another blog entry ready for his birthday so at least he could begin his next year on earth with a sense of accomplishment.  Temporary though that might be.

He cranked the wheel on the booby hatch that led down to the catwalk at the forward end of cargo hold one.  He squeezed into the narrow aperture and felt for the first metal rung of the ladder with the tip of his steel-toed boot.  Down on the catwalk it was like a box at the opera.  Best seats in the house.  The sound of the cargo moving took on a different pitch down there.  The light felt candle lit, like the side chapel in a cathedral.  He’d always gotten a semi-religious vibe off of cargo holds when he was in them.  Because there were so big he supposed.  He watched as the last of the cargo ran out of the gates.  

He keyed his mic.  ‘That’s all of her,’ he said.  

He climbed back up the ladder and emerged on deck at the heel of the unloading boom.  Even though it was nearly dusk his eyes still had to adjust to the light.  He walked aft towards his winch controls.  

‘OK Captain,’ he said.  ‘Standing by my controls.’

He felt the low rumble of the engine below his feet.  

‘Let her go up forward,’ said the captain from his high perch on the navigation bridge.

‘Roger that, let her go up forward,’ said Cory.

‘Let her go aft when they get there Nick.’

‘Roger that cap.’

One deck hand stood ready beside four wire and the other ran down the dock towards three.  When they were both in position he slacked the mooring wires down with his winch controls and they cast the wires off into the water. Scurried up the accommodation ladder.  Raised it up behind them. The wires slid in through the fairleads and flopped up on deck like large landed fish.

‘Three and four are in, the boys are aboard and the ladder is on its way up,’ Nick said.  ‘All clear aft.’

He felt the engine engage and a plume of black smoke poofed from the ship’s stack.  The M______ inched forward.

‘Hey cap, do you need any spots from me?’

‘Just stand by on the quarter and let me know if the stern comes in any.’

‘Roger that,’ he said.  

He stood on the quarter and watched the great bulk of her slowly creep from the slip and out onto the St. Marys River where night was swiftly falling.