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...
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...
Last month, on a run in Thunder Bay, I thought of my poor murdered pal Tom Brown. I didn’t set out to do so – my plan had been merely to run a 15km stretch of trail through the woods – but it was my...
“I think I’m weary of my terrifying heart.” J.P Donleavy, The Ginger Man 6.5 kms into a run it starts. My heart strikes a dud beat and then begins to race. I am crossing the pedestrian bridge that straddles lake Shore Boulevard...
There are five decks (storeys) in the aft house of the ship, or the accommodation, as we sailors call the space on board where we do all our living. Between the main deck and the navigation bridge there are four decks connected by 55 stairs and eight landings. In...
Goddamn the weather was savage at Superior Terminals in Thunder Bay, where we were loading grain and oats. The rain was relentless and well described the angle of the wind, which howled in off the lake sideways at 40 knots. The temperature hovered just above zero but...
The ship had already been operational for a month when I joined her at a stone dock on the St. Clair River. There is no time of transition when you return to work on a ship. No period of grace to unpack and acclimate. It was my watch...
I’ve been thinking lately of writing a story about a wolf. And I was thinking about this story, and a hundred other things, as I packed my bag for a month at sea. I continued to think on it as I journeyed to the ship and through the next...
On a flight to Malta, about 45 minutes before landing, I'll put down my book and look out the window. If I am in an aisle seat, and depending on the aspect of the plane, I'll need to lean forward and crane my neck awkwardly to port or starboard to do so. Hopefully it...
‘We’re never going to make it through unscathed.’ I said this to multiple crew members in the first weeks of our month-long rotation as we enjoyed unseasonably warm weather that was spring-like in its temperance. Then, with one last...
By 1430 the sun is already low in the sky. It lingers above the tips of the mangey jack pines and spruce to my right and gives the impression that if I run fast enough, I could overtake it. I am listening to the spectral, doom-laden Irish folk of Oxn (a first...
In memorium Shane MacGowan It was time to return to the ship. In the early afternoon of a mild December day, I drove yet another rental car on the QEW, south, towards the American border. Tens of thousands of starlings moved in front of my vehicle. Two flocks that...
for William Hurt 1950-2022 I thought of what William Hurt told me, as I steered a stretch of the St. Lawrence River, on a dark night, ten days ago. ‘Every actor should play Hamlet at least once in their career,’ he said. We...
You come up for watch at 0600. It’s still dark. You make a tea. Yorkshire Gold. Yorkshire Gold, the crack/cocaine of teas. At night all there is to see of the St. Marys River are navigation lights....
It came on quick last night as we slipped our wires. Freezing wind careening in from the west. I went aft to take my place on the stern and call spots as we reversed out of the tight slip....
We joined the growing queue of ships piling up at anchor outside the Port Weller Piers sometime around noon on Tuesday. We’d just run a load of soya beans up to Port Cartier in the gulf and barely made it back down before...
They were high. Tilt your head back high. Turkey vultures. Dozens of them soaring in narrowing circles. Wings outstretched in flap-less flight. Surfing thermals of warm air pushed up by the tufty peaks of a vast cumulous cloud that advanced on us like a mobile...
My doppelgänger died 15 years ago in a fire on a ship in Norway. This information comes from Julio, another of the AB’s (abbr. for ‘able-bodied seaman’) on board. He is from Nazare, of the big waves, Portugal. Moved to Canada in 1980....
stevedorenoun An individual engaged in the loading or unloading of a vessel. saltienounslang A salt water cargo vessel Jim drives a snowplow in the winter and was a mechanic for 30 years before he got this gig and he’ll tell you as much within a minute of your meeting...
‘I can still picture the little white stucco cottage with the sunflowers,’ my mother said, recalling the farm her family used to holiday at in Abersoch on the coast of North Wales, distant summers when she was a child. ‘There was an enormous bull mastiff there named...
I got off the ship at the coal dock in Sandusky, Ohio a few weeks ago. I drove a rental car home. I’d just read of another mass shooting and preferring to diminish the odds of my being mass shot, I took the northern route around Lake Erie. This...
I got picked up by the cops for hitchhiking in Algonac, Michigan one morning seven years ago. I was working as a cook on an old wood schooner that was on a summer jaunt around the Great Lakes. I jumped ship the night before and grabbed a motel room to escape the heat...
hawsepipe: noun Nautical. 1. an iron or steel pipe in the stem of a vessel through which the anchor chain passes. hawsepiper: an informal maritime term to refer to a ship’s officer who began his or her career as an unlicensed seaman and did not attend a traditional...
1.Hereabouts, habit is the province of all the good creatures who work on board. With the exception of the deckhands and the captain, everyone works a fixed schedule, which varies little. The ship’s work remains stolidly samey too. We load cargo at one dock and...
I waited for customs in the warm yellow light of the grain elevator in Toledo, Ohio. From where I perched on the bollard beside the aft accommodation ladder, if I craned my neck and leaned forward, I could see the dock and anyone approaching. I sipped tea from my...
Samuel Johnson once wrote that ‘being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.’ Having just returned to work after a two week leave and staring down the barrel of a six week stretch at sea I can’t help but sympathize. It should be noted that...
I woke from fitful sleep and dreams of a world gone wrong where people were always yelling at me. I was slow to rise, as is rote at this late date in the sailing season, when I’m all banged up, wore...
Grey. Grey. Grey. Grey is the order of the day. Melville devoted a whole chapter of Moby Dick to the colour white and its varying degrees, and similarly, one could exhaust reams of paper rhapsodizing the vagaries of grey and greyness that colour these northern winter...
To ply the St. Lawrence Seaway between Montreal and Escoumin a river pilot is required. They are trained to know every nuance of every inch of river. The fierce currents, the strong tides, the submerged rocks and sand banks and the many...
You could tell he was nervous by the way he carried himself. His movements seemed stiff, almost robotic, and his eyes darted around the deck of the big ship as he took everything in. Whenever someone walked past him, he squared his shoulders as though...
On entering the St. Lawrence estuary from west to east, that no-man’s-land where the fresh meets the brine, you will immediately become aware of the tide. If it is with you (the ebb), your passage will be swift, if against (the flood), a...
Nighttime, the third of November and I haven’t written a word in 46 days. I have only recently rejoined the ship after a month off in which I had intended to work on my writing and hammer it into some kind of saleable form. I...
I’m a sucker for stormy weather, and I love a rugged shoreline too. The kind of craggy, can opener coast that makes quick work of any vessel unlucky enough to come a cropper on it. A few days back a hurricane out east sent rain and wind...
Sailor’s stories are often full of adventure and high drama, hell, that’s why we like to read them. Think of Shackleton and Bligh or the novels of Melville, Conrad and Jack London to name just a few. What isn’t always talked...
It is said by some, that trouble on ships - like celebrity deaths and surfable waves – comes in threes, but we are well past that count now. For the last two weeks it has been the puppy tugging on the loose strand of a sweater, unravelling each neat, knit row, right...
The Science Centre sold glow in the dark stickers of the stars in their gift shop. I came home from a field trip with a pack and stuck them to my bedroom ceiling. My own universe. A cosmos of my own...
A low mist lies over iron country as we slide through the piers and into the harbour shared by the ‘Twin Ports’ of Superior, Wisconsin and Duluth, Minnesota, accompanied by a lazy swell that slouches shoreward along with...
Anxiety is a bear whose breath is always hot on my heels but it was a greyhound that got me. I was enjoying a mid-morning run when the dog lunged, tore the lead from its elderly owners hand, and bit me on the back. Some runs are so good they feel almost...
“For the beautiful is nothing other than the onset Of what is terrifying. “ Rilke I was eight years old when I killed the family dog on a warm Good Friday in early April. The night before I’d lain in bed and said prayers in my...
“It is a rare thing to live through a moment of huge historic consequence and understand in real time what it is.” The BBC My childhood friend John kept fish and he passed this hobby on to me. Together, we’d take the subway north and in the dim and humid...
Last night I dreamt a dream within a dream of an old woman who kept cows in a pasture beside a small forest. There was a circular path that ran through the woods upon which she would walk her cows every day. Round and...
“It is easy to forget, that in the main, we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs.” Jim Harrison Anyone who has had a dog will know the sound. A repetitive retch, pitched somewhere between a gulp, a glug and a burp, accompanied by the dog’s...
“The sea was angry that day my friends. Like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli.” George Costanza Two massive storm systems were set to converge in the North Atlantic and we planned to Indiana Jones it, and slide through the narrowing gap...
There’s a pile up at the Soo Locks. Seven cargo ships all wanting up or down. We are sixth in line and take the upper wall to wait beneath the Sault Sainte-Marie International Bridge. It’s 0330 and it will be hours before we get the...
‘It is too early for snow,’ said the first mate as we made the big turn at Johnstone’s Point, a near 90˚ bend in the upbound section of the St. Marys River. His inflection betrayed genuine puzzlement. In the few hours since we had cleared Detour...
A little after midnight Dawson emerged from cargo hold five. It was blowing a full gale and the temperature had dropped to -25˚C with the windchill. He stood over the narrow hatch and hand over handed the 75’ length of one inch hose up from...
‘I’ll never forget the date,’ he said, ‘December 6th, 1989. It was the day those girls were murdered.’ The captain is referring to the massacre of fourteen female students by Marc Lepine at the Ecole Polytechnique...
“They don’t call it Marble Hell for nuthin”, the captain says as we line the ship up for a tie-up at Marblehead stone dock in Ohio. From the wheel I can see white water breaking over the pier where the load rig is situated; at the end of...
Virtually everything I’ve written these past two years features a bird in it somewhere. There was the small goldfinch skittering up the deck as I did a round of soundings approaching Parry Sound or the bald eagle’s dogged pursuit of a seagull in the...
Weltanschauung; noun 1. a comprehensive conception or image of the universe and of humanity’s relation to it. 2. worldview. The time of our quarantine draws to a close. Travel plans are being made. The last round of testing did...
“We’re all of us haunted by our thoughts. So make friends with a ghost. It ain’t goin’ fuckin’ anywhere.” Al Swearingen, Deadwood the Movie There is a fox outside my window. I’ve seen him early mornings. He scavenges the local dumpsters...
for Mark and Emma I was a paperboy. Cold mornings, I would rise before the sun and gather the bundles of papers that had been left in stacks on the front porch overnight. I’d cut the tough, plastic bindings and assemble the various sections of...
He had a business card which read, Patrick J. Kerns – Rogue Sailor of the Seven SeasKegs Drained, Sea Monsters Trained and Virgins Converted. I met him in the summer of ’93, when I was a skinny and small 17 year old. Six of us teens signed aboard the Full-Rigged...
658 days ago, on a brief furlough between ships, I ran alongside the Welland Canal in Southern Ontario. It was a sunny day, one of the first warm days that spring. It felt good, not all runs do. As I ran, I was playing with words in my...
We are following a meandering country path. The way is led by a sea of Lellux (a local yellow flower) and an enthusiastic nine year old named Izzy. The almond trees are in bloom and their thin branches reach over stone walls, the pink and white...
for Maurice, Moira, Veronica and Patrick Follow me down a narrow country lane. High, dry stone walls sheathe the road tightly and small birds flit back and forth between them. The sky is an incandescent blue and the sun is high up in...
There are places your mother warned you about. You know. Past the train tracks on the outskirts of town. The Rouge River in Detroit is one of them. It’s here we unloaded our cargo of slag two nights ago. It is a pestilential...
Days. Doldrum days. Underway. At anchor. Alongside. Slow loads and slow unloads. Day workers day work and watchkeepers keep watch. There are days when the belly of time swells with idle hours only for it to rip wide open like the crotch seam of a fat mans jeans...
I’m woken two hours early by the 2nd mates knock at my cabin door, ‘We’re just passing Mission Point, we’ll need you for the locks,’ he says in what sounds, from my grimy fug of sleep, to be an obscenely cheerful voice. I grunt an...
It is a time of gales. As temperatures change, storm fronts form out west and barrel eastwards towards us on the Great Lakes, where they suck up moisture, fuel for their devastating engines. There are the large, slow moving Colorado lows, and the smaller,...
The engine room is like North Korea, I have no idea what goes on in there, and if I visit, I’m afraid I won’t make it out. Many minutes of my life have been lost trying to navigate its Escher-like catwalks and stairs, searching for an engineer, a storage...
The busiest train bridge in America is an unassuming iron swing bridge that spans the Maumee River in Toledo, Ohio, rather modestly called the NS South. At almost any time of day you’ll see a procession of freight trains trundling abacus like across it, heading east...
A late frost had left a thin carapace of ice on the deck, and the gathered crew trod carefully on the slippery steel in the chill of an April morning. We drank our teas and coffees in the half-light and some smoked cigarettes as we waited for the tugboat...
‘People steer the same section all the time in daylight and in good visibility,’ the captain tells the third mate who is learning how to pilot this stretch of the river. We are in dense fog, down bound on the St. Clair River. ‘The mistake they...
In the late afternoon they went ashore to gather wood. He nosed the zodiac up onto the bank and when they heard the familiar scrape of sand and gravel beneath its hull the others jumped ashore. ‘There’s nothing to tie the painter...
(Meldrum Bay, Manitoulin Island, Ontario) Yesterday, at anchor, waiting our turn for the stone dock, I looked out on the pebbled beaches and dense tree-line of the North Channel and noticed a tall white pine standing significantly higher than the other trees by almost...
John Prine died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know… I first heard him at the student union bar at my university in North London. I worked there and the bar manager, Tom, had a friend who was a punk from Northern Ireland. He saw that I liked country music and...
Green Bay, Wisconsin to Duluth, Minnesota Tom Weafer was an old colleague of my dad’s. They worked for the Ontario government. Both were new to the country. Tom was from Ireland. He was a little older and had been in Canada a bit longer and my father looked up to him....
Oxfordshire, UK-10km’s “10. I am grateful always to have had courage, gaiety and a light heart.” Barreling full-tilt along black country roads with hi-beams on is not without its risks though most of this seems to have been absorbed by the local badger population of...
(Partly truth, partly fiction) “Occupying a magnificent chosen position in this lovely old-world village in the Amber Valley. Weathered stone facing South West within a beautiful landscaped garden and having superb views over most lovely unspoilt country about mid-way...
There is an exuberance that pervades the Talking Heads’ 1984 concert film ‘Stop Making Sense. Watching it there is no doubt that they were a great band but on a recent re-watch what struck me is how much everybody seems to be enjoying themselves, particularly Tina...
Ghajn Tuffieha/Gnejna Hobbled by a bum knee and a six week moratorium on running, and increasingly unfulfilled by the paltry rehabilitative one minute walk/30 second run drills I’ve been prescribed – which for one used to chewing up at least 10km’s a day is the...
His face was not his fortune. A small, snaggle-toothed creature with monstrous breath and lopsided bearing. He used to skulk around the film studios where I was working. Just out of range, staring sadly at people. One day I saw a construction worker throw a rock at...
Sliema, Tax Biex-13km’s Once,I stood alone,atop the highest yard,in howling windswhile a wild oceanraged all about me. Of course it fell to me, as the most experienced of the deck crew, to scramble up the foremast and secure the t’gallant sail which had begun to...
Sliema, Marsamxett, Valletta-13km’s It is impossible to write of Malta without acknowledging the light. Perhaps it is the limestone of which this island is made, or the blue sea that surrounds this small rocky outcrop in the middle of the Mediterranean, that makes it...
Upbound, Lake Huron It is not a truth universally acknowledged that the greatest smell in the world is the pad of a Labrador’s paw, but it should be. I learned of this when I was young, on the cold winter mornings when my sister and I would tramp sleepily down the...
Mount Saviour Monastery, Pine City, New York, 11km’s My father was born to the crash and clamor of airborne ordnance as the Luftwaffe commenced what remains one of the largest bombing campaigns in history on his small island. Perhaps coming into this world to such...
Buck Mountain, New York, 9km’s I am driving with my father along a highway in upstate New York, to visit a Benedictine Monastery that he has been going to since 1980. This is a place of significance to him, a part of his history. I came here 15 years ago but was still...
Quebec City, 15km’s “Habit is a great deadener” wrote Samuel Beckett, but there’s nothing like good landscape seen from a ship’s deck to shake a sailor out of the often-humdrum routine of shipboard life. Navigating down the St. Lawrence River in Autumn one is deluged...
Fort William Native Reserve, Mount McKay-21.9km’s I must have taken a wrong turn. The mud underfoot is thickening and sucks greedily at my shoes and the undergrowth is closing in claustrophobically, with errant branches encroaching on my airspace and worrying my face...
Downbound St. Lawrence Seaway-Ashtabula, Ohio to Quebec City, Quebec Though the word is not confined to the provinces of the middle-aged and the elderly, it was when my doctor said it, ‘colonoscopy’, that I believe the lid on the coffin of my youth finally slammed...
Goderich, Ontario-15km’s Running on a treadmill is to jogging outside what Oasis are to the Beatles, mostly plodding, with the occasional flourish of brilliance. However, as a runner, cooped up on a laker for days at a time, I try to run a minimum of 5km’s a day, to...
Toronto, 8kms Having dispensed with a cliched week of heavy drinking that is the want of many sailors returning home from a lengthy sojourn at sea, especially those without a wife, it is time to cast off the shackles that gallons of beer will so ably fasten and emerge...
Thunder Bay, 9.4kms I have inherited many things from my parents. A great love of books and animals, my brisk gait, punctuality that verges on the pathological and a nose which, glimpsed in profile in the bathroom mirror or store front windows, even now, startles me....
Presque Isle National Park, Marquette, Michigan A 12 hour delay, as they charge the high dock with iron ore, means I can break away from the ship and explore this national park which abuts the dock we’re moored at. Off I go running through the wet wild woods by my...