The shipmate uncensored

They come from all walks.  Stumbling in their youth to the calling.  Detecting salt in their senses, and like a salmon to its natal stream they migrate to the waterfront seeking passage aboard a ship.  They feel the pull of the adventure, and are beckoned by the promise of good wages.  They come from an uneducated class, and upon the first port of call some will jump ship, the romance beaten out of them by the relentless sea. Those are never to return, the others will retain their berth.  They will retain the life.  It becomes all they know.  Their education the waves, their teachers the harsh salts who sometimes subtly, sometimes not, conform and initiate them into the intricacies of living aboard ship, to the small rituals and courtesies that make a shipmate; cleanliness, hard work, and a thickened hide capable of brushing off curses and ridicule.  In time they grow old, some advance in the ranks, some do not advance at all, but instead find mastery in the work of their rate.  Stubbornly they have persisted on whatever course they chose, or that which was chosen for them, until they become dependent on it.  Always keen to give it up, but to never retire, they continue on in dualistic confusion, both loving and hating it.  Then some finally break away to be terrified by the silence of the land, their bodies worn and plagued by deficiencies of hearing and sight, and in their journey always the question of why?  Why are some called to the lonely austerity of this way of life?  Why are some meant for the pleasant home and hearth, the mortgage, the white picketed fence with the happy dog and happy children, but not them?   What commonality with their shipmates can explain this universal fate of men of the sea?

Sailors in general maintain a blue-collar work ethic.  Unfathomable to them is the concept of four office walls and a desk.  Give them the open sea air, the manual task, and three square meals a day and they will soon be at home.  They both welcome and loathe hard work.  The problem of a task presented, like a riddle to be solved, entices them, but soon they will find the easiest way to circumnavigate their chore, for their list of projects extends on and is never finished.  And so they do what they might, and they do it steady as she goes.  This is not true for all, for some are incredibly lazy, performing minor tasks over great lengths of time, skating by as it is called, but not all aboard ship are true sailors either.

Most of these men do not consider their future.  They live in the moment.  They will work until they die.  Therefore, as soon as their check is deposited it is already spent.  Trucks, guns, Saturday nights, boats, and big toys, they work hard to save for the freedom of being ashore, and then the money goes by the wayside, as does time, and soon they are at sea again.  Most lack a college experience, but not intelligence, and so ignorance, not stupidity, plagues them.  Racism would be an example of their ignorance.  It unfortunately is prevalent here.  Nor would they consider themselves stewards of the sea, but instead the sea a beloved adversary of which they pollute without regard for their actions.

So it goes, too, with their health.  Once sailors were worked hard on to maintain both rig and hull, and they in return were maintained through some poor ration of salted meats.  Today the cupboards are filled with junk, and with ample time on hand between strenuous tasks the majority have complicated health problems.  They are always trying to lose weight, and they are trying to quit smoking.  But they demand their prime rib on Wednesdays and the ice cream stores replenished weekly with hot brownies to accompany.  They eat their bacon sandwiches on white bread with mayonnaise slopped on one slice and butter on the other.  And, sadly, without having spirits aboard ship so goes the hope of kicking the nicotine.  The environment they are subjected to is one of constant noise, heavy lifting of lines hard on the back and knees, and the ever-present diesel fumes, all these things take their toll in time.

Without women it is a bachelor quarters.  After two weeks at sea the innuendos become increasingly jarring, and by the end of two months…  What is the difference between high school and tugboats?  Adult supervision.  Tug boaters are boys at best, jesting and picking, crude in humor, profane in language and habit, and unable to control their urges.

However, there is innocence in their ways.  For all their gruffness they look after one another.  Never does one ascend a barge or work a heavy wire on the back deck without someone watching.  Never does one work against the elements with a deficiency of work gear.  Certain things are held sacred, while all else is fair game.  Shipmates clean up after themselves and respect the sanctuary of ones privacy.  And, too, do they mourn the passing of their shipmates, and they often honor their memory through the spinning of yarn about their time with them.  For the few who are able to retire for the few short remaining years of their lives, and often only after a diagnosis of some disease, then the survivors will sit back, nod, and say, ‘He outlived the boats.  He had a few years ashore.  He done well.’  And when the joking is cast aside and you sit across from them and say, ‘No shit, now.  Tell me what happened.’ They will break down, and the tragedies of their lives will unfold before you.  Therefore, just as in any other society they are in a competition of one-up-manship, but one on one they are just as vulnerable as the rest.

It should also be noted that there is a class of young mariners.  They are the ones who come in during the in-between periods of their lives for the adventure of it.  They are innocent, often energetic, and usually somewhat educated.  They are like Dana, who committed the two years following his education before the mast.  Yet these do not stick around, ever present in the moment, ever enticed by the romance of it, and ever looking for their way out.

A Crew of Six

The Captain: 

Also known as ‘the ole man,’ the captains range in ages and capacities.  The captain’s role is to command and maneuver the ship, especially in concern of navigation and weather.  The Captain is the liaison between the needs and wants of the office and the capabilities of ship and crew.  A vast majority of his job is administrative.  One can achieve the hallowed rank of captain in two ways.  The first is to attend some Mariner’s Academy, in which the cadet studies for four years the intricacies of shipping and ship handling, dedicating their summers to volunteer aboard American ships to gain experience and sea time, only then to have to work up from being a mate.  Others begin from the bottom.  Tug boating has often been the refuge for a sailor to work his way up through the deckplates.  It is not uncommon that the finest of our captains began as a cook, advancing to able-bodied seaman, then toiling through the dogged rank of second mate, and so on.  All men in this profession carry mariner’s documents that are regulated by the Coast Guard.  To be a captain one must upgrade through experience of sea time and formal schools that teach and test navigational and seamanship skills.  Captains are respected, and the captain that respects his crew is revered as a god unto his men.  He is near worshiped.  The captain that curses the men and drives them too hard or into danger is just as equally despised and his reputation in the fleet precedes him even before his foot lands on deck.

There was barefoot Charlie, who walked about the ship, weather decks, and engine room barefooted.  He would peer through his old, scratched beyond transparency, coke-bottle glasses at some weather fax, then throw it away and mumble, ‘doesn’t matter how big the waves, it’s just what direction they come from,’ all the while the ship getting knocked about in the trough of some swelling sea. Tall, with wavy auburn hair he would enter my galley in the morning and say, ‘There he is.  What’s for lunch?  Chef’s surprise?’  Certainly autistic, he was a treasure trove of facts, particularly concerning Mark Twain and oysters.

Then there was the former Master Chief in the Coast Guard, turned tug boater, a legend in his own mind. Whatever experience you might have had in life, he had one better and more relevant.  Never quite grasping how it was that he could stay in such good health when all the others around him were overweight smokers, and still he drew the unfortunate lot of getting cancer.  And so in a renaissance of self-help he discovered a book on the supposed evils of wheat and became obsessed, much to the cook’s chagrin, with a grain / starch free diet.  He would peer across the table to the deckhand who was having a helping of potatoes, and mumble under his breath, ‘uugh, wheat.’  The deckhand looking up in confusion.

There was the best of the fleet.  The captain that had run his own salmon boat in Alaska, working on tugs in his off time.  ‘I have been a failure in my life,’ he said.  ‘I am no more than a tugboat captain.’  But, he would add, of his three kids all have college degrees, and two have doctorates.  It was there that he had succeeded.

And the worst, a large man who had troubles negotiating the ladderwells, awkward and given to arbitrary fits and demeaning comments.  The table he kept a most somber affair.  He presided from the head, breathing heavily over his food with a dim countenance, as he took obligatory bite after obligatory bite to appease the cook.  Then without word of thanks, or without any show of appreciation theatrically discarded half of his plate into the slop bucket and took a candy bar with him to the wheel house, where he would sit and read magazines conveying the latest bulletin of celebrity gossip, and listen to satellite radio crime reports.

Or the well-meaning old man that must have gained mastery of circular breathing as he was able to curse continuously in a voice that could be heard over the engines and tow winch, spraying indiscriminately his tobacco spittle across the back deck.  But when a good joke was at hand his eyes all alight, and his laughter deafening, and he would say, ‘I like you.  I don’t care what the chief says about you.  You’re my kind of people.’

The Chief Mate: 

Next in line is the chief mate, and his responsibility is to see the captain’s orders carried out.  If the captain is a liaison between the offices and the ship then the chief mate is the liaison between the captain and the crew.  If you have any problems you take them up with him.  If the crew is cursed with a bad captain then it is his role to provide a buffer between the two.  The chief mate assists the captain in landing the barge, directs the sailors as they are making tow, or handling mooring lines.  In general, from my experiences, after a few weeks at sea the small eccentricities of people can become unbalanced to the point of insanity, but it is his role to maintain some semblance of order.

Where the captains have ranged in personalities, the chief mates have all been a constant.  They are hardened men with a cool head and a sense of humor who look over the crew instead of down on them.

The Second Mate: 

Those of you familiar with sea literature may also be familiar with the loathsome rank of second mate.  Rated as a deck officer, he is one yet fully initiated into the wheelhouse.  Whatever menial tasks despised by the captain and chief mate get passed on to the second mate.  He stands the hardest watches, and relieves the chief mate for chow, thus always eating last.  The second mate most often has progressed up from being a deckhand, and so is also in charge of keeping the deckhand employed with tasks, and often falls the blame onto him when the head is not properly cleaned, or the wheelhouse windows not washed.  Ambitious and young, the second is often overly eager to do his task well.

Not often well experienced, there is the infamous story of the particular second mate who would overzealously navigate his whole watch with his binoculars about his neck, alternately glancing from them to the GPS, and in time inevitably steamed over a crab pot, for it did not show up on the chartplotter, nor could he see its close proximity through his glasses.

Or the other mate right out of the Academy who brought up his blanket on the midnight watch, propped his feet up and took a good nap as the auto pilot navigated its way through the intricate and well-traveled inside passage from Seattle into Southeast Alaska, only to be roused by the Captain, who did not throw his usual fit, but instead simply said, ‘Pack your shit,’ and so left him on the docks in Ketchikan.

The Chief Engineer: 

Of all the crew the chief engineer has the most freedom.  He has reign over the vast intricate systems that drive the boat and is indispensable in his abilities to provide not only the necessities of propulsion, but also the luxuries of running water, toilets, air conditioning, and electricity.  He is also the most often roused from his rack in the odd hours for some discrepancy or another, and so is a collector of overtime pay.  The captain relies on him, and the two are often at odds.  The captain breaks what the engineer has to fix.  Engineers are as obstinate as the captain, masters in their own right, and few have I met that I have not wondered what effects years of being subjected to diesel might have on their stability.

There was my first encounter with an engineer.  A stocky built man, he was known as having the best hair in the company.  A silver fox, his mane kept immaculately slicked back.  For a man that worked amid grease and wastewater he was notorious for his obsessive cleanliness.  Also known for his alcoholic dependency he was a man of temper, who would erupt into childish tantrums at a whim, so as to even false charge sailors, like a grizzly might an intruder, then in the next instant shake his head and calmly explain that he is not an asshole, but that you are just an idiot.

Then there was the other, who walked about much like mister Magoo tampering with this or that and smiling on meeting you saying how much he loved his job, truly trying to convince himself of his own sincerity.  A self-proclaimed bleeding heart liberal whose child-like smile would contradictorily turn to sharp scorn upon any show of environmentalism.  Perhaps an effort to justify his intimate association with fossil fuels he would argue that Mars was warming, too, but nobody wants to shut down the car factories there.  One never knew whether, or how, to argue with such odd logic.  So let him pass on his way, for once he branded you as a tree hugger, you were no good to him.

Or the other, a silent strange little man with that perpetual cigarette hanging from his mouth while he cleansed some engine part in a sink of diesel, his pale eyes flashing erratically from one task to the other, who subsisted off of a diet of rice soaked in milk and sugar.

And are you familiar with the Walrus and the Carpenter from Alice’s Wonderland?  The engineer that was identical to the Walrus in so many ways.  A foul human being, never to be trusted among women or children.  Who spent his time in the Philippines between trips, and of his sexual obsessions there he was not modest, or humane, enough to not recount.  Who, on a tested occasion, would eat anything placed before him without pausing to take note of what it was he was eating.  An odd childlike humor, save his lack of civility, he was hard to dislike, genuinely worried for your safety, and easy to trust at his job, but personally one to be avoided.

The Deckhand: 

The deckhand is responsible for the cleanliness and preservation of the ship.  One considered himself no more than a boat janitor, to which he was not pleased, but was also correct.  However, in the old days one could earn a reputation as a stalwart deckhand, and in that way gain just as much respect as is carried by the captain.  When an international sailor is introduced in our company usually he fills this billet, and stays in it for the duration of his career.

There was a Polish deckhand.  A 63-year-old man, dedicated to his work, as long as he only had to sail to Hawaii.  A man whom you thought spoke decent English, for he always nodded and said, ‘Yes, Yes, I know this,’ then would go on and do exactly what it was that he was doing, wanted to do, or just the complete opposite of what you were asking.  A man that loved to fish, cried enthusiastically when the first flying fish was spotted as the ship entered the tropics, and would leap for the line when a Mahi was landed, and then would save the heads to make his fish head stew.  Who, also, would appear on the back deck in his Speedo, his balled fists on his waist as he puffed out his chest and allowed, with satisfaction, his skin to absorb the vitamin D of the sun while taking in the sea air.

And also a Mexican fellow, who would take any joke about being a Mexican, but would refuse with great pride being treated like one.  Missing a few digits on his extremities, he began his career working the canneries in Dutch Harbor before signing on with a crab boat.  He brings his own, ‘Mexican Ketchup,’ some distilled pepper sauce concoction that he spreads liberally atop of everything, and that is to say literally everything, and which the engineer blames for any deficiency or complication regarding the head or plumbing.

Or the last of the old breed.  A deckhand whose first name was forgotten as he assumed for himself the title of his rank, AB  (Able Bodied) Smith.  A man colorfully decorated from the neck down.  He had hinges tattooed to his joints and various ships and sealore about his person.  He bounced about the deck, always smoking, as he worked quickly and efficiently from one task to the next, always with a quick solution for whatever was broken, and always ready to help, the perfect shipmate sober, and apparently the worst while drunk.  Who once came into the wheelhouse and proclaimed that he had decided that his problem with keeping his last three wives had been himself.  ‘You think,’ the captain said, near falling out of his chair.  God rest his soul, he has passed now.

The Cook: 

The cook is the lowest and most humble of positions aboard ship.  After having studied the lore of the sea I am convinced of at least one commonality aboard any ship, that being that the cook is innately eccentric, almost to the point of insanity.  Having met a number of cooks, my theory was more or less confirmed, so I was loathe to accept a position on a tug as one.  However, I still stand by my assessment as a generality.

The stories around the galley table abound.  Out of the box Bob, received this sobriquet for all that he knows how to cook comes from out of a box, and he is not inclined to broaden his culinary skills.  There is the other veteran cook, who worked on crabbers for thirty years before retiring to tugs.  He has a ten-day menu he rotates through, and so there is little surprise in his fair.  He will bully you into a cribbage game, then throw the deck at you should he loose.  Or the one they call Squirrel who has yet learned the intricacies of the meat thermometer, and even for him to put out a half cooked raw slab of pork would be a great achievement, and too much effort for him to even attempt a side.  Or the one cook who served a lunch of canned chicken noodle soup, having not even taken the soup from the cans, he left out enough cans for each crewmember to have one, with the opener beside them, and a bag of saltines.

In short defense of my colleagues, the cook’s position is often referred to as being the most difficult job on the ship.  Whereas others can take shortcuts here and there, the cook’s work is always on display.  Whereas Sundays are referred to as Sailor Holidays, the cook has to prepare lunch and dinner every day for the duration of the cruise.  When hiring new sailors to the tugboat profession our company starts them as a cook.

However, the position of cook can usually weigh heavily on moral.  Good food can make a good cruise go by quickly, and since the cook is responsible for the common space of the galley it is often up to him to set the tone of that space.  He can often end up becoming the ship’s psychologist and doctor, should he so chose to fulfill such a roll.

It ought be said, that sailors will always complain about two things: the weather and the food.  Therefore, I take it as a great compliment that I often hear them complain of the food on their other voyages, but have yet to complain of mine.

To conclude:

And so in our little world we are a society of six.  And how this society interacts dictates what kind of trip it will be.  Some boats have worked out a well-formed crew.  The Malolo, due to the unique position she fills and her long rotation, is one of those few.   The men here have become like family to one another.  They know each other’s stories and eccentricities.  They are aware of each other’s problems and whatever aspiration or scheme each might be working to.  And so they are a hard society in which to be admitted.

There is apprehension when you crew up.  You do not know whom your companions for the next month or two will be.  You watch as your shipmates enter with their belongings.  They enter quietly, isolated, their head down, there is never a formal introduction, and it may be days before you make any kind of acquaintance, or find any common interests among them.  And when the trip is over they will all pack their sea bags, and just as quietly as when they crewed up, so they are discharged back into their life, often without a word of fare thee well.  For them it has been 20, 30, 40 years of shipmates come and gone, some for better, some for the worse, and each shipmate with some reason that brought them to sea.  In time they have all sailed on, and some day they go by the wayside, not to be heard from again.  These friendships are often as fluid as the passing waves, and the men have become hardened by this fact.  Often of diverse backgrounds and experiences, they are bound together by only a thread of commonality in the intricately laid rope of their being, and that commonality is that they are of the waves, vested into the ancient society.  In the duality of their lives none ashore share this with them, or fathom the other half of the sailor’s life, but their shipmates understand their struggles as the whole, and they need no introduction to each other, and in that way, out here, we are all of one common crew.