One More Good Adventure

As I said in the previous post my ex wife Brenda and I moved to Chicago about a year into our marriage and got jobs at the same publishing company. Sitting at my desk in the cubicle shared with the associate editor all I had to do to see my wife was to look up from my typewriter. Her desk was about 30 feet from mine.

A couple of weeks into our tenure a tall, girl with blond hair that hung down past her very well-formed posterior walked past my cubicle into the production department. Despite the fact that I loved my wife, and I did love my wife, when I laid eyes on Caroline a small voice in my head screamed, “I want THAT!”

As the fates would have it she was the managing editor for my wife’s magazine and the three of us became close friends. During the next couple of years there was an enormous amount of sexual tension between the three of us though nothing overt ever happened. Perhaps it was only in my mind.

One day in Florida, about a year after my wife and I split up, and about two years since I’d last seen Carey, I’d swallowed a couple of tabs of mescaline when the “clean the house bug” bit me. This was totally drug-induced since I’m the type inclined to hang my dirty clothes on the floor until it’s time to throw them into the washer.  Culling through shoe boxes filled with old papers I came across a postcard Carey had sent to me and Brenda when she was vacationing in Spain. All the old memories came flooding back in a huge, erotic rush. In my drug-altered state I hurried to my typewriter. Since I was still freelancing at the time the machine was loaded with a roll of teletype paper that I used when doing my rough drafts.  That way I could keep writing without having to change sheets of paper and ruin my concentration when I was on a roll. Those were the old days of real “cut and paste.”

I stood at my typewriter and all the old feelings for her came gushing forth and I ended up composing a 16 foot long, single spaced letter graphically detailing what I wanted to do to every square inch of her body. I ripped it off of the roll, put it into one of my business envelopes, slapped three stamps on it and dropped it in a mailbox.

Not surprisingly I never got a reply.

Two years after posting the letter, and by circumstances involving a midnight knock on my door by union thugs too convoluted and bizarre to go into here, I found myself back in Chicago for a couple of weeks waiting for a berth on a self-unloading ship that had been promised to me by the union that controlled the staffing of the dinner cruise boat I’d been working on in Fort Lauderdale. I was staying with an old college friend and, naturally, wondered if Carey was still in Chicago.

Naaah, she must have been married by this time but I dug out the local phone book nevertheless, and was stunned to find her listed and still at the same address where she’d been living when Brenda and I moved to Florida.

It took several hours to build up the courage to actually call her. She was home and seemed genuinely glad to hear from me. We agreed to get together the coming Saturday evening. The plan was to go out for dinner and perhaps take in some music and do some dancing which we both loved. But, she told me, she had moved recently and gave me her new address.

She was living near Diversey Harbor, at the edge of Lincoln Park. Her digs were on the 23^rd floor of a new high-rise. When Carey opened her door I was stunned. She was as eye-catching as ever. Half German, half Finnish, she carries her Nordic heritage well. That long blond hair still spilled past her waist and her eyes were a deep, emerald green. She was wearing a diaphanous yellow dress and with the lighting behind her it was obvious she was wearing little else. It wasn’t the type of outfit one wears just to go out. I was sure I was going to get “lucky” this evening and live out the fantasies I’d built up about her over the years. I was right about not going out as she said she’d whipped up a little something for us there.

Besides Caroline, the  view through her windows was also spectacular. Lakeshore Drive wound its way south into the city below us.  To the left of all the bright white lights of the buildings and the red and white lights of the cars going into and out of the city Lake Michigan was a black blot.

I can’t remember what we had to eat that evening. I was just awed to be in her company again and the conversation of what each had been doing in the intervening years flowed easily. Around nine Carey excused herself to go to the bathroom. I got up from the dining room table and wandered around the living room looking at the pictures on her walls, the books in her bookshelves and then, on an end table between her couch and the floor-to-ceiling windows, I spotted IT.

There, next to the table lamp, was the thick envelope with my name and old address on it. I vaguely remember writing to her years before and out of curiosity I took out the long yellow sheet of paper and started to read. There is absolutely no way to describe how embarrassed I became reading that drug-induced missive. It was so graphic it would have made Larry Flint blush. With fingers that barely worked I refolded the letter, put it in the envelope and returned it to the end table.

When the object of my affections came back to the living room I mumbled something like “It’s sure been great to see you again,” gave her a peck on the cheek and I was out the door. Honest! I don’t know if I was more mortified by what I had written or by the fact that she had kept the damned thing. So, there I was, sitting on the bus at 9:30 on a Saturday night leaving the sexiest woman I knew and who had obvious had designs on my tender body that evening and was now headed back to a friend’s house where six dogs were waiting to wag their tails at my arrival. What an asshole!

Saturday’s fiasco gnawed at my psyche for several days. What must she think of me now? Though I was starting out on a life-changing career move, essentially I was still a writer, so I did what writers do best. I wrote a letter trying to explain my hasty departure. I hopped on the bus the next afternoon knowing she would be at work and went to her apartment building where I convinced the doorman that it was of the utmost urgency that he put my new letter in her mailbox. That time was of the essence and entrusting it to the U.S. Postal Service was not an option.

That evening at dinner time Carey called saying she understood completely and would I please come again the coming Saturday, an invitation I quickly accepted.

This time when I arrived she was dressed in blue jeans, a white peasant blouse with colorful flowers embroidered about the neck. Her thick flaxen hair was worn in a braid that fell down to her beautifully curved ass. Unlike our previous meeting it was obvious that she was wearing a bra this time.

We ordered a pizza and scarfed it down. Carey had hers with a bottle of a fairly decent Chianti and we shared a couple of joints. The evening swept by with laughter, reminiscences both shared and individual, and speculation on where our lives were headed. My time in Chicago would be over in less than two weeks and I hadn’t the slightest idea where the ship would to take me.

In the very wee hours of the morning, but shortly before sunrise, she asked if I’d ever heard of Dory Previn.

I admitted my abysmal knowledge of popular musical stars outside of The Beatles, Cat Stevens, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and Fats Domino.

Carey, her green eyes looking searchingly into mine explained that Dory had been married to Andre and while institutionalized after a nervous breakdown and she started composing songs as a form of therapy.

“There’s one I want you to listen to,” she said. Rising sinuously and exhibiting the grace of the professional dancer she’d once been, she went to the turntable by the windows.

God, she looked so good there. Backlit by one of the world’s great cities and the soft golden hue from the candles scattered around the apartment I felt lucky to be in her presence and good graces.

The disc was already on the turntable. She turned it on, lowered the needle and came back and sat on the floor with her knees touching mine. She took my hands in hers and said, “I want you to really listen to the words of this song. Don’t say anything, please, just listen,” she said as the acoustic guitar intro filled the room. Then Dory began to sing in a lilting alto:

Would you care to stay till sunrise?

It’s completely your decision.

It’s just that going home is such a ride, such a ride.

Going home is such a ride

Going home is such a ride

Going home is such a low and lonely ride.

Would you hang your denim jacket near the poster by Picasso?

Do you sleep on the left side or the right? Or the right?

Would you mind if I leave on the light?

Would you mind if it isn’t too bright?

Now I need the window open

So if you happen to get chilly

There’s this coverlet my cousin hand crocheted, hand crocheted

Do you mind if the edges are frayed?

Would you like to unfasten my braid?

We fell into each other’s arms and clothing flew everywhere and we consummated our lust on the floor before ever moving to the bed as the eastern horizon of the lake was turning a light pink.

At Carey’s insistence I returned to Dennis’s, got my duffle bag and spent the next two weeks with her, calling the Union Hall in Detroit every couple of days until they told me a berth was available and I should be in Detroit in two days. Carey took the day off and we spent the next 48 hours naked and satiating ourselves.

After reporting to the union hall I went to the Coast Guard offices where I was issued a Z card which is required of everyone working on vessels of over 100 gross tons and returned to the hall. They wrote me a ticket and told me to meet the S.S. Consumer’s Power out behind Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant where I would sign on as an Ordinary Seaman.

Except for the year I spent teaching school a few years later, it was the worst job I ever had in my life.

The Consumer’s Power was what is known as a “self-unloader.” It is a creation of the iron ore fleet of the Great Lakes. Consumer’s Power delivered coal and rock salt around lakes Huron and Erie.

My place in this world of maritime commerce was to go into the holds with a shovel as they emptied and make sure every morsel of salt and lump of coal found its way off the ship. Underway I chipped paint and primed de-rusted areas. I ate and roomed with Abdul from Yemen.

I hated it and jumped ship, so to speak when we got back from a run to Canada two weeks after I came aboard. On the Lakes when you sign on to a ship you are there until the ice sets in and the ships are unable to move. I couldn’t see doing that until summer and fall deepened into arctic winter.

So, there I sat in Detroit with brown snow falling about me. The city air around the auto factories was so polluted that it was impossible for a pristine flake to make it all the way to the ground.

What was I to do now?  The pay on the ship had been pretty good with overtime and I had close to two thousand bucks in my pocket. It wasn’t going to last forever, though. Should I go back to Fort Lauderdale and confront the union goons? Chances were I’d never run into them again. But should I take the chance?

What about Chicago? Carey and I had spent a glorious two weeks together saturated and satiated with sex. But was that the basis of a relationship? Who knows? I dug into my grimy jeans, fished out a quarter to call for a cab to take me to the bus station. I stared at it for a couple of minutes, brown flakes melting as they hit George Washington’s nose.

What the hell? Heads I go back home to Fort Lauderdale. Tails I’d take my chances in Chicago. I flipped the coin high in the air, caught it and slapped it down on the back of my hand. I sat there for quite a while before raising my hand to see what would become of my life.

It came up tails. To shorten this long tale, Carey and I had a tumultuous relationship for the next three years. Three times I asked her to marry me. Three times she said “No.” Three times I literally got on a boat and left. “Third time’s a charm,” they say and I’ve never been back to Chicago again. And if you might think I’m a bit hypocritical because I wouldn’t have returned to Chicago for Brenda, I was only there in the summers for those three years.

I met my one and only ex wife, Brenda, at a small college on the banks of the Mississippi River in the northeast corner of Missouri. We were married about a year later. We were great friends, and sure, we loved each other, but the main motivation for getting married was so we could live together and stop having sex in the back of a car on the edge of deserted corn fields.It was the only way we could remain on speaking terms with our parents, and back in 1967 living “without benefit of clergy” wasn’t as prevalent as it is these days.

Back then I had a small beach ride tour business on the Outer Beach in Orleans on Cape Cod. The summer after our wedding was a financial disaster. Our season ran from Memorial Day to Labor Day. In the month of July we only had ONE day that was completely without rain or fog. People don’t take beach excursions on days like that. Despite the fact that I was an instructional assistant in the English and Drama departments at college and still had some GI Bill educational benefits coming we were too deeply in debt from the summer debacle that we had to move to Chicago where we had friends and get work to pay off our bills. We found work at a publishing house.. Brenda as a production manager for one magazine and I was assistant editor of another.

At the end of our second year with the publisher Brenda got a raise that amounted to eight cents an hour and I did slightly better with twelve cents. We packed our stuff into our Pinto station wagon and headed to Florida. I got a job as a copy writer at an advertising agency and Brenda did temp work for Kelley Girl. We didn’t know a soul in Fort Lauderdale.

One day I noticed a small item in the newspaper announcing a casting call for the local little theater group. Both Brenda and I had been heavily involved in the theater at college. As I said, I had been an instructional assistant in the Drama Department teaching stage craft (I did this simply by staying a couple of chapters ahead of the students) and Brenda did a lot of back stage work with costuming, props and lighting. I suggested we volunteer to do back stage work with the local group as a way of meeting people with similar interests as our own.

The director and star of the play (The Odd Couple) had an idea for forming a traveling theatrical troupe and invited the two of us to become part of the company. We built a portable stage, light and sound systems and put on one night stands at condominiums, country clubs and large restaurants from West Palm Beach to Key West and out to Belle Glade on the banks of Lake Okeechobee. Brenda was the Stage Manager and I handled publicity. The Gold Coast Players, as we were called, did quite well artistically even if we weren’t a financial success. We even made it to the front page of Variety.

In the summer of our second year we were invited to put on a “dinner-theater night” at a local resort hotel. They were looking for a way of drumming up business for their restaurant which languished at that time of the year. The night was a smash success. The show was Goodbye, Charlie and the star was Veronica Lake. It was the last thing she did before she died. It was so successful the resort signed us up to be a year-round venture. Over the next couple of years what had no become “Gemini Productions” (because Brenda and one of our two partners shared that zodiac sign) expanded and we had adjunct theaters in North Miami Beach and Boca Raton.

I was now the assistant Public Relations Director at a large hospital in Fort Lauderdale and was writing at least one freelance magazine article a month. On the theatrical front there were always four plays going on at any one time and we were raking in considerable critical acclaim. We garnered “Best Play,” “Best Actor,” “Best Actress,” Best Supporting Actor”  awards against competition from the Big Three: the Parker Playhouse in Fort Lauderdale, Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami and the Royal Poinciana Playhouse in Palm Beach, all of which used big-name actors whose names were known world-wide. Several of our actors went on to play regular roles on television soaps, others appeared in small parts in such films as Porky’s, Porky’s II,  Ace Ventura and Cocoon among others.

With four plays going at once (they would rotate through each of the theaters and another would be in rehearsal) I rarely saw Brenda anymore. Her normal work-day was 16 to 18 hours a day and her spare time was taken up with heavy drinking and cocaine. Sometimes we might only see each other a couple of hours a week. She did take off for several days so we could attend the wedding of one of my brothers up in Orlando. While there I told her she had to make a decision. It was either me or the theater. But as soon as the words were out of my mouth I knew I couldn’t make that demand because there were certain things I wouldn’t do for her. For instance, I would never move back to Missouri or Chicago and endure another winter. And if there were things I wouldn’t do for her then I had no right to demand she make life-altering decisions at my insistence. We muddled along for another six months and then Brenda said she wanted a divorce. We split our meager possessions down the middle and she moved out of our apartment and into the house with the theater company’s director and his partner.

We went to the company’s lawyer and asked him how much it would cost us for him to do a “no-fault” divorce for us. He said, since we had given him quite a bit of business in the past couple of years, he would do it, “as a favor,” for $300. We’re talking 36 years ago and $300 was quite a lot more than it is today, especially since I was no longer working at the hospital but had started to follow my bliss and was working for minimum wage as a deck hand on a dinner cruise boat.

“You mean to tell me,” I said, “you want to charge us $300 to have your secretary type our names in the blanks of some forms and make a trip to the courthouse? Forget it, I’ll do it myself.”

“Oh,” he sneared, “if you buy one of those kits they have out, you’ll be sorry.”

“I don’t need a kit,” I said. “I’ve been around you for a couple of years now and one thing I’ve learned is you aren’t as smart as you think you are.”

I went to the law library at the County Courthouse and asked to see the forms used for a “no fault” divorce. I copied them on the Xerox machine for a nickle a page; a total of less than a half dollar as I remember. Next I went to a stationary store and bought a small package of legal-sized paper, went home and typed everything out inserting my name and Brenda’s in the $300 slots.

When I’d typed everything out I went to the Clerk of Court’s Office and spread everything, except the final order, in front of the clerk and said, “What do you need to get this thing started?”

The girl said, “This, and this,” picking a couple of the forms out of the bunch.

“What happens now?”

“We’ll send a copy to your wife. If she wants to fight it then she has to file a reply. If she wants the divorce, too, she doesn’t do anything. We’ll send you a notice when you have to file the next papers.”

I called Brenda and told to expect the letter and to just ignore it.

Over the next few weeks I returned to the Clerk’s Office at their direction until I was down to the Final Decree and was given a date to meet with a judge. I was told I had to bring someone with me who could testify to the fact that I’d been living in Broward County for at least six months prior to filing for the divorce.

When the court date arrived the only person who could arrange some time off to go with me was a very buxom, six foot tall red head who was the receptionist at the dinner cruise company. We were shown into the judge’s chambers. He sat at his desk, looked at me, stared at Twyla’s enormous breasts, looked back at me and stared once again at Twyla’s chest as if he hadn’t seen it the first time.

“No, your honor,” I said, snapping him out of his fantasies. “She’s not the reason for the divorce. She’s a co-worker here to testify to my residence status.”

The judge asked me a couple of simple questions and then Twyla was sworn in and said she’d known me for almost a year and that I was a resident of the County.

“So,” the judge asked, “why the divorce?”

I gave him a run-down of the past couple of years, leaving out the part about the booze and drugs, and told him that Brenda and I were just going in two different directions with our lives and wanted to end the marriage before we ended up hating each other.

“Okay,” the judge said and signed the papers. “Take these down to the Clerk of Court and have it recorded.”

It was done. At the Clerk’s office I was given two prices for having the papers recorded, one of which was to have them notarized. I opted for the notarization and was charged $32.50. After I took Twyla back to the office I went up to the theater where Brenda was running the rehearsal for the newest show.

“Well, it’s done,” I told her, “and for a fraction of what that bottom-lawyer wanted to charge us.”

“How much was it?”

“Thirty two fifty,” I said.

“Wait a minute,” Brenda replied and walked off to the sound and lighting booth. She returned a couple of minutes later and handed me $16.25. “I bet it lasts just as long as if we’d spent three hundred,” she said.

It has for the last thirty six years so far.

A “Rogue’s Yarn” is a colored yarn of jute laid in a strand of rope to identify what materials are used in the rope’s manufacture.

Naval-grade manila (made from the abaca plant which is grown extensively in the Philipines and was shipped world-wide out of the Port of Manila)  and  is marked with one red yarn in each of two strands. Commercially made manila over 2 inches in circumference is marked as follows: Grade I, ‘Special’, one black rogue’s yarn in three strands; Grade II, ‘Standard’, one black rogue’s yarn in two strands; Grade III, ‘Merchant’, one black rogue’s yarn in one strand.

Commercial sisal (made from the leaves of the Agave sisalana plant) has a red rogue’s yarn while naval sisal has yellow in each of two strands.

Commercial hemp (we all know what plant that comes from) has no rogue’s yarn while naval hemp has red in all three strands.

Coir rope (made from coconut husks)  has one strand marked with a yellow thread.

Originally the yarns were used only in naval rope and the color indicated the ropeyard that made it and it was introduced to stop theft by making it easily recognizable, naval rope being considered superior to all others. Because of that there was a lot of temptation to smuggle the line out of the rope yards and sell it to merchant vessels.

Today different colors are also used in yacht running rigging to identify different sheets, halyards, etc.

Have to admit this is pretty cool…

This will be a relatively long post, but bear with it and you will learn something…

As far as I’m concerned one of the best books ever written about the sea is The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad. I marvel at Conrad’s use of the English language especially in light of the fact that it’s not his native tongue. Conrad’s real name is Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. Born in Poland, English was his third language.

Conrad knows whereof he writes as the holder of a Master Mariner’s ticket. The Mirror of the Sea is the closest thing to an autobiography Conrad came up with.

Words, of course, have meaning, and on a ship the words used have specific meanings that relay precise information instantly to all hands. Without that precision lives, in fact the entire ship, can be lost. One can’t say “pull on that line-thingy over there.” You have to tell someone to “haul in the stays’l sheet,” for example. Non-nautical persons can be more cavalier with their use of terminology, of course, and in the following example Conrad clarifies what the words “Landfall” and “Departure” mean to the seaman.

“Landfall and Departure mark the rhythmical swing of a seaman’s life and of a ship’s career.  From land to land is the most concise definition of a ship’s earthly fate.

“A “Departure” is not what a vain people of landsmen may think.  The term “Landfall” is more easily understood; you fall in with the land, and it is a matter of a quick eye and of a clear atmosphere.

The Departure is not the ship’s going away from her port any more than the Landfall can be looked upon as the synonym of arrival. But there is this difference in the Departure: that the term does not imply so much a sea event as a definite act entailing a process–the precise observation of certain landmarks by means of the compass card.

Your Landfall, be it a peculiarly-shaped mountain, a rocky headland, or a stretch of sand-dunes, you meet at first with a single glance.  Further recognition will follow in due course; but essentially a Landfall, good or bad, is made and done with at the first cry of “Land ho!”  The Departure is distinctly a ceremony of navigation.  A ship may have left her port some time before; she may have been at sea, in the fullest sense of the phrase, for days; but, for all that, as long as the coast she was about to leave remained in sight, a southern-going ship of yesterday had not in the sailor’s sense begun the enterprise of a passage.

The taking of Departure, if not the last sight of the land, is, perhaps, the last professional recognition of the land on the part of a sailor.  It is the technical, as distinguished from the sentimental, “good-bye.”  Henceforth he has done with the coast astern of his ship.  It is a matter personal to the man.  It is not the ship that takes her departure; the seaman takes his Departure by means of cross-bearings which fix the place of the first tiny pencil-cross on the white expanse of the track-chart, where the ship’s position at noon shall be marked by just such another tiny pencil cross for every day of her passage.  And there may be sixty, eighty, any number of these crosses on the ship’s track from land to land.  The greatest number in my experience was a hundred and thirty of such crosses from the pilot station at the Sand Heads in the Bay of Bengal to the Scilly’s light.  A bad passage. . .

A Departure, the last professional sight of land, is always good, or at least good enough.  For, even if the weather be thick, it does not matter much to a ship having all the open sea before her bows.  A Landfall may be good or bad.  You encompass the earth with one particular spot of it in your eye.  In all the devious tracings the course of a sailing-ship leaves upon the white paper of a chart she is always aiming for that one little spot–maybe a small island in the ocean, a single headland upon the long coast of a continent, a lighthouse on a bluff, or simply the peaked form of a mountain like an ant-heap afloat upon the waters.  But if you have sighted it on the expected bearing, then that Landfall is good.  Fogs, snowstorms, gales thick with clouds and rain–those are the enemies of good Landfalls.

Some commanders of ships take their Departure from the home coast sadly, in a spirit of grief and discontent.  They have a wife, children perhaps, some affection at any rate, or perhaps only some pet vice, that must be left behind for a year or more.  I remember only one man who walked his deck with a springy step, and gave the first course of the passage in an elated voice.  But he, as I learned afterwards, was leaving nothing behind him, except a welter of debts and threats of legal proceedings.

On the other hand, I have known many captains who, directly their ship had left the narrow waters of the Channel, would disappear from the sight of their ship’s company altogether for some three days or more.  They would take a long dive, as it were, into their state-room, only to emerge a few days afterwards with a more or less serene brow.  Those were the men easy to get on with. Besides, such a complete retirement seemed to imply a satisfactory amount of trust in their officers, and to be trusted displeases no seaman worthy of the name.

On my first voyage as chief mate with good Captain MacW- I remember that I felt quite flattered, and went blithely about my duties, myself a commander for all practical purposes.  Still, whatever the greatness of my illusion, the fact remained that the real commander was there, backing up my self-confidence, though invisible to my eyes behind a maple-wood veneered cabin-door with a white china handle.

That is the time, after your Departure is taken, when the spirit of your commander communes with you in a muffled voice, as if from the sanctum sanctorum of a temple; because, call her a temple or a “hell afloat”–as some ships have been called–the captain’s state- room is surely the august place in every vessel.

The good MacW- would not even come out to his meals, and fed solitarily in his holy of holies from a tray covered with a white napkin.  Our steward used to bend an ironic glance at the perfectly empty plates he was bringing out from there.  This grief for his home, which overcomes so many married seamen, did not deprive Captain MacW- of his legitimate appetite.  In fact, the steward would almost invariably come up to me, sitting in the captain’s chair at the head of the table, to say in a grave murmur, “The captain asks for one more slice of meat and two potatoes.”  We, his officers, could hear him moving about in his berth, or lightly snoring, or fetching deep sighs, or splashing and blowing in his bath-room; and we made our reports to him through the keyhole, as it were.  It was the crowning achievement of his amiable character that the answers we got were given in a quite mild and friendly tone.  Some commanders in their periods of seclusion are constantly grumpy, and seem to resent the mere sound of your voice as an injury and an insult.

But a grumpy recluse cannot worry his subordinates:  whereas the man in whom the sense of duty is strong (or, perhaps, only the sense of self-importance), and who persists in airing on deck his moroseness all day–and perhaps half the night–becomes a grievous infliction.  He walks the poop darting gloomy glances, as though he wished to poison the sea, and snaps your head off savagely whenever you happen to blunder within earshot.  And these vagaries are the harder to bear patiently, as becomes a man and an officer, because no sailor is really good-tempered during the first few days of a voyage.  There are regrets, memories, the instinctive longing for the departed idleness, the instinctive hate of all work.  Besides, things have a knack of going wrong at the start, especially in the matter of irritating trifles.  And there is the abiding thought of a whole year of more or less hard life before one, because there was hardly a southern-going voyage in the yesterday of the sea which meant anything less than a twelvemonth.  Yes; it needed a few days after the taking of your departure for a ship’s company to shake down into their places, and for the soothing deep-water ship routine to establish its beneficent sway.

It is a great doctor for sore hearts and sore heads, too, your ship’s routine, which I have seen soothe–at least for a time–the most turbulent of spirits.  There is health in it, and peace, and satisfaction of the accomplished round; for each day of the ship’s life seems to close a circle within the wide ring of the sea horizon.  It borrows a certain dignity of sameness from the majestic monotony of the sea.  He who loves the sea loves also the ship’s routine.

Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks and months fall away quicker into the past.  They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship’s wake, and vanish into a great silence in which your ship moves on with a sort of magical effect.  They pass away, the days, the weeks, the months.  Nothing but a gale can disturb the orderly life of the ship; and the spell of unshaken monotony that seems to have fallen upon the very voices of her men is broken only by the near prospect of a Landfall.

Then is the spirit of the ship’s commander stirred strongly again. But it is not moved to seek seclusion, and to remain, hidden and inert, shut up in a small cabin with the solace of a good bodily appetite.  When about to make the land, the spirit of the ship’s commander is tormented by an unconquerable restlessness.  It seems unable to abide for many seconds together in the holy of holies of the captain’s state-room; it will out on deck and gaze ahead, through straining eyes, as the appointed moment comes nearer.  It is kept vigorously upon the stretch of excessive vigilance.

Meantime the body of the ship’s commander is being enfeebled by want of appetite; at least, such is my experience, though “enfeebled” is perhaps not exactly the word.  I might say, rather, that it is spiritualized by a disregard for food, sleep, and all the ordinary comforts, such as they are, of sea life.  In one or two cases I have known that detachment from the grosser needs of existence remain regrettably incomplete in the matter of drink.

But these two cases were, properly speaking, pathological cases, and the only two in all my sea experience.  In one of these two instances of a craving for stimulants, developed from sheer anxiety, I cannot assert that the man’s seaman-like qualities were impaired in the least.  It was a very anxious case, too, the land being made suddenly, close-to, on a wrong bearing, in thick weather, and during a fresh onshore gale.  Going below to speak to him soon after, I was unlucky enough to catch my captain in the very act of hasty cork-drawing.  The sight, I may say, gave me an awful scare.  I was well aware of the morbidly sensitive nature of the man.  Fortunately, I managed to draw back unseen, and, taking care to stamp heavily with my sea-boots at the foot of the cabin stairs, I made my second entry.  But for this unexpected glimpse, no act of his during the next twenty-four hours could have given me the slightest suspicion that all was not well with his nerve.

Quite another case, and having nothing to do with drink, was that of poor Captain B-.  He used to suffer from sick headaches, in his young days, every time he was approaching a coast.  Well over fifty years of age when I knew him, short, stout, dignified, perhaps a little pompous, he was a man of a singularly well-informed mind, the least sailor-like in outward aspect, but certainly one of the best seamen whom it has been my good luck to serve under.  He was a Plymouth man, I think, the son of a country doctor, and both his elder boys were studying medicine.  He commanded a big London ship, fairly well known in her day.  I thought no end of him, and that is why I remember with a peculiar satisfaction the last words he spoke to me on board his ship after an eighteen months’ voyage.  It was in the dock in Dundee, where we had brought a full cargo of jute from Calcutta.  We had been paid off that morning, and I had come on board to take my sea-chest away and to say good-bye.  In his slightly lofty but courteous way he inquired what were my plans.  I replied that I intended leaving for London by the afternoon train, and thought of going up for examination to get my master’s certificate.  I had just enough service for that.  He commended me for not wasting my time, with such an evident interest in my case that I was quite surprised; then, rising from his chair, he said:

“Have you a ship in view after you have passed?”

I answered that I had nothing whatever in view.

He shook hands with me, and pronounced the memorable words:

“If you happen to be in want of employment, remember that as long as I have a ship you have a ship, too.”

In the way of compliment there is nothing to beat this from a ship’s captain to his second mate at the end of a voyage, when the work is over and the subordinate is done with.  And there is a pathos in that memory, for the poor fellow never went to sea again after all.  He was already ailing when we passed St. Helena; was laid up for a time when we were off the Western Islands, but got out of bed to make his Landfall.  He managed to keep up on deck as far as the Downs, where, giving his orders in an exhausted voice, he anchored for a few hours to send a wire to his wife and take aboard a North Sea pilot to help him sail the ship up the east coast.  He had not felt equal to the task by himself, for it is the sort of thing that keeps a deep-water man on his feet pretty well night and day.

When we arrived in Dundee, Mrs. B- was already there, waiting to take him home.  We travelled up to London by the same train; but by the time I had managed to get through with my examination the ship had sailed on her next voyage without him, and, instead of joining her again, I went by request to see my old commander in his home.

This is the only one of my captains I have ever visited in that way.  He was out of bed by then, “quite convalescent,” as he declared, making a few tottering steps to meet me at the sitting- room door.  Evidently he was reluctant to take his final cross- bearings of this earth for a Departure on the only voyage to an unknown destination a sailor ever undertakes.  And it was all very nice–the large, sunny room; his deep, easy-chair in a bow window, with pillows and a footstool; the quiet, watchful care of the elderly, gentle woman who had borne him five children, and had not, perhaps, lived with him more than five full years out of the thirty or so of their married life.  There was also another woman there in a plain black dress, quite gray-haired, sitting very erect on her chair with some sewing, from which she snatched side-glances in his direction, and uttering not a single word during all the time of my call.  Even when, in due course, I carried over to her a cup of tea, she only nodded at me silently, with the faintest ghost of a smile on her tight-set lips.  I imagine she must have been a maiden sister of Mrs. B- come to help nurse her brother-in-law.  His youngest boy, a late-comer, a great cricketer it seemed, twelve years old or thereabouts, chattered enthusiastically of the exploits of W. G. Grace.  And I remember his eldest son, too, a newly-fledged doctor, who took me out to smoke in the garden, and, shaking his head with professional gravity, but with genuine concern, muttered:  “Yes, but he doesn’t get back his appetite.  I don’t like that–I don’t like that at all.”  The last sight of Captain B- I had was as he nodded his head to me out of the bow window when I turned round to close the front gate.

It was a distinct and complete impression, something that I don’t know whether to call a Landfall or a Departure.  Certainly he had gazed at times very fixedly before him with the Landfall’s vigilant look, this sea-captain seated incongruously in a deep-backed chair.

He had not then talked to me of employment, of ships, of being ready to take another command; but he had discoursed of his early days, in the abundant but thin flow of a wilful invalid’s talk.

The women looked worried, but sat still, and I learned more of him in that interview than in the whole eighteen months we had sailed together.  It appeared he had “served his time” in the copper-ore trade, the famous copper-ore trade of old days between Swansea and the Chilian coast, coal out and ore in, deep-loaded both ways, as if in wanton defiance of the great Cape Horn seas–a work, this, for staunch ships, and a great school of staunchness for West- Country seamen.  A whole fleet of copper-bottomed barques, as strong in rib and planking, as well-found in gear, as ever was sent upon the seas, manned by hardy crews and commanded by young masters, was engaged in that now long defunct trade.  “That was the school I was trained in,” he said to me almost boastfully, lying back amongst his pillows with a rug over his legs.  And it was in that trade that he obtained his first command at a very early age.

It was then that he mentioned to me how, as a young commander, he was always ill for a few days before making land after a long passage.  But this sort of sickness used to pass off with the first sight of a familiar landmark.  Afterwards, he added, as he grew older, all that nervousness wore off completely; and I observed his weary eyes gaze steadily ahead, as if there had been nothing between him and the straight line of sea and sky, where whatever a seaman is looking for is first bound to appear.  But I have also seen his eyes rest fondly upon the faces in the room, upon the pictures on the wall, upon all the familiar objects of that home, whose abiding and clear image must have flashed often on his memory in times of stress and anxiety at sea.  Was he looking out for a strange Landfall, or taking with an untroubled mind the bearings for his last Departure?

It is hard to say; for in that voyage from which no man returns Landfall and Departure are instantaneous, merging together into one moment of supreme and final attention. . .”

The entire book is available, free, here…

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/tmots10.txt

A while back I was, I’m ashamed to say, eating at a fast-food establishment that sold “food” other than burgers. As I was eating my “meal” there was a young man making a scene at the counter. He had a distinct English accent and was complaining that what he had purchased didn’t look like the photo on the display from which you make your selection. He demanded that the minimum-wage drones who slap the slop together make him a product that looked exactly like the picture. This loudly went on for quite some time while the queue of hungry potential customers grew behind him. Finally the manager gave the complainent his money back and told him to take his “meal” with him gratis.

Of course what comes across the counter only vaguely resembles those luscious photos. Here’s what we’re inticed by and what we really receive.

And the reason why they aren’t the same…

It’s a bad, sad day when you don’t learn something new…

Today I learned you can’t wash your cell phone at the laundrymat.