A Transit Like No Other

Squid boats light the skies of the Sea of Japan like mini-suns. They loom 40 miles over the horizon, then pop over the curve of the earth like a punch in the eyeballs. There is no night when there are squid boats.

By dawn they are gone.

The following 5 knot emerald and cream seas of Japan’s Tsugaru Straits spit us out into the Pacific Ocean an hour ago, where we came around to 090 and began our great circle to Long Beach. The sea ahead looks much kinder than it was on the way over- a series of high pressure air masses squeezing the lone low pressure mass and forcing it north, and out of our way.

With luck.

Now we advance our clocks an hour each day and lose an hour of sleep a night. We will repeat Wednesday when we cross the dateline. The lack of traffic means the watches will drag on and thoughts will wander with little to anchor them against the swirling eddies and gusting zephyrs of the mind.

Long before I ever set sail, I used to watch the ships making their way up and down the Savannah River. At every stage of my life I have watched these ships I now sail--as a child, from Tybee Island; as a teenager, from the banks of the river or the Tybee road; as an adult, from the independent taxi service I operated driving the bar pilots, to the pages of G-Captain, or Maritime Executive, or one of the many other trade publications or vessel tracking webpages.

The first time I drove a ship up that river was epochal--there was the river before, and the river after, and they were not the same rivers to me. The time before was a time of observation and curiosity--where was she headed? Where had she been? What would it be like to sail away aboard a behemoth like that?

On of the most formative parts of my life watching those ships was spent at Old Fort Jackson, a brick battery originally built for the war of 1812. My official job title was “Fort Slave,” and I did all the jobs nobody else wanted to do for $3.15 an hour. Clean toilets, mop floors, rake gravel, sweep floors, wash windows, cook oysters, empty trash, fight insects…

I lived in a Sears & Roebuck Catalog building that was condemned by the state of Georgia, affectionately called “The Lab.” My roommates were rat snakes that chilled themselves in the electrolysis tanks housing the artifacts from the “CSS Georgia,” a confederate ironclad battleship that was scuttled by the fort during the civil war and dredged up, piecemeal, by historical scholars, starting in the 80s and continuing to this day.

Up in the caretaker’s house lived my direct supervisor--a man who defied any and all categorization. He was historian, blacksmith, movie-maker, weapon maker, marksman, music connoisseur, mechanic, drag-racer, reenactor, welder, rigger, carpenter, artifact preservation specialist, metallurgist, and a man with the most colorful array of expletives imaginable. 

Amongst other things.

Of course we became lifelong friends. We drank too much, smoked too much, made too much noise, and we “blew shit up” on a regular basis. He was 10 years my senior and as positive a mentor as anyone could hope for… there is a correct way to blow shit up, after all, and only a dumbass does it wrong.

He was remarkably attuned to helping others--for a man so heavily armed. His pragmatism and common sense held little room for religious or political sentiments.  

On many occasions, when we were out of beer, we’d take a bottle of whatever was left and “walk the wall,” which was what we called the drunken circuit of the top of the fort’s twenty-five foot brick walls. We’d sit on the powder magazine, next to the thirty-two pound cannon, and watch the ships go by as the sun rose.

It may have been 30 years ago as I write this, but I can still smell the river, the Kamera Chemical plant next door, the sponged black powder of the cannon.  

One ship- the “Alligator Independence” was about 275 meters long and one the largest that used to call into Savannah (it was about the size of the ships I’m sailing now)- and her bright baby-blue hull used to make us laugh even as we’d wonder aloud at the size of that boat.

It would fill the sky, covering the entirety of the South Carolina side of the river as effectively as a hand over the eyes. It turned the turbulent Savannah into a mere ditch. It would pass so close to the fort I could feel the breeze of it on my face.

First time I went upriver at the helm of a ship - one equal or greater in size than the “Alligator Independence,” I saw how small the fort actually is. How its place on the river is different than I ever imagined it to be. I wondered who was watching the ship go by… MY ship.

And now, as I cross the North Pacific Ocean, I have plenty of time to think about a new, and different, epoch that will define me--one without my former supervisor and lifelong friend in it: He let go from the dock, downbound on The River for places farther than I have ever been on any ship, bound for destinations I will not know in this lifetime.

His friends and family are at the fort as I write this, celebrating his life at a memorial I wish beyond measure I could attend. They’ll fire the cannon (I suspect the charge won’t be truly a “blank,” knowing him as I do), sending a fifty foot smoke-ring a half mile down the river on a rolling wave of thunder...

The memorial requested attendees to please not bring their own black powder. Seriously. But somebody will blow some shit up, I bet… later… after the casually-acquainted have gone home and those closest to him begin to mourn in earnest.

Someone hanging the devil’s 10 (riding a piece of plywood in a fire for as long as possible). Firing softballs out of the naval gun after the outer gate is locked. Walking the wall with a bottle of bourbon.

And I can imagine watching a tremendous ship headed out to sea, interrupting their conversations in mid-word as the steel blots out the state of South Carolina.  

“I wonder where that [thing] is headed?”

Out here, away from the river and the fort, my 90 thousand metric ton ship is a dot on an ocean that spans an entire hemisphere. We are huge, yet infinitesimal. We crossed the Kamil-Kamchatka trench - 9,800 meters deep. This ship is but a mote… a mere microbe skinning along the surface of a drop of water.

It is the entirety of the world as I know it right now.

And I stand my mid-watch in silence, letting the swirling eddies and gusting zephyrs of the mind carry me where they will.  And I think about my friend.