The Voyage of the Rose City

by John Moynihan

  Standing in line, I tried not to give away my nervousness. I’d silently grab my tray and silverware and, sandwiched between officers and men, would wait for my food. During the first week of the voyage everybody was antsy. A new crew, a long voyage, and an uncertainty as to what the wife would be up to during the months of absence put the whole crew on edge. In the crew mess, Billy and the boys covered up their displeasure at being away with loud talk and pointed exclamations. The old-timers began what was to become a predictable cycle of reminiscence. I took to sitting at their table to hear the fascinating oral histories of their time-lost world. My imagined visions of the Merchant Marine, it became clear, were not idle fantasies at all, but rather an inherited memory. There was, in fact, a time when one could crew on an old freighter and sail to Singapore, when the dollar was king and an American on the town could have more women, wine, and wangdoodle than he could possibly hope to handle. Another reason I sat with the old-timers was because they were just that. Age had mellowed even Dave Martin, who once claimed, while on shore leave for fifteen days in San Francisco, to have gotten into nineteen fights. My ignorance and weakness were not as important to them as was my youth, on which they looked with nostalgia. Sitting with the old-timers also meant I could keep my back to the boys’ table and eat my meals with the least amount of hassle.

  Our first weekend at sea ended with stocking the lifeboats. The Chief stopped calling all hands; now only those on watch or who wished to earn overtime showed up for work during the day. There were only two lifeboats, one on either side of the house. Twenty-foot red metal craft, they were stuffed with as many survival supplies as possible. In the cabinets under the seats, cans of fresh water and food, smeared with axle grease to prevent rusting, were jammed in. Other storage spaces contained radios, flares, rope, spears, extra oars, and, of course, a powerful outboard and a supply of gas.

  The physical labor was good therapy as far as I was concerned. Forming a chain, we passed the supplies up out of the storeroom and into the boats all day long. The Atlantic was smooth and the sky sharply clear. I was beginning to feel more relaxed with the circumstances of nautical maintenance. Then Ned approached me on the stern.

  He had obviously come down from the kitchen for a particular reason; lunch was almost ready, and he had much to do before an entire hungry crew showed up on A deck. He stopped me from whatever I was trying to do simply by his curious and threatening countenance.

  “Hey, man, how’d you get the ordinary’s job?” There was almost a complaining whine in his angry Philadelphia drawl.

  “Uh, in New York.” My response was far from satisfactory, and I knew it. My eyes all too often betray otherwise hidden guilt.

  “Well”—he paused, wondering how to pursue and confirm his conviction that I had usurped his job—“when did it go up? What time?”

  I said something about morning in as matter-a-fact a voice as I could conjure.

  “Morning, huh?” was his reply. He frowned and shrugged, stuffing his hands into his pockets and turning away in disgust. At least he’d not gotten anything out of me, I thought to myself. But the confrontation established Ned as my first open enemy on the ship. When lunch hour came around I closed myself in my cabin and wrote a long passage in my journal. Things were potentially very ugly.

  At 1:10 the watchman came by to see if I wanted afternoon overtime. I put on my work boots and trudged down the stairwell to get my orders from the Bosun. The next day we were to begin Butterworth operations. Apparently that involved cleaning the tanks somehow, but I really had no idea when, what, or where. But for now we were instructed to continue securing the ship and cleaning up.

  There is always that breathtaking moment when one who hasn’t seen the ocean for months comes over the last hill and first catches sight of the sea stretching out from the beach to the horizon. Used to the interruptions of hills and houses, the city dweller involuntarily stops in awe. The sheer geometry of that cutoff point between an irregular surface and a perfect sphere is at once startling and humbling.

  Out at sea this sensation is doubled. Not only does one see the limitless ocean before him, but behind him also. No amount of rationalization—the comforting thoughts that man’s nautical inventiveness can secure safe passage across the waters—will calm the frightening vulnerability that seizes you when you look around and realize that there is nothing for 360 degrees. As strong and steely as the supertanker SS Rose City may have been, it would have been a simple matter for the ocean to twist her into a pretzel and drag her down into the dark folds of the deep.

  The view from the stern was the most impressive. The huge screw that moved the ship discharged a great explosion of white water that ceaselessly frothed and writhed in our immediate wake and then smoothed itself out. It was as if some great carpenter took a plane to a wooden sea, the wood chips furiously flying at contact, the rough board becoming glasslike with each stroke of his hand. Alas, for this carpenter, the wood tended to diffuse, and within minutes the calm path of water that we carved was erased by the bucking of the tides. Nonetheless, from the stern you could see the earth’s perfect sphere plotted out with a great white line that radiated from the ship to a point beyond the horizon.

  Bud, Jimmy, and I leaned against the rail during a lull in the afternoon’s work and quietly watched the ocean. The two of them knew each other well enough from the hall to be relaxed in each other’s company. We idled, and our small talk gradually picked up into a full-fledged conversation. Bud squinted in the hot sun and looked down at me.

  “Are you related to the famous Moynihan?”

  “Yeah,” was my reply. Shit! was my thought, but having told the Old Man one story, I couldn’t change it now.

  “How so?”

  “He’s my father.”

  Bud started laughing, almost nervously. “No shit! I didn’t think there was any fucking way. I just took a wild guess.”

  Jimmy, who was looking on, grunted with interest; he was likewise impressed. “He’s a good man,” he said, nodding his head up and down.

  Bud mimicked his movements, but the conversation was over. We stood around in silence for a few minutes.

  It had become too awkward to even bother trying to cover up the new order of things with pointless talk. I made some excuse for myself and walked back to the house. As I disappeared I didn’t even worry about whether the two of them would start talking behind my back; what’s the point in yelling at the given? There was a bathroom between the back of the house and the stack deck that was rarely used. I closed myself in there and locked the door. The only thing more frightening than realizing the dangers of the ocean when you’re out in the middle of it is realizing that the ship you’re on isn’t any safer.

  After Bud and Jimmy found out my true identity I spent the remainder of the day quietly performing my duties. Jake gave me another lesson at the wheel and told me a few more stories of his first trip. He was becoming increasingly eager to put me on the right track, so far as sailing was concerned. The wheel, likewise, softened its temper. After the night’s watch, the Chief, sauntering over to the console, looked up from his clipboard and nodded permission for me to work the wheel. I still wasn’t going to be allowed to steer in narrow sea channels, but at least the heat was off from Jake and Billy. With one simple nod the Chief had created equity in the work on the 4–8 watch. I was an established ordinary. I may not have known what I was doing on the wheel, but that was far from the point. The point was, I didn’t have to burden Jake and Billy with splitting my wheel watch. I allowed myself a wry smile. What would the executives of Texaco do if they knew a twenty-year-old beer-drinking ex-hippie who had been out to sea for only two and a half days was controlling the destiny of one of their largest supertankers?

  It soon became clear that other than work and sleep there was very little that successfully distracted me from ruminating on the long months to come. While the lounge never wanted for conversation, the crew rarely if ever spoke to one another beyond an exchan
ge of casual anecdotes. This was partly the way of the sea: You don’t stick your nose in someone else’s business; the further you probe, the more trouble you’re looking for. Occasionally at coffee, or at a quiet moment in a drunk, someone might volunteer a tale of his past that wasn’t the standard comic rap. But at this early stage in the voyage no one wanted to think about his own wife, let alone listen to someone else’s troubles.

  Reading was one alternative to the blanket homesickness that had settled on the crew. Locked away in my cabin I could attempt to restore my lost peace of mind with vestiges of my intellectual past, but I soon realized that the noble stack of classics I had brought with me were doomed to fall before John Carter of Mars and the Gormenghast trilogy.

  Then there were the movies on A deck. Through the ship’s phone intercom system one of the crew would ring up Sparks (the generic title for a ship’s radio officer).

  “Sparks, how about a movie?”

  After a few minutes the TV would crackle to life in the darkened lounge. It seemed that Sparks had a Betamax hidden away amid his electronic labyrinth, and, like some omnipotent sorcerer, he wielded the power of diversion or tedium over the melancholy crew of the Rose City. There was an unlikely assortment of films, however; Woody Allen and F. Scott Fitzgerald films are not especially popular among seamen. Fortunately he had a tape of High Plains Drifter.

  There was, as it turned out, another source of films on board: The Captain’s Locker, the ship’s store, where gloves, cigarettes, and other assorted necessities were sold by the officers to the crew, sponsored a ship’s library of reel-films and a projector. A screen in the officers’ mess provided the backdrop for such hits as The Great Santini, Boxcar Bertha, and Eye of the Tiger. The featured attraction was the ship’s one and only porno movie, shown first forward, and then in reverse. After a while it became difficult to tell the difference.

  Down in the lounge Billy, Ned, and Charlie, the QMED, were in command. I drifted down with a beer and slunk into a chair to see what was up. They had broken out coffee cans and buckets to serve as coolers for their beer. Unlike myself, desperately trying to abstain from drink and smoke for a few months, they were ready to tear it up. Before long it was decided that a movie in the officers’ mess was in order.

  The officers’ mess was really no different from ours, except for the movie screen and the personal service they were given by the Steward’s Department. Billy dragged the projector into the room and we all settled down with our beer for the movie. Miguel joined us before long—it made no difference to him that he had seen all the movies on the ship fifty times; he went for the ritual. Billy and Ned were drinking gin and tonics from a pitcher, and it became clear as the movie progressed that they were becoming a team.

  There is a special art to watching movies at sea. With every action on the screen there must be a string of commentaries and expletives. Bud was the master of the play-by-play; his running analysis of the film’s progress kept everyone in stitches, and the story in perspective. Billy and Ned were pretty good at the game, but to them the importance lay in the party that went along with watching a flick. Back and forth, they poured each other drinks, aping the old-timers in their heyday. The more they drank, the stronger they felt. The stronger (and drunker) they felt, the less they regretted being at sea.

  At one point the film jammed and the revelry was broken. Billy, who had taken up position by the projector in order to run the show, had trouble getting it back in sync. I made my way over to where he was fiddling in an attempt to apply my cinematic expertise.

  Billy glowered at me. “That’s all right, college boy, I can fix it.”

  CHAPTER 6

  THAT NIGHT I HAD A VIVID DREAM. I was back at the university and haunted by all those things that never quite got done, all those half-fulfilled commitments and plans. Somewhere in the dream landscape: “I can remember scattered fragments …” is how my journal reads in the dream. I stand before a typical dorm, staring at it from the other side of a hurricane fence. Unlike in most dreams, there is a vital immediacy to the situation. As I emerge from the woods and make my way to the dorm I am overwhelmed by the sense of failure that has haunted me since I left school. Even in my dreams I am not free of regret.

  Inside the dorm there is the expected collection of familiar and important friends. (Each one has affected me somehow, and now they chase me out to sea.) Before them is a series of magical candles, each tall and thin, save for a great black one that has been fitted into a human head. A particularly macabre friend of mine appears only to play a satanic record, filling the room with evil chantings. The candles are lit, and the room is overwhelmed with their dark burnings. I am then forced to recite a demonic enchantment. That is when I first hear the Voices.

  They come from some undefined dimension. It is not a question of heaven or hell, up or down. They come from beyond, and they are not of my subconscious. They simply are. And it terrifies me. Later I will read in my journal cryptic statements heard in the dream: “That’s it! Can’t you see? That’s what it is! The chance/simultaneous happenings are the key …” But now the Voices dominate my thoughts. They cry out that they are not evil, but I am far too shaken to listen to them.

  “They never want me to get there.”

  Then I woke up.

  Then I really woke up as I heard the watch awaken the other two on my watch.…

  Thus I concluded the fevered account of the dream in my journal. It was the first dream I had on the ship, and it left me feeling haunted and uneasy. It would be another two hemispheres, twenty-three time zones, and three and a half months before I heard the Voices again.

  Butterworth operations (tank cleaning) involve hours of backbreaking preparation work, and hours of absolute inactivity when finally under way. After a tanker dispatches its load at the refinery, its tanks must be cleaned before a new load can be picked up. The first step is flushing out the twenty-four great tanks with ocean water. Six stories down, in the pump room, the third mate took Billy and me to open the sea pumps and send thousands of gallons of water rushing through the ship’s massive pump network. Like everything else on the ship, the sea valves were constructed for the least possible efficiency. It took us fifteen minutes just to open the first valve, straining on the great rusted wheel while the mate stood over us, watching. Once it was open, the rumbling of the water resonated throughout the ship.

  It is not difficult to tell whether a tanker is cleaning its tanks. Having washed, buffeted, and generally rinsed out the tanks, we could see the dirty water discharged from the side of the ship through the manifold. For hundreds of miles we left an oily slick on the surface of the ocean without thinking twice about it. Anywhere in the Atlantic, Indian, or Pacific Oceans the residue of tankers can be seen. At one point we followed the course of another tanker that had left a trail of pollution across several latitudes.

  The Butterworth machines were stored up in the forepeak. They were little more than mobile garden hoses: seventy-foot lengths of thick rubber tubes mounted on five-foot-high wheels that we rolled out onto the main deck. Attached to the end of each of the half dozen hoses was a twenty-pound metal contraption that looked like a heavy-duty sprinkler. It was through the sheer force of its spraying power that the 216,000 square feet of each tank were to be cleaned.

  The day was clear and breezy as we began our work. The Bosun had called all hands, and up on the deck the tired crew shuffled to the forepeak. Jake, in a better mood than usual, went into an animated demonstration of rope work. With a supple flip of his wrist he conjured a series of intricate and powerful knots. The others sat back and watched with distracted amusement; attention was given to anything that passed the time during work.

  The Bosun arrived on the bow and assigned us to various chores while he kept the Chief busy with the logistics of the operation. It was a good hour or so before all the machines were rolled out to their working positions. Not only did each machine weigh several hundred pounds, but the countless pipes that crissc
rossed the deck compounded the difficulty of the task.

  Except for a hatch leading to a staircase, the only openings to the tanks were the small, round apertures through which the Butterworth hoses were lowered. Using a T-wrench, Bud and Billy went down both sides of the deck unbolting and removing the heavy iron covers. It was then up to the rest of us to move the machines over to the open hatches and, screwing the nozzles onto the hoses, make ready to begin spraying. The work on the starboard side was not all that difficult, as there were only a few pipes that got in the way. But to gain access to the port deck we had to roll the machines up a ramp and over the great lengths of the steam pipes that stood three feet off the ground and ran all the way down to the house. Some of the crew suggested we roll the bloody things all the way back to the stern and around the other side of the house instead. There was, after all, the attraction of being able to waste a good twenty to thirty minutes on the job that way. But the Bosun would hear nothing of it.

  The hoses themselves were raised and lowered by water pressure, the other end of the hose being locked into one of the central pipes. At the Chief’s command the pump would be thrown on and thousands of gallons of water would rush through the lowered hoses and set their sprinklers in motion. It was a sight reminiscent of the Yellowstone geysers. At regular four-minute intervals the open hatches would erupt in a scalding shower of water, sending the crew running for cover. At the first level (the hoses were lowered to the bottom of the tank, about sixty feet, and systematically raised ten feet every forty minutes) the shower was not much more than an occasional three-foot burst, but at the highest level the fusillade of hot water made the area of the deck around the machines unapproachable.