The Voyage of the Rose City

by John Moynihan

  In the Straits were any number of small native craft. Some were junklike, others (steam) powered whalers. They nonchalantly passed us through the dirty water. There was more debris here than off the Cape: kitchen garbage, logs, even a single flip-flop. What had been the richest fishing grounds in the world only fifteen years earlier were now practically devoid of life.

  On lookout that evening I watched the sun set over the hills of Malaysia. The good weather was still holding out, and it looked as though we were going to make it through the first of the three nights in the Straits all right. The Old Man was on the bridge that evening. The officers were trying not to show their concern, but they were obviously as worried about the lack of radar as we were. More so—they knew the full extent of the possible ramifications.

  Through the twilight I spied two massive shadows coming toward us. The ship-to-ship radio crackled that they were a pair of U.S. Navy ships, a destroyer and an aircraft carrier, on their way to the Persian Gulf. Things had been heating up there; the Iranians and Iraqis were ready to go at it. That was not the best news we might have heard; there was a fifty-fifty chance we’d be assigned there after Japan.

  The destroyer’s “cutting edge” swept by us swiftly, its sleek dark outline barely visible against the twilight sky. Military ships did not have to display port and starboard lights—that would ruin the whole purpose of their cat-and-mouse game.

  The carrier was somehow slower, like an avalanche when viewed from a distance; so gargantuan was its size that it appeared to be moving in slow motion. The Old Man sauntered out onto the wing to get a look at it as it passed us by. This was the one that had collided with the Panamanian tanker five days earlier. Crippled, it was on its way to Diego Garcia for repairs.

  “They have worse crime rates on those ships than in most towns in America.”

  I looked at the Captain, amazed.

  “Sure. They got over seven thousand men on those damn things. A guy gets paid off and he’s rolled in the passageway before he can get back to his room. Christ, they got shopping malls, Burger Kings—the volunteer army gets all the low-lifes.”

  That blew me away. I stood there staring at this floating anthill for the next five minutes, its unbelievably complex labyrinth of high-tech conning towers and armaments hiding an entire city of troubadours. Shopping malls! Christ Almighty, we didn’t even have a qualified medic.

  The ship disappeared into the western night.

  Today began—while I was washing windows—with my seeing a very curious creature, ’bout 1½ inches long, found on the bridge deck. I couldn’t tell if it was a reptile, insect, animal, crustacean, or what! It crawled about, and as I tried to save it from the water of the hose (we were washing the windows) Jake said I’d better put it down—it might bite. Well, it might. Very curious.

  —7/22/80

  The Straits came and went. And during those three days it did not rain once. Three days in typhoon season, and it never rained. Everybody was relieved.

  On watch, the Chief confided that there weren’t even lighted buoys marking the channels. We’d been relying on the moonlight and the noon and horizon sun times. Those were the times the mates read the skies with their sextants. Each of them had a velvet-lined case for his personalized instrument. They’d strut out onto the wing at sunset, sunrise, and noon to take readings. It was partly tradition, partly security. A damn good thing it hadn’t rained while we were in the Straits. No, scratch that—a miracle.

  One night on watch, Tony told me, the Third mate came out onto the wing where my man was standing lookout. The Third was a cocky old-timer. Like Joe, he’d never bothered to advance his position. He didn’t want to bother with all the added responsibilities; he liked it just where he was, thank you. Kind of a Walter Brennan character. Anyway, he came up to Tony with an officer-sized chip on his shoulder and started pointing out the stars. Tony had been to Kings Point Merchant Marine Academy, and this big lug, a nice enough fellow all the same, seemed at a loss as to the mysteries of the heavens.

  Tony, ever polite, stood silently as the Third rambled on. After a point he had to intervene. If he was not mistaken, that constellation was Cassiopeia, not Orion. The Third stopped dead and looked at the able-bodied seaman. He turned around and disappeared behind the navigational partition of the bridge.

  Tony waited. A few minutes later the Third reappeared. Behind the navigation partition were the books. In the books were the positions of the stars in every part of the known galaxy for every day of the year. By the Second’s own admission, the mates never really bothered to read the stars; it was all there in the book. The Third had looked it up in the books.

  The Third stared up at the night sky.

  “I guess you’re right.”

  He walked back onto the bridge and resumed his duties without ever saying another word to Able-Bodied-Seaman Holmes.

  Tony and I had taken to talking to each other regularly on lookout. When he told me that story, he was delighted. He also dug having a confidant, and our rapport grew stronger with the lengthening days. While the rest of the crew suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous sobriety, Tony was fully laden with a stock of wine and Blue Ribbon. After a morning’s OT, he’d slip me a beer in the understanding I’d tell no one. No problem.

  When he’d come up to relieve me on lookout, I often found myself hanging out with him for upward of an hour. He’d read all the horror stories and delighted in relating them to someone. It was ghost tales around the campfire all over again. He also delighted in swallowing the red-hot stub of his cigar.

  We sailed out of the Straits into the South China Sea. Rounding the corner at Singapore Island, we were suddenly cut off by a Greek lumber ship. It came within twenty yards of us, cruising through the waves like a drunk Indian in a Trans Am. At dinner Charlie started bitching about the incompetence of foreign-flag ships, the flag-of-convenience vessels that American companies were now using to cut down costs (and subsequently killing the Merchant Marine, which was a pitiful twenty percent of what it was in World War II, when the Merchants suffered more casualties than all other branches of the military combined, as they’d been doing convoy duty for three years before we actually entered the war). They were for the most part Liberian. Then Greek. Then Panamanian. The governments didn’t ask any questions, and there weren’t any safety standards to worry about.

  Charlie took command of the dinner conversation.

  “Those no-good motherfuckers. I was going to moon them when I remembered they were Greek.”

  There was general laughter. Then I dredged up a joke from the bottom of the barrel.

  “How do you separate the men from the boys in Greece?”

  The crew didn’t know.

  “With a crowbar.”

  They broke out into long and loud peals of laughter. The gag had worked.

  The waiting had become overwhelming. We were off the Gulf of Thailand with only about a week to go, but the time was passing incredibly slowly. We watched the same movies over and over again. By now we’d seen High Plains Drifter twenty times and knew every line in the film. There was a magnificent grace to Clint’s performance. With a minimum of words he carried one of the great Westerns of all time. None of us grew tired of it, either. He was too cool, too Clint. The three Woody Allen movies on the ship, however, were complete bombs. Only Love and Death, which Bud liked, was shown more than once. These guys wanted guts, not neuroses.

  That night Joe told me about the “green flash.” When it’s perfectly clear in the equatorial zone a brilliant green flash illuminates the sky just as the sun goes down over the horizon. Unfortunately, there were always a few too many clouds around for me to see it, and it happens only under certain specific meteorological conditions.

  Overtime now took place out in the blistering tropical heat. The sun beat down on the steel deck and roasted us like spring chickens. Everyone moved slowly, sluggishly, resisting the temptation to collapse where he stood. The Chief put me to work banging out t
he rust on the deck with a nine-pound hammer. When he’d pass me by, Tony’d break into a refrain of “John Henry.”

  It was satisfying work. Billy called me “Ahab the Arab,” for the white rag I’d wrapped around my head in Berber fashion as I worked, squatting like an Indian, swinging the hammer up and letting it fall with a bang. The others moved in a similar rhythm, the scrapers and brushes grinding languidly in the equatorial heat.

  On the night of the twenty-fifth we passed our sister ship, the Beaver State (i.e., Oregon, whose capital is the so-called Rose City of Portland), on its way to Sumatra from Japan. This was bad news, since we were probably bound for the Persian Gulf now that the Beaver State was taking our planned route. On the previous trip, Rose City was stuck for a month off Kuwait, and the crew was allowed ashore once. Not that it mattered; there was no drinking in the port, and no women. Spirits sank.

  This was the longest single stretch at sea any of the crew had taken, with one or two exceptions. Now it looked as though we were going to have to do it all over again after a day or two in Japan.

  Well, five daze to go. So tonight we had a “Funky Union Meeting,” as Tony described it. The Bos would call upon the various department delegates (Jake—Deck, Miguel—Steward, Frank—Engine), then the treasurer (the steward), and then go through the various items, routinely asking if there was any discussion therein and saying, “What’s your pleasure?” and then going on to the next item without waiting for a response. Jake put up a couple of resolutions, both unanimously passed. The first called for transportation money back home from both foreign and domestic trips. The second was to make any bosuns or delegates who failed to report C and B cards when entering a home port donate $50 to SPAD (the political branch of the union). He was getting more and more worked up about it. Later he and Tony (to whom the resolution was largely directed) had a heated discussion. There were also citations against the lack of a payroll, and against Sparks for his neglect on the flower front (he was supposed to have wired flowers to the wives of several of the crew, a tradition in the Merchants, but claimed he couldn’t find a shop that would do it; as Billy said, “All Radio Operators are Bed Bugs”). The Bosun said, “We will now stand a solemn minute for departed brothers,” and everyone suddenly rose and stood in a pleasing, respectful silence.

  —7/27/80

  And time slowly passed. I heard “Funky Town” in Chinese while passing Taiwan, and Jake gave Jimmy and me a lesson in splicing wire cable. Jake had gotten very vocal on the matter of union politics. He went into wild harangues about the corruption of a once great union. The SIU had fought the Teamsters in the sixties, and beat them. The Philly hall had a semitruck driven through it, and several brothers were worked over or shot. But the SIU had won, and Jimmy Hoffa was discredited. For Jake these glory days had long since passed, and it infuriated him. He’d talk till his blood pressure rose like the stock market on a killer day.

  I listened, but nobody else did. They’d heard it all before. And they’d also seen Jake at the big meetings in Philly: silent and doting like one of the sheep. Dave Martin had made his stand a few times before the union bosses, but he never had the support of the brothers. It was too much to ask of them to face their leaders; it was too easy to follow the crowd. Out at sea it might be a different story, brothers full of anger and new ideas, but on the beach it was a cat-and-mouse game as to who would get the next of the very few jobs. To tick off the bosses was to write yourself out of the market. To follow their orders was to keep working.

  We passed the island of Luzon, the main island of the Philippines, during the full moon. The water was like liquid emerald coated with mother-of-pearl and sparkling fish scales.

  On the twenty-ninth we picked up Japanese TV. It was great. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t understand a word—it was something new, something different. On a talk show they followed the American patterns, but bowed to one another every thirty seconds, never quite giving up their old ways.

  Flies began to appear on deck; we were getting close. I was sitting in my room when Tony banged on my door and said he’d seen some flying fish in the water. He’d never seen them before, and he was very excited. They darted 150 feet above the water, flapping their wings like hummingbirds.

  On overtime we were painting the deck itself. The hot work on the bow was often accompanied by the tension generated by the mates watching from the bridge. In the last few weeks they had particularly taken to watching us, gathering around in groups as big as three or four. The crew was increasingly annoyed by this. Once, when Tony painted JOHN SUCKS on the deck as he worked to give me a hard time as I watched from up on the bridge, the Chief came over and looked down at him. I figured Tony was probably bummed he’d been seen goofing off, but when I saw him later, he said, “Good! Fuck him!”

  That was becoming the general attitude: “Fuck ’em!”

  On watch that night a voice came over the ship-to-ship radio: “To all ships. This is a Russian destroyer. Get out of our way. We are coming through. We repeat: Get out of our way.” The etiquette of the sea did not concern them. Come too close and you are in trouble.

  The next morning I got my first look at flying fish in action. They were great. They zigzagged over the waves like bees. It was their way of avoiding the jaws of a “natural selector.”

  Later in the day I was reprimanded for walking barefoot through the corridors: “If you cut yourself there’s no way you’ll have a case.” It wasn’t concern for my personal safety that spurred them on; they were just trying to teach me the way of the sea.

  The tension has been building up for daze. The mate and the Bosun have both been bird-dogging us while on deck. Billy has yelled up at the bridge in anger (though no one was there). Then yesterday at lunch Joe was asking the Bos about why the mate was bird-dogging us, and the Bos got all excited, yelling: “You ain’t on the fucking deck. If he was out there I’d tell him!”

  Said Joe: “I can see through the fucking port hole!” etc.

  Tension.

  Now there is the question of breaking sea watch while in port. Billy started, I believe, the rumor that the mate would let us vote on it. He and Bud were originally adamant that we should break watch, while Jake would preach for hours that we shouldn’t. But one day (yesterday) in the hot fucking sun chipping and scraping with the bird-dogs (the Bos included) convinced everyone that we shouldn’t break watch.

  “I’m liable to lose seven hours of overtime a day,” said Jake, exasperated, and so on.

  Well, today I go up to the bridge. The mate (I had the second wheel) says: “That Jake is too much.”

  I say, “How so?”

  The mate says, “He comes up to me and asks, ‘Well, Mate, what’s it going to be? A vote on the sea watches?’ ” The mate giggles. “Hmph! Fuck that shit, no one ever heard of voting on sea watches. That fucking guy has been out here thirty-five years …”

  I play along with him, as I’m trying to be as neutral as possible.

  “What is this? A pleasure cruise?” he continues. “If we stay more than two weeks we’ll break watches for sure …” Etc.

  At breakfast, at my usual table with the Bos and Peanuts, I relay the news that there is no vote. The Bos gets pissed.

  8:00 a.m.—ALL HANDS—breaking out lines. As the whole crew works, the mate shows up and starts talking to the Bos, who’s at the winch.

  BOS: I hear you might break sea watches, Mate.

  MATE: If we’re in the port more than a couple of days, yes. (he looks away)

  BOS: Then you’re going to have some fucking trouble! (his voice rises)

  MATE: What the hell are you talking about? We can’t just keep paying these guys …

  (The conversation turns into an argument.)

  BOS: Look, if someone hits me in the fucking balls I’m going to hit right back! (referring to our loss of overtime) We’ll go right to the fucking captain!

  MATE: Look! I run the fucking deck department!

  BOS: I don’t give a fuck!
We get screwed while everybody else gets overtime! We’ll stop right now.

  MATE: Fuck you! (He is adamant now, but clearly nervous because he has no control, and people are watching now. The Bos starts yelling, making like he’s ready to pop the mate.)

  BOS: Now you leave my men alone; we don’t want you spooking them on deck.

  MATE: Fuck you! You can’t just tell me what to do …

  (The Bos turns off the winch. Work stops. Jake and Billy firmly sit down as the Bos signals. All the others drop the lines except Bud, who keeps trying to work.)

  BOS: I don’t give a fuck. Let’s just get this shit over with.

  (Everyone else stands up and goes over to the rail, where they await the Bos’s signal. The mate stares down at the Bos, dumbfounded. The Bos stares back up at the mate with his great arms loose and ready at his sides. After a minute’s silence the mate turns and walks off, uttering a string of obscenities. The crew cheers and work resumes.)

  BOS: We got a fucking union on here! We got a crew of Philly Sea Lawyers!

  —7/31/80

  Channel fever—we all had it. One more day and we’d be off this stinking tub after seven weeks at sea. I read the Tarot and came up with the cards for Strength, Friendship, Opportunity, and Misguided Motivations. The final outcome was the Five of Pentacles: Obtuseness.

  The food had gotten downright terrible. Provisions were so low that Miguel was scraping the bottom of every barrel for each meal. The thought of some tasty Kobe beef lingered in our minds.

  As if to make up for this, the steward calmly strutted into the lounge that last morning at sea and sat himself down in the central chair.

  “Now hear this,” he began, his deep, throaty voice capturing the startled attentions of the collected company. He wasn’t looking at anybody in particular; he was looking at a convention that he’d been asked to call to order. “The orders have come in. We are going to be in Japan for three weeks.”