by Diane Lowman
“That would be so cool. I would enjoy that very much,” I answered quickly because I so wanted to see those stars. If there was anything behind his invitation, I missed it. The officers were much more formal and disciplined than the crew. I looked at the wedding ring on his right hand, and while those didn’t always assure purity of intentions, with him, I felt comfortable.
“Come up any evening that I have overnight duty.” I wondered how I would find that out, but just thanked him and left.
But apparently Herr Rose and I had business to conduct before pleasure. The next morning, mid-stitch, Herr Most marched into the lounge.
“You go meet First Officer Rose on the Lifeboat Deck. Schnell, ya?”
“Ya, ya. Where is the lifeboat deck?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes, exasperated, as if he’d explained this to me a hundred times before. As if I’d been born on the ship. He explained quickly and I listened carefully. And again he said, “Schnell!”
Herr Rose awaited me in his dress uniform just past the heavy steel door that led from the superstructure to the deck. I felt like I should stand at attention and salute.
“Morgen,” he said. “I must show you your lifeboat and explain the procedure for muster. We expect not to need this, but you must know.”
I nodded. We stood on what was, to me, the right side of the ship.
“First,” he began, “you must call the direction on board properly. The front. It is ‘fore.’ The back. It is ‘aft.’ The right, where we are now, ya? It is ‘starboard.’ And the other side, the left. It is ‘port.’”
I nodded again. My mind worked furiously to remember these terms as it also wondered how I’d recognize them in German. I did not want to have to be told twice.
“Now, come.” We walked a ways on the deck and stopped underneath a large rowboat suspended from pulley-operated cables above our heads. He looked around for a moment.
“The ship, she—is always female, the ship, ya?—she is very sturdy, but just in case, if you hear the alarm, you muster. You come together here, under this lifeboat. You take the life vest, here.” He pointed to a white bench, whose seat lifted to reveal a bin full of orange puff. “Put it on and wait, ya? Quickly.”
I nodded. “Good,” he said. The word always sounded like “goot” in their mouths. “Fire is the worst risk for a ship. Nowhere to go. If you smoke (schmoke), you put them out only in these red buckets filled with sand. Do you smoke?”
I shook my head, no, wondering again why they let the sailors smoke on board.
He relaxed, having completed his duty. He was tall and trim, with dark hair and a thick, dark mustache. His deep, dark eyes made direct contact with mine, which was unusual. Most people so far looked down or up or anywhere but directly at me when they spoke. His direct gaze would have unsettled me if not for his bright, warm smile. His age and rank were far enough above mine that it said friend, not predator.
We leaned over the railing and watched the blue, as far as the eye could see, only changing texture when the sea became sky. The sea was friendly but playful, little white-caps cresting and disappearing like mischievous prairie dogs. Looking straight down, watching the red metal slice through, it seemed we were traveling very fast. The cut was precise and virtually silent. The watery siren sea hypnotized me.
“She has a top speed of twenty-two knots,” he said. “Not so fast, but she carries a heavy weight. She works very hard every day.”
I looked at her, this ruby giant, with new respect. Immense and heavily laden in an absolute sense, yet miniscule and seemingly weightless within the context of the even vaster field she plowed through. Regally, without complaint.
Herr Rose pointed his finger out toward the horizon. “You see the seagulls, ya? That is how you know we are near land. They follow her looking for food. If you look down, you will see sometimes dolphins or flying fish. They swim near the hull and leap out of the water with their wings spread. It is quite amusing.”
“Wait, land?” I asked. “I thought we were well away from the East Coast and on our way to the Panama Canal.”
“Ya, ya,” he said. “But we pass islands: San Salvador, which your Christopher Columbus made famous.” My Christopher Columbus? He had no edge to his voice, but others would. This would be the first time of many, on board and off, that I would assume full responsibility for and represent all things American—good, but more often bad. Historically, politically, economically, and culturally. It was quite a burden for a nineteen-year-old college junior.
“And Cuba. We pass Cuba, too. The gulls, they come quite far out. They are a harbinger of land.”
I nodded, and thought, harbinger? So he was smart, too.
“We will make the canal in another day, although no one can say when we will go through. We wait just outside, anchored with all the other ships for our turn. You will see many different kinds of ships there: car carriers, they are immense; they look like big, floating tanks. Cargo ships with their own cranes that carry their payload on pallets in their hold. Long oil tankers that have yards and yards of pipe on deck. You can tell how full a ship is by looking where the hull meets the water. If full, you will see only a smooth hull line: one color. If emptier, the fore part of the hull will rise up and you will see the indent of the keel. Usually painted a different color.”
I nodded. This was more than anyone else had taken the time to explain.
“Have you met Herr Kapitän Beucking yet?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“You will. He will relax more once we are through the canal. Several of us take responsibility for the bridge. We rotate eight-hour shifts.” He looked around, his hands clasped behind his back, hair too short to blow in the strong breeze, as if trying to remember if he’d forgotten anything. Official again, he said, “Do you have any questions?”
“No. Thank you so much.”
I wanted to hug him. He was the first person on board who had treated me like who I felt I was. But he had already turned crisply and disappeared back inside.
Point of No Return
June 11, 1979
9.3593 N, 79.8999 W
The ship slowed, and the pull on my body ebbed. I dropped the top sheet and the needle and thread and knelt on the couch to look out. A crescent of land—looming dark from this distance—was barely discernable where it met the now darker and more still water that held dozens of illuminated anchored ships. I left the linens where they lay and bounded into the galley like a puppy that wants to go out.
“Are we there?” I asked Herr Most, who stood with his back to me, repositioning some glasses on the nonslip cushion in the cabinet. He didn’t turn around.
“Ya, ya. Soon. You make finish and you can go look on deck. But we won’t go in today. We will wait.”
I hated to wait. But I didn’t let on. He looked disappointed that his comment about waiting hadn’t riled me. He already knew I was always anxious to get going, to move forward, and had already begun to push back by needling me about delays. The schedule, as printed, did not leave much leeway between our projected return date and my first day of school. Herr Rose had told me that we’d likely anchor awaiting our turn, so I was armed with forewarning.
“It could be a long time,” he added, looking down at his hands and not directly at me. “You never know. It depends on the queue of other ships.” Now he looked up to see the impact of his words.
“Okay,” I said. “Do you need me later?”
He frowned and looked down at his nails, stymied for a moment, either wondering why I’d taken the news so casually or trying to think up something for me to do later. I tried not to bounce and fidget as I waited.
“You clean up the mending before you go, ya? Then make finish for the day.”
“If we go in tomorrow can I watch? Do I have to work?” I practically wagged my tail with excitement.
“You come here first, and we see what happens.”
I darted into the lounge to tidy up, not wanting to miss a m
inute of our approach, feeling like he’d already kept me too long. I stowed the supplies and stumbled out on deck.
The land came toward us. We, the camera, shifted focus from a long shot to a close up. With each passing moment, palm fronds crisped, ship outlines solidified, and ours shrunk in comparison to the others. She was enormous and solitary from the on-board-alone-at-sea perspective, but she normalized relative to the other vessels waiting to “go in.” She was just another ship.
We dropped anchor and settled into our spot in the canal’s holding basin. I popped back and forth like a ping-pong ball from port to starboard through the superstructure. From one gulp of heavy, hot, red air on deck, through the cool, blue linoleum air inside. Back and forth, back and forth, eager to check out all the neighboring ships, and loathe to miss anything. If any of the crew could see me, I’d confirm what they already thought they knew: I was crazy.
An overwhelming number and variety of fellow vessels dotted the water as far as I could see; too many to take in and process at once. This commercial navy laid out like a big metal blanket over the still cove filled me with a deep sense of connection to these anonymous seafaring comrades. No matter what their country of origin, what they carried, or where they were headed, we shared something very fundamental. We formed a community of itinerant transporters. I felt a deep pride for the TS Columbus Australia. She was the prettiest, most regal ship around. Her unique white, round funnel crowned her bright red body such that she stood out among the other, mostly black, many dingier boats with their mundane rectangular funnels. I could see signs of wear and rust on some of the nearby oil tankers, and the gargantuan car carriers had no personality. The cargo ships looked wimpy compared to our champion weight lifter; she was as large a ship as could safely pass through the canal. In this gathering of dinosaurs at the watering hole, we were the Tyrannosaurus rex.
It was a UN General Assembly of countries as well. Every ship’s registry was writ large on the hull for all to see, and each proudly flew the flags of its mother country (often different from the ship’s registry) and its parent company. In port, the ships also flew that country’s flag. So the masts fluttered with a multicolored display of allegiances.
Sated with this scenario, I went back inside, hoping to find someone who knew when we’d go in. But no one on board ever felt the need to tell me anything, and I would not have dared approach the bridge to ask. I hoped I’d run into Alois, because he might know. It would give him great pleasure to have something to hang over me. I couldn’t ask Herr Most because he’d just dig his thumb into the paper cut of my impatience. With no one in sight—everyone else was working or sleeping, in the case of overnight shift workers—I finally admitted defeat and went back to my cabin to collect most of my cash and the tape player to deliver them to Herr Stuhlemmer, with the very in-plain-sight ulterior motive of seeing if he might have any inside information for me.
“Welcome, Fraulein Meyer.” I kept encouraging everyone to call me Diane, but the confluence of German and ship etiquette seemed to strictly prohibit it.
I handed him the money and the eight-track player. “I make you a receipt for the money. When you need it, you advise me and bring me this receipt and I will mark the withdrawal. You leave the player with me. We will find a way to make it work.”
“Danke,” I said, as he turned back to his desk, busy with paperwork for our impending passage through the canal.
“Herr Stuhlemmer,” I began, and he turned back toward me.
“Ya, ya?”
“Do you have any idea—”
“When we will go in?” he interrupted. “Nein. It is hard to say. It depends on the other ships waiting, our place, our size—many factors—maybe tomorrow, but we have waited longer before.” He looked at me for a moment and turned back to his desk. “Guten Abend, Fraulein.”
I headed down to dive into Airport to pass the time until we began to move. The irony of reading a book about air travel while making my way around the globe at a comparative snail’s pace was not lost on me. I only popped back up on deck after dark to watch the necklace of ship and shore lights glisten around the harbor. I was wistful.
My phone rang at 0530 the next morning. “Most here. We go in today. You come here first. You get sun cream before you go out there—we are near the equator.” He hung up, and I leapt out of bed. I could hear my mother’s voice in his.
Given our proximity to the equator, and that I’d planned to stay on deck for the entirety of the eight-hour journey through the canal, I wore as little as I could, short of putting on a bathing suit. In denim cutoffs and a halter top, and with my hair pulled up and back in a pony tail, I raced down to eat, picked at my food, and stopped in the galley to grab the gloppy white stuff from Herr Most. He just grunted and shook his head at me as if I were his teenaged daughter borrowing his car. I headed out to the deck to watch the show. Many of the crew who were off duty had already crowded outside, and I slowed just a bit on seeing them. It didn’t occur to me that I’d have company, and I felt like a dolt for thinking I’d have a private screening, and a little edgy at being this exposed to them like this all day long.
“Morgen,” they said, one by one, and nodded. I felt like a new prisoner being paraded by the veteran inmates.
“Morgen,” I said to each, making only the briefest eye contact.
Karl, my tablemate, stuck close to me. He had turned out to be a sweet man; we talked more at each meal, and I appreciated his quiet, thoughtful demeanor. He seemed much gentler and less rough around the edges than some of the others. His proximity felt protective. From the others, it would have felt threatening.
“The pilot will come on the ship soon to guide us into the first set of locks,” he said.
I had to stand up on something to be able to peer over the side to see the small pilot boat sidle up to us, and the pilot and his mate board. They would assume control of the ship from Kapitän Beucking until we were safely through.
We approached the entrance of the first lock like a thick thread aiming for the narrow eye of a needle. The canal sat above sea level, so in order to pass we had to enter a concrete rectangular set of chambers to lift us up at the entrance and then lower us back down at the end. Each lock had its own name: Pedro Miguel, or Mira Flores, for example.
Just as we reached the entry to the locks, a coterie of navy-khaki-clad men carrying Herman Munster lunchboxes swarmed over the ship like ants on picnic watermelon. Like Lilliputians securing Gulliver, they had to tether the ship to the lock’s “mules.” These caboose-sized machines operated very much like train engines, but they were pulling ships. They flanked us and would slowly pull the ship into and later tug it out of place in the lock.
When the ship entered the lock, she sat low in the water, with the top of the walls on either side of us rising way above her main deck. Immense, solid metal gates closed and sealed behind us, and then water flooded in, like a tap filling a bathtub.
Slowly, slowly she rose, buoyed up by this miracle liquid that could raise the behemoth with the ease and grace of Mufasa hoisting Simba overhead. We could see the progress by watching the walls drop away until the main deck sat eye to eye with the top of the wall. The ship rose like Frankenstein on the slab, rising up out of the roof to attract lightning. Only when we reached this height, that of the canal water above sea level, could the mules tug us on our way, like a slow-motion slingshot, to the subsequent locks, and eventually out into the open waters to wend our way forty-eight miles toward the final set of locks that would gently set us back down to sea level and send us out on our way to the Pacific.
Curious about the canal and its operation, and desperate for conversation in a language I knew, I gathered the courage to approach and speak to one of the cadre of Panamanian workers on board. I picked an older, gentle looking man who sat and ate a mango and read a newspaper, taking a break while we passed through the lock.
“Buenos días, señor ¿Como está? I said.
He looked up; surprised
to hear Spanish come out of my mouth.
“Bien, bien señorita, y usted?” He smiled kindly and offered me a piece of squishy ripe mango on the tip of his pocketknife, as if he and I were old friends. His dark chocolate skin was wrinkled, but his short hair was still mostly black. I could not fathom how he and his coworkers could wear long pants and long-sleeved dark shirts—his was buttoned up to the neck—in this cloudless, relentless heat, but he seemed cool. He squatted, agile, not resting on anything but his heels.
“Oh, muchas gracias, sí,” I said as I took the offering, the sticky nectar dripping down my arm. “Me llamo Diane.”
I nibbled the tropical treat (we had little fresh fruit on board) and we chatted easily. I asked him about the canal, the surrounding area, and his work. He had been doing this since he was a teen; I guessed he was near sixty now. He thought I was Panamanian—the near-equatorial sun had toasted me— and hoped I’d have time to visit in Colón. Sadly, no, I said, not this time. So many people pass through here, and so few stay. He asked how I’d learned to speak Spanish so well, and guessed that I was fifteen. Maybe later in life I’d enjoy having my age underestimated, but now it made me feel like a child. He had to get back to work; break was over. But first he asked a question that I would hear over and over all summer, and asked myself often.
“¿Entonces, qué haces aqui? What are you doing here?”
“Trabajo. I’m working,” was the simple answer. I’m not sure I even knew the complete answer, but it was more complex than I could convey in Spanish.
I’d wanted to get away from suburban New Jersey, with its quaint downtown and gray strip of uniform megastores on Routes One and Nine. I wanted to see the world. To have an adventure like many of my Middlebury friends had done, and I hadn’t. I wanted some time and space between me and my old high school friends and my new college ones. Getting into and attending Middlebury had been a step up for me—a promotion in the social stratum. I looked so New Jersey compared to the corduroy-and-khaki-clad preppy kids with their seemingly perma-starched LaCoste shirt collars underneath Fair Isle sweaters. Maybe my tenure here, after feeling like a complete outsider on board in every way, would make me more of an insider at Middlebury.
