Submarine Outlaw

by Philip Roy

  “Fifty feet? Oh, you’ll probably hit fifty feet a quarter of a mile out, except for Deep Cove. Deep Cove’s got a dropoff about a hundred feet or so right off the beach. I know that because there’s an old schooner down there and we thought maybe we could raise her once. That was a long time ago. We dropped a cable a good hundred feet before we hit bottom. But she was too heavy. We burnt out the motor of the hoist and snapped the cable before we even moved her. I don’t think anybody’s tried since.”

  “Oh. Thanks.”

  “Listen now: you be careful if you ever go in the water around Deep Cove ’cause there’s an undertow. A young fellah I used to know drowned there fifty years ago. An undertow is an unpredictable thing. It’s not there one minute and the next it is.”

  I nodded.

  “I’m always careful.”

  “You swim like a fish, don’t you? I’ve never known a fisherman who could swim.”

  “I don’t plan on being a fisherman.”

  “So you say. You’ve got lots of time to change your mind.”

  “I won’t change my mind.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “I won’t change my mind.”

  Chapter Three

  At Deep Cove I started preparing to dive. It was important to be careful with everything, and I was. I gathered logs and tied them together to make a raft. I wrapped a rope around one log and buried it in the sand and tied the other end to the raft so it wouldn’t float away. Then I piled stones on the raft and paddled out past the drop off. I lowered the cable into the water and watched the markers disappear. Down they went in a straight line, which meant there wasn’t any undertow. Ziegfried said that pearl divers took deep breaths first, so I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. Then I opened them, picked up a stone and jumped off the raft.

  It pulled me down pretty fast. There was the five-footmarker, the ten, then the fifteen. It seemed to take a long time to reach the twenty, and suddenly there was pressure in my ears. I passed the twenty-five-foot marker but my ears were starting to hurt and it was beginning to get dark. The thirty-foot-marker was approaching but something — I didn’t know what exactly — made me uncomfortable and I let go. Then I was glad because the swim back up took a lot longer than coming down.

  On the raft again, it all seemed very different. “I can do better than that.”

  Resting for a few moments, I picked up another stone, took a couple of deep breaths and jumped off again. Down I went through a column of bubbles. In no time there was the fifteen-foot marker, the twenty, the twenty-five. But my ears hurt again and I let go. Once again, swimming up took a lot longer than sinking with the stone. The surface of the water spread out like a sheet of silver above me. But it was disappointing. I’d never make much of an explorer if I couldn’t try harder than that. Ziegfried said that pearl divers also slowed their heartbeats. Picking up another stone, I closed my eyes and tried to relax. A calm came over me. I slipped off the raft more gently and went down with the stone. At twenty-five feet my ears started to hurt but I ignored them and held on for the thirty-foot marker.

  “That’s better,” I thought as I swam up to the surface.

  But it was further to go and I was out of breath at the top. After five more dives it was enough for one day. The deepest I had been able to reach was thirty feet.

  “Thirty feet!” said Ziegfried. “That’s terrific! Gee! Was the water cold?”

  “A little.”

  “Was it dark?”

  “Not really. It started to get dark. I couldn’t see the bottom.”

  “Ai yi yi. You’re a braver man than I am, Al.”

  I beamed. I didn’t usually like to be called Al, but the way Ziegfried said it was okay.

  “Well, you better get in as much diving as you can because the fall’s almost here and the water will soon be too cold.”

  I nodded.

  “What will we do in the winter, when it’s too cold to work outside?”

  “Work inside.”

  I looked around.

  “Where?”

  “We’ll build a shelter around the sub. Posts and plastic. Two layers. Heat it with hot air. I’ve got half a dozen generators. We’ll put the whole thing together in a day.”

  It took less than a day. We dug holes for the posts and supported them with concrete blocks. We cut heavy-duty plastic sheets from a large roll and made a two-layered wall with five inches between, through which we blew hot air from a gas generator. With another generator we heated the inside of the makeshift shed. In the afternoon, just as we finished, it started to rain. It rained for the next two weeks straight. I always wondered how he had known exactly when to enclose the sub.

  Diving did get a lot colder. I braved it until the middle of October before calling it quits. I carried a jacket out to the raft and put it on between each dive. That helped. Still, I shivered and my skin turned blue. On one dive I reached forty feet, without much ear pain. That was encouraging. But the sky was dark and so was the sea. At forty feet I couldn’t see more than ten or fifteen feet away. At one moment I had the feeling there was something there, like a large fish, or seal, close by and watching me. It was spooky but I didn’t panic.

  “You’ve got nerves of steel!” Ziegfried said later.

  Then he looked very serious.

  “Well, I suppose what you’re planning to do will require nothing less. Do you think about that, Al? Do you think of the danger of it all, the risks you’ll be taking — sitting in a tiny sub, surrounded by freezing water, hundreds, maybe thousands of miles from any land?”

  “I think I am an explorer,” I said, speaking from my heart. “I think sometimes I will be afraid but I am willing to accept that. I think that all explorers know there are risks and dangers, but they are driven on anyway. That’s how I feel.”

  “Well, I take my hat off to you. It makes me proud to work on the ship of a real explorer. Now, let’s get back to work.”

  Oh, the endless work! There was work people loved and work people hated and work that simply had to be done. My grandfather loved fishing, but I would have hated it. Ziegfried loved fiddling with machines and inventing things but didn’t care to go exploring. He said that when people loved their work, it was hardly work at all. That’s how I felt about exploring, even though I hadn’t done it yet. I just knew. I didn’t love cleaning and preparing equipment for the submarine, but it was work that had to be done and so I did it. What drove me on was the thought of where it would take me one day.

  Over the fall and winter I came to the junkyard every afternoon and weekend. I told my grandparents that Ziegfried was helping me build a submarine in exchange for helping out in the yard. This was more or less true. No doubt they didn’t take the submarine seriously, but they didn’t stop me from going either. Likely they were happy I had found a way to keep busy.

  One day there might be no customers; the next, we’d be continually interrupted by people looking for hubcaps, metal fencing, sinks, toilets, bathtubs and so on. Sometimes people brought in things to sell. Watching Ziegfried buy and sell helped me better understand why people thought he was so mean and scary. But it was just an act. If they knew what he was really like, they would probably have taken advantage of him. When someone brought something in, he would frown and say the item was pretty much worthless. Only at the last minute would he offer a meager price, which was usually accepted. On the other hand, when someone wanted to buy something, Ziegfried exaggerated its value and seemed unwilling to part with it, agreeing only at the last minute if the customer had clearly reached his highest offer. And he always wore an angry face. I had to turn around so the customer wouldn’t see me grinning. This — the buying and selling — was work Ziegfried hated, but had to do if he wanted to stay in business.

  One day my grandfather insisted on giving me a ride to the junkyard, obviously to check out the situation. I introduced him to Ziegfried. My grandfather looked up at the towering junk dealer, who stared back, and the two men shook hands without s
aying a word. I couldn’t take my eyes off their hands when they clasped. Though my grandfather was a much smaller man, his hands were larger. His knuckles protruded like the knots in a tree. To me it looked as if the sea were shaking hands with the land.

  In the winter was welding, welding and more welding, which meant endless filing. Ziegfried would say, “Now, we weld the portal.”

  That meant that he would weld the portal and I would file it smooth. There was also the drilling of holes and riveting. The tank had to be reinforced inside and out. Ziegfried’s plan was to build an interior of wood, both to insulate and strengthen the sub. He sketched diagrams with beams ingeniously crisscrossing the inside.

  I stared at the diagrams.

  “But . . . won’t I bang my head?”

  He bent over the diagrams and stared closely.

  “No. You will duck.”

  We got the tank cleaned out and put a heater inside until the metal was bone dry. Ziegfried took endless measurements and made calculations for the position of everything. He measured my height, width and weight, allowing for growth. Then he designed the interior around me.

  It was a one-man sub. There would be one seat at the controls, one stationary bicycle, one bed and only enough space for one person to move around comfortably. After the wood interior was installed I could expect to stand up straight, with four inches to spare. If I grew more than four inches I would have to bend my head. If I stood with my arms outstretched I could almost touch both sides. The stern would house several waterproof compartments and storage, and the bow would feature an observation window in the floor. The bicycle would be placed in the very center, to allow the greatest freedom of movement for pedalling, and for stability.

  The engine would be installed in the stern and encased in its own separate compartment, lined with insulation. A steel wall, with door, would be constructed to separate the engine compartment, air-compressors, batteries, hydraulic and electrical systems, from the rest of the sub, which would enable me to shut myself off in case of fire or flooding in those areas. Ziegfried was working on an automatic system for pumping water out of each area of the sub. His idea was to have several sump pumps — each with its own battery source — which would automatically engage whenever water started filling the room or compartment. The air inside the sub would come from pressurized tanks, which would regulate automatically. New air would come from the tanks, which I would periodically refill on the surface; old air would jettison through a valve.

  On the outside he welded two tanks on opposite sides of the sub, which would serve as ballast. Part of each tank would be permanently filled with air to allow for minimum buoyancy; otherwise, I lived with the risk of the sub plunging to the ocean floor. Two hundred feet was as far as he felt the sub should go, which didn’t seem very deep to me, considering the ocean stretched down five miles in places.

  “Oh, you might dive three or four hundred feet,” said Ziegfried. “But by five hundred you’ll be popping rivets and inviting the ocean into your lap. Go down a mile or so and the pressure will flatten the sub like a sheet of paper.”

  The function of the ballast tanks was fairly simple: if you wanted to dive, you let water in. If you wanted to rise, you blew water out by forcing air into the tanks from the compressors. Ziegfried was also working on a design for a manual inflation of the tanks.

  “Murphy’s Law,” he said. “If something can go wrong, it will. We have to have back-up systems to our back-up systems. You can never be too safe in a submarine.”

  Spring came and the submarine began to look like a real submarine. We kept it enclosed in its plastic shed to keep curious customers from poking around and gossiping. We dragged junk over and placed it around the shed to make it look like a long-abandoned project. Finally, it was time to begin the wood interior. I thought that meant we were getting close to finishing. The hope started to grow in me that somehow the sub might be seaworthy before the next winter. I could hardly contain it. One day it slipped out.

  “Do you think I could try out the sub by the end of summer?”

  “Heavens above! We’ve got to cut the wood, steam it, bend it, fit it, sand it and stain it. Then we can start on the systems. We’ve got the engine and drive shaft to install; the pumps, air system, hydraulic, electrical, safety, communications, navigation . . .”

  He dropped his arms, took a long stare at me and sighed. I got such a knot in my stomach I had to sit down. We had been working so hard. Suddenly I saw the childishness of my impatience. I realized what an insult it was to his dedication and workmanship. How I wished I could take the question back.

  Never again would I make such a childish outburst again.

  “It was a stupid thing to ask,” I said quietly as we resumed our work.

  “Aye!” said Ziegfried, with a smile, “It was the stupidest thing I’ve heard in years.”

  Chapter Four

  I counted the days until school ended and I was free for the summer. It coincided with two other important events: the ocean had warmed enough for diving again, and I turned thirteen.

  “One more year,” said my grandfather, “and you’ll come out on the fishing boat. I started fishing when I was fourteen and so did my father.”

  It didn’t seem to matter to my grandfather that most kids in Canada stayed in school until they were seventeen or eighteen. You didn’t need an education to fish, he said. You had to read and write; everything else you could learn on the boat. After that, I told myself the submarine had to be ready by the time I turned fourteen. If it weren’t, I would stay in the woods until it was.

  The ocean had warmed enough for diving but you couldn’t exactly call it warm. Once again, I wore a jacket between dives. And I shivered and my skin turned blue. The raft had to be rebuilt. The winter had ripped it apart and strewn its logs across the beach. But I reached forty feet on my first dive and felt pretty good. At forty feet I thought I saw the outline of the ship. It was kind of eerie. Before I went home I managed to touch the forty-five-foot marker. At forty-five feet I was pretty sure what was below was the old schooner.

  “Well, that was before I came here,” said Ziegfried afterwards. “But I have heard about it. What I wouldn’t give to raise her and see what’s salvageable. But Alfred, forty-five feet! Now, that’s something to be proud of.”

  “Well, I am a year older.”

  “And a year wiser. In many ways.”

  I smiled. A compliment from Ziegfried really meant something; he did not waste words.

  The summer rolled along at a sluggish pace, which suited me fine. I hoped we would get more done than expected. But Ziegfried would never rush the work. Working with wood did not come as natural to him as metal. He would speak of the “virtues” of an engine, or the “strengths” of metal, but he always referred to the “difficulties” of wood. Metal was obedient, he said; wood had a mind of its own. This was particularly true in the tedious job of steaming and bending the wood. We cut narrow strips of cedar, maple and pine, steamed them until they were soft and pliable, then stretched them over a frame corresponding to the shape they would take inside the sub. For every three or four strips that molded into the shape we wanted, there was always one that twisted up like a fiddlehead. I saw the frustration on Ziegfried’s face grow.

  “Oh, go your own way then!” he would say to the twisted piece of wood. “We don’t want you anyway.”

  The wood had come piecemeal over the winter and spring. He traded for it whenever possible. I thought we had more than enough, but once it was cut to shape and the scrap discarded there was never enough. We were always on the lookout for more cedar, especially. It was best suited to water, Ziegfried said.

  Once we started to fit the wood into place, the interior began to resemble something vaguely habitable. Next to the touch of metal, the wood was soft and warm and pleasing to the eye. I got a wave of excitement every time I came into the shed and saw what we had accomplished the day before.

  Then one morning Ziegfried was
sitting on his back step, dressed in a black suit and wearing a mournful look on his face. He held a suitcase by his side. I was bewildered.

  “I’ve got to ask you a favour, Al.”

  “Of course. Anything.”

  “It’s my poor old mother. Her time has come and I’ve got to go and see her. I’ll be gone for a week. Can you keep the yard for me and feed my friends?”

  “Of course. I’ll look after everything. Don’t worry about a thing.”

  “I left instructions for their feeding. Give everybody fresh water twice a day. And don’t put your fingers in the Kaiser’s cage, or you might lose them.”

  “Which one is the Kaiser?”

  “The biggest one. He’s friendly enough once he gets to know you, but watch your fingers.”

  “Okay. I hope your mother’s okay.”

  He sighed, got up and walked towards the gate. He never looked back; just raised his hand. Then he was gone.

  I went to the shed, looked in and thought of things to do. There was wood to sand and tools to sharpen. Ziegfried said that working with dull tools was like drinking from a cup with a hole in the bottom. I could do those things, and clean up. Instead, I stepped out of the shed and stared at the yard. Oddly, the sight of the junk didn’t excite me as it used to. It was the work that mattered now.

  I decided to go into the house and get acquainted with the birds. I had never been inside before. Feathers and dust burst into the air when I poked my head through the door. The squawking was deafening. I covered my ears and entered. There were cages everywhere — some with several birds, some with just one or two. It wasn’t hard to spot the Kaiser. He was a large, brightly coloured parrot. He followed me with his eyes and stared so intensely I found it unnerving.

  I picked up the instructions Ziegfried left and sat down and read them through. Then I went around and gave every bird fresh water and seed. Some received vitamins and fruit. The Kaiser received the most. When he saw me approach with pieces of fruit he rolled his head around in circles and suddenly looked very friendly. But I was careful to keep my fingers away. Ziegfried said he had collected the birds simply by rescuing them from people throwing out old cages. I couldn’t imagine it.