The Watery Metronome of Death
Time to share another old sailor story, this one dealing not with naval arrogance or equipment "failure", but with good ol' fashioned human failings, myself being one of those humans. It's a tale that tells of the follies in which we human engage, misdeeds with noble intentions that present an ever-present threat to our very survival.
I used to work for Arrow Launch, running launch vessels and cargo delivery here in Puget Sound. Essentially, if you have a large freighter to serve with taxi service, or are delivering supplies to such a freighter, Arrow is the primary go-to company to call, Twenty-Four/Seven.
24/7. What does that really mean?
It means that you, as a customer, can expect -- for a price, surely -- that Arrow will do its best to deliver service to you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They do this through a remarkable old skill, delivered with mastery from the owner of Arrow Launch: Micromanagement.
As an employee, I was required to carry a beeper, and to respond to the beepings that little monster delivered. I was required to respond, as I stated earlier, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. That's right, folks. I was technically never off-duty. The penalties for non-response were almost surely termination, as a starter, and a brow-beating that could be delivered at any time by the owner. If you don't believe me, go to the "Job Opportunities" section of their site and note the phrase "Should live between Seattle & Tacoma (30 Min. to either port)" to describe my old job. Seattle and Tacoma lie about an hour apart. . . .
(NB: To comply with the overall Policies of Politeness the LJ does try to enforce, I have decided to omit the actual name of Arrow Launch's owner from this posting. In my defense, all of the incidents I relate can be corroborated by at least one other source, and in most cases by any employee of the company.)
This man, the Owner, opened my interview with Arrow by informing me that, if I worked out, I would be replacing a "problem employee" in my region, Seattle/Tacoma. He then sent me out to observe a job with the three other guys working the region. The only other guys. The entire job, I could only sit there and guess which of these three guys was the problem -- all nice guys, and all bitching about the job to me privately on my first day. Gee, which one would I be helping to fire? Imagine how comfortable that felt.
Also, my interview was the most colorful in my experience, colorful in terms of the harshness of the language used and the meanness of its delivery. Folks, I'm a professional mariner by certification and recent trade. I can curse with the best of them. I have embarrassed longshoremen in waterfront bars. No kidding. I made a longshoreman blush on a Saturday night near closing time with a comment and delivery I felt, well, amusing. One former deckhand complimented me by saying that, in order to get me to laugh, all one had to do was ". . . say the most disgusting thing that came to mind, and then wait for (me!) to top it" with something even more disgusting. (Michael, where ever you are, thank you again.)
Arrow's Owner dropped more F-bombs and shit piles in my interview, when he was trying to woo me into his employment, than I have ever encountered in a professional setting. I soon noted that the air of professionalism about the office was really more of an eggshell dance, people staying firmly on their toes lest the master express displeasure in their general direction. This guy ran a desperate fleet.
Later in my employ -- hey, I needed the money, and that he did provide -- I realized his daily micromanagement was really just a goal to be set and exceeded the following day, if possible. He set groups against each other, individuals against individuals, all in the effort of fostering a air of "snitch on your coworker, and I will spare you the flayings you see all about you." You could one morning be brought into the inner circle of confidants, only to be plotted against in the afternoon meeting. He would yell at you publicly and mercilessly, tearing measurable new assholes in employees bigger even than he, in reality, was, only to be smiley and jovial hours later as if your shit no longer still ran through the recently-ripped orifice. To call him "mecurial" would be to imply in mercury a false stability.
He personally was willing to mortgage any and all family time in order to please a customer, and, sadly, expected everyone under his financial wing to show the same dedication. I pulled teeth to get Xmas Eve off, since my Germanic family recognized that as the de facto holiday; but don't think that I got off work much before 3 am the morning before. Oh, yeah, throw in a 50 mile one-way drive to Olympia and back, and you get one fun time with the folks.
Against this background, the company plodded on. The smarter employees work in the farther-flung locations operated by Arrow, such as Seattle/Tacoma. Look on a map. It's quite a drive from Port Angeles, the company headquarters. I personally met the Owner once face to face. For my interview. After that, it was all on the phone and through letters and emails, dealing with the dispatcher on the phone and the most senior captain in my region. From the senior captain, I learned that one never provoked the Owner, opting instead to simply Do The Job, Don't Screw Up, and, if at all possible, Stay the Hell Out of Port Angeles.
(On an amused note, when I left P. A. from the interview, I saw a license plate frame: "Happiness is Port Angeles in Your Rear View Mirror." The way he was driving south on 101, he meant it.)
We got a job in Tacoma that brought all of the worst elements of the Arrow Management Strategy to a nearly disastrous head.
The job was straight-forward enough. Pick up the trash and laundry from an oil tanker at the dock in Tacoma, and deliver supplies to the same ship. Given the volume of freight to be handled, another boat and crew was sent from Port Angeles to assist the regular Tacoma boat, at that time the Cheyenne Arrow.
(The Cheyenne is the smaller red boat.)
I liked the Cheyenne. She had her quirks, sure, but every boat does. If memory serves, she held ten pallets of cargo on her back deck. Usually, the weight of those loads was moot, since ten pallet loads is seldom enough to overwhelm her stability.
But read on, read on.
Typical jobs consist of picking up pallets for delivery and running them out to the ships, or running out to the ships to pick up items for shore delivery, or both. Speed of these various tasks all depended on weather, of course, and about a zillion other factors over which I sometimes felt we crew had even less control.
How long will the job take? How fast can a crane operator on the freighter make a single load go up and down? The answer to that may amaze even the most patient amongst you. It turns out that, contrary to popular assumptions, the worst cargo loading equipment is generally found on vessels flagged in the U. S. of A. American vessels have the most stringent staffing requirements, generally have union crews that command very competitive salaries, and, therefore, are stuck with the lamest non-essential equipment, including under-powered davits and barely-functional gangway lifts.
Since the vessel being serviced that day ran between US ports with fuel oil, it was required to be an American flagged ship.
At the dock, the pallets are loaded onto the launches with a boom truck and flying forks or pallet jacks, then hoisted from the launch with the serviced ship's own cranes and davits. It's a fairly slow proceedure, given that I and the rest of the crew must stand beneath the loads to guide them on and off the launch, and we humans in general have an aversion to being crushed.
The jacks shown above make the job quite a bit faster, since the deck crew doesn't have to bend down to disconnect the pallet lifter. Too bad Arrow only had one set of forks in Tacoma, and two launches.
Further dragging the schedule was the unavoidable location of the boom truck, at the very end of the Hylebos Waterway, a fairly straight though narrow three-mile dredged estuary lying north to south through some of the most industrial waters in the region. Maximum speed: dead slow, with absolutely no wake allowed. This stretched the minimum time between receiving a load and starting the off-load to almost an hour.
Forgive me, but the details of this day are hazy at best, at least until the drama really started. We received and delivered pallets, I nearly got crushed when the boat drifted and I, tripped by the ankle-high rails, had to lie down and let a swinging load hover overhead -- the usual stuff. All I do remember is that the crew of the other launch, the Sealth, tired of waiting around for its turn to load at the boom truck dock, dropped me off to help the Cheyenne and started the seven-hour motor to Port Angeles, hoping they could still be in radio range of the Superbowl game on the way. They didn't bother to ask permission, since there was only one authority at Arrow, the Owner -- and he was nowhere near Tacoma.
An hour after they left, the boom operator returned from lunch and, upon hearing news of this departure, hit the ceiling. He had done the math, realizing how long it should take with two launches to finish, and now realized his personal schedule, probably also involving house guests and the Superbowl, was shot to hell. Everyone was getting punchy and dumb.
So punchy, in fact, that we decided to make only one more run, when we had a run and a half of cargo left to go out to the ship.
Normally, this was no big deal. It all depends on what's in the pallet. If it's potato chips by the case and a few boxes of pasta, we could strap them three high and sail without worries.
This load, however, consisted of crates of engine room equipment, topped by a 50 horse electric motor. . . a motor that weighed over a ton.
Some notes worth considering.
First of all, many out there in internet land are probably thinking to yourself, "Fifty horsepower? That's nothing." This is because you are used to dealing with high-RPM internal combustion motors, where astronomical horsepower ratings are plated on inky-dinky scooter motors. To calculate internal combustion motor horsepower, the finished unit is revved under a modest load until it breaks. The peak horsepower is then recorded. This is helpful for, say, NASCAR racers (grrrr. . . ) who wish to know how much oomph they can squeeze out of their powerplants in the last few laps just in case they stand a chance at victory.
Secondly, horsepower is a rather useless metric. It averages RPM and torque; therefore, the higher the peak RPM, the higher the horsepower rating.
Electric motors, on the other hand, tend to revolve more slowly. Non-controlled AC motors are almost always defaulted to 3600 RPM, far slower than the tens of thousands of revolutions one can find in an over-driven gas engine. Horsepower for motors is also calculated not for peak but for continuous operation, meaning the thing can go on putting out the plate rating for freakin' ever, not a milisecond before it explodes or melts.
Meaning this motor strapped to the top of a pallet and a half of cargo was a honking mother of a load.
Something else to consider.
Stability is a mariner's bread and butter. Load a boat right and it should sail into the sunset infinitely. Load it wrong, even with the same cargo, and the tub will haul over and sink at the dock.
Consider the mechanical metronome, the clicking timekeeper that swings a weighted bar. The weight slides up and down the bar. Set the weight near the pivot at the base of the bar and the unit clicks a fast and furious tempo that drives the novice pianists to frustration. Slide that weight farther and farther up the bar and the tempo slows toward ponderous.
Consider now the canoe, a vessel most everyone out in Internet Land probably has had the opportunity to sail. What is it most of us are discouraged from ever doing in a canoe? No, not making love, though like American beer, it is fucking to close to water. (Apologies and thanks to Monty Python).
Standing. That's the activity that will give canoeists the most trouble. When one stands in a canoe, one shifts the center of gravity of the vessel. Like sliding the weight up the metronome, the load's center redefines the stability of the vessel. Whatever the wishes of the canoeists, the vessel now wants to tip.
Physics can be so maddeningly insistent.
Back to the Cheyenne Arrow. I am used to this little boat, barely 50 feet long. Step aboard and she gives a little, springing back and rocking quickly like a well-trimmed vessel should. Bouncier than a freighter, more predictable than a canoe.
Once that motor was lashed to atop the other loads, I, on the bow, freed the bow lines to starboard and crossed the bow to the port side. Jack, one of two others aboard with me, crossed to the port stern at about the same time I crossed the bow.
The entire boat paused a moment, then started a long slow roll to port.
Jack and I immediately jumped to starboard, our eyes wide with realized terror. Before -- just before -- the boat pulled the edge of its port deck out of the water (!) and righted to the centerline, both of us had found a place dead amidships and held on for dear life. We had just weighted a metronome in liquid suspension with several thousand extraneous pounds placed five feet too high for the design of that particular timekeeper.
The panicked shouting to shore began. We needed to unload the motor, and make another trip. Except no one wanted to be the one to call the Owner and tell him what had happened. The shipping company that hired us would freak at the "needless" trip charged by the hour. Didn't we use two boats? Where were they? The agent would refuse the additional hour, given that it should never have been charged. Calling the Sealth back was pointless, now that it was hours away. How exactly were we going to phrase such a predicament to the Owner in advance? Like Cleopatra, he killed messengers. The bodies of the formerly employed were scattered hither and nigh and well known to all.
We looked around. Dead calm day, with neither a breeze nor a threat of one looming. Waters, likewise.
In every other company for which I have worked, we are encouraged to judge threat and to stand by that judgment. Only at Arrow is the motto, "You have to try it before you know it to be dangerous." A little damage? Ah, well, at least you tried. After all, "boating is a contact sport" (another coworker gave me that crock of shit quote, rather than admit that he sucked at piloting a vessel). You must try. Otherwise you are judged a pussy -- and the Owner does not hire pussies.
I should know. He told me so. In my interview. From which (I at that moment realized for the millionth time since putting myself in his employ) I should have run screaming.
So we tried it. Brian played captain, standing not behind the wheel but to one side of it, nearer the vessel centerline (it was a side steering vessel, like a car). I stayed on the bow with Jack, straddling my weight over as much of an area as possible, should I need to leap quickly in any direction.
On the crawl up the Hylebos, Jack and I on the bow grew more than giddy. Maybe it was the ten hours with inadequate food or water. Maybe it was the panic of the recent rolls. Maybe it was the frustration at having to work at a company that Simply Sucked, where legitimate points involving safety and common-sense were kept quiet lest they be brutishly attacked as Pussy Talk.
Whatever the causes we started to sing. Throughout the unloading of that deadly threat, we sang. And though we were getting a bit sick of the whole mess, we still sang, making up verses until we had fleshed out a little ditty that made no one laugh but ourselves. Call it humor from the trenches. Call it macabre. It worked for us, summing up the whole fiasco quite nicely.
I remembered the song we made up Friday, after all these years, because of the news. Friday was the thirtieth anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and everyone on the radio was remembering the Gordon Lightfoot song commemorating that loss.
Our song was sang to the same tune.
Our tale is now told
Because we had to be bold
And that made our deaths unnecessar-o.
We three idiots were drowned
And by divers were found
In the wreck of the Chey-enne Arrow.
The Cheyenne went down
Outside the Hylebos, brown
Water swirling through the sunken disaster.
The pilot house glass
Kept each moron's ass
In the brine to turn alabaster.
But the divers all shivered
At the message delivered
By our corpses, all stiff and distended.
To (The Owner) thoughts traveled
By our death not unraveled:
Six middle fingers extended!
I used to work for Arrow Launch, running launch vessels and cargo delivery here in Puget Sound. Essentially, if you have a large freighter to serve with taxi service, or are delivering supplies to such a freighter, Arrow is the primary go-to company to call, Twenty-Four/Seven.
24/7. What does that really mean?
It means that you, as a customer, can expect -- for a price, surely -- that Arrow will do its best to deliver service to you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They do this through a remarkable old skill, delivered with mastery from the owner of Arrow Launch: Micromanagement.
As an employee, I was required to carry a beeper, and to respond to the beepings that little monster delivered. I was required to respond, as I stated earlier, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. That's right, folks. I was technically never off-duty. The penalties for non-response were almost surely termination, as a starter, and a brow-beating that could be delivered at any time by the owner. If you don't believe me, go to the "Job Opportunities" section of their site and note the phrase "Should live between Seattle & Tacoma (30 Min. to either port)" to describe my old job. Seattle and Tacoma lie about an hour apart. . . .
(NB: To comply with the overall Policies of Politeness the LJ does try to enforce, I have decided to omit the actual name of Arrow Launch's owner from this posting. In my defense, all of the incidents I relate can be corroborated by at least one other source, and in most cases by any employee of the company.)
This man, the Owner, opened my interview with Arrow by informing me that, if I worked out, I would be replacing a "problem employee" in my region, Seattle/Tacoma. He then sent me out to observe a job with the three other guys working the region. The only other guys. The entire job, I could only sit there and guess which of these three guys was the problem -- all nice guys, and all bitching about the job to me privately on my first day. Gee, which one would I be helping to fire? Imagine how comfortable that felt.
Also, my interview was the most colorful in my experience, colorful in terms of the harshness of the language used and the meanness of its delivery. Folks, I'm a professional mariner by certification and recent trade. I can curse with the best of them. I have embarrassed longshoremen in waterfront bars. No kidding. I made a longshoreman blush on a Saturday night near closing time with a comment and delivery I felt, well, amusing. One former deckhand complimented me by saying that, in order to get me to laugh, all one had to do was ". . . say the most disgusting thing that came to mind, and then wait for (me!) to top it" with something even more disgusting. (Michael, where ever you are, thank you again.)
Arrow's Owner dropped more F-bombs and shit piles in my interview, when he was trying to woo me into his employment, than I have ever encountered in a professional setting. I soon noted that the air of professionalism about the office was really more of an eggshell dance, people staying firmly on their toes lest the master express displeasure in their general direction. This guy ran a desperate fleet.
Later in my employ -- hey, I needed the money, and that he did provide -- I realized his daily micromanagement was really just a goal to be set and exceeded the following day, if possible. He set groups against each other, individuals against individuals, all in the effort of fostering a air of "snitch on your coworker, and I will spare you the flayings you see all about you." You could one morning be brought into the inner circle of confidants, only to be plotted against in the afternoon meeting. He would yell at you publicly and mercilessly, tearing measurable new assholes in employees bigger even than he, in reality, was, only to be smiley and jovial hours later as if your shit no longer still ran through the recently-ripped orifice. To call him "mecurial" would be to imply in mercury a false stability.
He personally was willing to mortgage any and all family time in order to please a customer, and, sadly, expected everyone under his financial wing to show the same dedication. I pulled teeth to get Xmas Eve off, since my Germanic family recognized that as the de facto holiday; but don't think that I got off work much before 3 am the morning before. Oh, yeah, throw in a 50 mile one-way drive to Olympia and back, and you get one fun time with the folks.
Against this background, the company plodded on. The smarter employees work in the farther-flung locations operated by Arrow, such as Seattle/Tacoma. Look on a map. It's quite a drive from Port Angeles, the company headquarters. I personally met the Owner once face to face. For my interview. After that, it was all on the phone and through letters and emails, dealing with the dispatcher on the phone and the most senior captain in my region. From the senior captain, I learned that one never provoked the Owner, opting instead to simply Do The Job, Don't Screw Up, and, if at all possible, Stay the Hell Out of Port Angeles.
(On an amused note, when I left P. A. from the interview, I saw a license plate frame: "Happiness is Port Angeles in Your Rear View Mirror." The way he was driving south on 101, he meant it.)
We got a job in Tacoma that brought all of the worst elements of the Arrow Management Strategy to a nearly disastrous head.
The job was straight-forward enough. Pick up the trash and laundry from an oil tanker at the dock in Tacoma, and deliver supplies to the same ship. Given the volume of freight to be handled, another boat and crew was sent from Port Angeles to assist the regular Tacoma boat, at that time the Cheyenne Arrow.
(The Cheyenne is the smaller red boat.)
I liked the Cheyenne. She had her quirks, sure, but every boat does. If memory serves, she held ten pallets of cargo on her back deck. Usually, the weight of those loads was moot, since ten pallet loads is seldom enough to overwhelm her stability.
But read on, read on.
Typical jobs consist of picking up pallets for delivery and running them out to the ships, or running out to the ships to pick up items for shore delivery, or both. Speed of these various tasks all depended on weather, of course, and about a zillion other factors over which I sometimes felt we crew had even less control.
How long will the job take? How fast can a crane operator on the freighter make a single load go up and down? The answer to that may amaze even the most patient amongst you. It turns out that, contrary to popular assumptions, the worst cargo loading equipment is generally found on vessels flagged in the U. S. of A. American vessels have the most stringent staffing requirements, generally have union crews that command very competitive salaries, and, therefore, are stuck with the lamest non-essential equipment, including under-powered davits and barely-functional gangway lifts.
Since the vessel being serviced that day ran between US ports with fuel oil, it was required to be an American flagged ship.
At the dock, the pallets are loaded onto the launches with a boom truck and flying forks or pallet jacks, then hoisted from the launch with the serviced ship's own cranes and davits. It's a fairly slow proceedure, given that I and the rest of the crew must stand beneath the loads to guide them on and off the launch, and we humans in general have an aversion to being crushed.
The jacks shown above make the job quite a bit faster, since the deck crew doesn't have to bend down to disconnect the pallet lifter. Too bad Arrow only had one set of forks in Tacoma, and two launches.
Further dragging the schedule was the unavoidable location of the boom truck, at the very end of the Hylebos Waterway, a fairly straight though narrow three-mile dredged estuary lying north to south through some of the most industrial waters in the region. Maximum speed: dead slow, with absolutely no wake allowed. This stretched the minimum time between receiving a load and starting the off-load to almost an hour.
Forgive me, but the details of this day are hazy at best, at least until the drama really started. We received and delivered pallets, I nearly got crushed when the boat drifted and I, tripped by the ankle-high rails, had to lie down and let a swinging load hover overhead -- the usual stuff. All I do remember is that the crew of the other launch, the Sealth, tired of waiting around for its turn to load at the boom truck dock, dropped me off to help the Cheyenne and started the seven-hour motor to Port Angeles, hoping they could still be in radio range of the Superbowl game on the way. They didn't bother to ask permission, since there was only one authority at Arrow, the Owner -- and he was nowhere near Tacoma.
An hour after they left, the boom operator returned from lunch and, upon hearing news of this departure, hit the ceiling. He had done the math, realizing how long it should take with two launches to finish, and now realized his personal schedule, probably also involving house guests and the Superbowl, was shot to hell. Everyone was getting punchy and dumb.
So punchy, in fact, that we decided to make only one more run, when we had a run and a half of cargo left to go out to the ship.
Normally, this was no big deal. It all depends on what's in the pallet. If it's potato chips by the case and a few boxes of pasta, we could strap them three high and sail without worries.
This load, however, consisted of crates of engine room equipment, topped by a 50 horse electric motor. . . a motor that weighed over a ton.
Some notes worth considering.
First of all, many out there in internet land are probably thinking to yourself, "Fifty horsepower? That's nothing." This is because you are used to dealing with high-RPM internal combustion motors, where astronomical horsepower ratings are plated on inky-dinky scooter motors. To calculate internal combustion motor horsepower, the finished unit is revved under a modest load until it breaks. The peak horsepower is then recorded. This is helpful for, say, NASCAR racers (grrrr. . . ) who wish to know how much oomph they can squeeze out of their powerplants in the last few laps just in case they stand a chance at victory.
Secondly, horsepower is a rather useless metric. It averages RPM and torque; therefore, the higher the peak RPM, the higher the horsepower rating.
Electric motors, on the other hand, tend to revolve more slowly. Non-controlled AC motors are almost always defaulted to 3600 RPM, far slower than the tens of thousands of revolutions one can find in an over-driven gas engine. Horsepower for motors is also calculated not for peak but for continuous operation, meaning the thing can go on putting out the plate rating for freakin' ever, not a milisecond before it explodes or melts.
Meaning this motor strapped to the top of a pallet and a half of cargo was a honking mother of a load.
Something else to consider.
Stability is a mariner's bread and butter. Load a boat right and it should sail into the sunset infinitely. Load it wrong, even with the same cargo, and the tub will haul over and sink at the dock.
Consider the mechanical metronome, the clicking timekeeper that swings a weighted bar. The weight slides up and down the bar. Set the weight near the pivot at the base of the bar and the unit clicks a fast and furious tempo that drives the novice pianists to frustration. Slide that weight farther and farther up the bar and the tempo slows toward ponderous.
Consider now the canoe, a vessel most everyone out in Internet Land probably has had the opportunity to sail. What is it most of us are discouraged from ever doing in a canoe? No, not making love, though like American beer, it is fucking to close to water. (Apologies and thanks to Monty Python).
Standing. That's the activity that will give canoeists the most trouble. When one stands in a canoe, one shifts the center of gravity of the vessel. Like sliding the weight up the metronome, the load's center redefines the stability of the vessel. Whatever the wishes of the canoeists, the vessel now wants to tip.
Physics can be so maddeningly insistent.
Back to the Cheyenne Arrow. I am used to this little boat, barely 50 feet long. Step aboard and she gives a little, springing back and rocking quickly like a well-trimmed vessel should. Bouncier than a freighter, more predictable than a canoe.
Once that motor was lashed to atop the other loads, I, on the bow, freed the bow lines to starboard and crossed the bow to the port side. Jack, one of two others aboard with me, crossed to the port stern at about the same time I crossed the bow.
The entire boat paused a moment, then started a long slow roll to port.
Jack and I immediately jumped to starboard, our eyes wide with realized terror. Before -- just before -- the boat pulled the edge of its port deck out of the water (!) and righted to the centerline, both of us had found a place dead amidships and held on for dear life. We had just weighted a metronome in liquid suspension with several thousand extraneous pounds placed five feet too high for the design of that particular timekeeper.
The panicked shouting to shore began. We needed to unload the motor, and make another trip. Except no one wanted to be the one to call the Owner and tell him what had happened. The shipping company that hired us would freak at the "needless" trip charged by the hour. Didn't we use two boats? Where were they? The agent would refuse the additional hour, given that it should never have been charged. Calling the Sealth back was pointless, now that it was hours away. How exactly were we going to phrase such a predicament to the Owner in advance? Like Cleopatra, he killed messengers. The bodies of the formerly employed were scattered hither and nigh and well known to all.
We looked around. Dead calm day, with neither a breeze nor a threat of one looming. Waters, likewise.
In every other company for which I have worked, we are encouraged to judge threat and to stand by that judgment. Only at Arrow is the motto, "You have to try it before you know it to be dangerous." A little damage? Ah, well, at least you tried. After all, "boating is a contact sport" (another coworker gave me that crock of shit quote, rather than admit that he sucked at piloting a vessel). You must try. Otherwise you are judged a pussy -- and the Owner does not hire pussies.
I should know. He told me so. In my interview. From which (I at that moment realized for the millionth time since putting myself in his employ) I should have run screaming.
So we tried it. Brian played captain, standing not behind the wheel but to one side of it, nearer the vessel centerline (it was a side steering vessel, like a car). I stayed on the bow with Jack, straddling my weight over as much of an area as possible, should I need to leap quickly in any direction.
On the crawl up the Hylebos, Jack and I on the bow grew more than giddy. Maybe it was the ten hours with inadequate food or water. Maybe it was the panic of the recent rolls. Maybe it was the frustration at having to work at a company that Simply Sucked, where legitimate points involving safety and common-sense were kept quiet lest they be brutishly attacked as Pussy Talk.
Whatever the causes we started to sing. Throughout the unloading of that deadly threat, we sang. And though we were getting a bit sick of the whole mess, we still sang, making up verses until we had fleshed out a little ditty that made no one laugh but ourselves. Call it humor from the trenches. Call it macabre. It worked for us, summing up the whole fiasco quite nicely.
I remembered the song we made up Friday, after all these years, because of the news. Friday was the thirtieth anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and everyone on the radio was remembering the Gordon Lightfoot song commemorating that loss.
Our song was sang to the same tune.
Our tale is now told
Because we had to be bold
And that made our deaths unnecessar-o.
We three idiots were drowned
And by divers were found
In the wreck of the Chey-enne Arrow.
The Cheyenne went down
Outside the Hylebos, brown
Water swirling through the sunken disaster.
The pilot house glass
Kept each moron's ass
In the brine to turn alabaster.
But the divers all shivered
At the message delivered
By our corpses, all stiff and distended.
To (The Owner) thoughts traveled
By our death not unraveled:
Six middle fingers extended!