New Release: Chapter 6

Hold on to the railing. It's going to be a wild crossing from Seattle to San Francisco.

THE GREAT SEA AHEAD

VI

The explosion rings through the crew deck in the early morning, rocketing me from my Dramamine-fueled sleep and down the bunk ladder before I even clock that I’m awake.

“What the fuck was that?” Blake shouts from bed. He’s been there since yesterday, midway through our brutal passage through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a channel north of Seattle leading from the Salish Sea to the open Pacific, nicknamed “Juan de Puke-a” by shipmates who’ve sailed it before.

The reverberation spreads throughout the decks, the bulkheads, our bodies. The ship tilts to an absurd angle. Everything on our shelves that hasn’t already fallen by my feet rattles and slides. My “I don’t fucking know,” to Blake is drowned out by a new sound, sharp and insidious—the widespread crash of breaking glass. It comes from somewhere on the other side of our door, but it’s so striking, it might as well be inside my head. Gripping the bed frame with one hand, I stretch the other towards the cabin door handle, bound for the hallway, certain that cold Pacific sea water will soon sweep me away, my journey will be over, my parents will mourn my loss, and I’ll be known in heaven as an assistant cruise director, which will irk me for eternity.

The hallway I expect to find split in two is eerily intact except for a dark purple puddle oozing from beneath a storage closet door. Diesel isn’t purple, is it?

More glass breaks. Crew doors open. We stare blankly at each other, too confused to be scared. An engineer rolls a ShopVac down the hallway.

“Liquor cage broke to shit,” he says.

It’s not diesel; it’s Merlot.

The persistent shuddering and tilt of the ship must have weakened the shelves, already weighed down by dozens of cases of booze, breaking them and all the bottles, turning the space into a liquor lake. The muddy mixture sloshes back and forth, glass shards shimmering like icebergs. Everyone healthy enough to stand soon gathers in the hallway, half-clothed and covering their noses from the noxious smell. Most last a minute before retreating to their cabins. A few of us tie t-shirts around our faces and scoop the booze into buckets, pouring it down the shower drain of the closest cabin. The engineer vacuums up the rest, emptying the vacuum down the same drain.

I return to my cabin, shaken but relieved.

“Everything OK?” Blake asks.

I climb up to my bunk. “No life rafts tonight.”

When I step on deck in the morning, I might as well be in a movie. Moving gray mountains of water top the bridge, thirty feet high—nothing like the eight- to ten-foot seas reported when we left Seattle. The decks shudder as we slam down in every trough. Fifty-knot winds hurl ocean spray like buckshot against the bridge windows, making a joke of the small windshield wipers Captain Dietrich and the mates need for a clear view. The twin diesel engines roar just to keep us from going backwards.

The scene doesn’t bring to mind what one might think: The Perfect Storm, White Squall, or even Castaway. Instead, I see my paternal grandmother, Granny, standing in her one-piece, flower-print bathing suit on the beach at the Jersey Shore. “That ocean’s bigger than you!” she yells at my cousins and me, her voice a mix of love and fear, as we dive—invincible—into the waves. Every day, she drags an inflatable, rectangular raft into ankle-deep water—shin-deep if she’s feeling particularly adventurous—and lies there for hours. It looks ridiculous, but I can’t judge her. As a young girl, her older brother thought he’d teach her how to swim by throwing her into the Delaware River.

“That ocean’s bigger than you!” she yells.

“Yeah, yeah, Granny, we got it!”

Now I know what she’s meant all these years. I’m not invincible. And the ocean is one big, nasty, son of a bitch.

Had someone said, “Batten down the hatches!” before we left Seattle, the deckhands would have remembered to double-check the hatch on the bow, which opens to the laundry room below. Instead, the chief engineer’s rattling call on the radio delays the day’s sad lunch of white bread and deli meat. “I need whoever is up to get to the laundry room now! Now!”

Shipmates and I arrive moments later to find him tugging on the ceiling hatch, fighting against a torrent of seawater that’s already filling the room. “They didn’t dog it down tight enough!” We lend a hand, which only leaves us soaked and knowing that the real fix is going to be much more dangerous.

Captain Dietrich orders all available hands to meet in the lounge. Only a handful are well enough to show. “We need to be smart and safe here,” Captain says. “Whoever is going to go out there, I want him in a Gumby suit, tied with a safety line and held securely. And I want safety spotters on both sides of the stern.”

A hand shoots up from a deckhand named Chris, a former Marine from Alabama. “I’ll go on the bow,” he says.

The boatswain and deckhands volunteer to tie the line to Chris and hold him steady. I offer to be the safety spotter.

In minutes, Chris waddles into the lounge wearing a full-body, one piece, red neoprene immersion suit—the “Gumby suit.” The boatswain ties a quarter-inch thick strand of nylon line around Chris’ waist and holds the other end with two other guys.

“Listen to your radio and keep a good watch out there,” Captain says as I leave for the stern. “I want a life ring ready in your hand. If you see Chris go past and you can’t get the ring to him, keep pointing to wherever you saw him last.” He clasps his hands with his arms out straight, his two pointer fingers sticking out like a finger gun.

Finally, something I’ve trained for.

After being hired in August, the company flew me to St. Louis for firefighting and sea survival training. Firefighting training took place at a test facility with a cinderblock building filled with hay bales. Over four days, five other new hires and I—each as eager and naïve as the next—doused flaming hay bales in full firefighting gear, giving us the utmost appreciation for the men and women who do it every day. On the other hand, sea survival training was held at a YMCA pool. We practiced drown-proofing, flipped over life rafts, and learned how to do cannibalism correctly—I kid! I kid!—all while avoiding groups of elderly water ballerinas in the pool’s shallow end as we jumped in, screaming, “Abandon ship! She’s gonna blow!”

At the stern, I grab a life ring as Angry Poseidon pitches the bow towards the sky. I think about Chris and psyche myself up for a throw that could mean more than any I’ve ever made. Waves pound the hull, shooting spray into the air like fireworks. Half in a trance, I wonder when, or if, we’ll make it through. I’m surprisingly calm, focused. The storm has knocked the past away. The waves keep the future at bay.

On the radio, I can only catch pieces of Captain’s orders to the deckhands as Chris crawls out on the bow. I grip the life ring tighter, my knuckles white against the orange plastic, imagining him getting beaten by the waves, reaching out for the loose latches.

Then, through the chaos: “Hatch secured,” Captain confirms over the radio, his voice calm but heavy with relief.

We muster in the lounge, where a soaking-wet Chris sits hunched over on the floor, drying his hair with a bar rag and spitting salt water on the carpet. The red Gumby suit is crumpled up next to him like shedded skin.

“God, I can’t wait to have some PAX again,” Chris says. “Anything other than this shit.”

“Me too,” I say. Or was it someone else? Was it the Dramamine talking? No. It was me, and it’s true. Compared to this madness, the frustration of the last few weeks—years, even—have been like a splash in the kiddy pool. Passengers steal my sleep; they don’t make me fear for my life. Speeches leave me anxious and embarrassed; they aren’t going to kill me.

At night, I’m rocked to sleep by an easing ocean. The soft rush of the ship’s wake against the hull whispers, “You passed the test. You’re going to be OK.”

In the morning, the seas are calm enough for sick shipmates to slink out of bed, choke down some crackers after days without food. A few of us are on deck when the San Francisco skyline emerges in the distance. “Land ho!” I yell. The storm has delayed our arrival by a day, and passengers have been given rooms at a hotel near Redwood City, south of San Francisco, where we dock to begin the trip. We use every extra minute to prep the ship. Deckhands swab saltwater and sea detritus from the decks. Stewards make up the messy passenger cabins, reattach the dining room tabletops that had started to bend their supports when the ship tilted, and set them with the usual precision.

By embarkation, the hallways fill with shouts of “Let’s do this!” and “Here we go!” Rap music blasts in the galley. Chefs chop vegetables and stir soups to the beat. The hospitality manager and I hold each other to a push-up competition—a first for me in a suit and tie. Molly, now the new cruise director, greets the passengers warmly. She lacks Jessica’s flair, but her sweetness compensates for it.

Before dinner, I go to the sun deck and call my parents. It’s pushing 10:00 at night on the East Coast. I know they’re asleep, but I don’t care. My thoughts are grand, my confidence raised from the depths.

Mom answers.

“I’m staying on,” I say. “Mexico, Costa Rica. Wherever. I can do this.” For the first time, I don’t feel like a cruise director, especially not an assistant. I am a traveler, an explorer. I’ve been through some shit.

“Marc?” Mom says, still coming to. “Is everything OK? Dad said you weren’t doing well.”

“I’m fine.”

“I knew you’d figure it out!” Dad yells into the receiver.

“How was your trip?” Mom asks.

“Little bumpy. But just the break I needed.”