Can One Person Make a Difference

We were young once when life was smooth and natural and we had our entire lives in front of us. Kids went barefoot and played in the woods all summer, staying outside until dark until you could hear the crickets chirping and the frogs croaking, a time before noisy motor traffic drowned them out. It was a period when you could sleep outside on the lawn and see the stars at night and wonder about your place in the cosmos and on earth and if what you were doing really mattered in the big scheme of things. If time is infinite, then the time span of life on earth is but a mere spec and one person couldn't really affect the scope of its existence, whether it turn out wretched or virtuous. Or can one person really change the world?

Man Over Board

Fiction, from my novel Whale View Nights

I was thinking things were going normally and that I’d be down on the mess deck in a few minutes drinking coffee like it was no big deal. When I got to the hatch I kneeled down so I wouldn’t fall from the rocking of the ship and so I could get better leverage to open it. I could barely see Rusty, just a nebulous outline of him on the side of the ship peering back at me through the dark, frothy spray. I started to turn the steel wheel on top of the hatch. Just as I did a rogue wave about thirty to forty feet high, a size I had never seen before, lifted the ship and threw me into the ocean like a rag doll, along with Rusty, who I could hear scream over the roar of the sea. I was screaming too, like the cry of a man falling from the sky without a parachute knowing he was going to die. In that instant I could see everything clearly like someone had turned on a really big light: the back of the ship, the name Ariana, the crane, the upper deck, the back of the pilot house, the communications tower, and my goddam life coming to an end.

Twenty-one

During my shrilling scream I was thinking, I fell off the ship. I actually fell off the mother-fucking ship into the raging Pacific. I couldn’t believe it. If I lived, which I was sure I wouldn’t, how was I ever going to explain it to the XO? Why did I ever leave Roberta and join the Coast Guard without telling her in the first place. I should have stayed with her. She might have gotten her memory back some day. If not for me she’d be okay. Why didn’t I make her were a helmet god damn it. I knew better. We could have gone to college together and started a family.

     Rusty had much more resolve than I did and activated his strobe light the minute he was swept overboard, which allowed me to find him after the wave passed. I was scared out of my mind being alone in the undulation of the ocean and the blackness. I swam for him as hard as I could so I wouldn’t have to die alone, but it was like swimming up a mountain and down the other side. The ship hadn’t turned or even slowed. I kept yelling at it in panic. “Ariana, Ariana, come back goddamn it, come back.”

     When I got to Rusty I put my arms around him in relief, as if being with another person would ease my anguish. It didn’t help enough. “Rusty, are you okay,” I said hysterically.

     “I’m okay,” he said. “Calm down, take it easy, we have to think.” He was a bit freaked out too, and cold already since his insulated suit wasn’t sealed like my dry suit. He needed to get out of these frigid waters as soon as possible. He looked at my suit. “You have a flare on your suit,” he said. “Let it off, before the ship gets too far away.” So I did. It shot straight up and exploded in light, but the ship didn’t turn.

     “Why aren’t they turning for us? Wasn’t someone watching us?” I cried. Hell, I was damn near balling my eyes out with fear.

     “Shit, I didn’t tell them we were going aft,” Rusty confessed.

     “What,” I said shockingly.

     “I figured we’d only be a minute. I didn’t think anything would happen,” he said. He acted regretful.   

     “Then no one knows we’re out here,” I yelled as we were hauled up the face of a monster swell.

     “I don’t think so,” he yelled so I could hear him. “We’re going to have to figure something out fast. You have any more flares?” I looked on my suit.

     “One more goddam it, one more,” I said.
     “Quick, let it go before they’re gone,” he said. So I did and waited for the explosion of light, but the ship continued on. It powered up the coast getting smaller and smaller like our hope until it was just a faint light we could only see when we floated to the crest of a wave. We floated up the wall of one wave and then dropped hard into the trough of the next one, time after time. It was hard to keep from gulping water; the waves were choppy and I kept thinking each trough would suck us way down and drown us, like a giant leviathan swallowing us whole.

     “They’re not coming,” I cried. “They can’t see us out here. We’re doomed.”

     “They’re not looking back. They have no reason to,” Rusty said. I thought for a moment.

     “They’ll notice I’m gone. Eventually the OW will call down for the engineer and realize no one’s on watch, right?” I said.

     “That’s true,” Rusty said. “But by then it will be too late. There will be too much water between us and the ship.” He spit out some water, coughing. “There’s no chance of them finding us out here.”  

     We looked at each other in horror as we rose and fell in the infinite ocean and all its concealed depths. Who knew what lurked below us? Even though the earth was mostly water and my ancestors came from the sea, I was ill equipped to function upon it. I was about to lose my mind completely. “Who the hell falls off a Coast Guard cutter in the middle of the Pacific,” I yelled. Rusty was in the most danger of succumbing to hypothermia. With his suit he could probably last two hours at most before his body started shutting down. In my thick dry suit, I could probably last the entire night. Rusty was quite aware of the danger, but he didn’t panic, even though he was already shivering.

     I knew that the coast was about ten miles away, but I didn’t know what direction it was exactly. Once the ship was out of sight it was hard to keep any sort of orientation, but then I saw the North Star peeking through the clouds. There was more severe wind than rain so occasionally a gap would open up in the sky and I could see the stars. With this in my mind I calmed down a little and started thinking rationally, like I had to do something super human to get out of this. So we decided to try to swim toward shore using the North Star as a reference point, which wasn’t easy since we had to stop often to find it again and reorient ourselves. “You think we can make it with these currents?” Rusty asked me, his teeth chattering. He wasn’t much of a swimmer in the best of conditions. I was almost certain we wouldn’t be able to make it, not with the swells and the ocean currents, and I didn’t tell him I was sure he wouldn’t make it in that Mustang. He probably already knew he was a dead man. The only thing I had going was that I was in really good shape and worked harder the grimmer the situation became. I think it was from fear.

     “We have to try. It’s our only chance,” I said.

     “Agreed,” he said. “There’s no other way.”

     Then we started swimming. I thought if he started swimming he might warm up a little, but I think he already knew he couldn’t last until we got to shore. We both had lights on our suits, but it was still difficult to keep track of each other. We couldn’t see the coast or any lights because the waves were too high and choppy and the air in the distance too hazy; we were just too far out. I had to stop every few strokes and make sure we were heading inland, not out into the wretched abyss of the sea. It was hard to trust a star in the cold blackness. My mind kept telling me turn around and go back where the ship was, but logically, I knew if we did that we’d die for sure, be lost in the boiling and tumultuous sea until we froze or died from exhaustion and dehydration. At the city pool in ideal conditions I could swim a mile in twenty-five minutes. But here, wearing a cumbersome dry suit, in almost total darkness, with ripping under tows and swells the size of mountains, a mile would take at least an hour, maybe more. So to swim to the mainland would take over ten hours, and that was if we never stopped, which I knew was impossible. Each time we stopped, the currents would drag us back out to sea and take away some of our progress. 

     After what felt like about two hours I thought I could see the faint glow of a light along the coast, maybe a lighthouse or something. That gave me a hint of hope. I wasn’t sure if my mind was playing tricks on me in my panicked state. Everywhere else along the coast looked dark, since the wilds of Olympic National Park extended along the coast for many miles. “Rusty look, a light,” I said. He was half out of it with hypothermia and not able to swim much farther.

     “I don’t see it,” he groaned. I lost sight of it.

     “Maybe a cloud bank rolled in,” I said, but then I doubted I had ever seen it. “I thought I saw something.” I tried to make myself believe it.

     “I can’t go anymore,” Rusty told me.

     “You have to Rusty, you just have to,” I said. “Keep moving.”

     “My arms won’t work. I can’t concentrate,” he mumbled. He looked weak and garbled his words.

     “Swim twenty strokes at a time. Short goals.”

     “I can’t I’m telling you, I can’t,” he moaned.

     “You got to. Now swim,” I yelled in his face. “You can’t give up. Now swim.” He swam a few more strokes but had to stop again. “Twenty more strokes,” I yelled. Then he swam four or five more and stopped. I couldn’t get him going after that. He just floated in the big rolling ocean with a face full of fear, and shivering out of control. I thought for a moment that I could give him my suit so he could warm up. “I’m giving you my suit,” I said. I started taking off my hood, but upon seeing this Rusty found some reserve energy and started protesting.

     “Morgan, stop. You can’t do that,” he said.

     “I have to try,” I said.

     “It won’t do any good,” he said. He grabbed me to make me stop.

     “You’ll freeze if I don’t give it to you.” I kept taking off my hood despite his feeble attempt to stop me. Then Rusty shouted at me. It was the first time I had ever heard anger in his voice and it startled me enough to stop me in my tracks.

     “No, no you damn fool, stop. You’ll get water in it and then it’s no good to either of us. Leave it on,” he yelled. “Leave it on you fool.” I came to my senses and put my hood on. Then I grabbed hold of him so I wouldn’t lose him in the raging sea. I took the lanyard that had held my flares and tied it to his suit so we’d stay together. We floated for a few minutes and then he stopped shivering, which was a bad sign. 

     “I was going to go to Australia Morgan. I wanted to see the warm beaches,” he said, half delirious. “I need the warm beaches.”

     “You still can,” I said, looking at him, but his eyes seemed to have lost focus, like white buttons.

     “You’re going to have to go on without me,” he mumbled.

     “No way. I won’t do it.”

     “Go on while you still can.” It took him a long time to say a sentence now.

     “I can’t leave you,” I begged, but I knew he was right.

     “I’m done for. You, you can make it to the coast,” he said.

     “How do I find my way, Pope? I’m scared. How do I find my way?” I was nearly crying.

     “Swim east as hard as you can. Look for the lights.” He was hard to hear over the waves.

     “What?” I said.

     “Look for the lights on the coast. Swim east, you can make it.” He gave me a feeble pat on my shoulder. “You can make it buddy.” It dawned on me that he was a brave man.

     “You sure you can’t swim anymore?” I asked, but he didn’t answer, just floated with a droopy head. I started doing the side stroke for the coast, but I wasn’t making any headway. It was the only way I could swim towing him. I needed a longer rope, but I didn’t have one. I tried again, but it was the same. Eventually I just stopped and floated with him, waiting. We sat in the ocean for about another half hour, but there was nothing I could do for him. “Rusty,” I kept saying while tapping his shoulder and face. “Rusty, can you hear me?” My hands were shaking like you wouldn’t believe, from fear. His breathing became rapid. I panicked and started towing him again as hard as I could, desperate to get him to shore, but it was too far. “Rusty hold on buddy, hold on, please hold on,” I pleaded, but his eyes were starting to dilate. I could see them by holding my strobe light up to his forehead. I was terrified that he’d die and leave me out here alone.

     I begged him to help me, for him not to die first and leave me by myself. “Wake up Pope, wake up. You have to help me.” After an hour his head started jerking in convulsions and his mouth looked like it was gasping for air. Then after a minute he was still, and I was mortified with shock and couldn’t move for several minutes. I was certain he was dead, just a corpse now tied to me like a lifeless sea anchor, drifting over high rollers in the miserable, chilling darkness. “Oh my god, oh my god,” I kept muttering. I wanted to keep him with me because I was so afraid of being alone out here. His lifeless body still held a tiny bit of comfort for me but it was dragging me out to sea with the prevailing currents. I tried to calm myself so I could think straight and figure things out. “I got to do something, I got to do something,” I kept stammering.

     It took me a long time to make the decision to cut him loose, but finally I yanked on the lanyard three times until it broke. I held the lanyard for a long time, like an eternity. Then, as if I was reaching out to gently drop a handkerchief, I let him slip away down the trough of a wave and into the gloom. I started crying. “Rusty, Rusty,” I cried. “Jesus, Rusty.” Then he was swept up the face of a massive swell and over the top and was gone. I was shaking like a son-of-a-bitch, not from the cold, but from desperation. I was so afraid; I just wanted it to be over. Once I started to swim for Rusty’s body, but stopped myself. Maybe I could kill myself, I thought, but I didn’t have any way to do it quickly. If I had a cyanide pill or something, I thought. “Might as well swim inland until I die,” I said to myself. I was going to die trying, that was what I decided after I let Rusty go. I figured it was hopeless, but there was nothing else I could do. The loneliness was unbearable – suffocating, like a cement block on my chest.

     On the next wave crest, I took a bearing off the North Star again, with my hands shaking and my eyes twitching and wide. Then with all the fiber in my body, I swam as hard as I could. “All that swimming, all that training you’ve done,” I yelled at myself. “Now put it to good use for once in your life and save yourself, because you sure as shit can’t save anyone else. Now swim shit head, swim.” I swam like I was Hercules for crying out loud, and I started preaching to myself. “You can do anything. Do you want to live or do you want to drown, now swim.” I was getting angrier at each stroke, like I was turning into a tremendous machine, unstoppable and impenetrable. “Swim you no good piece of shit,” I yelled at myself like I was my own drill instructor.

     I don’t know how long I swam like that, possibly several hours. Finally I could see the faint lights along the coast getting larger. I was making progress, I couldn’t believe it. For once the waves seemed smaller. It was getting light out too, ever so gradually. Oh the light, I was thinking. “Thank you,” I said. The light really helped ease my fear to a manageable level and I started getting hopeful. I had a view of a whale, surfacing a hundred feet away spouting water out his blow hole, and that made me feel a lot better, like he wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me and was guiding me toward shore. I began pacing myself, swimming a hundred strokes and then resting for a few seconds. I was able to make out cliffs along the mainland. Then a few hours later I could see breakers. I was making it. “Jesus Lord, I’m making it,” I said, but I was becoming exhausted and had to stop and rest a lot more. But at least I had land in sight.

     It was rocky everywhere along the shore, and I didn’t have the will or the energy to swim up the coast to look for a better place to come in. I could see some animal on the beach, like a small bear or big dog. I wasn’t deterred one bit from coming ashore here. I felt if I stayed in the ocean, the currents would pull me back out to sea. I had to get on land no matter what happened, even if the rocks mashed my flesh to a pulp. At least there was a chance I’d live, but if I stayed in the ocean I’d die for sure, and there was no way in hell I was letting the tides take me back out.

     It was strange; the waves breaking over the rocks didn’t scare me, because I had already beaten such terrible odds of staving off hypothermia, swimming through monstrous waves in the dark, and finding land. I didn’t even stop to consider the safest place - just swam straight in. For a while I was swimming over swales increasing in steepness the closer to shore I got, rising up and over one after another. Then I hit the first breaker and tried to dive under it, but with my dry suit on I couldn’t submerge myself, so I rolled in it like a big washing machine. Then it let me loose and I was behind it, hacking up water and trying to clear my head. The next one hit and pushed me onto the rocky shore. I felt my shin break on a boulder and yelled out in pain as I washed up onto the beach. As the wave went out I held onto a slab of rock so it wouldn’t drag me back out. With all my strength, I crawled farther up on shore before the next one smashed me to smithereens. Two more waves hit me but I had gotten far enough up on shore not to get pounded on the rocks. I crawled until I was mostly out of the wave zone and then collapsed on my face in some pebbles.

     The animal I had seen from the ocean was a dog. He was waiting for me at the water’s edge, his feet in the surf and his eyes glued to me like he wanted to play fetch. He didn’t jump on me or attack me in my haggard state, but looked at me like he was in need of something - a friend. He looked like Murphy, my dog who had died, a cross between an Airedale terrier and a Lab. He was big and tall, maybe eighty-five to ninety pounds and around two and a half feet high at the shoulders. I kept expecting his owner to come rushing down to help, but no one came. I was too worn out to pay anymore notice of him, at least until I got some rest. “Good boy,” I said as I crawled past him. He kept about five feet away the entire time, shadowing my every move.

     My leg hurt badly, but I was so relieved from being out of the ocean that I could deal with it in my state of euphoria of being alive when I thought I was going to die a hundred times. I was out of the maelstrom of the Pacific, but I still wasn’t out of danger, especially with my injured leg. I kept waiting for someone to come get their dog and help me. Surely people had been looking for me, but there wasn’t a soul in sight. I couldn’t walk at all, so I had to drag myself across a small patch of sand just past the rocks and up onto the bank where the forest began. I didn’t want to pass out in the tidal zone and get swept away. It was a pristine forest, with fir trees five feet in diameter. I lay beneath one for quite some time in my survival suit and fell asleep from exhaustion. When I woke, the sun was going down and I fell asleep again. The wind was whipping down the shore and across the tree tops, and the air was so cold that if it weren’t for my suit I would have probably not survived the night, since I didn’t have the strength to make a real shelter. But damn, I slept with so much relief of being alive, that nothing else seemed to matter.

Top Ten Dangers Hiking Across the Wild Yukon

Top Ten Dangers Hiking Across the Wild Yukon

After two weeks hauling my canoe up a really wild trib alone with the dogs, it suddenly hit me like a wave. I still had so far to go and my food would probably run out toward the end, but I didn’t turn back. I figured I could squeak through somehow, making it on fumes and muscle mass if need be. I had never read anything about anyone hiking through this region before, across the Olgilive Range from the Yukon River in Alaska to the Dempster Highway in Canada, and I was starting to doubt myself. I was living on the edge really, or so it felt, a true frontier, maybe one of the last in the world. I was scared, but the vastness, primitiveness, and uncertainty of what lay ahead made me feel alive. Sometimes, the moose would just stop and stare at me because they had never seen a person before.

     I wanted to keep my canoe as long as I could, towing it behind me full of supplies. Once I started hiking I’d have to move faster or risk starving. To me the canoe represented security in wilderness travel and by leaving it at the headwaters I’d be taking myself into another realm of survival, a much harder one, but an even wilder one that stirred my mind rapturously. I wouldn’t have the canoe for an easy exit from the wilderness if I needed to get out in a hurry if I got hurt or needed to get more food. I had a small 410 shotgun though, which I could break down and keep in my pack or carry in my hand. It was the size of a B B gun, and light, almost the perfect wilderness gun except that it wasn’t very powerful. I could get food with it by using a shell or a slug, but it wouldn’t save me from a charging bear, though it could scare one like it had done two years ago on my first attempt of three to cross the Olgilives. Fortunately, a bear preying on a human was very rare and a charge usually a bluff; a test of one’s ability to remain calm under pressure. Tense up and a bear will zero in on that like a son of a bitch and become more likely to attack.

     In general, a bear encounter probably wasn’t even in my top ten things to worry about out here. Starving was number one hands down, being I had so much ground to cover and needed a lot of calories to do it. The dogs getting hurt was number two, since they were not expendable. What trouble they had, I had. If they went hungry, I went hungrier. They’d attack a porcupine in an instant if I wasn’t watching and could easily die from infection, and there were a lot of big porcupines in Alaska and the Yukon, like the size of a small hog.

     As long as I was on the river, one of us drowning was probably number three, because of the many logjams and cut banks the dogs or I could get hung up on. We had to maneuver past them all day long. Hell, even a foot of fast-flowing water could drown a person if he were pinned just right, so I had to be vigilant against that, for myself, but probably more so for the dogs.

     Eating something poisonous by mistake or getting ill was high on the list since I was consuming wild plants on a daily basis for extra calories, how little it may be. Falling down on a rock or off a cliff, especially later on when I’d be crossing the mountains was probably in the top five. Smash my skull or break a leg and the party was over, for me and the dogs. If I died they would die, linger around until they starved to death. Pure hunting dogs they may have been, but they were not wolves. They were not wild, and not capable of surviving out here indefinitely without me.

     Getting stomped by a moose was actually a bigger concern than getting mauled by a bear. A moose will stomp you till your dead, if he decides you’re worth stomping, but a grizzly will usually stop mauling you once you stop moving, so playing dead was actually the thing to do if a grizzly made contact. Hell, shooting myself with my own gun by mistake was probably a higher concern than getting killed by an actual bear.

     There were a lot of other smaller dangers too, like breaking a finger, banging a shin, stubbing a toe, sunburn, bug bites, dehydration, blisters, exhaustion, and so on, but those were not likely to cause death, just a big inconvenience, but I had to keep those at bay too since an accumulation of smaller problems could lead to a bigger one.

     Getting lost was a concern, but not as big of a problem as one might think. I usually knew where I needed to go. The problem was simply if I could get there before my food ran out. Actually, danger number one, the biggest threat of death if I included the drive up from Oregon would be dying in a car crash. A human body was not evolved to withstand those kinds of impacts. Life in a city or on our highways, in my opinion, was usually more dangerous than living in the wild, so if I truly wanted to increase my odds of living I should stay in the wild longer.

 Nellie on the Nation River

 Olgilvie River

https://www.amazon.com/Whale-View-Nights-Dave-Metz-ebook/dp/B07XWSX4SP

This is my novel about the Coast Guard on Kindle

Life Take One

I lived in forward birthing where no one should be made to live. It was no bigger than a walk-in closet, a coffin basically, designed for six low-ranking crew members. The night of my first patrol the sea was so rough that each time the ship hit a wave, the bow would plummet and I’d find myself in midair, for just a split second, my face plastered to the above bunk in a free fall. That was the same day I learned about my seasickness, and it would become the gnawing misery of my life for the next two years, like a slow grating death.

     Pretty much all I did around the clock was puke, sleep, and make my rounds. Sometimes I’d throw up so much that eventually I wouldn’t have anything left in my stomach. Then I’d have dry heaves, which hurt way more. Sometimes I’d sit there for several seconds, stomach muscles contracted tightly in agony, waiting for something to come up. The sooner I puked the sooner I’d get relief. During the dry heaves I’d be lucky to get even a trickle of stomach acid, which seared my throat and left a sour taste in my mouth. As long as the ship was rolling or pitching my body would try to vomit. The bow dropping was what really did me in. I felt like my guts and brain were being sucked out like I was imploding.

     After some time I got a rack in aft birthing, which made my life a lot more tolerable. I learned how to keep from throwing up. When the seas were rough I remained in my rack, but when I was on watch I sat at the most stable part of the ship, which was on the engine room floor right by the generator panel. I also avoided acidic foods and ate more basic ones, like yogurt, bread, and ice cream. I ate a lot of ice cream. Once, I ate some spoiled chicken teriyaki. Threw it up. Quite a few times I drank a tall glass of orange juice trying to rehydrate myself. Threw it up too, like a geyser. More than once I threw up my morning cup of coffee. The headaches I had from going off caffeine were imperceptible compared to how badly I ached being underway.  Hell, I even threw up my cherry-flavored sea-sick medicine when I was really new to the ship. I started to associate cherry flavor with being sick so much that months later if I smelled something cherry I got nauseous.

    The XO finally got me a house with two other guys on Whale View Court overlooking the ocean. It was a huge step up from living aboard the ship for the last six months with people coming and going as they pleased, always asking what I was doing. I lived there with two seamen, one named Ernie Dupray from Santa Cruz and another from Hollis, Oklahoma named Gary Franco. Franco was a border-line alcoholic. Whenever I was working on a piece of machinery, Franco would walk up with a straight face and say sarcastically, “Petty Officer Morgan, are you qualified to be working on that expensive equipment.” I’d tell him, jokingly, that I wasn’t and that I needed to get off work so I could ride my bike. I always felt constrained by the Coast Guard. My time was their time.

     Dupray and Franco made excellent roommates. I always had someone to do things with. Franco was my bar buddy. We once hit half a dozen bars in one night. Dupray was my outdoors buddy. We went running in the redwoods together. It was fantastic to live with the two of them, at least when we weren’t at work. Sometimes the Coast Guard seemed to get in the way, and I certainly planned on getting out after four years. I was pretty sure Dupray was going to get out. However, I think Franco was going to stay in for twenty – a lifer.

     Franco and I would go to the bar and he’d get blurry-eyed drunk and start yelling out slurs. One of his favorite things to say when he was amped up and ready to party was, “Go kick it live.” He’d yell it. Franco was a great guy though. He was mild-mannered and would do just about anything for you, when he was sober. Sometimes when he got drunk, he’d black out and not remember how he got home.

     We spent a lot of hours on the job. After working all day we often got called out at around one or two in the morning to tow in a fishing boat that had broken down. Their reduction gear or steering would fail, or something like that. I began to feel like I was in the towing service. Unbelievably, I used to throw up on nearly every trip. Sometimes I wanted to die; I was so sick and exhausted. Dealing with sea sickness late at night when my body was supposed to be asleep made it even harder. My head always throbbed and my sense of balance got completely out of whack. Our ship was stocked with sea sick medicine, which I used for the first few months hoping I’d somehow learn to cope with the pitch and roll of the ship, but it was a losing battle.

     We were instructed to take a cocktail of drugs, two pink pills and one blue pill. The blue pill was a downer and combated the queasy feeling, but it made a person terribly sleepy. Since we had to be awake to stand watch, we had to take two uppers as well, the pink pills. It didn’t seem right taking an upper and a downer together like that, but supposedly that was the only way they’d work. Some people abused them. Don Aberson, who I usually relieved for watch, always took a blue before bed while sitting on the mess deck listening to music. He was kind of a junkie. He always got the eight-to-midnight watch, which was the best night watch. He’d pencil himself in for it; he was the chief’s little buddy. “Time to take my bedtime cocktail,” Aberson would say before drifting aft. Sometimes I was on the verge of total collapse, and all he could say was how he was feeling pretty good on the blues and ready for sleep, the bastard.

     Once, we were on a seven-day patrol with our ship doing eight knots against twenty-foot waves. It was too dangerous to turn the ship around for port since we might capsize when our ship was broadside, so we had to ride it out. It was early in the morning and I had been on watch for two hours, suffering like usual. I had puked several times already and between rounds I sat in the galley with my head drooping. There was no one else awake down below, just me against the dim red lights, which only made the nausea worse. Feeling like a ghost ship, it rolled, the lights flickered, and the bulkheads creaked. I decided to lie down on the floor for a few minutes. I didn’t see the harm and figured I’d hear if anyone came down the ladder. To me there was no difference in waiting sitting up or lying prone, but they didn’t take too kindly to someone sleeping on watch. The place I laid my head was right below the gun rack for the nine-millimeter pistols. At one point, I thought if I had the key to that rack I might have blown my brains out to end my vile misery.

     Lying down was a huge mistake. I immediately passed out. Before I knew it, I woke up and was lying on the mess deck floor in a filthy pool of water that had gushed in from the chain locker up forward and possibly the wastewater tank. It had the stench of sulfur and rancid food so foul that it made my nasal passages burn. I was supposed to monitor the chain locker when we were in rough seas and pump it out if it got too full, but I had pretty much given up by that point. One unspoken rule was to finish your watch so others could rest for their own one. I should have woken someone up.

     The officer of the watch came down and saw the water and me lying incoherently and woke up the chief, who then came rushing into the galley. “What’s going on Morgan,” he yelled. “Where did all this water come from?” I looked around, with blood-shot eyes and a haze in my head. I couldn’t think straight.

     “It must have come from the chain locker,” I said.

     “No shit. Why didn’t you pump it out a long time ago? You want us all to go down.”

     “I think I’m dying chief,” I said; so maybe they’d go easy on me later. Maybe I really was dying. I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel in all this struggling; only pain and my life being squandered.

     “I don’t give a rat’s ass. Now get the chain locker cleared before we sink.” Just then Aberson stormed onto the mess deck from back aft, his shirt hanging out and his boots untied. He had been woken up too and was kind of the whiz for any problems in engineering. He was a little tyrant too, but he knew the ship inside and out. He went right for the chain locker. It was completely full.

     “We got big trouble Chief,” he yelled. “The water’s coming in from the vent.” Then he rushed back to the engine room and turned on the pump for the chain locker and started pumping it out the side of the ship. I managed to get to the chain locker and monitor the draw down while puking into a plastic bag. When it was empty I stumbled back to the engine room to tell him.

     I was in a world of trouble. The chief and the XO weren’t too impressed by my watch-standing abilities, and even the captain made a brief appearance to scowl at me. The fuckers sat me down on the mess deck the next day and had an informal hearing about what happened. “We thought you being a petty officer, you’d have more skills,” the XO said. I didn’t tell them that in school I had rarely studied; I partied too much. They ranted on, the chief and XO taking turns at me.

     “I have a whole list of infractions,” the XO said.

     “If someone hadn’t come down when they did, we would have sunk for sure,” the chief said. He wasn’t the smartest man in the world and used Aberson a lot to make himself look good.

     “Not sure what we’re going to do with you,” the XO said.

     “Send you to an ice breaker, then you’ll see what trouble is,” the chief said scornfully. I started feeling like they were berating me instead of just telling me what my punishment would be. Being so strung out on seasick drugs, I about flipped out.

     “What are we doing out here?” I blurted out. To me it seemed like a bunch of lifers floating around on a metal tub in the dark and power of the sea where we had no comprehension what could happen. “We don’t belong out here for chrissakes.”

     The chief glared at me with a gushing sigh. The XO was more humane and sat listening. After a few seconds the chief spoke sternly. “We’re out here to save lives, you understand. If we weren’t here people could lose their lives.”

     “What people,” I yelled. “There’s no one here. It’s just the dark and the waves, and me puking every fucking day. I could lose my goddam life; we all could lose our lives.” The XO stood up and put his hand on my shoulder to calm me down.

     “Now take it easy Morgan. No one was hurt,” the XO said.

     “We all knew when we signed up we might have to risk our lives,” the chief said. I knew he was right. They tried to talk reasonably about our mission; about saving lives, stopping drug smuggling, and keeping the coast secure, whatever that meant. I got sick of people using the word secure all the time.

     After they finished talking they both stood up to go. “Maybe you should think about your duty a little more,” the XO said while I stared down at the table. “You’re going to have to get qualified again, or we’ll have to demote you.” They only put me on a sort of probation, which in a way I was sorry for. At that point I wanted out; I wanted the sea sickness to be over for good and get on with my life.

     The chief had me clean out the sewage tank. This was my punishment, even though they called it a disciplinary action. I had to put on some coveralls and wear a respirator so I wouldn’t poison myself. With a putty knife, I scraped stalagmites off the ceiling and the fecal layer off the walls and dropped them into a bucket to haul out. The stuff was pretty solidified and not as foul as I thought it would be.

     Franco came by on his way outside to paint the fantail. He put his hands on his hips and stared at me until I looked up and saw him. “Petty Officer Morgan, what is it you are doing down in that hole,” he said.

     “Beats the hell of me,” I said. “Trying to become a lifer I guess.”

     “Does anyone know you’re down there?”

     “I doubt it.”

     “Are you qualified to be working on that slimy crap?”

     “Get a move on seaman,” I laughed. “You’re holding up progress.”

     “Okay, okay, yes sir. I understand sir. I’m moving on sir.” Franco always made me feel better. In a way I had dodged a serious bullet for falling asleep on watch. I wasn’t getting kicked out, which deep down I didn’t really want. And nobody died.

    After a few months I got a new supervisor named Arthur Linley, who was one rank above me and who I’d work with the most closely for the remainder of my enlistment, besides a fireman, who was one rank below me. Linley replaced Aberson and was a welcome relief to his arrogant personality. On patrols Linley was always reading a book when he wasn’t on watch. He was the only crewman I ever saw reading anything that didn’t do with the Coast Guard. The first time I saw him lying casually in his rack he was reading This Side of Paradise. Not only was Linley a great sailor, a hard worker with integrity, but he had a multifaceted intelligence that extended well beyond the work place. “See that,” he said one night on patrol while we were standing on the deck taking in a calm evening, which was rare. “It’s always north in the sky and never changes,” he said. “If you don’t have a compass, look for the North Star. It could save your life.”

     We also got a new electrician named Rusty Pope, who also stood engineering watches and out ranked me by two pay grades. He usually exaggerated his status aboard the ship. One night when Franco and I ran into him at the bar he was telling a woman that he had a crew working for him, which technically he did. He mainly did the electrical jobs alone though, while Linley, the fireman, and I worked on the mechanical parts of the ship. What I liked about him most was that he always patted me on the shoulder when he knew I wasn’t feeling well. “How you doing buddy,” he often said. He never complained, he never raised his voice, and he never looked down upon anyone, I mean never.

     I started using a stronger drug to help me cope with my sea sickness. It came in a small round patch, which I wore behind my ear. This was one powerful drug, and was supposed to be related to the same drug in truth serum. The only trick was that it had to be applied a few hours before it was actually needed. It took that long for the drug to take effect, but when it did, ahoy, watch out. It doped me up so much that my nausea was suppressed. The drug made me feel lousy, but it was better than puking my guts out day and night.

     A few times we’d get called out in the middle of the night, and I’d quickly put on the patch before leaving Whale View. A few times I’d get to the ship and the patrol would be canceled for some reason. Sometimes it’d be a broken vessel that got its engine started again. Other times it was just the captain running a response drill. I’d rip off the patch and hope it hadn’t taken affect, but most of the time I’d spend the rest of the night doped up and stupid, and the next morning I’d feel like I had been hit over the head with a baseball bat. Too much of the drug could make me feel queasy and wobbly on land, like a reverse effect; like I belonged in the sea with the whales, which in their evolutionary history used to live on land, like people. Sometimes after a really long patrol when the seas had been tumultuous and I had been doped up the entire time I’d start to feel okay. Then when I finally got back on land at our pier, it felt like it was moving like I was back on board floating over massive waves again.

     We were getting called out in the middle of the night at least twice a week to tow in some broken-down boat on top of our regular work schedule. This went on for a couple of months and the crew was getting pretty irritable. I told Franco one day, “This job is taking years off my life.” Some of the boats we towed in weighed one hundred fifty tons. It was no small potatoes, that was for sure. If you screwed up, people could die. The deck crew had to hook up a three-inch-diameter line to the broken vessel. There was always a danger of the line parting and whipping back and killing someone, like a howitzer. One of those lines could slice your legs clean off.     

     About a year and a half after I was stationed on the ship we got a mayday call from a fishing vessel sinking fifty miles off the coast. We had done a lot of tows by now, too many to remember, but never this far out, and never in such violent seas. For a ship this small, the waves were real hummers. The strong winds made their crests steep and curled. We were instructed to keep our survival suits with us at all times in case we capsized. I was thinking hell, what have I gotten myself into now?

     We didn’t know what we we’d find when we got on scene. We only knew that a fishing trawler called the Tasha Mara was going down fast with three people on board. Crashing over thirty-foot waves, our ship could only do ten knots without sustaining damage and rendering the crew incapacitated. But we had to get there by the time the Tasha Mara sank and the men were forced into the frigid water.

     I was fortunate not to have the first watch in such conditions. I stayed prone to keep from getting sick as long as possible. Rusty had the watch. He was durable as hell when it came to dealing with rough weather. After his second engineering round he stumbled back to aft birthing and sat at the table under the red lights looking haggard. His body swayed with the roll of the ship as he sat there, silent and head drooping as the engines droned and vibrated. He looked like a shell of a man, like a ghost in the ruddy gloom. “You all right Russ,” Linley asked, his voice emanating from some invisible space. You couldn’t really see the people in the bunks because there was too much of a shadow. They were like corpses.

     “Oh yeah,” Rusty said like he always did. “I’ll be fine. Get some rest.” Then he got up and stumbled back out the hatch. That was the last thing I remembered until about an hour later when we were nearing the Tasha Mara. The officer of the watch ordered all hands up and to their emergency stations. Rusty came back, touched our shoulders and shook each of us a little. We often couldn’t hear the loud speaker since half of us wore ear plugs to dampen the noise of the engines.

     “Daniel, we’re almost there, time to get up,” he said. I moaned in horror, my senses twisted and foggy. The motion of the waves often put me in a coma, especially at night. I didn’t feel like getting out of my rack. I was only twenty-three, but I felt like a feeble, old man. I also felt drugged, depressed, and achy all over, with some heaviness pressing on my head that I thought might make my capillaries burst. I wanted to stay in my rack until the ship moored up to the pier, the engines shut off, and the rescue mission over, but they’d probably demote me if I didn’t get up. I made my way through the engine room to the mess deck while trying to maintain my balance. It was a huge effort to keep from falling down when the ship was jerking around.

     The engineers didn’t really have an emergency station. Our job was pretty much just to make sure the engines ran. I sat waiting and swaying on the mess deck with the cook, who was even sicker than me. His arms were sprawled out and his face plastered to the table where we ate, sticking there with his sweat. Each time the ship rolled, his arms slid across the table leaving greasy ooze marks. “You okay, Allan?” I asked, attempting to give a little sympathy, but in my horrid state, I was mostly pretending, going through the motions of being alive.

     “Oh,” he moaned. “Yeah, I’m okay.” He didn’t look okay.

     When we got to the scene the vessel had sunk, but we found two men floating free in the waves with strobe lights shining and their emergency beacons attached to their life jackets. Franco spotted them from his lookout corner in the pilot house. The bridge watch stander’s only job was to look out the window and watch for things, nothing else.

     We pulled alongside them and immediately they climbed aboard using a cargo net we deployed over the side. The third man wasn’t able to help himself. We found him a little farther on floating in a life ring. The XO ordered engineers not on watch to the aft deck to help with the rescue, which was Linley, the fireman, and me. He always gave us the shit jobs. The rest of the crew was too busy trying to control the ship.

     Linley grabbed the life ring with a boat hook and pulled the man to the side of the ship. This wasn’t easy considering the high waves and the rocking of the ship. We had to time the swells so we could grab the man and haul him aboard before he bashed into the side of the ship and crushed his skull. It was the only way. The captain wouldn’t allow anyone to go out in the small boat. It would have been suicide. Remarkably, Linley and I grabbed the man on the first try and pulled him over the railing quickly.

     We dragged the man over by the crane where we’d be safer from the waves sweeping across the deck. Then we tied ourselves off with some rope. The man’s face was cold and pale like a card board cut out. I was sure he was dead, but Linley started mouth to mouth. “Do chest compressions,” he ordered. I had never done them on a real person, just on a dummy in training. I would have let someone else do the job, but there wasn’t anyone else, just the fireman, but he was too busy tying us off and puking. I think I broke some of his ribs. I could hear them popping as I pressed down, which made me hesitate. “Keep going,” Linley shouted. After about three minutes we got a pulse. He started breathing for a short time. I couldn’t believe it. He seemed to have come back from the dead.

     We stopped CPR and monitored the man for a few seconds with the intent of carrying him into the ship to warm up. “Jesus, he’s alive,” I said while Linley had his head down listening to make sure the man was breathing. Then the man vomited on Linley’s face. He wiped once to get some of it off and then turned the man over on his side so he wouldn’t choke on his own puke.

     “I got to clear his airway,” Linley said, and then he stuck two fingers into the man’s mouth and scooped out most of it. I felt as queasy as a mother fucker and wanted to pass out, but Linley kept yelling at me. “Hold him damn it, hold him.” The fireman had tied himself off and was lying on the other side of the crane, useless like I usually was.

     “Get yourself inside,” I told him. Then I forced myself to help hold the man still while the waves pummeled our ship. His eyes were rolling back. I watched the fireman make it inside. We were about to take the man inside so Rusty and Dupray could work on him. They were our medics. Then he started seizing, his body wrenching up off the deck shaking. I tried to hold him down so he wouldn’t injure himself, but he was too strong. “He’s going to break his goddam back,” I said over the roar of the storm. Rain was blasting us and rolling down my cheeks in streams.

     “We have to hold him,” Linley said. Then the man went limp again and we continued mouth to mouth and chest compressions in the bitter, biting wind. We couldn’t get a pulse anymore, so we dragged the man into the upper hallway out of the weather and Rusty came up and shocked him with paddles. He couldn’t revive him either, even after several attempts. The fireman took over the watch so Rusty could keep working on him, but after an hour it was obvious the man was dead. The captain came down from the bridge.

     “That’s it Captain,” Rusty said. “He’s gone.” The captain looked a little disturbed, but he kept his composure.

     “All right then. Let’s pronounce him dead,” the captain said and then went back up to the bridge while Rusty noted the time.

     I had only seen one dead body before and worried about my own precarious mortality. Who knew what was lurking down the road? “What do we do?” I asked.

     “We got to put him in a body bag,” Linley said.

     “Really, he’s dead?” I asked.

     “Yeah, dead,” Linley said. I felt like throwing up.

     Over the roar of the engines and the sea, we had to shout if we wanted to say anything, but mostly we were speechless.

     I looked at the dead man’s face, etched with a permanent grimace of pain. The body was ghostly white and stiff, with glossy eyes, and covered by a long, black beard.

     “I got to throw up,” I said.

     “Okay, I’ll wait,” Linley said as Rusty turned to go resume his watch from the fireman, who could barely function now. Then I stuck my head outside and puked over the side of the boat, and a swell came and made me sway. I grabbed the rail to steady myself. “Let’s stuff him inside and get this done.” We slid the bag around the man and zipped it up. The last thing I saw of him was his hollow eyes staring back at me. Days later, it would haunt me in my dreams at night.

     We arrived back at our pier just as the sun was coming up, its orange glow radiating over the flatter water of the harbor. We moored up and stored gear before leaving. I was sitting on the dock, my head throbbing, trying to adjust to the steadiness of land before heading home. Funny, it didn’t feel right. I sat as most the crew disembarked. Then Franco came by and sat down next to me on the curb. I was exhausted as hell. He had this shitty grin on his face, like nothing could get him down. Not even the backward equilibrium you felt while you were trying to switch back over to land. “You ready to go kick it live,” he said.

     “What? Now?”

     “Yeah now. This is life take one boy. You got to live the life you got. You saw what could happen.” I rubbed my aching forehand pondering that. Then I stood up and looked at the waves breaking over the north jetty across the harbor, a hint of the oceanic fury that lay beyond. Despite our troubles and pain, hell, we had to live man, live. That was Gary Franco’s motto, and that was probably the most important lesson I learned in four years.

     “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”