Before We All Go Down

From my novel.

Is there really such a thing as a noble cause, or is it better to do nothing? What and who would be the cause of our demise?

Before We All Go Down

Our ship had its own private dock along the inside wall of the south jetty, which was off limits to the public. The south jetty was farther inland than the north jetty so it didn’t get pounded by large waves when storms rolled in. Stray cats lived in the south jetty. I used to take ham and turkey sandwich meats, the really expensive kind, from the ship’s kitchen and leave at the edge of the rocks during the night when I was on watch. If the cook found out I was taking that meat he would have freaked. I wanted to give them the tastiest food I could find to draw them out, but they were too wary. The cats, boney thin, sometimes had kittens whose growth was stunted from lack of food. I didn’t want them ending up at the pound or being euthanized. I figured living a scrawny life was better than no life at all, so I kept feeding them and not telling anyone. At least if they were alive, they had a chance. As long as they were alive, there was hope.

            I stole a few things from the ship too. Not big-ticket items because I thought that would be wrong. Just small essentials that I needed occasionally around the house, like a wrench to work on my bike, toilet paper since none of us at Whale View ever bought any, bagels, and paper towels, things like that. I figured the Coast Guard owed me for the overtime I put in and didn’t get paid for.

            While in port, every four days everyone except the captain and the XO was required to be on the ship all night after work until the next day. This was called an in-port watch. There were usually three of us at a time, an engineer, a crewman, and an officer of the day. This way if we got called there would be at least three people to do short rescues in the harbor, one to stay on the ship and two to go out in the small boat. If we got a call way out at sea, the three people could recall the crew and get the ship ready for deployment. Someone was required to be on the bridge at night, like guard duty. The watch from twelve to four was the most difficult, since it left you sleep-deprived the next day. However, they let the guy who stood the midnight watch sleep in. You could roll out of your rack around ten and drink coffee and eat muffins on the mess deck for a half hour or so. The cook used to set out delicious oat and raisin muffins. I usually ate four or five before the rest of the crew showed up for their break. Hell, by the time I got done eating muffins it was almost time for lunch, which meant the day was almost half over and I could head home to Whale View soon and go for a bike ride.

            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, so even though they still had engine power, they couldn’t use it to get home. I began to feel like I was in the towing service. Unbelievably, I used to throw up on nearly every trip. Sometimes I just wanted to die; I was so sick and exhausted. Dealing with sea sickness late at night when a body was supposed to be asleep made it even harder. My head always throbbed and my sense of balance got really 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.

            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 typical of sea sickness, 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. Dolen Abbershod, who I usually relieved for watch, always took a blue before bed while sitting on the mess deck listening to Neil Young on the stereo. ‘Am I too far gone, too far gone for you,’ the song played. Dolen never got sick though. He was kind of a junkie. He always got the eight to midnight watch, which was the choicest night watch. He always penciled himself in for it; he was the chief’s little buddy, his gopher and advisor. “Time to take my bedtime cocktail,” Dolen would say before drifting aft to his bunk. He couldn’t hear well so he always talked loud. A lot of engineers had bad hearing because they didn’t use proper hearing protection around the loud machinery. Sometimes I was on the verge of total collapse, dealing with the constant roll of the ship, trying to read gauges, and write and keep my balance, and all Dolen could say was how he was feeling pretty good on the blues and ready for sleep.

            Once, we were on a seven-day patrol with our ship doing eight knots against twenty-foot waves. Thick slabs of green water were blasting the bridge like we were looking into a large sea aquarium. 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. Our captain, Lieutenant Darrel Darmouth, who some of us called the devil behind his back, had given up a career in marine biology to become an officer in the Coast Guard. “The pay was much better,” he said at chow one day. He usually didn’t talk about his private life around the crew. “And I know I’ll have a pay check coming in every month, not worrying about getting grant money to feed my kids.” He always showed up to the ship in his dress blues. When preparations were being made to get underway, the captain wouldn’t show up until the last minute. On a normal patrol, he was the last one on and the first one off. If lives were at stake, he was supposed to be the last man off. I always thought he should set an example by being the first one aboard and the last one off. He had a bit of an ego, so this was to be expected.

            It was early in the morning and I had been on watch for two hours, suffering seasickness like usual. I had puked several times already and between rounds I sat in the galley with my head dropping, the insidious nausea killing me. There was no one else awake down below, just me against the dim red lights, which only made the nausea worse. Feeling like a deserted ship, it rolled, the lights flickered, and the bulkheads creaked. I decided to lie down on the floor for a few minutes until I felt composed enough to make another round. I didn’t see the harm. I figured I’d hear if anyone came down the ladder and I’d be able to hop up before they saw me lying down. To me there was no difference in waiting sitting up or lying prone, but they didn’t take to 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 gun rack I might have blown my brains out to end my vile misery.

            Lying down like that was a huge mistake, because I immediately passed out. Though, I wasn’t sure if I had just fallen asleep or if my body had given 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 from the ship’s wastewater tank. I wasn’t sure how long I had been asleep. The water 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 watch. But I should have woken someone up.

            The officer of the watch came down, 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 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 this suffering; 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 Dolen rushed 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 wiz for any problems in engineering. He was a little tyrant too, but he knew the ship inside and out. He passed me and went right for the chain locker. It was completely full.

            “Jesus,” 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. It was difficult to pump. You had to open the main valve slowly as you turned on the pump so it would get suction. If you opened it right away no water would be sucked through and the pump would burn up. I managed to get to the chain locker and monitor the draw down while puking into a plastic bag the entire time. When it was empty, I stumbled back to the engine room to tell Dolen to turn off the pump. We didn’t want to fry it and make more work for ourselves.

            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, shake his head, and then disappear again to his state room. They sat me down on the mess deck the next day and had an informal hearing about what happened. “We thought you coming here from school, you’d have more skills,” the XO said. “Thought you’d have better mechanical abilities, and your sea sickness is quite a problem.” I had expected this for what I had done.

            “School was really hard for me. I was thankful to pass,” I finally said, but I didn’t tell them I never studied 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 Dolen a lot to make himself look good. He was an alcoholic with three ex-wives and loads of child support to pay, which didn’t leave him with a lot of extra money. He shared a run-down trailer at the end of town with a fat buddy who didn’t work.

            “Not sure what we’re going to do with you,” the XO said. The chief and the XO looked at each other.

            “Send him to an ice breaker, then he’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 and started raising my voice.

            “What are we doing out here?” I blurted out. “We don’t do anything.” 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 of what could happen to us. “We don’t belong out here for chrissakes.”

            The chief was also a bit of a bully. He glared at me with a mean face: a down-turned mouth, raised eyebrows, narrow eyes, and a long, 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 goddam 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 on the dotted line that we might have to risk our lives,” the chief said. I didn’t say much after that because I knew he was right. They tried to talk reasonably with me 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. We had to secure our gear, secure our watch, secure our ship, make the operation secure, and so on. It drove me batty.

            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 was ready to get out; I just wanted the sea sickness to be over for good and get on with my life; see my brothers again and a few friends I had before I joined up, maybe stop by Jeff Chapman’s house and see what he was doing, or get the nerve to look up Roberta English. I missed walking my dog in the woods around Roseburg.

            The chief had me clean out the sewage tank, and the gray water tank, which was the tank that held the water that drained down the galley sink. This was my punishment, even though they called it a disciplinary action. Dolen, with his skunk-like personality, was giving me orders on how to do it, kind of like step by step instructions for morons who were even too stupid for scraping sewage. First, I had to pump the sewage tank to the city system through a dock connection. Then I had to unscrew some pretty hefty bolts, open the hatch, and let the methane gas out. “Not like that, not like that,” Dolen kept saying. It’s just a goddam sewage tank I was thinking. 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. It was the gooey, decomposing sludge on the walls of the gray water tank that almost made me lose my shit.

            “Not like that, not like that,” Dolen was saying again from above. “Chief wants it done right.”

            “How then?” I shot back. “It’s just fucking slime.”

            “Don’t use that tone or I’ll report you to the chief,” he threatened. I was getting livid listening to him giving orders that I didn’t need about how to scrape shit off walls.

            “Tell him I don’t give a shit how he wants it done,” I said. I was sick of being nice to him. Dolen and I were the same pay grade, but he had a few more months in the Coast Guard than I did, so technically he outranked me, but it didn’t make any sense to me. We should have been working side by side as coworkers, not with him as my boss. He never helped on disgusting jobs like this. 

            “Okay, I’m reporting you to the chief,” he said, and rushed off to his stateroom and came back with him. Once the chief saw that I was down in the sewage tank doing the worst job imaginable, he just walked off.

“Don’t worry about him, unless you want to get down in there too,” he said. I snickered. “You’re such a dip shit,” I said under by breath, and Dolen went off to do something else, only god knows what.

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

            “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?” I chuckled at him. He could always make me laugh.

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

            “Okay, okay, yes sir. I understand sir. I’m moving on.” 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. I wasn’t getting demoted, which was nice, and most important of all when I looked back on the situation, nobody died or was injured on account of my mistake. I still had a shot at making something of my life.