Dave Metz's Blog: Coast Guard

Dave Metz's Blog: Coast Guard: Except from my coast guard novel. A Slow Grating Death The executive officer, a lieutenant junior grade, who...

Coast Guard

Except from my coast guard novel.

A Slow Grating Death

The executive officer, a lieutenant junior grade, who we simply called XO, was in the process of getting three of us housing when I arrived, but it was taking time. I had to live on board the ship. “You don’t mind staying on the boat for a couple of weeks until we get you housing?” he asked. I said I didn’t mind but really I did. What else could I say? It was miserable living on board. I had virtually no privacy. I had to store my bike and most of my possessions in the cab of my little truck; I didn’t have a canopy. Each time I opened the door in the parking lot to get something, a bunch of other things that I had crammed in there would fall onto the pavement. I didn’t have pots or pans or any other household items, just exercise equipment, hiking gear, and books. I missed nature by being on the ship.

            I lived in the forward birthing compartment for the first few patrols, where no human being should be made to live because of the beating it took, being right under the bow of the ship. It was a serious design flaw to put a birthing compartment so far forward, like it was meant to be a punishing chamber for the lowest caste of the crew. I felt like a sardine packed in there with five other guys. It was no bigger than a walk-in closet, and the floor was always sopping wet and the walls were covered in mildew, which the captain and XO didn’t know about. They never ventured to this part of the ship. It was a coffin basically, designed for six low-ranking crew members. If you weren’t dead yet you soon would be if you slept in there. 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 my face, for just a split second, plastered to the bunk above me in a free fall. They stacked them three high on each side of the compartment. They called rooms on board the ship, compartments. 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.

Borneo Jungle

This is an excerpt from a novel I didn't get around to publishing. It isn't meant to be all true. 

Chapter One

From the frenzied airport the newlyweds hike down the jungle highway in a monsoon deluge. Thick drops ping off the pavement in little explosions, and the light has been so dimmed by rain that it’s hard to see each other’s facial expressions; to know exactly what the other is thinking or the mood they’re in. When drenched to the bone, their t-shirts plastered to their skin like latex, Rebecca stops suddenly, refusing to take another step. “It’s time,” she says.

            “What, seriously,” Donald says, glaring at her through the descending torrent.

            “You know I have to do my practice.” She’s a strong believer in leaving the world a better place.
            “Yes I know Becca, but look around. It’s a freakin hurricane out.” She stands waiting until he gives in. “Okay, if you have to, Jesus, let’s set the tent up back there away from the road so no one will know we’re here.”

            “You’ll have to do it though. You know I’m vulnerable right now.” She says she has an ongoing illness, but her family thinks it might be in her head.

            “Sit tight lovely one. I’ll take care of it.”

            “Thank you Don.” She kisses him in the rain. “What would I do without you?”

            “Probably disintegrate into your couch,” he kids.

            “Ha, ha, not without you.”

            Donald hurries to erect the tent, fumbling with poles and fabric while she sits motionless in the rain chanting and meditating, rivulets of water running off her chin like a river. He calls to her when it’s finished. “Okay my young Buddiss, it’s ready.”

The forest used to stretch inviolable from sea to sea, like the boundless green ocean. Now there are just fragments down here along the coast, remnants of a once great wilderness where everything was in balance. They’re hidden enough so people driving by, sputtering and caged in vibrating steel, can’t see their tent, just a wall of trees shrouded in mist. As the rain lets up they hang their sopping shirts and pants on a vine to drip, drip the water away. They’ll never dry though. Not in the rainforest. Nothing ever does. The wetness is perpetual and penetrating and causes skin to rot. The leeches like it, but probably nothing else does.

Long Live Freedom, Long Live the Wild

If protecting the environment doesn't become the main priority for our political leaders it will continue to be ravaged. Most of the world’s problems stem from one, a degrading natural world and our disconnection to it. At every turn the president only keeps pressing ahead with his fascist agenda, which does nothing to help the environment and everything to destroy it. Only with wilderness can we be healthy and truly free; only will the poor have a chance. How do you get someone like him to think along these lines or at least fathom the idea that without nature humankind can’t survive, so he will do some good? The answer is simple. Getting him to do it is another matter entirely. You take him to the Amazon jungle and have him try to survive for three months in the wild led by a Mascho Piro or an Huaorani shaman. Otherwise you can’t. His sickness of greed and narcissism cannot be cured in an industrial world of asphalt and steal with people like him who cannot think outside the capitalism box. You have to replace him before he takes us all down. We have to respect nature again. This requires massive public pressure, shaming leaders who support anti-environment policies, and also by becoming an ardent minimalist. Long live freedom. Long live the wild.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn8gk67s6YM

Almost Home from the Brooks Range

Caribou Bar Creek

 

Some of my last hours in my seven-month trek across the Brooks Range.

Instead of continuing around on the ridge, I come right off it on a direct course toward the mountain hoping to save some time. It’s lower in elevation and likely brushier, but shorter. The terrain turns out hellish. I get right into the thick of ten-foot high brush and boggy ground for hours, and then a burned area miles long that has left tall grass and swamp in place of what used to be a lush spruce forest. I have to step up a notch again to match the difficulty of the terrain. The only thing that keeps me going is my clear view of Shaltah Mountain to remind me how close I am to Old Crow. I’m almost home, so I plug away, staying calm and exerting the same constant effort.  I continue to make progress though, and keep at it, step after step, sloshing through the arctic swamp and weeds. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and this gives me motivation to keep going.

     At Caribou Bar Creek grass and brush are everywhere. It’s swift and over my waist from all the rain in the last week. Later I will learn that this has been the wettest summer on record. I set up camp for the night. I cook black beans over an open fire until close to midnight, but just as I finish a hail storm starts so I take the pot of beans into my tent for the night. The hail storm is the worse I’ve ever seen and the ice particles hit my tent so hard I’m afraid they’re going to punch holes in it and tear it to shreds. I wait and worry, and start gathering up my gear in case everything gets wet and I have to spend the night without a tent.

     And I wait, sitting up and not sleeping until the storm passes, with Will curled up in a ball watching me. “Enough already,” I yell at the top of my lungs. The hail still falls hard, and lightning flashes over my tent with a bolt touching down one hundred yards away. I duck down, covering my head with my arms. It’s like the earth is shattering and ripping apart in a thundery volley of mega bombs and spraying shrapnel. The hail falls for a solid hour, and then suddenly, it’s all over. To my relief my tent is still intact. During the night it gets so cold that I have dreams of shooting down an Olympic bobsled course on my belly.

     When I wake up the next morning my tent is now at the creek’s edge. It has risen a foot or more during the night, and the sides of my tent are buried in a foot of hail. I have to dig out. I start out the day in my rain gear, wading the creek to my waste in some rapids, which is the shallowest place. Then I hike for three hours through more brush, tall grass, and swamp. My feet are soaked from the first few steps of the day, and within an hour they started hurting from the wet cold and ice - swamp grass, and frigid water for several miles. I pass a duck looking for her baby after the storm, and a minute later the baby waddles right by Will and me in full view, like he’s too cold and worn out from the storm to be cautious. I leave the baby in peace so the mother can find him.

     Later in the day as I climb up what I thought was the last pass before descending the other side into Old Crow, I start to warm up and stride out. I’m hiking fast like I’m doing a day trip in the mountains of Oregon when I was twenty-five. It feels great to finally be slim and in shape and to now have a light pack, almost empty of food. I’m almost home and nothing can stop me now, or so it seems. After days of despondence, suffering, and self-doubt, I’m invincible now. “Get out of my way,” I keep saying. “I’ve just hiked the Brooks Range. What you think of that.” I’m talking to all the obstacles I’ve crossed in the last four weeks, and even the ones on my previous trips: rivers, lakes, bogs, brush, grass, mountains, cliffs, wild animals, starvation, exhaustion, biting insects, and forest fires. I’ve beaten them all, becoming the kind of person I’ve always dreamed I could be: a man of the mountains and forest, walking to Old Crow.