For the Animals

Animals don’t have rights like people. They should. We should look out for them, not torture them. Our entire society is set up for humans to dismiss the suffering of animals so that we can go on like everything is rosy and that their pain doesn’t exist. It does. Suffering is suffering. This weighs heavily on my mind, always has. I cannot ever lose my sympathy for people of course. This goes without saying. But also, I cannot ever lose my sympathy for animals. To do so, would make me a blight on the planet; a real asshole stinking up the place. In an ideal world, the only meat I’d eat would come from an animal who died naturally, say of old age or an unfortunate mishap like he drowned or something. Then in my mind I would not be adding anymore suffering. I rarely find these kinds of animals though. Eating happy farm animals who died of old age would work, if I could find them. Stores should label this info so I could check it out before eating them. Shooting an old buck in the woods, I could live with, if I truly needed to eat right then. I couldn’t lose the respect. When I find an animal lying by the side of the road injured, or any other place, it is my obligation to try and help him (if I’m not starving) and not pass blindly by. I do not want to fall into the trap of saying, it’s only an animal. Nothing can be done. Or that I shouldn’t interfere in the natural process. Because truth is truth, pain is pain, and the golden rule applies to everyone.   

            I’m trying hard these days to become a minimalist, and more importantly, a vegetarian. And to know where my goddamn food comes from; how the plant or animal was raised, how they lived, and how they died. Mostly, I’m just trying not to eat that much in general, to alleviate the tangled uncertainly of it all, the barbarianism of the market-place food. When I die, preferably very old and happy, I hope a poor starving polar bear and her cub can make a nice meal out of me, so I can give back, rightly so, to animals.

Why I Walk

Why I Walk

Once long ago when I was living in a dingy one-bedroom apartment working a dead-end job I started having panic attacks. They were far worse at night, when the gloom of winter had a tight grip on me. Each night without fail I’d wake up at about two o’clock shaking in terror. Remarkably, I learned that you could have panic attacks while sound asleep. I’d come to consciousness, not wondering if, but knowing with absolute certainty that in about an hour I’d be dead. That is the nature of a panic attack. You don’t think you’re dying, you know it.

I’d jump up, pace my room, get dressed, shoes on, keys and wallet in pocket, and get ready to rush off to the emergency room, if I could make it. Most of the time, I didn’t go. I simply paced until I regained control. I started sleeping fully clothed, shoes and jacket on and everything, in case I had to rush off to the hospital. Time was critical. Maybe in a last-ditch effort they could save me. That’s what I thought. A few times I actually drove there and walked around the parking lot for hours watching the bright neon light that read emergency. If it came down to it, I could go in there. You’d be surprised the things you see late at night in winter on the hospital grounds. There was the dense fog descending and the street lights trying to penetrate through, a lone raccoon, darkly silhouetted, waddling out from behind the dumpster, a lone car engine trying to crank over after the night shift, a slouching janitor shambling out of the automatic sliding doors to empty the trash, and me thinking I was going to die on my feet traipsing across the parking lot, which was much better than sitting around waiting for it to run me down like the grim reaper.

            I didn’t think anything could be done for me, to cure my terror-ridden mind in the dark hours of those long-ago frigid dawns. Sometimes I’d walk all night until it got light before the fear finally dissipated enough so I could drive home and get a couple hours of sleep before work. I had a dismal job in a windowless factory making computer wafers.

The fear always dissipated if I walked long enough. Sometimes in the day I’d have the panic too, but being around other people helped. The nighttime was always worse. I used walking to rid my fears of some phenomena I did not understand. It was like that movie Speed. If I slowed down a bomb would go off, probably in one of the arteries of my brain and I’d die on the spot. Or my aorta would implode. You see, when you’re in the midst of a full blown panic episode you’re not thinking straight, just in a state of flight or fight from the crippling dread. I would have run, but I was too afraid to muster the concentration for that. I needed it to battle the fear. I used walking to keep myself together, every day for hours until one day after about two months the panic vanished as mysteriously as it had come. I think the lack of nature had made my brain ill, and the walking healed it. In the years afterwards it never really came back. Oh, I get afraid sometimes. Who doesn’t? Of what, I’m not really sure, probably that I’ll sit around too much doing nothing and my life will pass me by. I vowed to keep walking so that it would never come back again. I wouldn’t wish that kind of terror on anybody.

            I walk long distances. I have too. I spent three summers walking across Alaska. I walked across Oregon and Washington, parts of Borneo, and s short stint in the Amazon. I go for a walkabout every year. If I can do it for two months I seem to remain pretty bullet proof to the panic returning. Now I’m on my way across Canada, from the Yukon River to Quebec. Well, of course I don’t really think I’ll get that far, and I don’t care. Maybe I’ll decide to go somewhere else instead. I just need to be on the move and this gives me a destination to shoot for. Walking is good, but other forms of bodily movement work too I think, canoeing, cycling, skiing, rowing, walking, whatever. The key is to use my body so my brain won’t get all jammed up and unravel out of control. I cannot let my mind get away from me ever again, so I’ll keep heading east every summer through the wilderness. I’d like to hike Mongolia, the Chaco Boreal, and the Tumucumaque Range someday. They say there are people there who still feel free. The wilderness setting works better for me than a city. There are no damn distractions, things to get in the way that really don’t matter one smidgen in the big scheme of things.

I have a Buddhist partner now, which is perfect for me. She says to the effect of what I already know; that you don’t have to really be anything, except a speck of dirt floating free in the universe; to reach a high state of nothingness so to speak. She tries to get that by sitting for long periods of time meditating, chanting; emptying her mind of all the garbage we fill it up with in the smart-phone modern world. Today is worse than ever for that. I tell her that what she is doing is virtuous. I told her about my panic attacks years ago and that I need to be on the move, steady and rhythmically to reach the state of nothingness, or tranquility, or whatever you want to call it, that she talks about. She understands. There is more than one way to reach this peaceful state. My favorite travel writer, the late, great Bruce Chatwin once said something like, people get depressed because they stay in one place too long. I understand those words better than ever, so this is why I walk in the wilderness every year. I made it across the Olgilvie Range this summer, my body suffering, but my mind becoming unbreakable, an immovable rock in a raging river.

I’m feeling as placid as ever at home now. I go for long bike rides daily, and I race every fall. It’s not for the ego aspect of it. It’s all for the sake of retaining my serenity. With a healthy body comes a healthy mind, and vice versa. Next summer when I start out from the middle north region of the Yukon and head east through the vast tundra and taiga, I’ll have that clearly on my mind while aiming for the empty horizon in the wild, northern sky. I walk for the health of my brain as much as for anything else.

Crossing the Great Unknown

Crossing the Great Unknown

I spent forty days crossing the Olgilvie Range in the Yukon this summer, from the Yukon River to the Dempster highway. It’s a huge stretch of mountains little known. Most the creeks, peaks, and passes don’t have names. No one ever went there, so there was never a reason to give them names; never a consideration for it. So, the major pass I crossed didn’t have a name. The bears, the wolves, the song birds, the moose, there were many. A lone wolf, darting through the shadows of the trees, followed me for a while, curious about my dogs. I almost ran into a grizzly who was hunkered down in a thicket on a cold, rainy day. They’ll stay in their bush as long as you don’t approach it. It’s such a remote place that I didn’t hear a plane for a month. I was out of the lanes, if that was even possible anymore in this day and age of crimp, crumple, and cram of nature.

            For the first half of the journey, towing supplies in a canoe upriver, I was afraid I’d have to turn back due to the ruggedness of the country and running out of food, but I pressed on despite my fear, figuring I’d somehow pull through and find a way. I crossed the pass, followed another river for a day, and then crossed a great expanse of taiga and tussocks until I hit the Olgilvie River twenty miles below its headwaters. Within the Olgilvies there are smaller mountain ranges too, also massive in themselves, like the Taiga Ranges and the Nahoni Range which I crossed or skirted the edges.

            I followed the Olgilvie River for days down to the Dempster Highway, running on fumes, nearly out of food. I stumbled down the road and eventually got a ride back to Dawson when I thought I was getting too thin, down over twenty pounds I’d later find out. But now, and this was the one thing I so urgently hoped for by going on this expedition, I had a glint in my eye knowing that beyond my struggle, there was a wild out there still, far bigger than myself. I so dearly wanted to be part of it, each year for a couple months at least, even if it meant suffering with the heavy load on my back, great loneliness, a nagging fear of desperation to make it through, and severe hunger bordering on starvation. It was worth the price to connect with wilderness again.

The day after I got back from the pristine solitude of the Yukon, they, somebody, was having a blaring car rally on the street right in front of my house. Just great. I don’t know why the city puts on such events. Normally this would have driven me through the ceiling, the irrefutable absurdity of it all. People sat in lawn chairs along the street watching these things bomb by, like they were living entities capable of feeling.

            I had reserves now built up from being in nature for so long, my spirit regenerated. So I sat in my backyard with my dogs drinking beer, tolerating the event. But it went on and on into the night, Jesus. Depending on the individual, I believe you only can tolerate so many frenzied dealings like this until your gone-ballistic switch triggers. I used up a good deal of my reserves on the drive home, people driving like their minds had gone totally off the rails, no composure or restraint whatsoever.

            After about two hours, a good beer-buzz going, I stumbled back into my house, shut the windows and blinds, and put on the movie Jeremiah Johnson. Shit, I wished I was in the Yukon again, where the only sane creatures were the animals, and the only insanity was where wilderness ended and civilization began.

 Heading east from the Yukon River up a small trib

 Last camp on the west side of the pass in the Olgilvie Range

 The pass I crossed

 The high pass

 Southern edge of the Nahoni Range

 Rest on the tussocks

 The Taiga Ranges

 Along the Olgilvie River, only days to go

 The Olgilvie River

 Late evening

 The Dempster Highway at last

 Down 20 pounds

Crossing the Yukon on Three Thousand Dollars

I splurged on some luxury items, like a life jacket for the canoe leg, cigars for way out in the backcountry to counteract loneliness, a satellite communicator to stay in touch with the frenzied modern world, and a brand new tent with a fresh, unbroken zipper so the noseams won’t infuriate me at night with their annoying, hard-to-find bites. I also bought two used canoes, one for a hundred dollars I had to patch, which I’ll use to haul myself, the dogs, and a mountain of food down the Yukon River out of Dawson City and part way up a trib heading east into the Olgilvie Range. The second canoe, which cost 350, will be used to float west back to Dawson City at the end of the summer. It’ll keep me from having to hitch hike. A two-thousand dollar charter flight back is out of the question for me, a poor non-capitalist who never gave a rat shit about money my entire life because I was always too busy thinking about wild animals and how to go somewhere really remote to see them. When I was a young kid I thought I could live on the coast of Alaska and have a pet whale.

            I also bought a new battery for the long drive up. I bought cocoa, and generic coffee in a big fat can, five pounds for a few bucks, normally tastes like crap, but not when you’re living on the edge struggling in the wild for weeks at a time. Then it tastes like heaven. I don’t know what heaven tastes like though. Heaven is probably where I’m headed, in the heart of the Olgilive Range. Our true nature, perhaps, is to always retain an inner calm and do no harm. Somehow this calmness has gotten lost along the way in the hustle and bustle of a world that has accelerated ludicrously off the rails. I hope to get this tranquil mindset back by around day sixty or so, and then really enjoy the rest of the trek with a rail-thin body and a clear-eyed mind. This is my only goal besides just being out learning about one of the last great wildernesses.

            What else did I buy? Oh yeah, a pair of fishing waders for hauling my canoe up the first trib, so my feet won’t throb painfully from the cold water. I spent a hundred bucks on contour maps. It’s nice to know exactly where you are on a trip like this, so you can complete the trek and not have to wander around the same region for days looking for a pass through like Bob Marshal had to do. Often, I don’t really care where I am, as long as I’m finding food and melding with the land, melting into it like a bear. I don’t want to be a menace to nature, a big fat ass just eating up resources and taking up space, but I know this isn’t entirely possible. By being alive, you displace other life. It’s only the scale of the displacement you can control.

            In the Yukon, my most prized possession might just be a piece of fishing line wrapped around an old plastic medicine bottle with a few shiny lures inside. This is my fishing gear, insuring that I can keep myself and the dogs fed if my food runs out prematurely; if I stuff my face too much and don’t stick to my rationing schedule. I should lose nearly two pounds a week over the course of the summer, close to twenty pounds. Then I’ll really be somebody.

            I bought a down jacket for the cold. Someone gave me a rain coat. I forgot who. Most my clothes were either given to me or bought at second-hand stores. My wool socks ae ten years old. I bought a ball cap for a dollar, and sunglasses too. I even have fuel for my stove this time for when I’m stuck inside my tent for a couple days waiting out a storm and can’t build a fire to cook. I like being in my tent, when the only sounds I hear are either animals, water, wind, or thunder, nothing else, no god-forsaken grinding of motor cars. They’re making us all crazy, consuming our lives and the world. I have antibiotics for the dogs, but not myself, in case of porcupine encounters. They can cause hideous infections. I guess I can always use theirs if I have to. I have one little cup, a titanium pot, a spoon, a head net for mosquitoes, the little bustards. They’re pollinators and feed an enormous quantity of migratory song birds, so I guess I can endure the buzzing and biting for their sake. Birds need to eat too. I have a small bar of soap, but no shampoo or razor. I want to see if my beard grows in grey yet. Not getting any younger so I guess I need to get moving.

            Most importantly, I don’t care one bit if I bring any of this shit back with me when it’s all over. It’s just stupid shit after all. You want to save the planet, stop buying shit. Buddhism teaches you not to have attachments to anything, not even the wilderness, not even your body. But it also teaches you not to have any aversions to anything, not even getting lost in the wilderness, and not even your body. Material things are meant to be worn out, lost, or just plain left behind, or better yet, never had in the first place. I’m trying to get better at this, you know, to be dust in the wind or something like that. The only things I want to bring back form the wilderness is a sense of relief knowing it is still there.  

Hiking the Yukon

The Yukon is a land larger than life. It says so on the signs as you cruise up the highway. Eighty percent of the province is still pristine wilderness. I've been going to the region since I was twenty-five, over twenty-five years. My trips keep getting longer and longer. I guess this is my thing in life. I was buying about thirty pounds of lentil beans today to send up there. A man next to me in the check-out line was eying them, so I told him about my trek. "I'm hiking across the Yukon," I said. It's sounds so absurdly over the top when I say it to someone. But that's my plan, to hike from the Yukon River in Alaska to as far east as I can get before the weather of summer wanes. I'll hike up the Nation River, into the Olgilvie Range, across the Dempster Highway, along the Beaver River and see how close I can get to the border of the Territories.

     I like how out on the land I become so serene. The only sounds you hear are wind, water, animals, and thunder. That's what I'm looking forward to the most, just simple, natural sounds to bring my brain back in sync; back to a state of bliss you can only get in nature. And when you get in really good shape on top of that, you really come into your own. You really feel like waking up and saying, yes, I'm alive.

     My life feels dry like cardboard when I stay in a town too long. Only out on the wild of the land do I really start coming alive. Thomas Hardy wrote something to the effect that, life does not leave man because life is too big, but life leaves man because man is too small. Not sure what the exact quote was, but I do not want life to leave me. I want to do it justice; I want to make life proud. I want to get to know the wild.

   

Dave Metz's Blog: Before We All Go Down

Dave Metz's Blog: 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 o...

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.