Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Three white lights

In navigation, three white lights vertically and red to right 
and green to left mean a tugboat and tow more than 200 
meters long is coming toward you.
That Thanksgiving night seems like it was more than a hundred years ago now. That night I learned what the loneliness of the ocean sailor is all about. We were delivering an 83-foot fish tender from Alaska to the Seattle area and Thanksgiving found us off Namu, British Columbia, about to enter Fitzhugh Sound.

Below in the galley we had a turkey we'd brought along cooking in the diesel stove. The odors wafting up through the house brought memories of their own. The boat rose and fell on a gentle swell as we entered the sound and I checked all the visible navigation aids against the chart to make sure we were far enough offshore and heading the way we wanted to go. With all signs good, I set the auto pilot and leaned back in the chair casually watching the dark water ahead. The VHF radio had barely issued a peep all day, but occasionally traffic on the Single Sideband disturbed the quiet in the wheehouse.

Then out of the buzz and garbled voices a clear one loudly called for a particular vessel. That vessel responded equally as clearly and suddenly a father at sea connected with his young son on the night of Thanksgiving. The father said he was on a tug off the coast of California near San Francisco; the son responded with an unhuh. And that was how the conversation went from there. The father  trying to coax any kind of conversation out of the boy he could, wanting that connection so desperately and the son unsure and shy answering in affirmative grunts and mumbles. Did you have a good dinner?  Uh huh.  Did you have turkey?  Yeah. Did you have mashed potatoes and gravy?  Mm hmm. Did you eat your vegetables? Ummm. The seaman laughed at that response.

But you could almost feel the desperation in the man's voice as he queried his son most likely wanting any sign at all that they were connected and he was appreciated. If it did come, I never heard it. In time the father said he had to go and the boy said OK and that was that. Given that a woman never came on I assumed this was a divorced father, as I was, which probably made the pain all the worse.

On and off through the night I thought of that father on the tug somewhere south of us, not even knowing which way it was headed. I replayed the conversation in my head and thought of my own son 2 years old at the time with whom I could not have even had that stilted conversation.

I actually thought of a song.  For a long time I thought it would be cool given the number of folks on the water around the world to write a series of country-western-type songs in the way of truck driving ballads but about work boats and the people on them. A tug with a tow longer than 200 meters shows three white lights vertically forward and I started on "The Three White Lights of Christmas." Perhaps fortunately for the world, I never got very far with it, but I have never lost the memory of that night on Fitzhugh Sound and that sailor's conversation with his son.

I guess on holidays no matter who we are or what our circumstance is, in one way or another we reach for family. I have spent many holidays alone since that night and in a way feel that kinship with mariners and in that understanding I know that every year somewhere in the world, there are sailors out on the big oceans trying to converse with a child across the waters and, one can hope, making that desired family connection.

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Memorable quotations

The best way to know you are having an adventure is when you wish you were home talking about it." — a mechanic on the Alaska State Ferry System. Or as in my own case planning how I will be writing it on this blog.

"You can't promote principled anti-corruption without pissing off corrupt people." — George Kent

"If only the British had held on to the airports, the whole thing might have gone differently for us." — Mick Jagger

"You can do anything as long as you don't scare the horses." — a mother's favorite saying recalled by a friend

A poem is an egg with a horse inside” — anonymous fourth grader

“My children will likely turn my picture to the wall but what the hell, you only get old once." — Joe May

“Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” — Ernest Hemingway

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth. Kurt Vonnegut

“If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.”Stephen King

The thing about ignorance is, you don't have to remain ignorant. — me again"

"It was like the aftermath of an orgasm with the wrong partner." – David Lagercrants “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.”

Why worry about dying, you aren't going to live to regret it.

Never debate with someone who gets ink by the barrel" — George Hayes, former Alaska Attorney General who died recently

My dear Mr. Frost: two roads never diverge in a yellow wood. Three roads meet there. — @Shakespeare on Twitter

Normal is how somebody else thinks you should act.

"The mark of a great shiphandler is never getting into situations that require great shiphandling," Adm. Ernest King, USN

Me: Does the restaurant have cute waitresses?

My friend Gail: All waitresses are cute when you're hungry.

I'm not a writer, but sometimes I push around words to see what happens. – Scott Berry

I realized today how many of my stories start out "years ago." What's next? Once upon a time?"

“The rivers of Alaska are strewn with the bones of men who made but one mistake” - Fred McGarry, a Nushagak Trapper

Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stared at walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. – Meg Chittenden

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. – Franz Kafka

We are all immortal until the one day we are not. – me again

If the muse is late, start without her – Peter S. Beagle

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain Actually you could do the same thing with the word "really" as in "really cold."

If you are looking for an experience that will temper your vanity, this is it. There's no one to impress when you're alone on the trap line. – Michael Carey quoting his father's journal

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. – Benjamin Franklin

It’s nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of. – Shirley Hazzard

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence -- Bertrand Russell

You know that I always just wanted to have a small ship to take stuff from a place that had a lot of that stuff to a place that did not have a lot of that stuff and so prosper.—Jackie Faber, “The Wake of the Lorelei Lee”

If you attack the arguer instead of the argument, you lose both

If an insurance company won’t pay for damages caused by an “act of God,” shouldn’t it then have to prove the existence of God? – I said that

I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. – Eugene O’Neill

German General to Swiss General: “You have only 500,000 men in your army; what would you do if I invaded with 1 million men?”

Swiss General: “Well, I suppose every one of my soldiers would need to fire twice.”

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.—Gloria Steinem

Exceed your bandwidth—sign on the wall of the maintenance shop at the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center

One thing I do know, if you keep at it, you usually wind up getting something done.—Patricia Monaghan

Do you want to know what kind of person makes the best reporter? I’ll tell you. A borderline sociopath. Someone smart, inquisitive, stubborn, disorganized, chaotic, and in a perpetual state of simmering rage at the failings of the world.—Brett Arends

It is a very simple mind that only knows how to spell a word one way.—Andrew Jackson

3:30 is too late or too early to do anything—Rene Descartes

Everything is okay when it’s 50-below as long as everything is okay. – an Alaskan in Tom Walker’s “The Seventymile Kid”

You can have your own opinion but you can’t have your own science.—commenter arguing on a story about polar bears and global warming

He looks at three ex wives as a good start—TV police drama

Talkeetna: A friendly little drinking town with a climbing problem.—a handmade bumper sticker

“You’re either into the wall or into the show”—Marco Andretti on giving it all to qualify last at the 2011 Indy 500

Makeup is not for the faint of heart—the makeup guerrilla

“I’m going to relax in a very adult manner.”—Danica Patrick after sweating it out and qualifying half an hour before Andretti

“Asking Congress to come back is like asking a mugger to come back because he forgot your wallet.”—a roundtable participant on Fox of all places

As Republicans go further back in the conception process to define when life actually begins, I am beginning to think the eventual definition will be life begins in the beer I was drinking when I met her.—me again

Hunting is a “critical element for the long-term conservation of wood bison.”—a state department of Fish and Game official explaining why the state would not go along with a federal plan to reintroduce wood bison in Alaska because the agreement did not specifically allow hunting

Each day do something that won’t compute – anon

I can’t belive I still have to protest this shit – a sign carriend by an elderly woman at an Occupy demonstration

Life should be a little nuts or else it’s just a bunch of Thursdays strung together—Kevin Costner as Beau Burroughs in “Rumor has it”

You’re just a wanker whipping up fear —Irish President Michael D. Higgins to a tea party radio announcer

Being president doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are—Michelle Obama

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Man caught driving stolen car filled with radioactive uranium, rattlesnake, whiskey

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Nude beach blowjob jet ski fight leads to wife's death

Woman stabs husband with squirrel for not buying beer Christmas Eve

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