Hereinafter the Passenger

As the news of my appointment circulates among family, friends, and my university community, I receive attention, congratulation, good wishes, and one question: Aren’t you excited? No, actually, not that I’m aware. I’ve never been a particularly excitable boy.  And after eight years of remote possibility and over two more of stated intention and increasing likelihood, going to Poland seems the most natural thing in the world. Next step. Not quite as predictable or periodic as the sun coming up, but certainly logical and consequent, maybe casually destined.

This week I’m reading the terms of my contract for carriage aboard cargo vessels, and the reading is much to be preferred to the small print of airline tickets and the user agreements of electronic devices and social networks. It reads of a previous century, maybe two. The passenger is “asked to kindly take note of the following important information” as to “the peculiarities of passage aboard a cargo vessel.” As mentioned in my previous blog entry, the passenger, hereinafter, “the passenger,” must be able-bodied and visibly so with a certificate from a doctor verifying fitness. In “cases of doubt” as to fitness even with a certificate, the passenger may be subject to “a medical examination by the Association of Seafarers.” Who would not want to be examined by the Association of Seafarers and pronounced fit for duty? Who would not want to be enrolled in their company, the men who go down to the sea in ships? Fitness, the contract advises us, is “a matter of principle.” Ancient idea.

Among other ancient ideas, we find obedience and good order: “all passengers shall be subject to the authority and rules of the captain and the officers of the vessel.” Consumers, customers are not a law unto themselves here, and in fact, on a cargo vessel, are pretty much afterthoughts; “the transportation of cargo essentially takes precedence over the interests of passengers.” We seem almost to be paying for the privilege of being considered potential flotsam and jetsam. Rather tonic, refreshing. In the event of any of the following, the carrier may discontinue the passage and disembark the passenger at the nearest port of the carrier’s convenience:

Force majeure, marine, port and river risks or risks related to other navigable waters, actions taken by public or government agencies, epidemics, collisions, shipwrecks, fire, errors in the navigation or control of this or any other vessel, confiscation or seizure of the vessel as part of a legal procedure, sudden or unexpected shortage of fuel, war, hostile actions, civil war, terrorism, piracy, riots, strike or industrial action or any other causes and circumstances outside the control and responsibility of the carrier.

(Talk about covering your aft.)

So, Josh, are you excited yet? Maybe a little.

Transatlanticism

Yesterday I authorized my bank to wire a deposit reserving a cabin on a container ship, Rickmers Shanghai, “or [a] sister vessel,” for my Atlantic passage. Departure from Philadelphia, enchantingly imprecise, is listed as “on about [sic] early January 2013.” Apparently we still sail, rather, by the seat of our pants when once we flew. I emailed as well some personal information to the marine contractor. The form requires that travelers be able-bodied, given that, unlike cruise ships, no doctor is aboard; “Passengers must be able to walk and care for themselves unaided.” Check. They do not transport exiles over the age of 75. Understandable, no problem. Their stipulation that “[h]ealth/accident insurance is mandatory for the duration of the entire freighter voyage” as well as “insurance covering international emergency medical evacuation” reminds one how fragile life can seem on the high seas and how effing expensive it must be to preserve it in extremis. The total cost, thus, of ocean-going one-way amounts to almost double the cost of round-trip airfare, so that tramp-steaming is not for tramps anymore. Freighter travel caters to the more upscale vagabond.

I was charmed to learn that my port of destination will be Antwerp, in Belgium. Initial discussions had me leaving Charleston, North Carolina, and arriving in either Hamburg or Bremerhaven, which is closer, I suppose, to Poland, but much less poetic. You see, when my grandfather emigrated from Europe in 1902, he departed from Antwerp and landed in Philadelphia. Forth and back.

And of course, ironically, the headline from today’s Polskieradio: Kontenerowiec Huelin Renouf zderzył się ze skała u wybrzeży Alderney, jedną z Wysp Normandskich. “The container ship Huelin Renouf collided with a rock near the shore of Alderney, one of the Channel Isles off Normandy.” One's Polish is always just good enough to read headlines like that.

Ostatnie Dobre Słowo

A Vice Demigod (this is not a redundancy) in the university’s central office of Human Resources, Patti, has granted my request for a RECESS (Reduced Employment Costs thru Employee Salary Savings) appointment, providing that oh so necessary bureaucratic “last good word.” It’s officially so ON! baby.

Busy with work, I’ve had time only to attend to the extracurricular activities around becoming Polish. True, I have refinished Miłosz’s New and Collected Poems (1931-2001) and dipped into Kołokowski, as time permits, but only in translation, as the intellectually lazy do. The good word comes none too soon.

Small News

Submit, resubmit, resubmit one last time, then patiently await the final word. Such is work and life and work life under bureaucracy, even relatively efficient and benevolent bureaucratic institutions. While I await the final word on my recess appointment, anticipating a good one, I have begun travel planning and arranging residency. I had hoped to stay in my cousin’s newly purchased flat in Piasek, the “Sand” neighborhood in Kraków, next to Nowy Świat, the “New World,” but his real estate agent has already sublet it for the period of my stay. Efficient fellow. We’ll find something else, no worries. My cousin invites me to contact this agent, a lawyer whose last name is Cygan, the Polish word for “gypsy.” A lawyer and a gypsy, he speaks no English, so I will have to email him in my halted and halting Polish. Writing to a gypsy lawyer in a difficult language—no worries.

As for travel, I’m trying to book Atlantic passage on a boat, a container ship, a kind of homage to my grandfather’s comings and goings, though, of course, my living conditions and experience will be epochally different from his. But I do imagine that being out of the sight of land for whole days and nights at a time, an entire week and more, on vast seas both sunny and sunless, under measureless starry night skies, a guy, a fifty-plus year old man, might feel something of the restless energy of an eighteen year old immigrant or the ambitious hope of a forty year old family man returning to Poland to live his dream. I, virulently unromantic, am not uncurious about you people.