Passenger's Log

Below is a log of my brief, happy life as a Seafarer:

June 11—I am aboard the Julius S, in a relatively spacious, though spartanly-motel, fourth-deck, corner cabin, about the size of my mieszkanie on Karmeliczka, though, sadly, without a microwave or a tea kettle. It does have a refrigerator, however, with a resident Beck’s, and a cold one. More to my deserts than the Crowne Plaza Hotel Antwerp at 180 euro a night—I didn’t pay full price, nobody ever does—this berth will bear me home in basic comfort and excellent company. After two days in Antwerp, and fifty plus years everywhere else, I conclude that luxury is indeed more luxurious than basic comfort, two or three times more, but you pay four or five times more for it in terms of money, with an additional sales tax in life and soul, unless you are very lucky or sufficiently ruthless.

Around me on the dock, rows and rows of containers, heavy industrial modes of moving them, big-wheeled caddies, barges, cranes, with squat cylinders of fuel oil, cooling tanks, chimneys, windmills, and, of course, expanses of gray harbor. An operative industrial aesthetic that we don’t get to see too often in the heart of the heart of the country, largely, crudely rich in capital—stuff—and men in coveralls and hardhats. The old commercial capitalism. God love it.

After a solitary and unexceptional curry in the galley, I, the only passenger on this short haul to Liverpool, found myself in the officer’s bar drinking beers with the captain and an international cast of officers—German, Russian, Slovakian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and a largely Philippine crew—who were chain-smoking hand-rolled cigarettes to a man (note to self: remember pipe), reminiscing about their wilder days in African, Asian, and South American ports, and happy as clams to be making the summer milk run between Europe and America. The captain bears a remarkable, though Wagnerian, resemblance to my brother Neil, and he sports a fair knowledge of and appreciation for the oeuvre of Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead. Could you ask for a more capable crew?

I’ll sleep well tonight.

Supercargo Cabin

Bunk

 

Antwerp Dock

Captain, My Captain

Antwerp Harbor Lights

Homeward Bound: June 12—In my very first week in Kraków, I discovered a bar just down the street, on Studencka, the Stary Port, the “Old Port,” which I had thought at one time to make a sort of base of operations. But not having actually been at sea—except metaphorically—I thought myself, though sufficiently old, absolutely unqualified. To haunt there would be too much of an affectation. I did attend once with Dr. Banaś, where I questioned the extent and authenticity of Polish sea-faring, citing Davies: “Despite modern propaganda, which pays great attention to supposed maritime traditions, Poland’s connections with the Baltic were extremely slender…. and have only marginal significance.” In all of my reading, I have not run across the name of a Polish navigator/explorer, pirate, commercial ship’s captain, company, or admiral. A 16^th century poet once asked “What cares the Pole about the ocean’s stand?” (53-6), which I take as the ultimate authority, notwithstanding Dr. Banaś’s protests. The bar offered live music, sea shanties, to which she confessed that she was not partial. Need we say more? For sea-faring we must turn to ex-pats, to Józef Teodor Konrad Korzienowski, Joseph Conrad.

Underway at 11:15 a.m. Six hours down the river to the English Channel. How long it would have taken my grandfather to pass the Schelde, I do not know, but with the aid of atmospherics, I have begun to consider his journey, his podróż. How different does an estuary look a hundred years later? The gray water, the wide wet sandy flats, the green rushes, the dairy cattle grazing on the firmer plots, some sheep, sea birds. But as the “Supercargo,” I review it all from a lofty elevation; he, no doubt, stowed below deck, probably even below the waterline. The Schelde would have looked differently from there, and smelled so. I don’t pretend to enact, or even re-enact, but only to rehearse in as humble a fashion as reasonable.

June 13—The seas today are flinty gray with hints of aquamarine in the wake, and rougher, so that not only do I feel the constant, low thunder of the engine, but now, too, some gentle heaving. The cook asked me yesterday if I got seasick. “We’ll find out,” I replied. So far, the worst is as turbulence on a jet flight, a little shake, a little shimmy, a light lurch, and a constant rattle.  We’re heading into the wind, when we turn the corner on Great Britain, the captain expects the going to get smoother.

The evolutions of a broad expanse of water, the roil, the boil into foam and the surprising whip of spray, the ceaseless rolling out of fractal equations, hypnotizes me like a camp fire or the movement of clouds before a storm, producing a somber, majestic lethargy.

At noon, the sea is heavier, a dark green obsidian under the sun, the wind strong and cold. We pitch and drop, and my stomach begins to unsettle, the intimations of nausea. It seems to help to look off into the distance, to the horizon, or to lie in bed with your eyes closed; the fewer planes of visual attention, the better. I’m reminded of the upside-down house in Szymbark—which wasn’t even moving—and how visual disorientation leads to vertigo and unbalance. A couple of weeks of this, or a month or more, which my grandfather might have endured, would evacuate a man pretty completely of his past.

A few hours, and the worst of the chop is over. Whatever else this passage becomes, it does not promise a Caribbean cruise.

 

June 14—A smooth beginning to the day, breakfast with the captain, a most agreeable German bon vivant, a calm Channel and mild winds. I finished Conrad’s Secret Agent yesterday, a melancholy and miserable story of secret police and turn of the century anarchist counter-terrorism gone awry. Nothing about Poles or the sea. I could read “Some Reflections on the Loss of the Titanic” for its 101^st anniversary. Maybe after we depart Liverpool.

We arrived in Liverpool right on time, entered the lock, then threaded the needle of a passage to our slip assignment at 2:00 p.m., where some unloading and loading proceeded. While Liverpool is a smaller port than Antwerp, I had much more time to observe what strikes me as just the staggering scale of industrial commerce: big boats, many big boats, cranes and loading gantries 300 feet high (“much bigger ones in Chinese ports”), two or three different types of container caddies, themselves 75 feet high, and thousands of containers moving into a small port from all over the world in a single day. A massive operation of technology, engineering, and capital. A small-town boy and a small, landlocked provincial-city mind, I have my doubts whether humanistically inclined revolutionists could run this machine, much less understand it.

Coming Into Liverpool

Liverpool Crane

Liverpool Dock and Container Caddy

 

For our brief port call, two officers, Chris and Julius, and four or five more crew, and one passenger, myself, taxied into the Cavern Quarter, named for the bar in which the Beatles launched themselves, now a tourist Mecca, in which alcohol was, is, and will be served, now and forever. I participated in a 3-pint Guinness “poob crawl,” beginning at a Pizza Hut, where we laid our foundation, then hoofed over to the Cavern, for pictures and souvenirs—my dear Mayor, my dear Musician, you will be pleased—and beer. The Cavern and the Lennon are two dark holes in the ground, painted black, and house a few acoustic relics and memorabilia of the New Evangelists, including a live musician from the era, pencil-thin, almost skeletal, playing some pretty respectable blues with undying reverence. A sinner, I neglected to thank him for the vision of true faith before we left for The Grapes and the Reminiss, lesser sites on the pilgrimage, the latter, throbbing techno on a sticky floor. A good brief time in a good place, though not the kind of stop a Polish immigrant would have made in 1902. One can’t repeat the past, but one can try to make it rhyme, tap one’s foot to the backbeat.

Club Entrance

John & Josh
 

Bluesman

June 15—A sunny sky and a relatively calm morning on the Atlantic. A couple of young Swiss women, M & M, one a lawyer, the other an artist, boarded in Liverpool for the long haul to Chester/Philadelphia. Together we received a safety lesson and a tour of the engine room, which again impressed me with the mass and complexity of modern economic and industrial systems. An engine, 4 decks high, a straight-7 cylinder, each cylinder assembly about the size of a shower stall, turning a shaft about 1 meter in diameter, at the end of which is a propeller 7 meters across. Twenty thousand horsepower. The ship requires and generates the power necessary for a small city, burning 400 tons of fuel for one trip across the Atlantic at $600 a ton. It carries enough fuel oil and diesel to reach America and back, and then some. And the Julius S isn’t nearly the largest of ocean-going vessels. And we’re one of thousands. International, transcontinental trade in stuff, things, material requires big boats to move. Most of us still live material lives, blithely ignorant of where and how things are made and how they get to us; we know only a little, our own corner, of how the world works, if that. I don’t think anyone does know how it all works, but it seems to. Better for a few than for the many; satisfactorily, perhaps, for a majority than not; miserably, no doubt, for too many. But how to make better, systematically, what we don’t understand. I couldn’t even pass the safety exam that ended our tour.

Chief Mechanic & Fellow Passengers

Straight Seven
 

Control Room

June 16—We are now miles out to sea, no land in sight, and we will be this way for days, until the coast of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. All about, the Atlantic is more or less uniform in its motion, a rearward undulation, the rise and fall of its breath slow, its color a few shades of gray with aquatints aft as the propeller churns air and bubble into the mixture. It melts back into gray under the sun in the distance, which trims a sliver of the horizon in platinum. This is the image of the void, the formless waters above which the spirit of God moved na porczątku.

Na Porczatku

Let There Be Light

  We gained another hour last night, which we’ll do every two days, and must remember to “retard” our clocks to synchronize. The captain says we will not likely see another vessel until we’re near port. What must be the loneliness of things out here, of God, of gull, and the rare single-handed sailor.

June 17—Reading during the long watches, a history of the Jews in Poland, a biography in Polish of the warrior hetman Stefan Czarniecki, a little Conrad, a little Herbert, a bit of Miłosz: “Indeed, the ocean shows us what we really are/Children who for a moment feign the wisdom of captains.” (174) And Pinker, too, on the decreasing violence of our species under the influence of civilization, a fortunate and not unreasonable captivity. A long way to go, of course, and with no certainty of reaching the angelic kingdom on earth, but if we happened to reach that oft-promised land, would we be human beings anymore? Or truly angels? And one of the socio-economic vehicles of this transformation, trade—“the container ship.” (284)

Gray today, grays, many, light and dark, a lively chiaroscuro, though my camera can’t capture it. The brightnesses are lost, and thus, the sharpness of the contrasts. Abaft, the horizon is befogged. The sea is rough, the wind strong, the boat shakes as it rolls steadily ahead. Through no will nor conscious effort of my own, I do not blanch as I did earlier. “You get used to it,” they say. I guess you must.

We seem to have stalled momentarily out here on the high seas, at about 4:30 p.m.

As it turns out, we weren’t stalled. We were rescuing a boat, a single-handed sailor adrift in the North Atlantic, now a very fortunate single-handed sailor, safely aboard, but his boat—and to hear him speak of it, his heart and soul and no small part of his life—alas, remains adrift, now long away and out of sight.

D__ is a Portuguese, from the Azores, a good, sweet, sympathetic fellow, who concedes to being obsessed about work and about his boat—and maybe, too, about adventure—having bought the shell in 2005 and spent these last eight years sailing and refining, sailing and improving, sailing and customizing, sailing and perfecting his tight little craft for his longest adventure to date, a navigation to Iceland, begun just over a week ago. Named for the moon, Lua was sailing beautifully until last night, when in heavy seas, her rudder snapped, leaving him in a perfectly watertight vessel with engine, masts, and sails intact, but no way to direct his efforts. Alerted to the situation at midday, we made a sharp turn north and picked him off his boat at 4:30 p.m.; the captain and crew of the Julius S do good work. But we are not equipped (nor empowered) to tow a small vessel thousands of miles to safe haven. Uninsured for such a loss, D__ says with a misty eye but a resigned and philosophic voice, “This is life,” which is to say, “life is hours and hours of lovely, ingenious work (and many euros) lost.” When it is only that…

Lua Adrift

June 18—Spent an hour with my captain on the bridge, a quiet, lofty, high-tech space well appointed with ashtrays and binoculars. So automated is the sailing of this vessel, there is often only one person on the bridge at a time keeping but half an eye on the various screens. It could serve as well for the study of a philosopher or a Zen meditation hall. The captain showed me his weather and course-plotting software and pointed out the iceberg line and the general resting place of the Titanic. We’ll be in the vicinity over the weekend. In the meantime, laundry.

We’ve been eating very satisfactorily onboard, three squares a day possible, and while this routine offers more than I am accustomed to eating, I have from time to time eaten this third meal—the first of the day actually. It’s called “breakfast.” Interesting concept. A couple of days ago, the cook prepared for the midday meal chicken cordon bleu, and while I cannot claim it exquisite, it was pretty good for freighter fare on the high seas. Which reminds me that I have a reckoning to correct.

Among the many failures I have to report on this trip is my failure to eat the duck. Kaczka Krakowska, “wild duck Cracow style,” I had (almost) every intention of eating, and I had the time on Friday night before I left, but I simply did not have the appetite, having devoured the previous week or so golonka; kotlety szabowy, kurkurowy, cielęcinowy; kremówka, karpatka; naleśniki; zapienkanki, kebab and the Polish version of Asian stir-fried noodles. (Pork knuckle/joint stewed in beer then roasted, courtesy of the Golonkarnia, that is, the “Golonka House”; pan-fried cutlets of batter-dipped pork, chicken, and veal; cream cake and chocolate cream cake; “pancakes,” though they’re rather like crepes or, when filled, quasi enchiladic; baked open-face melted cheese sandwiches—Slavic gut bombs—and the fast fusion foods from the mid and far easts.) Absent the duck and kiszka, I have eaten traditionally enough now to significantly upgrade my estimate of Polish foodways. While I cannot accord it the bluest ribbon, I know I could eat there as happily (and as unhealthily) as I do in the United States.

On the subject of bread and cakes, ciastki, I’ve not eaten better, and know of no place where you can find a freshly-baked loaf of all these varieties, and more, across the street: galicyski (“Galician”),zbojnicki (“bandit/pirate”), chłopski (“peasant”), góralski (“highland”), sadecki, królewski (“royal”), słoneczniki (“sun-flower seed”), cyganski (“gypsy”), żytny (“rye”), krakowski (“Cracow”), włoski (“Italian”), pasterski (“pastoral”), wiejski (“country”), kresowy (“frontier”), okrągły (“round”), ziomek (“compatriot”), ludwik bawarski (“Bavarian”), tygryski (“tiger”), słowianski (“Slavic”), pełne ziarno (“whole grain”), finski (“Finnish”), turecki (“Turkish”), rodzinny (“family”), and pszenny (“wheat”). The variable staff of life in Poland. With szarlotka as the crown.

June 19—We are steaming through a couple of low pressure systems, which means inclement weather, rain, wind, chill, chop, hours for reading and writing. Yesterday the captain and the bosun saw whales to starboard, dramatically flukes up. He thinks we will see more. The day before, we were visited by porpoises, dark ones with flat, curious faces, sporting off to port. A brief inter-species gathering. Otherwise, we lumber on alone into mist and gray.

A week now on the water, sometimes, briefly, under the sun and the largest possible dome of sky—mostly cloudy—with the most efficient horizon, the widest vista available, and the longest northern days upcoming, I am not bored, though I have begun to anticipate returning to my old life, not a new man by any means, or wishing to become one, like my grandfather, nor even a significantly changed man, but not the same one either, just myself at the end of a sojourn, a discrete, bounded, and singular experience. Ocean watermarked, I could visit now the Stary Port in all honesty.

June 20—Into a serious fog. Or is that just a fogged window? Both, it turns out. More rough dark sea, an almost wintry scene, late winter, when the snow is dark from dirt and exhaust with only random spatterings of white. Summer means different things in different places.

Longest Day: June 21—And not only because we add an hour tonight at midnight. After a rough patch of ocean, reading up on the social history of violence, the Jewish experience in Poland, Czarniecki at the battle of Chocim, the tough-minded poetry of Herbert, and watching two hours of The Hatfields and the McCoys on the recommendation of my captain, the skies have cleared, the waters have smoothed, with summer impending. While Pinker effectively argues that the world moves steadily in the direction of universal lows in global violence, we all live our lives individually, locally, where squalls of lethal inhumanity and misfortune are our world, imbed themselves in our subjective consciousness and memory. Not least in the press. Fortunately we get little news out here of the world—some, but not much, a brief compendium of a half dozen stories, and more sports, once a day—and no news of our family and friends, which I trust is good news.

We only passed within 300 miles of the final resting place of the Titanic. The weather has taken us farther north than the collision site, though still much farther south than the current iceberg line. We plunge again into fog as we cross into the warm moist air of the Gulf Stream.

Clear of the fog we find dolphins, slowly arching on the dark surface or sporting in the bow wake, and enjoy our first sunset. Of my sights to see, only whales and stars remain. Day ends, summer has begun.

Solstice Sunset

Solstice Sunset II

Atlantic Twilight Colors

Message in a Bottle: June 22—Emailed the Mayor of my expected arrival, Tuesday morning, the 25^th. (It’s an old email address. See if he gets it.) If all goes as expected, I will be through customs by 10 a.m. In the hands of my friends and brothers, home.

As I finish Herbert, he dismisses the notion of voluntary émigrés, and I have to take his point to heart,

Emigration as a form of existence an odd thing
pitching your tent without friends and family
living without sanction duties we all will agree
our homeland weighs heavily on our shoulders (497)

Or lightly, which is not bad, when you are getting older. But the poet seems to get cranky in his 70s, crankier, not undeservedly, but gentler, too, wistful even, with old friends. I have to read him, however, at his toughest-minded.

June 23—Saw whales yesterday from the bridge, though by “seeing whales” I only mean glimpsing a few spumes and the smallest dorsal patch of whale, that largest of living creatures on earth, the dark matter of the seas. On the menu last night, duck, not Cracow style, but not bad. Afterward, we retired to the bar for Saturday night beers, then over to the crew lounge for karaoke. I scored in the low 90s for “Bad Moon Rising” and “Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” A-.

The waters are smooth today, you can’t believe it’s the same Atlantic. Not so smooth as a mirror, but rippled like stained glass, blue under the sun with diamond highlights, gray ahead thereof. I learn that the Mayor did not receive my message.

Our first clear night. Tea on the bridge with the Filipino officers. A fine moonrise over the Atlantic, Wschód księżyca nad Atlantykiem, with fishing boats aft on the horizon. These precise scapes and shades I will likely never see again. Vast as they seem, they are nothing compared to the vastnesses that they are, now completely black and light.

Moonrise over the Atlantic

 

June 24—My grandfather crossed the Atlantic from Europe to the U.S. three times: once as a young man with a dream, once as a grown man with a plan, and finally as a man with plan and dream thwarted. Sometimes God blesses us with failure. I’ve read enough Polish history and poetry now not to envy the lot of heroes or imagine the fate of my father, my aunts and uncles under the Nazis or the Soviets. So that, if I’ve not made as much progress as I had hoped—two small steps, not some great leap forward—I calculate that the odds on a qualified failure are at least a qualified future, that is to say, a future, a tomorrow, back in the land of opportunity.

June 25--Farewell to the Julius S, the crew and my traveling companions.

 

Julius S

 

Passengers

 

Old Men of the Sea

 

 

Belgian Waffle in Belgium

While I wait for my boat to come in, I walk about in Antwerp, see sights and eat a waffle. I see that Antwerp is not Kraków owing to many small particulars, and yet, European cities are European cities in ways that American cities will never be—ancience, stone quotient, narrowness of streets—while at the same time, cities are cities in much the same way, and in the future, they will be almost indistinguishable. Their architecture and history are and will be preserved largely in the service of global commerce, especially tourism, with the shops offering more or less the same international brands. The local souvenir shops will vend almost identical T-shirts and key-chains, loving the place with stereotypical graphics and fonts. Better than Disney, but not history. I do not lament this homogenization, this hollowing out, this salting and drying; some preservation is better than no preservation, and modern preservation will be as good as preservation has been. We can at best cherish the past, even only its husks; we cannot live in it. It’s not a bad walk-through, though.

Hmmm, waffle.

Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal & Rubens Statue
 

OLV or Cathedral of Our Lady
 

Grote Markt/Great Market

Stadhuis/Town Hall

Street View from the Grote Markt

Not in Poland Anymore

Nineteen hours aboard a Sinbad bus and three countries later—Germany, Holland, Belgium—I’m in Antwerp, where I will pass customs on Tuesday afternoon and board the Julius S for passage home, first to Liverpool, then on to Chester, Pa., that is, Philadelphia—close enough. We leave on Wednesday the 12^th and expect to arrive back in the states on the 26^th of June.

Germany, Holland, and Belgium, while not a completely different world—there are no completely different worlds here on earth—are pretty distinguishable europes, wealthy and sleek, with smooth highways, the lines bright white and freshly painted and the church steeples protestant and severe. The early morning derelicts of late-night revels have darker complexions than those in Poland, even the tanned Poles. Lacking a recent empire, Poland’s hardship cases are mostly home-grown. My last memory of the Planty from this trip will be an early Saturday morning bum urinating spectacularly while he walked, his water arcing golden in the rare sunshine like a few flings of new groszy. The rough, the ragged, the unfinished, the ruined can surprise you.

I was ready to leave, though, not because I’ve tired of Kraków or Poland, though I have tired of the rain and drizzle these last two weeks. No, rather, it was just time to go, time to reflect, regroup, and reconceive in light of all the information I’ve gathered on this reconnaissance. Imagine a next step. While not a great leap forward—linguistically—I have moved ahead and with this realization, however cliché: Poles are just like everybody else I’ve ever met, live essentially the same life; but they live it in an old country and in Polish, no small achievement, two features that continue to fascinate and to elude me.