Fo'castle Waltz

We'd get down on our hands and knees armed with one of those hammers and attack the rust blisters that coated the old metal deck and chip away the rust on its pock-marked plates. Then with the stiff wire scrubbing brushes we'd scrub the area we'd chipped until we'd rid it of all the rust that had gathered in its pocked surface. After we swept it down we'd get a large bucket of rancid fish oil and each of us would dunk a hand swab into the fish-oil bucket and paint the deck with this odoriferous goo.

Crawling around all afternoon on a hot metal deck was hard on the knees—if I remember correctly, in one of the more excruciating Oriental tortures the victim kneels on a lumpy hot metal plate, with drops of water hitting him one by one between the eyes while a wingless fly crawls on a bit of exposed anatomy and while some other part of him is smeared with some sweet liquid and a herd of vicious red ants... That seems a little confusing and I might have mixed up a few recipes, but it does feel like chipping decks.

Though chipping has one quality—if you'd call it that. It awakens and stirs thoughts, and you find yourself reviewing all you ever learned about anatomical structure. You try straight simple kneeling, as if in prayer. In a little while you become conscious of your patella squirming about between the knobs of your femur and tibia, trying to get comfortable and adjusted to the unrelenting knobs on the deck. The tendons that hold it in place snap about and when that becomes unbearable you shift to the left hip with a little support of the left gluteus maximus and, supporting yourself with your left arm, you chip away. The muscles along the inner right leg, the tailor muscles, begin to react first. You try to readjust by sitting up higher. The triceps in the shoulder begin to go, you feel it in the under forearm, finally the wrist and palm tendons, and then in the left thigh structure; the left cheek of the gluteus maximus is worn through . . .

So you shift, readjust, and try it all out on the right side; but since you're not ambidextrous, after a few ineffectual twiddling chips with the hammer in your left hand—the right is required to support the arrangement and maybe some one bellyaches that you're stalling—you attempt another arrangement, then another, until every one of your two hundred and six bones is a raw, mangled, disconnected unit, and each of your protesting muscles a bloody, loud-mouthed, screaming agitator, and all your nerves knotted together in one tremendous headache.

Cracking up the crust of rust sent a dirty, biting cloud of dust up your nostrils, into your eyes, and into the sweaty creases of your skin—that was unpleasant. Scrubbing down a deck with that damned wire brush, ripping your finger tips on its loose strands and on the deck itself, was an unhappy experience. But swabbing that fish oil by hand as the heat of the sun beat down on the base of your neck and your back—with the fish oil almost sizzling as it'd hit the broiling deck and throwing the heat and stench up into your face—that was tops. And just as bad, hot or cold.

Now, then, stowing gear, Soogie Moogie, washing down, chipping decks, and later in our trip scraping and painting and red-leading and painting overside (which is an item in itself) and cleaning bilges is what deckhands who work as day men do aboard a freighter. So, if you thought as I did, that a ship is shoved out to sea and the deckhands heave a deep sigh and settle down to a long pleasant browse until the ship sights port again, accept my assurance—it isn't so.

Not for us a turn at the beautiful little brass wheel in the crystal clean wheelhouse, not for us the poetic leaning up in the prow like an ingrown ship's figurehead as a look-out. Lookout for what, I asked A.B.'s as they came back off watch to the fo'castle. Well, they'd say, maybe a bit of wreckage, or an iceberg. Ever see one in these waters? No, but you might, they'd say hopefully.

But each day (which really wasn't so awful; I've just been bearing down on the heavy pedal) brought the consolation of evening. And evenings aboard the dirty little Hermanita were beautifully long and full. Music, singing, talk, arguments.

7. Sailors' Music

THE SUN WAS STILL HIGH WHEN WE'D KNOCK OFF and carry our hammers and things up fo'ard to Chips. He'd be readying himself for supper and impatient to lock up his storeroom.