by Erik E. Gize
It was just after seven in the morning, and we were heading south, off the coast of Oregon. I trudged across the main deck of the Paula Naio, an old commercial merchant ship, dropping each step of my boots with enough force to vent my frustration. Each touch of my heel let out an occasional bang that somehow made me feel better. I had taken this opportunity, a career track available to Navy Reservists, to better hone my navigation skills. This ‘little side job’ for the ‘old man,’ however, wasn’t what I had signed up for. Why hadn’t I just said no when Captain Helweg cornered me in the officer mess?
We were simply going down the coast, a fairly quick run to Oakland. No chance for open-ocean celestial navigation on this leg. Though it would only be a short transit, many of the crew were intent on getting off the ship and rotating home for a break, some sort of contractual thing.
I went through the watertight door that led to the expansive foredeck proper. The steely layers of morning air seemed atypical for the Pacific Northwest in August. I squinted against the occasional beams of sunlight filtering through the rumbling masses of twisted grey fog suspended above us. The sunbeams tossed brilliant spotlights of illumination here and there on the surface of the water. Elsewhere, the day clung to its dinginess. It was a tad muggy, yet the occasional, determined wind gusts chilled me as I continued toward the hold. Alone on deck, an awareness of the irreversible awe of the Pacific crept over me, something timeless, a temporal compression.
I had hoped to “shoot” some stars. Maybe cross off another qualification in my move up through the ranks. Especially when I saw Captain Helweg bring that box onboard. I was hopeful, sure, it was the new sextant. Instead, I’d been tasked to go and deal with the messy-ass forward hold, and dig through layers of rat-shit, cat-shit, and asbestos dust for some stupid board.
As I reached the starboard side, the covered hatch, about ten feet in front of me, stood propped, or “dogged,” open. It was rusty, like everything else onboard. I poked my head into the hold and looked down. Why had I felt compelled to volunteer? I waited outside, already regretting my agreement to help. I was urged to move, driven by an age-old oppression of self-doubt, feelings brought on by the sight of that distant horizon, straining with history.
I stepped though the hatch-way and started climbing down the ladder facing away from it, as was standard practice in the Navy, holding both hand-rails, behind me. My eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness below while the hold boomed with sounds of rollers slapping the ship’s bows.
I slowed about halfway down the ladder, trying to get a glimpse of what was going on. My eyes adjusted slowly. The hold was a cavern. At first, it seemed partially empty, but soon more shapes came into focus. I floated down the ladder, sinking into the depths of the forward hold. The lights were already on as I neared the bottom and two men in the far port side corner were throwing stuff around. I couldn’t see who they were just yet. When I got to the bottom, I scanned the area and was finally able to discern my surroundings.
The Paula was a container ship of an earlier generation. She had a few tanks for bulk liquid molasses, and this smaller space, rigged to hold palletized cargo, or odd sized items that simply would not fit into a standard shipping container. There were piles of stuff everywhere. The greasy-dock stink from a half-dozen enormous coils of old mooring line wafted around the space trying to escape through the hatch above. There were also empty, dented oil drums, and decrepit chipped Formica-topped folding tables up ahead to my right. As I made my way toward the men, I passed a rusty bicycle laying on its side. The hull echoed in a way that popped my eardrums as I tentatively negotiated the uneven decks, warped from years of the ship bashing into seas, holding up heavy cargoes, and endless general abuse. The grit of rust, and the multi-colored paint-chips, crackled and crunched underfoot like broken glass. The whole space was mummified with the oxygen-poor funk of abandonment.
As I drew near, I recognized them. Mike and Ken. Two kids, essentially—hardly twenty. I placed my steps with searching toes, while watching the pair dig their way to a set of large boards propped up behind the big pile of junk. They moved in bursts of activity, then halted, bullshitting for a second or two before starting up again. They paused as I got there, and looked up with pursed lips. We were all crew, all licensed Merchant Mariners, but nasty distinctions remained, indelible. I had spent some time on active duty, then went to university to earn my commission and a mate’s license. Most of the others onboard had not. My delayed choices made me about five to seven years behind my peers. I was the “old guy,” not so affectionately referred to as over traditional age (OTA). There would never be trust, and respect would come very begrudgingly. I had little incentive or energy to try, too focused on advancing my late bloomer career. “Where’s the rest?” I asked.
They just looked at me.
“Just us.” Mike finally blurted.
“Well… I’m here to help,” I said. “What are we after?”
“That one in the back.” Ken said, signaling with wiry arm, and bony finger.
Behind five or six massive hatch sections stood, just visible, a plank, about eight feet long, by three wide, and two inches thick. It was draped with a dusty US flag, also known as the National Ensign, hastily duct taped to one end. The contraption screamed heavy. Even in the dim light, I noticed the boards had been assembled with some care, they were even, and well varnished—and they looked familiar. I cringed.
“What do we want with THAT?” I asked, half hoping I was wrong.
“We’re gonna dump a body.” Mike said. “Didn’t the Captain tell ya?”
I stood there, close-lipped, thinking, No, the old-man most certainly did NOT tell me…
It must have been that damned box I saw the Captain bring on board. Not the shiny new sextant I had been hoping for, the most magical of all navigation tools, but human remains. The mystery, the topic of much scuttlebutt (rumor) onboard, was now, for the three of us, at least, solved. The mundane task that had been merely a pain in the ass moments earlier, morphed into the powerful urge to be anywhere else. I fought to control my rambling and chaotic thoughts. I stared at the boards. Nothing was accidental, not on this ocean, not anywhere. This was all supposed to happen.
We progressively excavated our way through the debris, four feet, three, then two until we pulled the plank from the pile and dragged it over to the base of the ladder that led up on deck. I heard the ringing of boots above a moment before the Second Assistant (2/A) and Wiper from engineering peered, looking down, through the open doorway.
“Hey! Need help?” the 2/A called out.
“Yeah,” I said, craning my neck. “Grab the bottom of this thing, we’ll push it up.”
They grabbed the lipped edge and started pulling the “Burial Board” vertically through the narrow hatch onto the deck. Then, we climbed out. I took a massive gulp of air, pulling it past the stink of the rotting junk in the hold that still camped out in my nostrils.
Soon, the First Assistant Engineer and two more dudes showed up.
“We’re the side boys, for the ceremony,” the First Assistant Engineer said.
“Old Man will be up here with the Chief Mate and the remains shortly.”
“You know the deal?” I asked while we waited.
“Yep. Done this before.”
Silence. The wind enforced its opinion, keeping lips drawn tight, and sealed.
“Navy?” I asked, with some force, to be heard.
“Uh-huh. You?”
“Yeah. Reserves,” I said.
“Well, okay then.” He quipped with some teeth, as if disdaining formalities.
The boards were placed on the bulwarks, the small metal walls around the perimeter of the main deck. Glimmering wooden edges hung in space, over the starboard side. Boisterous waves rushed by below, random glints of blue diamond-like flashes fired as determined bits of sunlight shredded though the fog to reach the sea surface. The scene was vying for my attention and winning.
Most of the crew were present now. We wore the classic Merchant Marine uniform: whatever we had on. Dirty, stained, or ratty and faded seemed to be the standard. Some, despite the moist air and wind, were in T-shirts and shorts, others were in torn, oil-soaked boiler suits. A handful of the crew were in N-1 jackets and no-name jeans from resale shops. Even those of us who were military, in some other life, were civilians here. Disheveled was an understatement.
We formed up, four men on each flank, and waited. I leaned against the wind, shuffling my feet to keep my balance. My mind raced at the significance of what we were doing. I tried to view the event for what it was, a timeless act. Internally I begged for a distraction. The Pacific provided uncountable examples, fleeting, ever-present, in-your-face, and remote. I forgot what day it was, as I struggled to come to grips with the past, and this moment.
Bits of conversation floated over the breeze. Some guys already knew pieces of the story. The dead guy was some old World War II Navy vet who wanted to be kept, in his final repose, under the slate covers of the sea. He was joining his buddies, across miles of definitive continuity of the nearly indefinable Pacific Ocean, apart yet connected, inextricably bound to them.
It was warming up now, but the wind gusts still made me shiver. I was lucky to have good deck boots, heavy, tarred leather, with such fantastically thick soles that they completely insulated my feet from the ever-clammy steel underneath. We were standing there so long, our ranks began to shift and sway. One guy started it, and almost like a yawn we all followed suit. Soon it was as if we were independently fidgeting in place, shuffling, stamping with disjointed boredom. By this point I lost count how many more crew came out on deck, but it looked like nearly everyone.
I stood firm. I would never have believed when we left port that we would be burying a man at sea. I had signed on with this company, as a civilian mariner, to work, to transit the seas of the world. It was my job to drive ships, and transport cargo, not bury people. The emotional strain was too much, it pulled me taut and I handled it poorly.
Scattered bits of an old poem soon came to mind. This situation was so unreal, and yet, somehow, so completely normal that what we were doing seemed almost blasé. It was more than a duty, it was some weird expression of sacrifice, of love. It was still difficult, but somehow, in the unwritten order of things, it made sense.
I tried to focus on the matter at hand, but the poem was determined to take over.
“Of sea-captains young or old… All that went down, doing their duty…”
The bow dove, and the Paula shuddered slightly, sending vibrations through the ship like a rolling snap of breaking granite rushing through some echoing quarry someplace. It shot, bow to stern, right under our feet. I looked west, back to that damned, contemptible six thousand miles of lifeless expanse. I peered aft at our bubbling wake. There was just water. Bitter. Nothing, yet so rich with compressed history. The glowing fog hung on, it persisted, here and there. The bows slammed again, shudders raced down the decks once more. Concentrate Erik. Stand fast. I tried to remember more of the poem. I was beginning to get choked up.
“Of … Where? Where…??? There it is, I thought… Of… the few….” Ah … It was Whitman. I remembered.
“Of the few… whom fate can never surprise… nor death dismay…”
And then the best. It danced through my mind’s eye… as the Flag edge snapped in the wind.
“A spiritual woven signal for all nations… emblem of man elate above death…”
“A pennant universal, subtly waving,” My sinuses began to burn.
“All time… All seas, all ships…”
I deliberately bit the tip of my tongue to keep my bearing.
Eight of us stood, four to a side, separated by three feet of wood. Everyone looked hazy and blurred out. Eyes were forward but each respective gaze drifted around in some sort of exhaustion, punctuated with a hard kind of singular ease, a contentment at abandonment of control. We could only look at the arbitrary distance beyond the other, opposite person’s ears.
The bows of the ship heaved, now with sullen, chesty voices. Spray and the wash from the wake hissed. Bits of salt-encrusted rust drifted about in the swirling gusts that forced the bit of rust, or paint, to settle in small corners of the deck. Someone muttered, almost inaudibly over the gusts, “Let’s just get this shit done,” and shoulders seemed to drop a bit at this statement. We waited for the ship’s master, our chief mate and the box of remains, as we strained against the gravity of our impending task.
Captain Helwig led the way out of the starboard-side hatch, with the ship’s Bible and a few papers that flapped wildly in his clenched hand. The Chief Mate was right behind him, carrying the same steel box I had seen Helwig bring aboard several days earlier. We stood, still weaving, most of the crew finally in attendance.
Helwig turned, and once the Chief Mate stepped through, the Captain dogged the door back down. As they marched over, I glanced at the throbbing, downcast horizon. It was the beginning of something inscrutable. Time became not a moment but a deep and dense continuum. We were a part of another’s history, and now, history ourselves.
Holes appeared in the clouds, the skies cleared, and a hesitant delft blue danced over the waters along the starboard bow. Attracted by the light that filtered through the mist and fog, small seabirds skidded along the face of the waves near the ship like barrel-chested little people, all naturally body surfing as if it were the most basic and normal thing to do. They hunted persistently for the next bit of food.
Minutes passed and nothing happened. The bows of the ship slammed again in the expanding seas, with hurtful, panting, sighs. The old girl drove on, unrepentant, resigned to it all. My red-wool beanie dripped with both sweat and the golden iridescent fog driven forcefully into our faces. We continued to stand there. A recently shaven Helwig came in closer now, he had a fresh blue polo shirt on and ironed khakis. Unusual for him. A few noticed. He stopped at the head of the board and pulled aside the National Ensign. As he held it up, the First Mate, in a clean but frayed looking boilersuit, his scraggly hair contained in a distinguished pony-tail, placed the box on the middle of the board, then stood back as Helwig pulled the flag back over the box. Everyone paused. Someone tapped their boot, as if to a private song, for a second or two.
Helwig then read the letter aloud, but the wind snatched away most of his words.
Our faces were blank, like stacks of critical documents incompletely filled out. No one smiled or frowned. Expressions were almost meditative. Nearly every man’s eyebrows were clearly stitched together, faces, and foreheads wrinkled like those of formidable professors past, giving out clues for an upcoming exam. History matters immensely, yet here we are reliving the past in a repetitive pattern, all dwarfed by eternity. Eighty years ago is, truly, right freaking now. It dawned on me that our actual ‘awake’ lives will turn out to be such an infinitesimally small part of our overall existence, and the longer we exist, the smaller our “lived on earth” portion becomes, ever-present, always smaller. Infinite.
Then, the Captain spoke again, much louder now….
“Anybody know anything about this guy?” And, somehow, through the rumor-mill onboard, most of us did, but we kept silent.
After no one spoke up, the Captain read from the Bible, “Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble…”
It was about ten-hundred hours and the time had finally come.
“Proceed.” Helwig said.
The box slid out from under the flag, down the boards and into the sea, the edges of its welded steel construction clawing at the varnished oak, with a fingernail-on-chalkboard quality.
Then, there was just silence.
At twenty-seven, I hadn’t thought much about death. I had been more focused on reversing past career failures, getting ahead, catching up—and that assignment had been my ticket. It was supposed to have provided me with the training and experience I needed, qualifying time on my license. Instead, what had once been an imprecise, distant thought now stared me in the face.
As the burial party broke up and the boards returned to the forward hold, the crew lazily dragged themselves back to their regular duties and the foredeck was empty once more. Shapes of individual men floated aft, disappearing into hatches and the dark bowels of the ship.
I could not wrap my mind around the rarity of what had just happened. It had been both an honor, and a chore. Duty. Love. It confounded any attempt at measurement. It was all supposed to mean something. We carry the very young, the old, and even the dead. They, too, in their time, carry us. Did I need to understand all that I was compelled to accept? Being afraid of death was like being afraid of tomorrow, stupid when there was nothing I could do to stop either from happening.
Lost in my meanderings, I became aware of the old man leaning on the rails right next to me looking over the starboard side. He startled me, not only because he wasn’t screaming, but also because he was so relaxed it made him appear ten years younger. We watched the body-surfing feathered creatures playing in the waves. After a while, he said in a way that was so calm and dispassionate that the deeper meaning of his words did not reveal themselves to me until hours later. “Life must be good as a bird… assuming you get enough to eat.” And then he stood, tall, erect, and drifted away.
There it was again. The Pacific enforcing its own peculiar brand of universal humility, wrapped in a perfect sort of grace, all at once, in limitless quantities. I realized that service was a continuum. I was proud to have served a fellow veteran in this capacity, as “Third Mate,” allowing him to rest as he had wanted. It was done.
The wake faded into oblivion behind us as the sun crept out in more determined and glowing volumes. I was struck by how there are beginnings… but true endings, if they even exist, are a different thing altogether; better to see it late, than never glimpse it at all.
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Erik Edward Gize is a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander, a Bronze Star recipient and longtime mariner. He has served across military, federal, and commercial maritime sectors, including expeditionary operations in Iraq and logistics coordination through the Naval Sea Systems Command. He holds an MBA from Purdue University and degrees from the California Maritime Academy and Montana State University. Mr. Gize is a native of Palo Alto, California.
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