We are still a few days from passing through the straits between Honshu, Japan’s main island that contains Tokyo, and Hokkaido, kind of the Japanese Alaska, but more like a Japanese Maine or Michigan (not saying it isn’t nice, it does look nice, but there is a tunnel under the strait to it…) My computer is giving me fits by trying to get me to pick a region, even though it seems to have no problems playing movies from every region, so I decide to play Tropic Thunder in the crew lounge (little did I know that two months alter I would be visiting areas of Myanmar still ruled by factions of the Shan State Army that inspired this movie), knowing that the Filipinos will get a kick out of some if not all of the humor in the movie, and I am half curious to see who laughs when. I knew that Ben Stiller’s Tom Cruise take off adopting a Vietnamese kid would be funny to them, and predictably, when he flings the kid off the bridge at the end of the movie, they were howling, but they laughed at some of the subtler stuff too, telling me a few of them do understand English much better than they speak it, and that they can be cheeky even though it seems a national obligation to just agree all the time and smile a lot.
Fresh from this paternalistically seditious success, I decided to retire to my room, but something got me curious to peek at the bridge, maybe because the ship was kicking relatively hard (nothing 130k tons kicks that hard comparatively, the officers keep reminding me, many of them having cut their teeth on remarkably smaller vessels, but you know the seas gotta be big for it to move at all unpredictably). I arrive on the bridge, it in it’s typically blacked out state at night, to find one of the smarter young mates, a kid named Carlos from Manilla with 4 years of a Filipino Maritime academy under his belt, and Luarenin, the 3rd mate, on watch. When you show up on deck when it is blacked out, just a few dark screens on, every other light blocked by a curtain in the nav room, you take a moment to figure out who is there by pausing as you approach the console to let your eyes adjust, and they often say something to you when you show up to let you know who is there, since it is like walking into a darkened movie theater. Often times people engage you in talk because nothing is going on other than the normal rounds: Hit the dead man switch every 9 minutes, plot the location once an hour, rip off and file the weather fax and warnings, and look for traffic. You can go from Oakland to Japan and never see another ship they have told me, and we have seen 2 so far, one which was perfectly silhouetted by the setting sun during our pig roast the second day out, so I find it exciting, well, it’s not that exciting, it’s two ships literally passing in the night, but to a brain raised on disaster movies, and given the relative lack of outside impacts on our little bubble at sea, it is exciting for me.
But let’s say it’s slow motion exciting. I know realize how much compressed narrative it takes to make this stuff movie sexy. I had fantasies of constantly dodging fishing ships and the 7th Fleet in some secret emergency a la The Final Option or The Hunt for Red October… but to quote someone I talked to before I got on the boat who had a similar experience crossing the Pacific from an army deployment in Korea in the mid 60’s.. What did I see?.. I saw the sea. No more, no less, he was wisely implying.
When I came up on bridge I discerned it was Carlos and Luarntin like I said, but they seemed preoccupied… I had been scanning the controls at this point for over a week, maybe once or twice a day, learning a bit more every time, so I was able to put together pretty quick that they had approaching traffic, on a course that was potentially dangerous, and to make it more exciting or dangerous, they couldn’t see it yet.. it was a foggy night, and even huge ships often only have like 4 lights, just like any other.. the one you are looking for first is usually the mast light, which should be visible as many as I would guess 8 miles away on a clear night, but this was not a clear night.. it was blowing 30 knots, I can’t tell you how big the waves were because I was still learning to judge that from my pampered position on this behemoth, but maybe 30ft, possibly more (spray was smashing over the front rank of containers, which must be 80 feet above the water level if not more), and there was rain and fog.
Laurentin and I sill hadn’t bonded yet.. he was one of the few officers that held me at a suspicious distance..in fact of all the guys on the ship, he was the hardest nut to crack, the rest just didn’t speak English I later figured out.. not that any Romanian is unfriendly, he isn’t, but his public persona was quite sour by Romanian standards.. he was the scoffing grump of the crew, not that he couldn’t be warm, he was to me, often, but also kind of saw me at first as a big smiling potential nuisance, and I had to prove myself as not someone who was going to break an ankle in the middle of the Pacific…he’d been at sea for I bet 25 years, and he doesn’t want trouble.. I walk around in flip flops, and I think he underestimates me a bit, and there was no point in trying to verbally convince him of anything about me.. he was like a cliché of an old army NCO.. show me don’t tell me, Leroy! Later in the trip I would go to great lengths to try to break him down, and I learned that a lot of it had to do with a skepticism of Americans, as he felt that there hadn’t been much wrong with life in Romania before the fall of communism. I decided to grab a pair of binoculars, there are always about 4 pairs floating around the control areas of the bridge, and look for the damn thing. One more set of eyes couldn’t hurt, no one had really made too much differentiation between me and the crew, and maybe I could win some points with ol’ larry with a bit of earnest American help..
After about two minutes of scanning, I saw the faintest of white lights, a few degrees to starboard of the visible crows nest behind the bow that is about 200 meters in font of us always, and hangs like a little white painted cloud at night, kind of a constant marker of our nose position, unless, of course, the ship breaks in half or something. I called it out, and he seemed to find it at the same time, and for the first time, I got some approval out of Lawrence.. nothing glowing, but he didn’t seem to mind the help.. Finally I was something more to him than just a mysterious crazy American willing to pay for something he needs to be paid to do, and my help was accepted.
Here is where it got funny. My brain is racing at the speed of Speed 3.. two ships charging at each other in bad weather on the wild north pacific ocean! Hundreds of thousand of tons of cargo and life and environmental devastation in the balance, Dennis Hopper has rigged the Exxon Valdez to plow into Long Beach or some shit, and Keanu only has 10 minutes to save the world..
In our case.. that 10 minutes was a foot tapping boring ass time staring into the gray.. you see, our boat goes 21 knots when we are going full, about the max before diminishing returns in fuel, but we had slowed due to the inclement weather, so maybe 17 knots, and the other boat must have been doing 12 or 15, but that still means you close at like a minute and a half per knot, maybe 2.. this is Top Gun at glacial speed. So we go from “bogey at 12 O’Clock, Mavs!” to…..: “how’s about those Mets…?”… as we watch the light slowly materialize maybe 5 miles away from the mast light to eventually a red running light marking his port side, and this and three other instruments, from an IFF type thing (Identify Friend or Foe, something that reads data released by the ship by radio waves, and can even plot it on your other screens. Info like name, registration, size, and heading) to different radar and GPS screens. The other ship goes by about a mile to port, some 8 minutes later..
I watch him slip off the port side and away, trying to read his name by the light he has on his stern to match it up with the weird Indonesian sounding name that our instruments gave us, kind of wondering if I am the only one who had turned this into a harrowing near miss at sea, wondering if their watch officer was sweating like Ted Striker in Airplane, or just dreaming of vanilla sugar cookies like everyone on the bridge seems to, and realize that things really do happen at a human pace out here…
I decide to turn in, chuckling to myself about getting so quietly jazzed up about something akin to a wrestling match between Galapagos Tortoises, a bit embarrassed that I got so excited so quickly….glad I didn’t voice any excitement to give Lawrence any other impression than that it was just one more sugar cookie cravin’ night for me as well, wishing I was eating pan fried salt-less chicken on the boardwalk in Constanta after a night playing hide the gypsy with the wife and reading Dracula adventures to the kids…
it has been an eventful night by Libra standards!
Lawrence and Chuck do give me a warm good night as I head for the dim light of the staircase, and I do feel like I have accomplished something… which is a rare feeling when you have time… nothing but time…