The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (28 page)

US
: Thank you.

“Bonne chance”
would have been more apt, especially when the dish was Hawaiian Breakfast (pineapple slices and cheese and ham on toast), chile con carne laced with cornflakes (which we surreptitiously flushed down the toilet), or estofado de lengua (hint: this long piece of flesh is found in a cow's mouth). The grub, allegedly Romanian, was prepared by a sweet Filipino man with no culinary training and a fervent attachment to salt and his new deep fryer. The food budget, he told me, was about $7 per person per day.

I paid $2,010 for my passage. For $399 I could have booked a last-minute discounted luxury cruise from Copenhagen to Miami on the
Norwegian Star
, which has 10 restaurants, a shopping center, a video arcade, and an outdoor beer garden.

“You have to be slightly bonkers to go on a freighter,” Andrew Neaums, an Anglican priest, one of my fellow travelers, told me at dinner. He was accompanied by his wife, Diana Neaums, a landscape architect. The couple, in their sixties, were wrapping up a two-month freighter expedition (“Wouldn't touch a commercial cruise!” Andrew said) from their home in Australia to their new one in England, where Andrew was to begin work in a country parish. Born in England but brought up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), he is lanky and hale, tan and partly bald, and looks like someone who once won the America's Cup. She, originally from England, has a cordial, puckish face and an outstanding white bob. Roland Gueffroy, 58, a Swiss travel writer with tousled hair and a perpetual stubble, was en route from Zurich to Bern, but not the ho-hum, 80-mile westbound way. He headed east and, two and a half months later, was on the final arc of a circle around the globe that involved trains, boats, buses, and trucks. Roland is laconic, with a dry wit that lapsed only when he insisted on trotting out one of his poop-deck jokes. (A poop deck, from the Latin word
puppis
, meaning “stern,” was originally intended as a buffer at the rear of a ship to protect it from waves, but today it refers to the aft deck above the main deck.)

We four were the first passengers who had crossed the ocean on the
Rickmers Seoul
in a year and a half. Until the early 1960s, hopping onboard a tramp steamer or hitching a ride on a banana boat was not unlike taking the Bolt bus to Boston. OK, it was not exactly like that, but the point is that it was not so unusual—and it was cheap. Jonnie Greene, a New York dance and opera critic, remembers crossing the Atlantic on a Dutch cargo ship for about $75 in 1952, when a first-class passage on an ocean liner could have cost about 10 times that. Writers used to favor freighters for the price and the solitude. Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, and Paul Bowles were devotees. In 1958, airlines began to offer regular flights to Europe, which challenged the supremacy of ocean liners. To lure customers, many cruise lines upped their role as impresarios of
fun
(Baked Alaska parades! Miniature golf! Pastel Night!), promoting the cruise as the vacation rather than the way to get to the vacation. Unable to compete, freighter lines by and large got out of the house guest racket.

Why would shipping lines even consider taking passengers nowadays? At the Rickmers headquarters, in Hamburg, Sabina Pech, the general manager of corporate communications, told me, “It is a matter of entertainment for our crews.” Perhaps. Although many crew members were gregarious, they were mainly busy with the operation of the ship. When keeping company with the crew, therefore, I often felt as if I'd shown up at the wrong office for Take Your Daughter to Work Day.

At dusk on the first evening, we peered over the rail of an upper deck, watching two tugboats, the
Reid McAllister
on our starboard and the
Teresa McAllister
on our port (such a pushy family!), maneuver us into takeoff position in Philadelphia harbor, readying us to motor down the Delaware River. We were on our way to Virginia to pick up six locomotives and, for me, a box of gingersnaps. From there we would mosey across the Atlantic at an average speed of 13 knots—14.96 miles an hour—reaching Antwerp in about 12 days. This is the pace that a not-so-schlumpy bicyclist can pedal on flat terra firma. If pirates were chasing us, the ship could hightail itself to safety at 20 or 21 knots, but that kind of velocity would tax the engine, squander fuel, and increase pollution.

I remarked to my companions that 115 years earlier, my paternal grandfather had made almost the reverse trip at approximately the same speed, except that he traveled steerage, from Antwerp to Philadelphia, whereas my cabin was next to the laundry room on the officers' floor (
KILO OF WASHING POWDER INSIDE IS NOT MEANING OF VERY CLEAN CLOTHES
, a sign on the machine stated). Also, my grandfather was seven years old and accompanied by his mother and five brothers and sisters. His younger brother Jack was absent because he'd fallen off the train from Romania while the kids were horsing around on the platform between two cars. (“Don't tell Mother,” my grandfather instructed his siblings after the accident.) My disaster? I electrocuted my hair dryer later that night by neglecting to switch it from 120 volts to 220. Luckily, my cabin was across the corridor from the electrician's.

Somewhere between Philadelphia and Norfolk, I visited the bridge, where night and day you could bother whichever two crew members were on duty monitoring the ship's vital signs. This involves various gauges and electronic charts and apparently can be performed while kicking back in what looks like a dentist's chair. (The ship runs largely on autopilot, except when it must be navigated through narrow passageways.) It's like playing a very boring video game, I said to Raul, who covers the eight-to-twelve shift, both a.m. and p.m. “Yes, except you have to stay
away
from target,” he responded. A woman's voice was heard fuzzily over the radio. “All ships, all ships, all ships,” she said, adding, “
Smeterljdrt fifillsgfdter tere
twenty-four
oik
.” Raul translated: she was from the U.S. military, and there was a warship conducting exercises in the vicinity. (We never saw so much as a smoke signal on the horizon.) Also on the bridge are several pairs of binoculars that afford one superb views of nothing. The seven seas are, I discovered, as interesting to look at as an unplugged lava lamp. No fish in sight, no birds overhead, not even the briny tang you associate with a beach. The ocean becomes oceany only as you approach the shoreline, where seaweed, plankton, and other things that appear to have escaped from a Japanese restaurant attract larger marine creatures and stink up the place as they decay.

At about six the next night, we pulled into Norfolk, the prow of our high-rise ship aligned with a tiny sign on the quay that said
STOP SHIP HERE
. Crew members tossed tag lines down to a team of stevedores onshore, who lassoed turquoise ropes around four bollards. There were anchors aboard, but they remained tucked away. Now the loading began—and continued until the wee hours of the morning. Transferring a locomotive from land to ship is as simple as depositing luggage into the trunk of a car, except that instead of oomph you need a few winches, cranes, and lashing slings. Your job might be to attach the harnesses to the cargo, maneuver one of the four deck-mounted cranes from inside the operator's cab, or figure out where each piece of cargo should be placed so that the ship doesn't tip over. (This is the responsibility of the chief officer.) Or, if you are a crane instead of a person, you will work in tandem, knitting-needle style, with another crane, one of you hooking the harness at the front of the locomotive, the other handling the back end, and then both synchronously lifting your haul 50 feet in the air, swanning it over the open hatch, and lowering it into a capacious hold. The locomotives were stacked in two layers, three to a layer. “This is the most excitement we're going to have for a while,” Roland said as we watched the goings-on from the deck. “After this, it's just another day and another day and another day.”

Crew members on cargo ships like to say, “It's always Monday or Saturday,” to describe their binary schedule. If you are a seaman, for most of the year you are schlepping cargo on and off the boat, painting the crane, derusting the crane, repainting the crane, overhauling the generator, and, after dinner (chicken and rice again), watching
Fast & Furious 6
on your laptop (unless you are Leo Rubio, a 35-year-old able-bodied seaman who has no laptop and thus passes the time at night by weaving rope hammocks). Finally, after a nine-month stint, you hang up your hard hat and go home and sit on your La-Z-Boy until you find another assignment.

“What's the appeal?” I asked some fellows gathered in the crew's mess, smoking cigarettes (nearly everyone smokes) during their morning break. Felito Balde, the bosun, a brawny 56-year-old from the Philippines, whose arm is tattooed with a clipper ship, said, “It's simple: money.” For supervising the deck crew, he earns $2,000 a month, four times what he says he could make on land and enough to support his five children. (He has a BS in marine transportation and has been a sailor for 29 years.) According to Balde, an ordinary seaman makes $1,400 a month, an able-bodied seaman $1,760. “To give you an idea about how much this is,” the ship's fitter, Valentino Ramos, told me, “a manager in a bank in the Philippines earns a thousand dollars a month, and he must pay room and board. A teller gets five hundred dollars.” Nevertheless, this is not a career with high job satisfaction. OS Mark Ryan Miranda Bautista told me, “It's a hard life. You go away and your kid is a baby. Come home, he's working.”

“They're not paying us for the work,” OS Emerson Tibayan said. “They're paying us for the homesick.”

At night, the rocking of the ship made me feel as if I were on a water bed, which I suppose I was—big-time. In my cabin, every hinge and lock rattled, and I could hear what sounded like the rhythmic wheeze of an emphysema sufferer. Some sleuthing revealed it to be the shower curtain sliding back and forth on its rod.

After a few days at sea, when the North Atlantic swells measured 4 to 5 meters, I had assorted lacerations, contusions, and boo-boos on my arms and legs from being hurled willy-nilly into things. My balancing abilities had been reduced to those of a drunk wearing reading glasses while descending a staircase during an earthquake. I spent a lot of time in my cabin, occasionally venturing into the cold and windy outdoors to pass time on the deck, which was furnished with four old plastic chairs roped to a pole. From there, if I was lucky, I could observe a handful of crewmen throwing scrap wood overboard. A chart posted in the bridge states what can and can't be dumped. If you are at least 12 nautical miles from shore, you can toss any sort of food waste except animal carcasses. You must refrain from dumping synthetic ropes, fishing gear, incinerator ashes, and clinkers.

I also sometimes strolled along the ship's flank, past bins of orange chains and green ratchets, spools of thick aqua nylon rope, large burlap sacks brimming with cast-iron thingamajigs, barrels of lubricant, nooks begging for stowaways, a miscellany of green-painted steel structures with names like Void Vent and Cargo Hose Drench Connection, and the four mighty cranes, the winches, and the other things you pray to Neptune don't fall on top of you, until I reached the bow, where—holy moly, could this be?—only a 42-inch-high rail separated me from Davy Jones's locker. I visited the bow of the ship regularly, even though Paul, the chief mate, told me that nobody goes there—“only the passengers, to recreate the scene in
Titanic
.”

I haven't introduced you to our captain, Florin Copae, or is it Copae Florin? To be safe, I'll call him captain. Originally I'd been booked on a different voyage, but I jumped ship when my travel agent told me it would be helmed by a man classified “not passenger-friendly.” The captain of the
Rickmers Seoul
, a 61-year-old Romanian with a beard, waxy silver hair, a missing tooth, and a convex midriff, is not passenger-unfriendly, but neither would anyone place him in the “palsy-walsy” category. He, like the other officers, usually sat alone at the dining-room table and ate with dispatch. When we were dockside, he wore a khaki shirt with epaulettes and matching shorts or a pressed orange jumpsuit embroidered with the word
Master
. He is all business—in Antwerp, where we were loading 260-ton friction winches, I said hello to him in the stairwell, to which he replied, curtly and justifiably, “I am fully busy.”

On the open sea, he wore a T-shirt, shorts, socks, and sandals. From 7:30 in the morning until 1 or 2 a.m., he is bogged down with administrative concerns and e-mails (yes, he had an Internet connection and I did not), but, if you are lucky, you can catch him with time to talk, and here is what you might learn: that he'd had his heart set on being a captain since he was a little boy (“I was reading too many books about Magellan when the teacher asked us what we wanted to be”) but didn't see the ocean until his twenties, when he was a student at the naval academy; that he rarely gets seasick but when he does he likes to eat greasy food; that he hasn't read a newspaper for five or six years (“fed up with politics”); that he is on the ship four months and then at home four months; that his wife is a doctor and his daughter is in medical school; and that, with regard to the few females in the business, he has “nothing against women captains and pilots but when the situation is getting hard they are getting lost.”

Does he like his job? “I wouldn't do it if I was starting now. Now it's a dog life. I am always doing accounting and paperwork.” The combination of the Internet and scads of new environmental regulations, such as a rule that requires vessels to change from high-sulfur fuel to low-sulfur fuel when they are within certain distances of U.S. shores, has made it dreary work. What cheers up the captain? Plants. When we reached Hamburg, a friend delivered a cutting from the captain's garden in Romania, along with a package of soil, so that he could transfer his Red Lucky magnolia to a larger pot.