Of old ghosts and goodbyes

A reflection on days long gone.

I never really got used to saying goodbye when I was at sea. It’s part and parcel of the path you choose and yet was something I had to get used to. I have known men who never did get used to it and who, as a result, did some pretty silly things in the belief that it would somehow make it all OK. Me? I just thought it could never be just OK;  It was what it was.

Unlike my peers – whose futures were already mapped out for them at home to became a part of the fabric of the town, part of the fixtures and fittings, I had long ago decided that I didn’t want any of that. I preferred to be away at sea, adventuring – because that was what it was then. Not only the countries you visited but also the life at sea with the unpredictability that went with it – like the weather, the long leaves at the end of each trip and the money. This was a time before the cheap packet holiday and budget airlines so that when I was home and someone asked where I was off to next, and I would reply (for example) Mexico then they’d look at me with a sort of envy. I may as well have been going to the moon! They also believed I went there the day after I left home. They never saw the bit in between, the actual days and weeks at sea. How could they? They had no understanding of it. Their knowledge of the world seldom strayed further than a day trip to London, and that itself was an expedition.

Anyway, goodbyes. Yes, there were many of them and sometimes I used to think too many for one lifetime. Goodbyes to people, to family, to lovers, to places – all of them in their own way, a loss. So it was a universal term – a continual ending without actually being an ending, that which finalised the experience. If I was to take one that remains in my now dimming memory then it has to be one of those impossible and never to be actually realised events that we all have in our lifetime. Sailors memories tend to be strong ones by virtue of the extra ordinary life they lead. More out of the ordinary than that known ashore where days roll into each other with a comfortable regularity and the knowledge that there will be a tomorrow, no matter what. Given the trade a seaman follows, and his proximity to the grey widow maker that is the sea, each moment of time becomes precious for tomorrow might never come.

We had towed a barge from Gothenburg in Sweden across the wild winter Atlantic to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Once we had arrived with it – having been battered by weather every single day on passage – our orders were to stay in port and await confirmation of another job that the company were setting up and rumoured to be another tow over ‘the pond’ (as the Atlantic is known) to Hamburg. No-one knew how long it would take to secure the contract – if at all – but it meant we could take some time out to get ashore. After 42 days of being thrown about like corks, we were ready for letting off steam.

It was winter and that means, over there, snow falls are measured in feet. Ice everywhere and a wind so bitterly cold that it cuts through everything you wore with the ease of a knife. So cold in fact that if you touched bare steel then your skin stuck to it. Well below freezing, the harbour itself was almost always iced up and it meant that the ice breakers were on the go 24 hours a day to keep the port open. You could hear them going about the business all day but at night, lying in your bunk in a cabin just below the waterline, the sound of their working was like the constant crunching and groaning of some mythical beast.

I was 22 then. I had just got my AB’s ticket and in my youthful arrogance, there was nothing you could tell me that I didn’t know about towage and salvage! I’d learned my trade with some fine seamen and the tugman’s trade – given its very nature – is pure seamanship. It is a world of wire pennants and shackles, tow springs as thick as a man’s waist – and almost impossible to handle when wet.  Of heavy weather and slow sailing speeds, of an environment that is constantly moving this way and that to the fickle rythym of the sea – and I loved it! The year before I had celebrated my 21st at the height of summer anchored off Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia. Burned brown as walnut from the long, airless days with no presents, no cards, no fuss. Just one year older and a day nearer going home.

We very quickly found a convenient bar, situated just outside the dock gates and not too long a trek in the deep snow that seemed to fall endlessly from skies always dark and leaden. It was very typically Canadian with a sort of dim syrupy light inside it, warm, friendly – and reasonably priced. It was frequented by seamen, longshoremen, truckers – a working man’s bar where they dished out frothy beer and wiped the head off the glass with a plastic knife when they served it and where everyone was friendly and you felt right at home. Within a few days of getting in there and using it regularly, we were soon part of the place.

She was a 25 year old barmaid called Angelina – dark, in an Italian way, but her genes were diluted by generations so that she was also very Canadian in her manner and her dress – which was (like everyone at that time of year) more for comfort and never for fashion.

I don’t know why but she took a shine to me the first time we met but to be honest, it was reciprocated. There was an indefinable and very instantaneous magic between us from the first time our eyes met and, whenever we as a crew came in, I got served first. It was me who got the smile and the flashing, capricious eye contact. Me who got the conversation and her full and undivided attention. How so? I don’t know because it was not planned and it certainly wasn’t by design either. It simply was. At the end of each night she would come from behind the bar and hang around me, as I got my gear on, making small talk. The shy smiles that flitted between us were gentle and never challenging or boastful. Back aboard,I had to put up with the constant ribaldry that is the way of men within the monkhood of the mess room – but I basked in it because it felt very good. I felt somehow privileged, chosen if you will – and being young, adored every single minute of it.

That first week we were under stay of orders so we never knew when we would be sailing. However, we received a Telex via the agent to say that another job had been secured for us and we were to pick up a Swedish cargo ship to tow her to Hamburg for repairs. She had lost power on her main engines and as she was a new ship we were tasked to haul her back to her builders yard. That was the bad news. The good news was that she would not be ready until she had finished discharging her cargo  – another three days at least. She lay across the harbour from where we were tied up so it wasn’t as if we had to steam anywhere else to get her.

Most days aboard we tended to get small tasks to do inside as, with the ice and snow, there was nothing that could be done outside on the deck. In reality this meant a couple of hours work in the morning and then the rest of the day was our own. Some would spend it sleeping or generally dossing about but not me, I headed up to the bar where I would have a meal, drink some beer and talk with Angelina. As long as I could see her, then the world felt right and good and I was happy in my way. The day we received the news that we would be sailing soon she asked me if I wanted to come and see a movie with her that night – and I said ‘yes’ before I’d even thought about it. She said she would pick me up that evening off the ship and after that confirmation we spent the rest of the day talking, smiling and laughing in that secret, special bubble people attracted to each other have which is generally just existing inside each others spaces. The rest of the world wasn’t there, there was just her. Looking back now, I would not have had it any other way.

She turned up that evening and we drove to the cinema in her car – and every moment we spent was like I’d known her for all of my days. Can you understand that? It was an unique feeling to be there and to just feel ‘one’. Like it was always supposed to be like this and always would be. Then, in the dark of the cinema, she touched my hand – a simple gesture in itself but I felt raw electricity flash through me and my heart felt like it was going to burst out of my chest. I can’t remember what we watched – I just looked at her and she at me and time itself stood still. The naivety of that single moment – its uniqueness – was the most powerful thing I had ever felt, How was I to know that it would be repeated in the future, when I would least expect it, and when it happened again it would erase all memories like it and take  a place as the only one? I didn’t. I still don’t. They say lightning never strikes twice but I know that to be a lie.

She took me back to the ship afterwards. There was an awkward moment when indecision loomed up between us but it didn’t feel right and we both knew it. I wanted her – but not like that. She was someone special and that was the most important thing of all then. She said she would pick me up in the morning, to take me along the coast and to see more than just the waterfront and we made small talk and laughed in the pauses in the conversation – whilst all the time our eyes locked and  burned with something we didn’t understand. I don’t know how long we sat there like that but we nervously exchanged chaste kisses that burned despite the cold and I got out of the car too fast in my embarrassment and inexperience, to stand like a loon in the falling snow waving like a mad thing as her tail lights went out of sight in the blizzard that blew between us.

The next day she was there early and we went together further along the coastline, to a bay where the sea roared in and the wind screamed across the tops of the jagged coast – but we were insulated from it by being hand in hand and laughing and happy and, I know now, in love. How easy it is to witness the answers from this point in your life when back then, you didn’t understand it. Time may well be a teacher but in my case, the lesson was far too advanced for me to take in.

So we walked awhile and we laughed and threw snowballs at each other, then walked some more. The brutal majesty of the sea crashing on the shore was awesome and we watched the hills of grey water power in across the expanse of the bay’s mouth, to spend themselves in a roaring fury of foam on the shoreline as they continued the sea’s timeless battle with the land. Eventually, out of breath from the wind that pummelled at us both, we found shelter in the lee of a small cabin and then we kissed.

This wasn’t the nervous peck of inexperience. I held her close to me, feeling her lithe body hard against my own.My hands held her by the waist and then there was that incredible lightness of being that seems to pause everything for the slightest – but almost eternal – moment of time and we kissed again. How funny it is when one thinks back to moments like that! There was nothing – absolutely nothing at all – but her. In my arms, her body against mine, our lips, the warmth of her, the lightheadedness of that contact – and when we broke, breathless and blushing, I knew in my heart of hearts that if she would have asked anything of me then, I’d have agreed.

That night I stayed ashore. We went back to her little flat and listened to music, drank some wine and talked. Oh and how we talked! Different lives, different people – but the common denominator between us the knowledge that we had collided and that it felt as if it was to be, forever and ever amen.

Later still, in the velvet dark of the night, with the wind hammering on the windows and the snow falling heavily outside of the steamed up, frozen windows, we made a slow and languid love, After, she fell asleep in my arms and I held her – held her to me and did not want to let her go. Ever. I sat with her body curled around mine below an immitation  Native Eskimo quilt, and listened to the minutiae of the sounds, the record of that night. The soft, low music from the all night radio station, the spiteful gusting of the wind. The hush of the snow as it fell like muted rain on the roof above our heads – and her breathing as soft as a sigh, as contented as I felt. She was real against me, the curves and hollows of her body solid as it lay next to my own and if ever a man was a millionaire, then that night, I was him.

Yet let her go I had to. With the coming of the dawn, the time for parting arrived as well. We showered and we eat a breakfast of toast and jam, followed it down with bitter coffee and then we held hands and didn’t let go until we had to, by which time she was driving back to the docks and we were both singing along to a song we knew on the radio. I felt like there was nothing better than being alive right then, that there was no woman more beautiful, no couple more fortunate and life was for her and I alone.

It wasn’t to last.

About an hour after I got back aboard the Mate turned us to for opening the hatch and dragging the gear out onto the deck. I worked with the other crew and, as we hauled out the pennants, an ice breaker drew alongside and the pilot came aboard.

The Mate said we were shifting ship across the harbour to connect the tow up to the ship we would be taking to Hamburg. I wasn’t unduly worried as it was only across the bay from the bar and when the evening came I’d get a taxi over. We’d never hooked up and sailed before. Ever.

So we slipped the moorings – the ropes were so frozen they were like iron bars – and we crunched our way astern of the ice breaker. Meanwhile we started working on deck to get the heavy towing gear up from the hold, the chain bridle, the shackles, the wire pennants. Wrestling with the steel hard towing spring and hooking it to the tow wire from its stow alongside the engine casing. Then, laying alongside the cargo ship with our stern under the flare of her bows, we worked with her crew to rig for sea.

Normally, once we’d rigged up we would await the arrival of a Lloyds’  Surveyor who would come and ‘sign off’ the gear and give us the all clear to sail. They usually took days to fret and find their way around  – but this time, the surveyor came aboard as we had finished and worked his way over the two ships as we had our coffee in the mess – and, just as we finished it, signed us both off as ‘fit to go’.

I never expected things to happen so fast but once he’d done that, we were swung out until we were ahead of the ship we would tow to Hamburg, our main engines throbbing with life. Two small harbour tugs came over and attached themselves to the tow to pull her clear of the berth and an icebreaker moved to and fro clearing the channel. I started to panic because this could only mean one thing and, in desperation, I asked when we were due to sail. Surely, I said to the Mate, this was a wind up. How could the surveyor pass us fit as quickly as that?  We’re not really sailing are we? We’re going to a lay berth for a night or so…..He shook his head and told me the surbetor was happy with the whole connection – with the shackles and their pins, the chain and its weight and length, the wire pennants and the main tow spring. ” Fit for an ocean passage ” He’d said and signed over the clearance certificate and insurance papers on the chartroom table, with a double of good Scotch to bid us bon voyage. I heard myself ask tremulously when? The answer gutted me: ” As soon as the sea pilot arrives “.

I was almost out of my mind with panic then because we were going and I was not going to have time to say goodbye. It felt wrong, somehow. Unfair. I’d met someone – and now that chance was being ripped away from me. I kept hoping something would go wrong and we’d have one more night in.

It was not to be. We sailed about midday, slowly heaving 15000 tons of dead weight that trailed along behind us until we were clear of the harbour enough to stream the tow to its full length. Then – setting the courses – we left Halifax astern of us in the snow squalls that ghosted in. We passed Point Pleasant on the port side and moved out to the main channel. By the time Spectacle Island and Purcell’s Cove were to starboard, I could see nothing astern of us. Not even the tow, which had become just a grey, shadowy object following us dumbly, tethered to us by a steel cable.

In a very short space of time nothing of the land could be seen – just the rolling grey mountains of the North Atlantic. I stood, forlornly, on the boat deck in the freezing, bitter cold and my heart felt like it was breaking.

Later that evening, I tried to call her from the ship but when the bar answered, they said she wasn’t in. They promised they’d get a message to her and took the call sign details of the ship so that she could reach me. She never did. I tried again when we reached Hamburg, thirty three days later – but if she was there, they didn’t say. Maybe she found someone else? Maybe she just thought I’d run out on her…..maybe….maybe. I never knew. I never will.

So that was a goodbye. A sailor’s sort of goodbye. In the years that followed there were many more. Some good ones, some bad. All in their way unique and different.

Over the years I often sit and wonder what she’s doing now, but also realise the goodbye we never had was the way of it, was the way of a sailor. I don’t regret what we had – which was precious little looking back – but I do value the moment and the magic of it. There have been many goodbyes since then but now I try to make sure they are finalised. You can’t have unfinished business. By not doing so the legacy it leaves is a constant question that stays with you and comes to visit when you least expect it.

It remains ‘what if?’ and, in that sense, it is never really a goodbye, is it?