Reflections on A Life at Sea

Photo by Monica Pattangall, January 2015

Like any other job, merchant shipping can be a boring life. The daily routine. You are manager of a warehouse, and you own part of it, too. More often than not, you own a share of the inventory, as well. There’s bookkeeping, enough you feel like a clerk much of the time. You keep track of your goods, your cargo; you make sure it’s safe and not burning, rotting, shifting, rusting, leaking, being eaten by vermin, or consumed by your crew. Then, of course, you have to make sure your warehouse is moving along the water in the right direction, avoiding bad storms, finding fair winds, making good time, and remaining whole and safe. And then you have employees – the crew who are with you day and night for weeks on end. You keep them busy tending to the warehouse; you see to their doctoring, their diet, their safety, their training, and their comfort (such as it is), and sometimes see to the wrapping of their remains in a spare tarp, and committing them to the sea. Is it lonely? Not so much as some might think. Some men enjoy being master of their own small universe. I do.

Men in the business of tending floating warehouses, buying and selling goods, moving everything from wood to wine, fish to fruit,  limes to limestone across the sea – we are born loners. We are also born to live in denial. We are little different from the merchant in your hometown. He has all the same worries in one way or another. My warehouse could sink. Two of them already have. But theirs could be taken by storm or fire, too. The difference is that they are the more sociable creatures. They will rebuild their warehouse on exactly the same plot where the old one stood. They live in the midst of family and friends. They are there when those family and friends are born, are married, are sick, and when they die. They go to weddings, christenings, meetings, parties, and funerals. I don’t.

Except for my wife and my daughters, whom I choose to keep with me at sea, all of my relationships are temporary, too short to become attached or over-involved in each other’s lives. For a month or two here, a few weeks there, I meet up with them very briefly – we talk, share cigars, trade stories and news; I hear of the events that happened back in the home towns or at sea, relate what I have heard of family, prices, wars, disease, and ports; then we take our leave an get on with the business of moving our warehouses across the oceans. We will meet again in another time and place. In one or another enormous port city where it is so much easier to be alone, yet enjoy the company of well-known strangers.

I spend two-thirds of my life on the sea, at the center of my own small world where I am in control of my destiny, my family, and the lives of the few men who help keep us afloat and moving ever onward to the next harbor. I find it easier to deal with news in the abstract, far away from the place and time from whence it comes.

Perhaps it was losing my mother, and so many of my family, when I was a boy of eight that makes me want to distance myself from the land and people of my blood. I know I am never comfortable among them for very long. Even with my brother – we enjoy each other’s company so very much at sea or in a foreign port, but not so much at home. Our separateness is also our bond.

Perhaps I am just a wanderer, in search of eternal adventure like the generations of people whose blood runs in my veins along with the sea water. I know for certain that when the time comes that I must leave the sea, I want to be among others like myself – the loners and adventurers who wandered the oceans without boundaries, and whose memories are of far-off places, wooden ships, and canvas sail. If that cannot be, I pray my soul will be committed to the deep, for it could not bear to be bound to the shore and an ordinary life.

WSN