For three summers during college, I worked as a deckhand on steamships that carried iron ore from Duluth, Minnesota, to the voracious steel mills of Gary, Chicago, Cleveland, and other industrial cities on the southern shores of the Great Lakes. I did this because, being a union job, it paid very well and because my father was the traffic manager for the ships and could easily place me into a job. My father worked for U.S. Steel and was in constant contact with the ships, informing them what ports to go to and informing the ports when a particular ship would arrive. It was a complicated job, but he did it well. He did it well because he loved it. The job drew on his penchant for detail.
The previous summer, I had worked as a deckhand on the Irving S. Olds. Frankly, I don’t remember much about it. I’d boarded the Olds only a few days after graduating from high school. I’d been all of seventeen years old. In the week leading up to boarding the Olds, I remember viewing the prospect of working on a ship with a mixture of dread and uncertainty. I had been very sheltered, growing up in a family that was, I felt, overly protective.
Yet I was also a contradiction. Deep inside me, I yearned for travel, for adventure, but I drew back from new experiences. Perhaps, in a sense, I feared rejection–that I would somehow not measure up to others’ expectations. A kind of trepidation would kick in. I was a moth drawn to and fearful of the proverbial flame. In structured situations, I did well and was comfortable—such as in school, where the expectations were clear and approval for a job well done was always around the corner. But unstructured situations were a whole other thing. They stirred a sense of anxiety. What if I didn’t measure up? What if? What if? And my mind would be off to the races, imagining the worst outcomes possible.
But, miracle of miracles, I had survived that summer on the Olds. Everything had been a blur, but I had survived. I’d done as I’d been told. I’d carried out my duties quietly, obediently. I’d gained a smidgen of confidence. Now, as I prepared to board the Arthur M. Anderson, my anxiety had abated, my introversion had receded. I knew what to expect. I felt more ready to observe, to participate in the life of the Anderson.
A ship, as every seagoing author from Melville to Conrad has observed, is a self-contained and intricate mini-society—in this case, of 33 men. Thirty-three men with their cliques, likes, dislikes, and, in some cases, hatreds. Yet for all 33 souls, the main thing was the care and feeding of the ship. It took all kinds to run a ship. Suffice to say that both Richard Speck and Jack Kerouac had worked as deckhands.
As deckhands, our primary job was to batten down and remove hatches and to handle cables when the ship was pulling into the dock of one of the steel mills. But when we weren’t pulling into or leaving a dock, our other primary responsibility was to care continually for the ship by chipping, sanding, and painting. It was hard work, but I liked it. I liked bending down and feeling the sun and the physical pleasure of driving the chipper into the old coat of paint and prepare the ship for the new coat. It was all about fending off the weather—efforts without which the ship would eventually become a rusty bucket.
I was one of four deckhands, and we were led by the boatswain—or bosun for short—who was primarily responsible for the docking and undocking and chipping and painting. On the Anderson, these men were all unique personalities. Larry was in his forties, with a round face and a round body and a Cheshire-cat smile. But his most salient characteristic was his deformed left hand and forearm. Larry had worked for years on the boats, and he had learned to compensate. Years of compensation had strengthened the muscles of his right hand and arm. When he shook my hand, he squeezed it until I winced. He handled the cables with aplomb, using his right hand to grab the cable and using his weakened left hand to guide the eye of the cable over the mooring.
We four deckhands shared one cabin—a tiny space in which we threw ourselves onto two bunk beds, each with a curtain to draw close to give ourselves some modicum of primacy. In those close quarters, we couldn’t avoid knowing each other’s business. Larry’s business was dirty books. That was his “hobby,” you might say. He opened his locker, and it was filled from floor to top with what you might call literature from the wrong side of town. He bought the books on the bumboat, which was a small vessel that came along the ships when they were docked and sold everything from Coke to cigarettes to the dirty books of which Larry was so enamored. I read a few. These were not Lady Chatterley’s Lover—works of literature with flimsy clothing.
Then there was Buzz–Jim Buzhardt. He was my bunkmate. He had the upper bunk, and I inhabited the lower bunk. He’d done a tour of duty with the U.S. Marine Corps in Vietnam, which was gearing up toward the disaster it would soon become. This was 1967. Now he was working to save money to go to college. Buzz wore an ultra-neat crew cut and a tattoo on his muscular left bicep that displayed the insignia of the Marines. Like Lake Michigan during its calm interludes between storms, his quiet manner sat atop a steely intensity. Buzz introduced me to the poems of Robert W. Service, a British-Canadian poet who wrote about the Yukon and dreams lost and found among the gold mines of the North Country.
The fourth deckhand was Ernie Lundgren. Ernie had eyes like a falcon’s and a mouth that turned down at the end into a perpetual look of displeasure. I came to think of Ernie as the Old Man of the Lakes. He’d worked on the lakes since the 1930s—since the Great Depression. He had always been a deckhand and never wanted anything more. He trained his eyes on those blocks of paint that were starting to fade and scab, and he attacked them with amazing ferocity. The important thing was to chip away the old paint on the deck of the Anderson so that we could give the ship a fresh new coat of paint to protect it from the unceasing elements. I sometimes wondered how much paint the Anderson absorbed in a year. It must have been hundreds of buckets—maybe even thousands! I wondered if Ernie were married. It was impossible to know. Ernie hardly ever talked.
Frank Bruno was the bosun—our boss. The most notable thing about Frank’s physical appearance was his skin. It was ridged and soil-brown and beaten into submission by the sun and the rain and the snow. His belly was large and firm, his arms thick and beefy. On the second day after we left Gary on our way to Duluth, we were painting a portion of the deck with the distinctive red-brown color of the U.S. Steel fleet. Frank stared down at me as I applied the paint. “Nice work,” he finally said, “but not much of it. You ain’t Picasso or Rembrandt. Let’s pick up the pace!” I got the message.
That night, in the deckhands’ cabin, Larry, Buzz, Ernie, and I played poker. One of my suitcases served as the table on which we played. The game moved rapidly. If I was slow to state my bet, the three older men yelled at me to hurry the hell up! Larry and Buzz each had a small flask of whiskey that they sucked on, even though alcohol was strictly prohibited on board and was cause for immediate termination if it came to the attention of one of the officers. Larry and Ernie smoked, and soon the smoke had formed a thick, claustrophobic cloud. Buzz and I coughed and waved the smoke out of our faces. The three men played hurriedly, obsessively, even desperately.
The ante was a dollar. As the evening unrolled, Buzz won and Larry lost. After a couple of hours, Buzz was up a hundred dollars or more, and Larry was down the same amount. With each losing hand, Larry groaned. He cursed his cards. He looked at my small pile of winnings—about twenty bucks. He shook his head at how a dumb, stupid, naïve college kid could be outplaying him.
When it was Larry’s deal, he used his good right hand and his malformed left hand to shuffle dexterously and deal rapidly. He smoked Camel after Camel. Unfiltered. He wiped the sweat that rolled down his forehead like drops of acid. “Crap!” he exclaimed after losing yet another hand. He slammed his cards down on the suitcase. He looked at the others, his eyes yellow.
By the third hour of the game, the atmosphere turned poisonous. Larry and Buzz were on the verge of being drunk. The cloud of cigarette smoke hung over the four of us like a stink bomb. After each loss, Larry threw down his cards. The beads of sweat on his forehead dripped into his eyes. Ernie said they should quit. Larry said, “No goddam way, not till I get my money back!”
After one more loss, Larry slammed his cards on the suitcase so hard that it made me jump. Larry looked at the neat pile of singles and fives and tens gathered like succulent sheep in front of Buzz. He stared at Buzz with evil eyes. Suddenly he shouted at Buzz, “Yer cheatin’! Yer dealin’ from the bottom!”
“I’m not cheating, and you’re drunk out of your mind!” Buzz said. I could see Buzz tighten his fists.
“Yera bastard!” Larry shouted. Suddenly he reached out and grasped the front of Buzz’s shirt. “Give me my goddam money back!”
“Shove it up your ass!” Buzz squirmed out of Larry’s grasp and pulled his fist back and glared at Larry. “You’re so damn drunk you don’t know what you’re saying.”
Larry got up and started to lunge at Buzz.
Ernie shot out his arm and pushed Larry back into his chair. He shoved his face up close to Larry’s and said in a low voice, “He ain’t cheating. The fact is–you’re drunk! Get ahold of yourself, for God’s sake!” Larry stared through the prism of alcohol at Ernie. I could see that he was afraid of Ernie. Larry turned away from Ernie and stared at the bunk next to where he was sitting. Ernie said, “Go out on deck and cool off for God’s sake.” He looked at Buzz and me. “This game is officially over.”
Buzz shook his head and loosened up his fists. “What a jerk,” he murmured.
Larry tottered out of the cabin and slammed the door. “He’ll cool off,” Ernie said. “I better go out there and make sure he don’t fall overboard or some damn thing.”
The next day, we deckhands were painting. We were always painting. Larry and Buzz refused to work together. After one day of their refusal to work together, Frank came into the deckhands’ cabin and motioned to both of them to follow him. After about half an hour, they both returned. For the rest of the evening, they didn’t look at each other. They didn’t talk to each other. Larry slammed his curtain shut and read his dirty books. Buzz rambled out on deck and smoked and stared at the encroaching nightfall. The next day, Frank told Larry and Buzz to work together on painting the smokestack. Larry held the ladder while Buzz climbed up and painted. They didn’t exchange a word. Not a word. But gradually they got the job done—painted the entire lower half of the smokestack until it gleamed under the sun. They did the job, all for the care and feeding of the Anderson.
One night, soon after the poker game, I saw Buzz alone out on deck. The sun was sinking in a blaze of glory toward the horizon in the west and lighting up the sky with bands of purple and red and orange that streamed across the sky. Buzz leaned against the cable that ran the length of the ship. I walked up to him. Buzz nodded at the sinking sun and the blazing sky and said, “She’s a beauty, isn’t she?”
We leaned together on the cable, each with one leg up on the bottom cable. Buzz turned to me and surreptitiously slipped a flask out of his front pocket and offered it to me. “Here,” he said. “Have a snort.” As furtively as possible, I put the flask to my lips and drank. The whiskey burned its way down my throat and threw flames into my belly. I coughed. I looked at Buzz and said, “Larry sure was a jerk that night—the poker night.”
Buzz snaked a snort of his own out of the flask and looked at the blazing orange and red ribbons that dragooned across the sky. “Oh,” he said, “these things happen. He just had too much to drink. He’s not a bad guy. Frank did the right thing to make us work together after that happened. You can’t let things like that fester. It’s not good for the sake of the ship if you let things fester like that. That’s what makes Frank a good boss. He knows what he’s doing.”
I looked at Buzz. I envied his self-assurance, his air that he knew exactly what was what. He looked at me and said, “Kid, you’re coming along, you know. You probably don’t even know it, but you’ve learned a lot of stuff out here that’ll do you good.” I knew it was true. I’d been on the Anderson for a month now, and I’d started to absorb the ways of the ship. It was more than painting or handling cables. It was learning secrets about the way things worked, the ways people worked. I’d learned to take soundings, or measuring the amount of water in the tanks of the ship. Frank had let me handle the winches, which controlled the cables, while he watched. I’d learned to handle the thick hoses efficiently when we were cleaning the hold after the Hulett shovels at Gary had scooped up the iron ore and transported it to the steel mills. “I hated it the first few weeks,” I said, “but now I kind of like it. I like Frank and Ernie. I’ve even gotten used to Larry.”
“Him and his dirty books,” Buzz said with a chuckle. He shook his head. “You know, a guy like that–with that hand of his, you know–he’s done all right. He’s had to deal with a lot of stuff in his life. That night of the poker, I was ready to knock him on his ass. That was wrong. I lost my cool, mostly because I had a little too much out of this here flask. I lost my cool, and I shouldn’t have done that. I was mad at myself after that. That is the big thing they drive into you when you first get in the Marines—don’t lose your cool.”
Buzz paused. “I don’t exactly feel sorry for the man. Another thing I learned in the Marines is that it doesn’t do any good to feel sorry for other people. But I know it’s been pretty tough for him over the years. You’ll notice that he doesn’t have too many buddies out here on this boat.” He paused. “That’s what I’ve noticed out here,” he continued. “A lot of these sailors—they don’t really have friends, even though they work and live together all the time.”
“I noticed that, too” I said. I paused and then asked, “Are you going to stay on the boats?”
“Hell no. I’m saving every nickel I can out here. I’ve got the G.I. Bill, so the government will pay for me to go to school. I’m going to go to the University of Minnesota, and I’m going to major in business. And then I’m going to start a business of some kind. I don’t know what it’ll be, but I know that’s what I’ll do. I was only 18 when I signed up for the Marines, and the only thing I wanted was to get away from home and make something of myself. I didn’t have a plan when I went into the Marines. But gradually I learned. I learned that I’m not especially in love with taking orders. I want to run things. You know, I could start a painting business or something related to computers—they’re going to be big. But whatever it is, I’m gonna learn everything I can about running a business. I’m gonna be like a sponge.”
I stared at Buzz. I’d never heard anyone be so definite. Buzz’s dream was like a tree in a forest that you could wrap your arms around. The dream surrounded Buzz and somehow made him more real. I stared at Buzz and felt myself so unformed, so directionless.
“So what do you think about that, eh?” Buzz grinned. “I’m a man with a plan. And if that doesn’t turn out–well, I’ll think of something else to do!” We laughed together and took swigs from Buzz’s handy flask and threw our laughs overboard into the surrounding waters.
That evening, after supper, I walked onto the deck of the Anderson. To the east, I could see, miles away, a stretch of sand, yellow-white against the stark blue sky. This, I would later learn, was Sleeping Bear Dunes in Michigan. The dunes were 300 feet high, but from this distance of many miles, it was a tiny strip. The Anderson moved inexorably north, and the dune slowly slipped into the distance. It had been there, and now it was disappearing. The crew was being propelled forward, and in the meantime, the earth was spinning on its axis.
The next morning, Frank took me aside and said he wanted to talk to me before we started work that day. I stared at Frank, who wore the years in deep crevasses that crawled across his face. Frank’s nose bent down like a broken golf club, and his skin had absorbed the rays of the sun and transmogrified them into thick, tough leather. Behind Frank’s rough and weathered exterior, though, his eyes were steady. He looked at me and said, “Young feller, do you have a radio?”
“Aye, sir.”
“Does it get a strong signal?”
I nodded.
“Well, every morning, I want you to turn on that radio and get the sporting news and the regular news, and I want you to pour a cup of fresh coffee and bring it to me and give me as good a rundown on the day’s news as you can.” This would mean carrying Frank’s coffee the length of the ship because Frank’s cabin was toward the bow of the Anderson. “Do you think you can handle that, young feller?”
I nodded. The next morning, I did as Frank had asked. I listened to the radio for a bit, ate breakfast, poured a cup of coffee for Frank, and transported it to him.
When I opened the door to Frank’s cabin, it was like entering a home away from home. Frank had curtains over the porthole that looked out onto Lake Michigan. He had a matching bedspread. On his dresser stood neatly arranged photographs of a woman and a young man and young woman—Frank’s wife and children, I assumed. Frank was sitting in an easy chair in the corner of the cabin when I entered. I handed Frank the cup of coffee, and he said, “Thank you, young feller. Set yourself down.” I sat on a metal chair in front of Frank’s small desk. “So do you like it out here on the lake?” Frank asked.
“I hated it at first. It was so confusing–so overwhelming.”
“That’s good. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.” Frank paused. “I saw you looking at those pictures. Those are my wife, Margaret, and my two children, Frank Jr., and Annette.” He looked at me. “Now tell me about the baseball yesterday.” I knew that Frank was from Minnesota, so I reported that the Twins had beaten the White Sox.
Frank said, “Well, that’s all fine and good. The Twins are loaded. They have Harmon Killebrew and Bob Allison—all these strong guys who can hit the ball a mile. But can they turn a double play? Winning—it’s all in the details. You know what I like about baseball, young feller? It’s pointless. That’s the beauty of it. You have all these wonderful athletes, and you have the beautiful shape of the baseball diamond. It has a magical geometry. And there’s no point to it all! If you win, you don’t inherit a million dollars. If you lose, the world don’t come to an end. There’s no point to it! That’s what makes it beautiful!”
Frank paused for a moment and looked closely at me. “You know,” he said, “I seen something in you. You’re gonna be a good worker, but your mind wanders. You need to learn to—and I mean this in a way meant to be helpful—you need to learn to keep your head in the game, like a ballplayer needs to learn to do.” I nodded. I knew what he meant. He said. “Keep yer eyes open. Yer workin’ on the most precious bodies of water on the earth—the Great Lakes. After yer watch, take a moment to step out on deck and admire their beauty.” He mused for a moment. “And another thing. Yer gonna be criticized out here. I’m gonna criticize you. But don’t take it to heart. We’re just tryin’ to make you better at yer job. It’s all about makin’ the ship work better and takin’ care of the ship so she is seaworthy for a long time far into the future.”
Frank stared at me. “Cuz you see, it’s us against the elements out here. The elements are all tryin’ and strainin’ to destroy this here ship. During a storm—and yer sure to encounter one out here sooner or later—well, I believe in God, but during one of the fearsome storms that come up, especially on Lake Superior, God ain’t gonna protect us, that’s for sure. We gotta do it ourselves. Yer on yer own out here during a storm. So like I said, you gotta keep yer head in the game.” He paused. “Now, do you have any questions for me?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “How long have you been sailing out here on the lakes?”
“Well, I started when I was 19 years old. I was just out of high school. But then there was World War II, and I served in the U.S. Navy for the duration. I got out of the service in 1946, and I decided to go back on the lake steamers, and I been here ever since. Twenty-two, twenty-three years, I guess, if you add it all up.” He paused. “Well, listen, he said. “I’m all talked out for one day. So let’s get out there and paint this goddam tub!”
More weeks passed, and then it was my last trip, at the end of which I would leave the Anderson and return to school. We had left Duluth behind and were well into Lake Superior when Frank called us deckhands together and said, “Bad weather report. It’s gonna blow.” To the northeast, the clouds were accumulating and obliterating the sun, and the waves were beginning to rise up in anger. Frank had told me earlier in the summer that we would experience a good blow at least once before I left the Anderson, and this was going to be it.
Normally, when we deckhands tightened the battens that held the hatches in place, we tightened only every other one. But now the four of us went back on deck and secured every batten to take sure that the hatches didn’t slide out of place. That was the greatest danger to the ship–that the terrible forces of the storm would move the hatches and allow water into the hold.
We finished securing the hatches. Frank told us to clear any coiled ropes, stray chippers, or paint brushes off the deck. The waves began to leap at the ship, and I could feel the vessel start to rock back and forth. Frank told me to go to the deckhands’ cabin and make sure nothing was left loose. I grabbed my radio and some other paraphernalia off the dresser and shoved it into one of the drawers. I removed toothpaste and toothbrushes and other toiletries from the head and shoved them into the drawers of the dresser. I closed and tightened the porthole, for water would swamp the cabin otherwise.
I climbed into my bunk. I could hear the anger of the lake, feel the Anderson rocking back and forth, back and forth. I lay in my bunk, waiting, while the other three more experienced deckhands helped Frank secure anything else on the ship that needed securing. I heard the roar of the waves and the attack of lightning and thunder and the scream of the wind as it pelted the Anderson. The Anderson was rolling—five degrees, then ten degrees–tipping inexorably from side to side. I felt bile began to build in my stomach. The other deckhands came in and stripped off their rain gear and retreated to their bunks. Buzz said, “It‘s gonna be hell out there!”
The bile gathered in my belly. I closed my eyes and felt the rolling of the ship and my bunk rising and falling like a chaotic baby’s carriage. I felt the acidic bile churning in my lower intestine. “Oh, my God,” I whimpered. I clutched my pillow as I felt the ship roll back and forth. I felt the bile moving toward my esophagus. “Oh my God, oh my God,” I moaned. The wind attacked the vessel, and the waves rolled the Anderson back and forth, back and forth, and the bile worked its way up through my esophagus. I clamped his eyes shut and grasped the metal undergirding of his bunk bed. I felt the bile enter my throat as the ship careened back and forth.
Suddenly I catapulted myself out of the bunk and half-raced and half-crawled to the head as I felt myself thrown back and forth by the force of the rolling ship. I slammed open the toilet and let loose, coughing, sputtering. I wiped my mouth, tasted the horrendous acidic taste, stood up just enough to be able to look into the mirror. I was ghostly pale—alabaster white—so white that I looked like a corpse. I wanted to be dead! Frank had been right—there was no God during a storm on Lake Superior.
I half-ran, half-fell back to my bunk. At the same time, Buzz leaped out of his bunk and opened up the porthole just enough to see out. Over Buzz’s shoulder, I could see the angry, roiling waves of Lake Superior. The porthole descended as the Anderson rolled deeper toward the waters. The waves were angry, attacking. I knew that the waves were crashing and washing over the bow of the ship. I got up. Ernie screamed at me, “Get back into yer bunk right away!” Ernie yelled at Buzz, “Close that goddam porthole, for Christ’s sake!” Buzz slammed it shut.
Back in my bunk, I was exhausted. I picked the bits from around my mouth and wiped them away with the bandanna in my rear pocket. The ship continued to roll. Tears sprouted in my eyes. Would this never end!? I heard the angry gods pummel the Anderson, slamming it, rocking it back and forth, attacking the steel hull. The gods were angry that the Anderson had ventured into their territory. They were relentless and without mercy. Poseidon roiled the waves with his mighty hands and tossed the waves over the ship. Would the ship crack in two? I sank into fear and felt the pile build up once more in my belly. It was the worse moment of my entire life, and it was never-ending. I staggered to the head again, released again, looked again at my face in the mirror. It was dead-white. Tears crept down my cheeks. I stumbled back to my bunk, clutched my pillow, fought against the bile. There was nothing left in my belly.
Gradually, I felt the Anderson roll a little less, the force of the waves begin to abate, the howl of the wind grow a little less fierce. I clutched my pillow. Disregarding what Ernie had said, Buzz leaped out of his bunk and opened the porthole a crack and looked out onto the angry lake. It was marginally less angry. The rolling was less steep, less sickening. A touch of light punctuated the clouds. The ship kept rolling, but less severely. I clutched my pillow, fought the bile building up in my belly once again. I turned away so that the others would not see me huddling in my bunk. I didn’t want them to see me. I sniffled and clutched my pillow. The ship rolled, but not so severely. The wind roared outside, but less angrily. Poseidon had settled down. He wasn’t so angry any more. The others arose from their bunks.
Buzz grabbed me. “The worst is over,” he said. “Put your rain gear on. Let’s see what the damage is.” We walked down the interior hallway of the aft cabin to the hatch that led out onto the deck. The ship still rolled, but now that I was on my feet, the rolling didn’t seem to affect me so much. Lake Superior was settling down, the rolling less pronounced. We looked out, and we could see the bow of the Anderson cut its way through the thick, gray waves. The Anderson battled its way forward, and it was winning. The hatches protecting the hold had not budged. The battens had stayed secure. The work we had done was good. Water had not seeped into the hold. Buzz put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Fun, eh?”
Larry patted me on the shoulder and said, “Look at it this way, kid. You lost five ugly pounds.” I managed a pathetic chuckle.
As the lake settled down, I retreated to the deckhands’ cabin, threw myself onto my bunk. Almost immediately, I fell asleep. I slept through the night as the Anderson made it way to the Soo Locks at Sault Ste. Marie—the locks that led from Lake Superior to Lake Huron.
The next morning, Buzz grabbed my big toe and shook it until I woke up. “Time to go to work!” he said. “We’ll be going through the Soo locks soon!” We walked out onto the deck, and Frank propelled Buzz and me onto the dock on the bosun’s chair. We threw the eye of each cable over a mooring and watched as the ship was slowly lowered to bring it to the level of St. Marys River, which would lead into Lake Huron.
Overlooking the locks was an observation deck, filled with spectators. I regarded them. I remembered when I had made my first trip through the locks, and I had desperately wished that I’d been among the spectators watching the men on the Anderson do their work. In three months, things had changed. I was part of the crew of the Anderson. I felt apart from those spectators. The world of the Anderson had absorbed me in those three months. I was an integral part of the ship. I knew that in two more days, I would be leaving the ship, and I felt bittersweet. The things that had happened, the men I had lived with and worked with for three months—they had become part of who I was. I felt myself different in some way that I could not articulate but that felt as real and solid as the deck of the Anderson. This thing—sailing—had gotten into my bones in some mysterious way. The ways of the ship had infiltrated my psyche. I felt different from the spectators now–part of a separate world that had slowly accepted me and changed me. I’d become part of something larger than myself—a mission to care for the Anderson and preserve and protect it.
Two days later, the Anderson drew near Gary, where the giant Hulett shovels would dig the iron ore out of the bowels of the ship and dump it into railroad cars that would transport the ore to the insatiable steel mills. I ate my breakfast and, for the last time, transported a cup of coffee to Frank. He was waiting for me. He said, “So, it’s your last day on the Anderson. You’re abandoning us to our fates, eh?” He grinned at me. I happened to look at the three photographs on Frank’s dresser. “Do you remember their names?” Frank asked.
“Yes, sir,” I answered. “Margaret, your wife; your daughter, Annette; and your soon, Frank Jr. What do your children do now, Frank?”
“Oh, they have their own lives, as children have a habit of doing. Annette is married and has two children, and she teaches third grade in a small town in western Minnesota. Frank, Jr., works for an engineering firm in Minneapolis.” Frank lifted himself from his easy chair and walked over to the dresser and picked up each photograph and looked at it. The crevasses that crisscrossed his face looked deeper than ever, and his eyes were hooded by the accumulated years. He looked at me and shook his head ever so slightly. He said, “I missed things when they were growing up. I made it to their graduations and weddings and all the important stuff. But being out here, I missed the day-to-day stuff—wiping their noses, playing ball, that kind of thing. Margaret basically raised them.” I looked at him—at the deep lines in his leathery skin and the aging eyes. “In many ways, it’s a good life,” Frank murmured. He paused. “But it can be a lonely life.”
For the last time, I rode the Anderson into Gary. Each of the men I had worked with that summer—Frank and Buzz and Larry and Ernie—shook my hand and wished me the best. Even Larry said, “You done a good job this summer, kid.” I felt more strongly than I had ever felt that something bound me to each of these four men.
I descended the ladder and stood on the dock and looked up at the enormous Hulett shovels unload ore from the Anderson. The operator, sitting in a cab above the shovel, catapulted the shovel forward on a track until the shovel stood directly over one of the open hatches. He released the shovel, sent it plunging into the hold, and I heard the shovel close, grasping hundreds of pounds of iron ore. The operator raised the shovel and drove backwards and released the ore into a waiting freight car. I turned, and a cab was waiting to carry me into Gary and the South Shore Railroad station, where I would catch a train for Chicago. As I rode in the cab through the fantastic chaos of the steel mill, the memories of the summer burrowed into me–memories so powerful that infiltrated my bones and my muscles and pounded through my veins.//
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I’m a writer based in the Chicago area. I’ve done a lot of different stuff in my life. I’ve been a merchant seaman, a high school English teacher, a corporate communications writer, a textbook editor, an educational consultant, and a free-lance writer. I’ve published short stories, articles, and essays in The Progressive, Snowy Egret, Earth Island Journal, Chicago Wilderness, American Forests, and other journals and magazines.
In 2006, the University of New Hampshire Press published my first book, This Grand and Magnificent Place: The Wilderness Heritage of the White Mountains. My second book, which I co-authored with a prominent New Hampshire forester named David Govatski, was Forests for the People: The Story of America’s Eastern National Forests, published by Island Press in 2013.
https://amzn.to/3Utt44E
About the Author
