I’m a chump for a boat ride. If it’s around the bend, or around the world, I’ll line up for it. I would have probably boarded the Titanic in Liverpool even if I knew it was going to hit an iceberg. That’s how obsessed I am.
I love the smell of salt air; the sight of sea gulls soaring in the sun; the wind in my face; the sound of diesel engines throttled down to cruising speed; the promise of far horizons. I’m not knowledgeable about our current Navy, but my anecdotal impression is that today’s sailor doesn’t have the opportunity to travel that we had in the 1950’s and 60’s. I know I had been to over 20 countries by the time I was 20 years old. Of course, I enlisted at 17 on a so-called “kiddie cruise,” with the agreement that I would be discharged on my 21st birthday and still ended up a “lifer,” staying in the Navy for 36 years.
I was in the minority. Most of my contemporaries were “short timers,” counting the days until they could be discharged and return to the “world.” Instead of dodging ships and sea duty, as many did, I sought them out and was “in” for anything that was “floating and smoking,” or as we liked to say, “haze gray and underway. “Consequently, I ended up with over 22 years at sea and ashore in more than 100 countries. I don’t know that these experiences made me any smarter or a better person – but they sure did put a “faraway look” into my eyes.
I’m sitting here on the balcony of my rented condo at Orange Beach, Alabama, and what caused me to start thinking about going to back to sea, other than the view of the Gulf’s blue waters and that old freighter, slowly working its way across the horizon, was a dinner cruise last night on the SS Perdido Queen, over in Mobile. They say that a criminal always goes back to the scene of the crime – and I guess that you could say that a sailor will always go back to a ship, even if it’s just a cut-down version of a classic Mississippi River sternwheel river boat putting around Mobile harbor.
While I went just for the ride, the food was good, and we found ourselves in the middle of a murder mystery in the fictional town of Murder Creek, acted out by the Bay Cities Improv Company. I ate my jambalaya as I watched my fellow passengers being accused of murder while trying to avoid the trumped-up charges myself. To be honest, I paid more attention to the passing scenery outside the boat’s windows than I did the unfolding murder plot: the sparkling of city lights on the water, the flash of welder’s torches from the port’s around-the-clock shipyards; the occasional passing of tugboats pushing long, unlighted barges to destinations farther up the Mobile River. It’s hard to visualize the extent of the port and its facilities from the interstate highway.
But, after all, Mobile was a primary port of the Confederacy and a destination of many blockade runners. The Battle of Mobile Bay, in 1864, which took place a little farther out to sea, between Forts Morgan and Gaines, made the reputation of Union admiral, David G. Farragut, who, during the battle, had himself tied to the main mast of his flagship, the USS Hartford, and who uttered those famous words: “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” In any event, the “Perdido Queen” is a “two thumbs up” cruise. It sails nightly from Water Street alongside the Convention Center in the middle of downtown.
It’s odd, sitting here, that I seem to remember the short trips, the brief excursions at sea, about as well as I do the eight-month, around-the-world deployments. For example, while I was on a ship that was undergoing overhaul at Mare Island Naval Shipyard in San Francisco, I decided to take the tour out to Alcatraz federal prison, as much for the boat ride as for anything else. Although closed in 1963, it’s still a foreboding place, a cluster of drab buildings atop a pile of rocks on a barren island in San Francisco Bay, appearing much like the military fortress it originally was. On that small tour boat, one could certainly get an idea of the swift sea currents that characterize the waters of the bay, which are the basis of the government’s claim that “no one ever escaped from Alcatraz.” The Golden Gate Bridge is off in the near distance, and I always enjoyed sailing underneath the span because it’s a different perspective of the bridge than the average person ever sees. On the other hand, it was always more enjoyable to look up at it coming home than it was going out to sea and to who knows where for seven or eight months at a time.
I remember more about the boat’s departure from Fisherman’s Wharf that day, in the shadow of the old, abandoned Garibaldi chocolate factory, than I do of the tour itself, other than seeing the small cell where Al Capone spent almost five years. There was an indigenous Peruvian reed flute/pan pipe band on the pier, playing music from the Andes, and their rendition of “El Candor Pasa” has stuck with me much longer than Simon and Garfunkel’s. My visit to Alcatraz was, of course, long before the 1969 “Red Power” occupation of the island by Russel Means and other Native Americans. They were protesting the violation of the “Treaty of Fort Laramie” (1868) which gave the Lakota Sioux “all federal land in South Dakota that was retired, abandoned, or out of use.” The government finally broke up the seven-month occupation, causing one accidental death. The “Indians” still want their land.
When another ship of mine was in dry dock in the Boston Naval Shipyard, I took a bus driver’s holiday, an afternoon tour of Boston Harbor. It was in the news as, only as few days before, Delta Flight 723 had just crashed into a harbor seawall while on final approach into Logan Airport with the loss of 88 of the 89 passengers aboard. It’s a compact harbor, and one can see many famous Revolutionary War-era landmarks from the water: the Old North Church, after all, that’s supposedly where Paul Revere arranged to have a signal lamp lit – one lantern if the British were coming by land and two lanterns if they were coming by sea – and began to make preparations for his ride to alert the local militias and citizens for the impending attack; the Bunker Hill Monument, commending a lost battle but which did prove that the patriots could hold their own against a professional British army; the USS Constitution (“Old Ironsides,” so named, because it was impervious to enemy cannonballs), the Navy’s oldest commissioned ship, which only goes to sea once a year when it is turned around at its pier; and even the tony residential area of Beacon Hill, or “Nob Hill,” as it is known locally. This is the home of the “Brahmins,” or the upper-class Bostonians who have dominated city life since our nation’s independence. The local ditty goes something like this:
And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the
Cod,
Where the Lowells speak only to
Cabots,
And the Cabots speak only to God.
This boat tour was in 1973. I had been on another ship in the Charlestown shipyard, a suburb of Boston, back in 1963, and on Sundays when I didn’t have to chip paint, I would ride the MTA (subway) over to Tremont Temple Baptist Church, by the Boston Common, to attend Sunday School. My motives were not entirely religious. If you know Boston, you know that the Common (a large public park) is right across the Charles River from Harvard College, and the Sunday School class I attended was full of Harvard students. I attended the class every week primary just to sit on the back row and listen to those super smart students talk. It was a different world than the one I had been in all week. Although it’s not a historical site as such, the church is on the path of the “red brick trail” that tourists follow all over town to visit the famous historical places.
I don’t even have to get underway to be happy, if there’s a ship involved. It can be tied up at the pier and I’m content. A ship of mine was in the Long Beach, California, Naval Shipyard, and I decided to spend the night on the famous Cunard Ocean liner, Queen Mary, now a luxury hotel, which was permanently tied up a few hundred yards away. Frankly, the long silent corridors down in the bowels of the ship seemed a little creepy. In fact, it’s rumored to be haunted with the ghosts of GIs who didn’t make it home from the war after it was converted to a troop ship during World War II. I didn’t see any specters, but my favorite place on the ship was the lounge just over the fantail frequented by Prime Minister Winston Churchill on his several trips to the States from England to confer with President Roosevelt during the war. Seems like I did smell his cigar smoke, but I guess it was my imagination.
Although it has now been moved to a museum in McMinnville, Oregon, Howard Hughes’ “Spruce Goose” airplane was then on display, for a nominal fee, on the pier alongside the Queen Mary. Only 13 feet shorter than a Boeing 747 jet liner, the Spruce Goose was made primarily of wood. Constructed of birch, because of wartime restrictions on the use of aluminum and concerns about weight, the plane had the largest wingspan of any aircraft ever flown until that time. Hughes, working with shipbuilder, Henry J. Kaiser, sold his design to the War Department in 1942 to meet their need to transport large amounts of men and material across the Atlantic to the war zone. The “Goose,” a flying boat, was designed to carry 750 troops. This was during the height of the German U-boat submarine menace, and one solution seemed to be in the air. Unfortunately for Hughes, a perfectionist, design and construction problems delayed the first flight of his plane until 1947, long after the war was over. On its only flight, with Hughes at the controls, it flew about one mile, rising to a height of about 70 feet in Long Beach harbor.
Incidentally, at the nearby shipyard, I also had a long-term mechanical project that I was proud of - rebuilding my first automotive engine, in a 1956 Cadillac Coupe de Ville which I bought down in Tijuana. I must have done a decent job because I later drove it cross country to my next ship in Boston, only breaking down once in Pennsylvania Dutch country when my exhaust manifold came loose. Another random thought: as I think about it, every one of the shipyards that I mentioned above is now closed. If we have another major war, and need our ships repaired, it remains to be seen where we will send them.
Several have asked about the “internet radio” that I mentioned in my last column. It is a neat piece of simple electronic equipment, like an ordinary, tabletop radio, that syncs up with the internet in your home. My radio, an old Korean-made Sangean WFR-20, will pick up any radio station in the world that also broadcasts its signal on the internet – reportedly around 25,000. My radio, like most, then breaks the signals down by country. For example, if you wanted to listen to stations in Greece, you just scroll to “Europe,” and then “Greece,” and then to any to the 18 stations that are available. I notice that good internet radios are now on sale on Amazon for around $120.
Maybe it’s because I drank the water at Camp Lejeune, but I seem to have filled up the blank spaces in my life with boat trips, long ones and short ones: the Perdido Queen, an overnight cruise from San Diego to Ensenada, Mexico, on a derelict ocean liner scheduled to be broken up the next day; mindlessly riding the Bremerton, Washington, to Seattle, car ferry back and forth across Puget Sound; doing the same thing on the Mississippi River ferry from New Orleans over to Algiers when I was a teenager; and countless such trips overseas. All my life, it seems like I’ve been looking for what was on the other side, and maybe playing checkers while the rest of the world played chess but – in the long run - no matter where you go, it’s ok, as long as you eventually come back. Remember: the world is round. If you go far enough away, you will be headed home.
Light a candle for me.
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Benny Hornsby of Oak Grove is a retired U.S. Navy captain. Visit his website, bennyhornsby.com, or email him: villefranche60@yahoo.com.
