Essays of E. B. White (30 page)

In those northern waters in 1923, Captain Lane guided the
Buford
much in the manner of early aviators: he flew by the seat of his pants. Approaching Kodiak, we ran into thick weather. All afternoon the ship crept blindly through a cold, drizzly fog. We felt obliged to make Kodiak because we had a passenger to discharge, and for the newborn Alaskan-Siberian Navigation Company the discharge of even one passenger was an event of considerable moment, tending to add luster and credibility to the trip. The passenger in this case was an Airedale terrier, but that didn't diminish the matter. With visibility close to zero, the skipper became unsure of his position, and his uncertainty was magically transmitted to the passengers. I heard a couple of ladies nervously ask an officer whether we shouldn't just drop anchor and wait for the weather to clear. (This would probably have been one of the longest sea waits on record.) After a while, a fishing boat appeared under our bow, its crew gave us our position by shouting and pointing, and away we went on an altered course. Captain Lane went ashore that night after a hard day at the chart table. He did not get back to the ship till late. I was called to his cabin at three in the morning to clear away glasses and bottles. I find the following entry, written an hour earlier:

This entry bears the telltale mark of a writer at work. The sixth sentence first read, “At any rate he hasn't appeared for his coffee yet,” and I edited it, crossing out the word “yet,” which was a sensible move, rhetorically, and shows that I was working away at a hard trade at a late hour. Wilbur, he who dozed, was also a diarist, although I didn't know it at the time. Two night saloonsmen, both of them diarists—a strange, unearthly ship in a strange, cold sea! A portion of Wilbur's d iary is now in my possession. His widow recently sent it to me—a tiny notebook crammed with loathing for the menial life. “No more of this ‘working your way' stuff—if I can't go first class I stay at home.” Wilbur's urge to restore himself to a decent place in society was as compelling as my own urge to make my way farther down in the ship, sink to the depths and try the rapture of human dereliction and drudgery.

My next entry is a poem called “Lament.” It begins:

        Millions of songs are knocking round, back and forth, inside my head: songs of praise and of wonder. But I can not give birth even to one song.

An odd statement. I was giving birth almost continuously, like a hamster. None of the songs had any merit, but there was no lack of parturition.

The passengers' disappointment with the Territory of Alaska was often quite apparent. Dutch Harbor, our next stop, did nothing to lift their spirits. A few deserted houses, a family of Indians, a sow and her three young ones—hardly a place made to order for San Francisco ladies bent on sightseeing. I went ashore and followed a muddy path over a small hill and sat down in the grass where I could look across at Unalaska. This village, seen from that distance, was a picture-book place—a single row of white frame buildings, one of them a little Greek Orthodox church with two green onion spires. Behind the town, rising out of the sea in soft and billowing folds, were green treeless hills draped in swirls of drifting fog. They seemed incredibly lofty and massive, those hills—a backdrop for a dream sequence. I wanted desperately to visit Unalaska, but was not free to go, since I had duties on board.

While I sat there, staring, two ladies from the
Buford
came along and stopped in front of me.

“Is there anything over there worth seeing?” one of them asked, thinking I had been there. “From here, it looks to me as if it was pretty dead. If there's something special about that church, I want to go on, but otherwise, if there isn't anything special, I don't care about going. Do you, Kate?”

Kate shook her head. The two of them seemed ineffably sad and uprooted.

I told them I hadn't been to Unalaska but guessed there was nothing special. And on that report they turned listlessly back toward the ship.

Later on, I contrived to get over to the village; a boy in a small boat ferried me across. By some standards, the place could have been called dead, but, walking the length of Unalaska at the foot of the green, tumbled hills, alone and wonder-struck, I felt more alive than I had ever felt before in my life. I was about as far west as a man could conveniently get on this continent, I was a long, long way from home, songs of praise knocked in my head, and I felt a gush of exhilaration. Added to my cup of pleasure was the knowledge that when I returned to the ship I could go to bed instead of having to work all night; my job had changed abruptly. For the remainder of the voyage, I was to be messboy to the firemen.

At dawn that day, the second steward, my boss, had appeared in the pantry, where I was deep in dishes. “You can knock off,” he said. ‘Tomorrow I'm putting you on as firemen's messboy—take care of eight men, firemen's mess, and you won't need the white coat. We'll sign you on the articles at fifty a month.”

Although the second did not mention it, I had heard rumors of a fight below in the ship—someone had got knifed—and I was reasonably certain that my new job was connected with this affair. I figured I was the replacement for the knifee. This turned out to be correct. At any rate, I obeyed orders; I went to my room, fished my old flannel shirt and dirty trousers from my bag, and turned in, wondering why I was to receive fifty dollars for feeding eight people when I had been receiving nothing but my passage for feeding about thirty. I knew there was a catch in it somewhere, but I dropped off to sleep. At six the following morning, I reported for work. This was the true beginning of the voyage for me; I was below at last, where the ship's heartbeat was audible and her body odor undispersed.

Why did I long to be below? I don't know. I just remember that I did and that this descent seemed a difficult but necessary step up life's ladder. The whole Alaskan experience was a subconscious attempt to escape from the world, to put off whatever was in store for me; the farther down inside a ship I went, the better the hiding place. Moreover, I wanted to test myself—throw myself into any flame that was handy, to see if I could stand the heat.

The firemen's messroom proved to be a dandy crucible. No young man could have asked for a more direct exposure to heat, fumes, toil, and trouble. The room was small and rank-smelling, with a porthole a few feet above the waterline. When I close my eyes these days and think of Alaska, the picture always comes to me in a round frame, for I viewed much of our future forty-ninth state through the porthole of the firemen's mess, and the picture has a special smell—a blend of cabbage, garbage, steam, filth, fuel oil, engine oil, exhausted air, exhausted men. It is a smell you get nowhere but in a ship.

At one end of the room was a warming table through which live steam passed, a little of it always escaping in whispers and causing the room to overheat. In the center stood the mess table, flanked by two benches. On the side away from the porthole were a sink, a garbage can, and our shrine—the coffee urn. This urn was hooked up to the ship's steam lines. It had an intake valve, an exhaust valve, and a glass gauge in which the coffee slowly rose and fell with the motion of the ship. I soon learned to tell the
Buford
's angle of heel by glancing at my gauge. Filth set the tone of the room, and the smell was steady and reliable. Filth had accumulated in subtle ways: bits of tired soap stashed away in tin cans, morsels of rotten meat tucked between the pipes overhead, slices of raisin bread that had been deflowered and left to die, cheese that had been placed in safekeeping behind the urn—everywhere trinkets and keepsakes. The former messboy, like so many millions of people on land and on sea, had saved against a rainy day. It was easy to see why the firemen had taken matters into their own hands, finally, and brought his regime to a bloody close. But I think untidiness was only part of the story.

As I stood there on an empty stomach at six o'clock on that first morning and received my instructions from the second steward, I felt dizzy, sick, and scared. The instructions were sketchy, and the second acted as though he wanted to get away while I was still conscious and willing. He told me I was to carry the firemen's grub down from the main galley, serve it, clean up afterward, make the bunks in the forecastle, empty the garbage into a chute in the ship's side, keep the coffee always fresh and hot, keep the toilets clean, and do what the men said. “You take care of them—you do what they tell you,” he said. “I'm still your boss, and if you get into any bad trouble, let me know. But they're the ones you have to satisfy.” Then he introduced me curtly to my opposite number, a Puerto Rican youth named Luis, who was the sailors' messboy, and who would show me the ropes. The second then departed. I don't recall that he ever showed up again in the small world I now inhabited.

Luis was a twitchy youth swathed in a long, dirty sweater dangling to his knees. He had two eyes, but only one of them was on duty; the other peered straight ahead into another—and, I think, better—world.

“What job you come from?” he asked.

“Night saloon,” I answered.

“Ahhh! Then you know how to steal. That is good.” He seemed vastly relieved. My men, he explained, would expect delicacies of obtainable only by the light-fingered.

Being shown the ropes by Luis turned out to be a dizzying experience—like being taught to fly a plane by a bright child. “Come ong, boy!” he said, and started out on the run, singing “Rock of Ages” in Spanish. Luis was evanescent, volatile, and loaded with interesting fancies and misconceptions, many of which did not pertain to the mess. He thought seals could fly, and he thought Harding had just been married, not buried. Steam valves mystified and excited him, and he couldn't keep his hands off them. As he scampered here and there, with me tagging along, he warned me about the low state to which I had fallen. The black gang, he said, were the lowest bunch in the ship, and I would be their servant, which made me low man. He described the firemen as having conceits and passions that were incredibly irregular and troublesome. And he warned me about the language in the messroom and forecastle. “Gee, boy,” he said sorrowfully, “they use awfool language. Sonna mon beetsch, it is terrible the way they talk, those bastards.”

I wasn't worried about any naughty words I might hear, but I had other worries. I knew I was a lamb set down among wolves, and I was greatly concerned lest the firemen, my masters, remember my face as belonging to first class and find out about my past, which was too dainty for a messroom. I was marred by gentility and stained with education. Worst of all, I had come aboard first class, and, thanks to the caprice of the second steward, I still occupied part of a first-class cabin. I knew well enough that these incriminating facts would have to be concealed if I were to survive. I felt like a man who had committed some monstrous crime in the past, one he will have to live down by good conduct. Stealing seemed my golden chance to redeem myself from my early infamy. I determined to be very brave and steal carefully and well. I decided to do my work, give good service, and keep my trap shut. My assets were that I was wearing a two-day beard and clothes that bore the clear imprint of toil.

The first breakfast was crucial and was served in a dense cloud of live steam. Luis had flipped the valves of my coffee urn in passing, the urn had erupted, and the room had become a Turkish bath. I could barely see the men's faces through the murk, blackened and stained as they were with engine-room oil and dirt. But they couldn't see mine, either, which was a break. They complained angrily about the steam bath, and when they found a new boy serving them, their curiosity was aroused, and I was required to answer questions and fill them in on my past. This I did in broad strokes, using place names and dismal events, always derogatory to management. Everywhere I had worked I had got fired, I said. The men were pleased with this familiar indignity, and they loved place names. (I was well fixed for names, as I had spent the previous summer crossing the continent, working at odd jobs.) In Cody, I said, I had sandpapered an open-air dance floor all day for a lousy three bucks. In Minneapolis, I had peddled roach powder, door to door. In Big Timber, I had worked as a hay hand. And everywhere I had got sacked. This was my simple card of admission. Sight unseen, the men hated all my past employers. I was now their boy. As I dodged about, dishing up oatmeal and trying to subdue the urn, my courage began to return. After the first loud outburst, the men settled into a dull guzzle and the question period came to an end. One or two of the faces looked positively amiable. Two of my fellows, I later found out, had been in jail, which I regarded as adventurous and laudable, and one of them was suffering from a venereal disease, which I found disquieting and worrisome. The memory of the famous Army film
Fit to Fight
was still fresh, and I assumed that I would soon contract the disease merely from using the same cutlery.

My name, I discovered, was Mess. “Get me an orange tonight, Mess!” one of the wipers said as he left the room after my debut. I knew from the sound of his voice that this was a direct order. I perceived, too, that the wiper was less interested in the sweetness of an orange than in the sweetness of having a personal servant to bedevil. Below decks, fresh fruit was not part of the diet; to get an orange, you had to either grow one or steal one. In the days that followed, I learned to pinch goodies at the source, or from staterooms with their doors left open. This was part of the routine at sea. I became a floating Robin Hood, providing my men with delicacies by robbing the rich. It was part of the stratagem of survival, theirs and mine, and I laid my snares for a dill pickle as artfully as a trapper for a mink. The men themselves were not unreasonable. While I was carrying out my first assignment, I was in a cold sweat, fearing that the sight of one orange in the messroom might lead to a demand for oranges right across the board. This proved not to be the case. My firemen did not crowd their luck. And except in rough weather, when their deranged stomachs caused them to delve into the vast lore of seasick remedies and dreams of miracle cures effected by combining the most rare and unlikely substances, they asked of me only tasks I could humanly perform. Thanks to my former job in the saloon, I had valuable contacts in vital supply centers. In Wilbur Wolf I had an actual confederate, who saved odds and ends from the night buffet and turned them over to me as slyly as though we were pushing dope. Never knowing when a fireman would strike, I kept goodies always on hand in a hiding place by my bunk, as a man in rattler country keeps a snake-bite kit at the ready.