Safe from the Sea (10 page)

“And Jan hated to be blind,” Olaf continued. “I mean, we knew exactly where we were and where we were heading, but when you can’t see your hand in front of your face and you’re putting up with the hell we were, you have a tendency to get a little hot. At least Jan did.

“He had a guy at every position every minute of that cruise—a man at the wheel, a man at the radar, a man at the compass, a man on the charts—it was like watching an orchestra. Jan would say, ‘My heading?’ and the watchman at the gyrocompass would say, ‘Four five, sir,’ and Jan would say, ‘Speed?’ and a voice would say, ‘Eight knots steady, sir,’ and Jan would boom again, ‘Is it clear?’ and the wheelsman at the radar would say, ‘Clear, sir,’ and Jan, ‘Position?’ and the wheelsman at the chart, ‘Captain, we are at such and such latitude and longitude, sir,’ and Jan, ‘How much water have I got between me and that goddamn island?’ and the wheelsman at the radar would say, ‘Sir, Isle Royale six point zero seven nautical miles bearing one hundred and forty-one degrees,’ and the wheelsman at the chart would settle it all, ‘Six point zero nautical miles to shoal water, sir.’ ” Olaf related the whole pilothouse episode as if he were a conductor himself, raising and wagging his fingers.

Noah, his heart actually beating a little faster, was sitting on the edge of the sofa. “And the water is coming over your deck and it’s snowing like the end of the world . . .”

“And in the middle of it all, roaming from the charts to the compass to the wheel, Jan would take each piece of information and plug it into his internal calculator and come up with some goddamn equation the sum of which dictated every move he made. And despite his aggravation at being blind, despite that
goddamn
lake and the wind like a hurricane, he still managed it all without a hitch. I don’t think he ever even spilled any of his coffee.”

Noah stood up and stretched his arms above his head. He felt boyish, nearly giddy in the thrall of the story. “What about the rest of the crew?”

This question seemed to sober Olaf. “The crew? They were just a bunch of anybodies. With the exception of guys like Jan and Luke, they were just men and boys.”

For the first time since Noah had arrived at his father’s house, he called up the picture in the museum, the one of the whole crew dockside with the
Rag
in the background. Although he could not summon a single face clearly, he could recall the apathy he’d felt looking at them. He remembered chalking it up to some kind of ambivalence toward his father, but in retrospect it was an ambivalence borne by the unconscious knowledge that what his father had just said was—and always had been—the truth. Twice already he’d alluded to the commonness of the crew, and twice now Noah had paused at the realization of this deflating fact: They weren’t gods and giants sunk on that ship, they were men and boys.

“That takes some of the starch out of the story, don’t you think?” Noah asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Isn’t it more fantastic to think of the guys who died as a little bit heroic, as swashbuckling sailors? As something more than a bunch of yokels from Great Lakes port towns?”

“I don’t think so,” Olaf said, pausing to consider it seriously. “It’s real life. In real life there’re boys from port towns.

“There’s one picture of them that I’ve never been able to get out of my mind,” Olaf continued. “After we’d cleared the southwestern tip of the island, must’ve been around suppertime, I went down into the crew’s quarters for a fresh thermos of coffee and something to eat. You remember that the top two decks on the bow of the
Rag
didn’t have any interior passageways, don’t you?”

Noah nodded.

“Well, that walk usually took, what, twenty seconds? Two flights of stairs, maybe thirty steps altogether? There were eighteen hours of snow and ice coating those stairs and that railing. You put that together with the wind and rolling of the boat and that walk was the hairiest time of my life. Until then anyway.

“The temperature couldn’t have been above zero, and I was out there without my mittens, without a hat, gripping that goddamn railing for dear life. In twenty seconds my fingers were burning cold. I was slipping all over the place helter-skelter. And I couldn’t see three feet in front of me. I remember sitting down for a second, wrapping my arms around the railing with my hands tucked up inside my coat, and hugging that goddamn thing like I was a child.

“The sound of that storm,” Olaf continued, shaking his head as he closed his eyes for a long moment, “it should have been my first warning. I could hear the lake washing over the deck. I could hear the wind roaring. And I sure as hell could feel that wind coming from every direction.” He looked hard at Noah, his eyes colorless in the cabin light. “For maybe three seconds while I was sitting there, everything went quiet, though, and I could hear her bending.”

“Bending?”
Noah said, sitting up and combing his sweat-damp hair back with both his hands.

“I sat on that icy step for a couple of minutes. I don’t know what in the hell I was waiting for, but I couldn’t move. The ruckus was out of this world, howling and drumming all over the place. But then it just stopped, went quiet, and I heard it: a slow, high-pitched cry. I knew it was the
Rag
under the weight of all that ice and water. It sounded human.”

Noah dropped back onto the couch. “Those boats don’t bend.”

“Sure they do,” Olaf countered. “Like skyscrapers give a little in the wind.”

“What did you do?”

“I finally got down into the crew’s quarters. And that’s when I saw them—this is what I was getting at—all bleary-eyed and miserable, sitting around the common table playing euchre. Most of those boys were still drunk when they came back on board in Two Harbors, and when you put the weather and seas like we had on top of what they must have been feeling to begin with, well, they might as well have been dead already.

“Tell you what, I never saw a card game on that ship without a pile of money in the middle of it. Hell, those boys found ways to gamble over Crazy 8s, but not that night. They were just trying to keep their cards on the table.

“There were thirty men on that boat, the lesser part of half of them on the bow—wheelsmen, watchmen, deckhands, the mates—and the rest on the stern—the engineers and oilers and firemen and wipers. The galley crew. The boys on the back had their berths in eight small cabins above the engine room in some goddamn cold and clammy quarters. Steel bunks with lumpy mattresses attached to the low overheads. Even the shortest guy back there couldn’t stand upright without knocking his head on something.

“And noisy as hell, too. They had to sleep through the constant whining of that engine and the churning of the prop. None of them could hear a goddamn thing. They had shit and grime under their fingernails all the time, and their trousers were always dirty at the knees. But for as filthy as they always seemed to be, that engine room was the cleanest place aboard that boat.

“The chief back there was Danny Oppvaskkum—a great guy—who knew the physics and chemistry and engineering of that ship like he’d invented and built it himself. Couldn’t tell which way the wind was blowing, but he could’ve taken that thing apart and put it back together with a screwdriver.”

“How old was he?” Noah asked.

“Danny must’ve been about forty-five.”

“Was it”—Noah paused, hoping a second’s delay might make the question seem more delicate—“you know, was it his fault?”

“Oh, Christ no. No, no. Danny was innocent in that mess. He probably gave each of those boys an extra hour of life with his thinking.”

“There’s a picture of all of you in the maritime museum down in Duluth. Did you know that? You look like a football team in it.”

“They might as well have been a football team, being as they were young and lean to a man.”

“Did they have any idea, do you think?”

“Any idea of what?”

“Any idea they were about to die?”

Olaf closed his eyes, appeared to be thinking about it. “The storm was bad, no doubt about it, but we were killing it. It was snowing like hell, and it was cold as hell, and there’s no doubt some of those boys
wished
they were dead, but none of us thought we were going to die. Not in our wildest, worst dreams.” He’d rolled up the magazine and
tapped his knee with it. After a second he concluded, “At least none of them were thinking about it then.”

Outside, it was still snowing and the leafless trees were all tangled in a stiffening breeze. Inside, the air suffocated and the stove continued to ping.

Olaf, whose hands were crossed over his lap, was thumb-wrestling himself. He looked up. The few seconds of silence had clogged up his voice, and he had to clear his throat before he asked Noah how long it takes to brew a pot of coffee and make a couple turkey sandwiches.

“I don’t know,” Noah said.

“Think about it.”

“Five minutes?”

“It took me twenty minutes from the time I stepped into the little galley in the crew’s quarters to the time I had a fresh thermos of coffee and sandwiches for the boys on the bridge. The way that goddamn thing was yawing, I dropped a full jar of mayonnaise, beat the hell out of my knee on the corner of the icebox, nearly burned my left hand off making coffee. I was a goddamn fool for trying.”

“Was the walk back up to the bridge as scary as the walk down?” Noah asked.

“It was no stroll on deck,” Olaf said as he set his head back against the chair.

Noah tried to place the story his father was telling in the context of what he already knew himself, or had at least read. None of the books that dealt with the wreck differed much in terms of what happened. His father returned to the bridge to find a panicked captain. The three methods of communicating with the engine room from the bridge had all failed. Noah could picture the brass Chadburn standing like a giant keyhole with the black-handled lever that, when
set to a certain position in the pilothouse, would signal the engine room to adjust some aspect of her speed or bearing. He knew that if the Chadburn failed there was an onboard telephone line that connected the two ends of the ship. If both of those failed, there was a system of bell messages that the bridge could send to the engine room.
Two whistles check
? he wondered.
Four whistles all right
?

In each of the histories written about the
Rag
, the authors told similar stories of the simultaneous failure of all three modes of communication. None of them knew, though, precisely why the engine room had taken so long to comply with the captain’s orders. The reason they didn’t know was that the only man who had witnessed or been privy to the finer points of the communications snafu and lived to tell about it had never bothered to do so.

“Why didn’t you ever set the record straight on why they weren’t answering Jan’s command? It makes the whole thing seem sort of fishy, doesn’t it?” Noah asked.

“Nothing fishy happened on that boat,” Olaf said. “Not unless you consider twenty-seven men burning and drowning fishy.

“The reason I never gave those goddamn reporters the details is because what happened out there was nobody’s business but ours. Selling newspapers on account of our bad luck seemed like horseshit to me. If people wanted to know what it was like to get out of something like that with your life, they should have signed up to ship out at Superior Steel and taken the chance on finding out for themselves. It was between us and the lake. The big-bellied newspapermen weren’t interested in what happened, they were interested in making a circus out of us, in selling their goddamn advertisers an extra ad in a special section.”

“Don’t you think there were plenty of people who just cared enough to know?”

Olaf dismissed him with a wave of the hand.

“The Coast Guard and National Transportation Safety Board reports both said the same thing—that when you got back to the bridge Jan was upset because he couldn’t contact the engine room and he wanted to check down because you were about to round Isle Royale.”

“How in the world do you know what the Coast Guard and NTSB reports say?”

“It wasn’t just the newspapermen who wanted to know,” Noah said.

Olaf cast a glance at Noah, one he interpreted as apologetic, even sheepish. “Jan’s agitation was as simple as that, yes,” he said, steeling his voice as best he could. “When I got back up to the bridge, he was trying to get them to check down. We were about to pass the northern end of Isle Royale, and he wanted to be prepared to assess the seas.”

“Were you in danger?” Noah asked.

“None that we knew of. Jan was taking things slow because of the whiteout, but we weren’t in danger. At least not because of the weather, we weren’t going to run aground or founder under those seas.”

“But not being able to get in touch with the engine room . . .”

“
That
was cause for concern,” Olaf said.

One of the things that had never added up for Noah was why—after only two minutes of trying to reach the engine room—Captain Vat had become so anxious. He remembered being on midsummer cruises with his father when the
Rag
was still running on coal. He recalled his impression of the engine room after watching it in action for an hour or two. If not chaotic, it had certainly seemed perpetually hectic. All the levers and gauges, the noise and motion, so many pipes steaming or dripping with condensation or whistling out of the blue,
and so many guys, even on calm days, tending to the countless details, led him to believe it was a miracle they had time to listen to orders of any sort. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what the commotion must have been like back there on the night she went down.

“So what did Jan do?”

“He nearly panicked, that’s what he did. When I got back up to the bridge he was sounding the bells for the third time. Three whistles,” Olaf said, “it meant they were to check down. When they didn’t respond after the third try, he thought about sending a couple deckhands back to see what the hell was going on. In fact, he went so far as to summon them to the pilothouse.