Margaret Dean - Endurance - A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery

From that point on, I enjoyed the challenge of school. I knew how to work hard and enjoyed seeing it pay off. It almost became a game I played with myself: let’s see how well I can do at this. In a strange way, it was easier for me to get an A+ than it would have been to get a B. Shooting for a lower grade was like aiming an arrow at a smaller target. “Just okay” is like threading a needle; “the best I can possibly do” is a much broader set of goalposts. I decided to try to know everything. Then I would always get an A.

That phone call with Mark was almost as pivotal a moment in my life as reading The Right Stuff. The book had given me a vision of who I wanted to be; my brother’s advice showed me how to get there.

Soon after classes got started, I had gone into the ROTC office and said I wanted to join the unit. I learned that I could participate in their courses and training, but I couldn’t apply for a scholarship until after I had at least one semester’s worth of grades. So I trained with the other cadets, doing drills and weekend exercises and taking classes on leadership, weapons systems, and military etiquette. On top of all that, all Maritime students had to study to be licensed with the U.S. Coast Guard, which was a requirement to become a merchant mariner. (I did wind up getting my U.S. Coast Guard license and have kept it current to this day.) We learned celestial and terrestrial navigation, seamanship, meteorology for mariners, and nautical “rules of the road.” After my first semester with a nearly 4.0 GPA, I was offered a Navy ROTC scholarship in exchange for at least five years of military service—longer if I went to flight school. I was pleased to be that much closer to my ultimate goal, and of course my parents were pleased that the rest of my tuition would be paid for.

At the end of the school year, we spent a few weeks preparing our training ship for our first cruise. The Empire State V, the former USNS Barrett, was a retired troop transport ship that we were learning to operate—we each had assigned tasks on the ship. When we finally started moving, I was standing watch on the bow, and the gray East River opened out before us as we crept away from the dock and headed into the fog of the Long Island Sound. I kept peering out intently into the thick soup as if the ship and every life on board depended on me: it had been drilled into me that the bow watch was not just the eyes of the ship but also the ears—I was listening for other ships and ready to call up to the bridge if I saw or heard anything that might pose a threat. As the engine room came up to speed, the distinct smell of the boiler oil tinged the air. I stood watch past City Island, past New Haven, and on to Montauk. Later, as we rounded the point to head east out into the North Atlantic Ocean, I took a deep breath of the ocean air. We were at sea. I felt like I was finally getting somewhere. I had the sense this was the stepping-off point for what would be many exciting adventures of discovery. I wouldn’t be mistaken.

I STILL COULDN’T quite believe we were sailing to Europe. If you’d told me, a little more than a year earlier, that this was how I would spend my nineteenth summer, I wouldn’t have believed you. The accommodations aboard the ship were dark, dingy, and poorly ventilated. When I headed up to the mess deck for meals, I often came across people throwing up into the large trash cans that lined the room. At night, people moaned in their bunks from nausea. I seemed to be immune to seasickness, and I hoped the vestibular fortitude would carry over into flight and eventually into weightlessness.

We worked on a three-day cycle: maintain the ship one day, stand watch one day, and attend classes one day. The best watch to draw was helm, as we would actually get to have a hand on the wheel steering the ship. Bow watch meant just looking out over the water trying to identify other ships. Stern watch meant looking out for someone falling overboard, which no one ever did. Class days we’d pile into small rooms filled with high school desks for academic instruction. Some of this was interesting—navigation, meteorology, and emergency procedures like firefighting or search and rescue. It wasn’t my intention to become a ship’s officer, but it seemed like a good backup career, so I paid attention and did as well as I could. At night we honed our celestial navigation skills, learning to fix the position of the ship using a sextant to measure the angle between the horizon and a particular star or planet. There was complicated math involved and it was tricky to learn, but it was necessary for sailing (and, I would learn later, for spaceflight too).

The first port we pulled in to was Majorca, Spain. (Beautiful beaches.) Then came Hamburg. (The only souvenir I have is a complete and permanent aversion to apple schnapps.) Next, we stopped at Southampton, England, and took a train into London. (I was shocked by how awful the food was for such a large cosmopolitan city.)

On the cruise back to home port, I felt I was getting the hang of the duties on board and the classroom material we were studying. We came back to Maritime stronger, more resilient, more competent than when we’d left. We’d learned to work together in difficult circumstances, responded to the unexpected, and survived. I’d understood that the point of the cruise had been to teach us seamanship, leadership, and teamwork, but it still surprised me how much I had learned. I stepped off the Empire State V a different person than when I’d stepped on.

AS SOON as I finished that first cruise, I got on a plane to Long Beach, California, to do ROTC training on a Navy ship cruising to Hawaii. I was with midshipmen from other colleges, including the Naval Academy, who were doing all of this for the first time. Though I was only a few months ahead of them in experience, it seemed like much more.

This was my first real exposure to the Navy. Freshman ROTC and naval academy midshipmen were expected to do the work of enlisted sailors, so when I became an officer leading enlisted men, I would know what their responsibilities were like. I lived in crowded berthing again, with about twenty guys in bunks stacked three high. It was good practice for living in small spaces in the future. Just as on the Empire State V, we did a lot of manual labor on the ship, which some guys resented. But I wasn’t bothered by it and was happy to be on a ship, making progress toward a career in the Navy.

MY SECOND CRUISE on the Empire State V, the summer between my sophomore and junior years, offered me better work assignments and more authority. Our first night in port in Alicante, Spain, my classmates and I threw a party in our room. Drinking was not allowed on the ship, but as long as we didn’t cause any problems we hoped not to get in any trouble. Within a few hours we were pretty lit. I finished off a bottle of vodka, the last of the alcohol we had on board, and I thought I should mark the occasion by throwing the bottle against the bulkhead to smash it. But instead of breaking, the bottle bounced off the wall and struck one of my classmates on the back of the head. She was nearly knocked out, and we probably should have sought medical attention for her, but instead we thought it was hysterical, including her.

Intent on continuing our party, we came up with a great plan: we decided to get a Jacob’s ladder (a hanging ladder made of heavy rope and wood planks) and throw it over the back of the ship. Then we could climb down, swim to the dock, and sneak off to a nearby bar. We dispatched a couple of people to the forward part of the ship to find the ladder and haul it back. When they reached the rest of us, waiting for them at the stern of the ship, they were dragging the ladder, which weighed nearly a hundred pounds. As we were putting it into place, I got into an argument with a classmate about which of us would go down the ladder first. We were yelling and screaming, neither of us backing down, and nearly came to blows. I finally convinced him of my superior qualifications for the job and triumphantly climbed over the railing to test how securely the ladder was fastened. In fact, it wasn’t tied down at all. I fell, along with one hundred pounds of rope and wood, thirty feet into the dark water below. I remember hitting the hard, cold water as if hitting a sheet of pavement and reflecting with surprise that I had remained conscious. I quickly sank, pulled down by the heavy ladder, which I was now tangled in. It took a huge effort to swim back up to the surface. I was able to struggle over to the engineering side port, used for loading supplies while the ship was docked, and some of the engineering cadets were already there waiting to pull me back in. I was completely limp from the shock of hitting the water so hard, as well as from the vodka, but eventually a classmate pulled me in through the access door. I made it back to the aft part of the ship undetected, and our superiors never learned of our adventures. I surely would have been expelled if they had, and that would have cost me the one chance I had managed to create for myself.