Peter Geye - Safe from the Sea

“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.

“I’ll tell you what,” Olaf continued, “the look on the faces of those kids said as much as anything about the shape we were in. We’d been at it for years, right? Jan and myself and Joe? But these kids were just starting out, just finishing their first season. It was the first big blow any of them had seen. When Jan told them to put on their life vests and they took turns looking out the window into that wildness, Jesus, you’d’ve thought he was sending them right to hell.”

“But he didn’t send them, did he?”

“Goddamn,” Olaf said. “I sure as hell didn’t want him to. I thought it was a suicide mission.”

“But you had to cross it.”

“I did, later. But it was different when he asked me to go because I expected to. I was used to those responsibilities. These boys just wanted to go to bed. As it turned out, not sending them cost them any chance they might have had.” Here his voice trailed off again. Noah could practically see the parade of crewmates passing through his father’s memory.

“Anyway, Danny finally called, and Jan lit into him like I’d never seen. ‘Goddamnit, Oppvaskkum, I almost sent two boys across that deck. Do you have any idea how dangerous that would have been? Do you realize ignoring calls from the captain — even in emergency situations, especially in emergency situations — is unacceptable if not outright insubordinate? We’re fighting a monster up here and you don’t have the time to heed my calls?’ ” Olaf was doing his best impression of a man with a much deeper voice than his own.

“But he was trying to contain the leak. It wasn’t his fault,” Noah said.

“You’re right, it wasn’t his fault that the line was leaking, but I can’t imagine what kind of trouble they were in — or how fast that trouble must have found them — to justify not responding to the bridge. We’re talking about one of the cardinal rules here.”

“So even if a guy’s up to his ankles in diesel in a place as combustible as that, it’s more important that he pick up the phone right away than figure out how to stop the leak?”

“The point is that by not picking up the phone, he jeopardized the whole order of things. Because he didn’t pick up the phone, two guys were about to be sent out into that storm. Because he didn’t answer the phone, the guy in charge of the ship was paralyzed, see?”

The line of reasoning was so familiar to Noah that he almost laughed. How many times had his father used the same hierarchical theory to make Noah paint the garage or shovel the sidewalk at their old house on High Street? “Aren’t there exceptions to the cardinal rules?” Noah asked.

“I’ve never seen one,” Olaf said. “And I’ve seen a lot.”

That was familiar, too, his father slapping down the trump card of experience.

“What did Danny finally say that made Jan send you across the deck?”

“Danny knew right away how serious the problem was. As far as I could tell — and I never knew for certain — the main fuel line had ruptured near the tank, which was in the forward half of the engine room where the coal bunker had been the season before. The leak was serious enough that the entire engine-room crew, including the porters and steward, were busy trying to clean it. It had to have happened so goddamn fast — gotten out of hand so goddamn fast — that there was no chance to even sound an alarm.