Читать книгу Into the Raging Sea - Rachel Slade - Страница 13

JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA, 30.39°N -81.54°W

From above, Jacksonville looks like a battleground between land and water where water is winning. Rivers, streams, and inlets branch like veins folding in on themselves, following their own secret logic; roads curve here and there, searching for a path from one scrap of land to the next. A series of bridges stitches northern Florida’s tenuous coast together.

It was late in the afternoon on September 29, 2015, and Jacksonville’s wide open-for-business highways were choked with commuter traffic baking in the heat of another late September day. Down at the sprawling marine terminal on Blount Island, stevedores loaded El Faro, a 790-foot-long ship, with 25 million pounds of cargo: 391 containers, 238 refrigerated containers, 118 trailers, 149 cars, and enough fructose syrup to make more than one million two-liter bottles of soda.

In his comfortable home at Atlantic Beach, Eric Bryson waited for a call from his dispatcher. Eric was a river pilot with the St. Johns Bar Pilot Association. He made his living divining the secrets of Jacksonville’s waterways to safely deliver tankers, cargo ships, and car carriers up the St. Johns River to the Port of Jacksonville or back out to sea. Federal maritime law requires that every deep-draft vessel hire a local guide like Eric to navigate ships through these waterways so that they don’t collide with each other or the struts of bridges, or take one of the many tight turns too wide and ground on the shallow banks.

To earn his piloting job, Eric had to memorize the twists, hazards, and depths of the St. Johns River in exquisite detail—enough that he could draw a navigable map of it from memory. Though the pilot’s test was only open to seasoned ship captains like him, just the top scorer was considered for the position. When he took the exam in 1991, Eric blew away the other twenty-six applicants.

Since it requires such highly specialized knowledge, piloting is one of the most stable positions in the maritime industry. Getting the St. Johns job meant that Eric could give up the seaman’s life and settle down for the long haul with his wife, Mary. They could work together raising their two kids in the warmth of the Florida sun, and he’d never be more than seven miles out to sea. It was a radically different life from the typical mariner who spends at least ten weeks straight on a ship, often out of communication, far from home.

Eric thinks of his job as a craft. “Any idiot can color inside the lines,” he says of finessing a ship safely in and out of port. “The art of it is coloring outside the lines safely.” Sturdily built, just shy of six feet, bald and bearded, with a face like a benevolent bulldog, Eric is the embodiment of male competence. Ponderous by nature, he does not take anything lightly. Some mariners who’ve worked with him call Eric “the Priest.” All this, combined with his detached Yankee demeanor, puts ship captains at ease when Eric assumes command of their vessel.

The pilot dispatcher’s call for SS El Faro came at six o’clock. The container ship was just about ready to leave port, but she was running an hour late. She’d been delayed because she’d been incorrectly loaded—someone had accidentally transposed a few numbers in the ship’s loading software, causing the weight of the cargo to be unevenly distributed, which resulted in a noticeable list. The stevedores had had to scramble to shift cargo around to get her upright once again.

Eric knew El Faro and her two sister ships well—they’d been running twice weekly from Jacksonville to San Juan for nearly two decades, and he’d piloted them up and down St. Johns River dozens of times over the years. He knew many of the deck crew and officers, too, if not by name, at least by face. They were nearly all Americans. These days, that was notable. Most of the ships coming in and out of Jacksonville were registered in foreign countries and crewed by a mix of international laborers—predominantly Philippine.

By the time Eric got the call that hot Wednesday evening, his small travel bag was packed. He’d been following El Faro’s loading progress all day. He grabbed his navy-and-yellow pilot’s jacket and walked through the kitchen door to one of his company’s white Subarus, perpetually parked in the driveway.

As he drove to the terminal, a concrete expanse about the size of Central Park surrounded by a high chain-link fence, Eric cleared his head of the little things that might distract him. He needed intense focus to do his job right. Eric was acutely aware that in the world of big ships, complacency meant death. Now nearing sixty years old, he wanted to get out before his job killed him. Which it nearly did, twice.

To bring ships into Jacksonville, Eric had to board them at sea. He rode in his pilot boat seven miles out to the vessel, at first invisible on the horizon, just a blip on the radar, then looming large as he and his driver pull alongside. Riding up next to the massive, impermeable steel hulls never ceased to give Eric a thrill. If the winds and seas were high, the ship could trace out a big, lazy circle in the water to create a temporary lee for the small pilot boat.

Big ships rarely stop or drop anchor for pilots—they have so much momentum that they’d take miles to come to a halt, and even then, they’d drift with the winds and currents; instead, the pilot boat nestles up alongside like a pilot fish clinging to a whale shark, then tries to keep up with the ship, about 11 miles per hour. The two vessels aren’t ever tethered together.

The small boat is outfitted with an external set of stairs leading to a platform, like a kitchen ladder that someone screwed onto its deck. Moored at the pilot association’s office, the stepladder steps off into the void. But alongside a thousand-foot-long ship, it’s the only way a pilot has any chance of climbing aboard.

Once the boat is riding alongside the ship, a small door in the enormous hull opens, a friendly face pops out from the steel wall, and a hand drops down a rope ladder as the pilot boat’s driver tries to maintain the same speed and course as the ship. The pilot climbs his stepladder and then pauses, clinging to his platform, gauging the situation. The bottom rung of the huge ship’s rope ladder dangles a few feet away from the pilot’s shoes, but the two vessels are bobbing up and down at different rates. The pilot times his leap as the ship and pilot boat perform their version of synchronized swimming. He grabs hold of the rope ladder and scrambles up.

I once took a piloting trip with Eric. I thought I was mentally prepared for that moment when you had to take that leap of faith. But when confronted with all this—the flimsy rope ladder, the wall of black steel, the deep water rushing below with nothing to catch me if I missed—I panicked. Freud says that those who are afraid of heights don’t trust their bodies not to jump. If my hands decided to let go, I would plummet between the two vessels and drown.

“Grab on! Climb up,” Eric commanded. I reached out and gripped that rope ladder like my life depended on it, which it did. And then I scurried ten feet up the hull, ten steps straight up, holding my breath until I was safe on the deck, looking back down at Eric’s head as he followed me scaling the side of the ship.

Pilots have missed that ladder. They’ve slipped and fallen into the sea where they were crushed between their boat and the ship. In October 2016, a pilot with more than a decade’s worth of experience died this way on the river Thames.

Eric was once reaching for the ladder when his driver pulled away too soon, leaving him straddled between the two vessels. Eric was forced to make a split-second decision: jump for the ladder and risk missing it, or fall back into the pilot boat. He hurled himself toward the deck of his boat and saved his life but shattered his heel. He was out of work for months, and in immeasurable pain, but hated being on meds. His second accident was caused by his bag—caught on the pilot boat platform, it yanked him back, and when he fell onto the deck, he broke his back. He’s never fully recovered from that. But he’s alive.

Pilots board a berthed container ship like anyone else—up the gangway or loading ramp.

That’s how Eric got onto El Faro on the evening of September 29.

He parked his car at Blount Island Marine Terminal at 7:30 and walked across the expanse of tarmac by the fading light to the ramp. As he approached El Faro, Eric regarded her dark blue steel hull. Like all massive ships, El Faro was a paean to modern engineering—a floating island capable of moving the weight of the Eiffel Tower through the ocean at 25 miles per hour. She was as long as the Golden Gate Bridge is high; it would take more than four minutes for a person to walk from bow to stern. Designed in the late 1960s, she was built for speed at a time when fuel was cheap and fast shipping fetched premium pricing. To reduce drag, she had a narrow beam that tapered steeply and evenly to her sharp keel.

These days, the profit is in cargo. The more you take, the more money you make. So modern ships are bulkier and slower; megaships, like the 1,305-foot-long Benjamin Franklin, are fat all the way to their little nub of a keel and can carry up to eighteen thousand containers. (If you lined them up, they’d reach from Manhattan to Trenton, New Jersey.) These ships made El Faro look like a toy.

Just about loaded up, El Faro sat low in the water, but Eric could still see her load line marks etched into her hull indicating she was safe to sail. Thick lines kept her tied to the dock as trucks and cars sped up her wide loading ramp, located at midships, in a fog of gas and diesel exhaust.

Twelve stories above Eric, a crane operator labored in a glass-bottomed cab hanging from a track, hauling the final containers onto El Faro’s main deck.

A working crane is like a massive version of the classic claw game, and watching it load ships is mesmerizing. On the dock below the crane, a longshoreman steers a flatbed truck into position next to the ship, then releases the clamps holding the container to the truck’s chassis. A typical container is forty feet long and can be as heavy as thirteen cars. The crane operator uses cables and winches to lower the “spreader” over the steel box—a steel frame that aligns with the container’s top four corners—and locks it in place like a tight-fitting lid. The spreader grips the container as the operator artfully swings it above El Faro’s deck, accommodating for the box’s languid movement, and just as momentum begins to pull it backward, he lowers it into its designated spot, using gravity’s pull to level it into place. Stevedores lash each box to the ship’s deck with steel fittings, tightened with turnbuckles. Stacks of containers are locked to one another like Legos.

The frenzied choreography works most of the time but occasionally things happen—a container slips from the spreader’s grip and crashes back on the flatbed, or it lands misaligned and crushes a longshoreman’s hand as he’s leveling it into place, or a stevedore gets hit by one of the huge trailers being driven off the ship in a great rush.

The huge loading cranes themselves also pose danger. They glide on two tracks that run parallel to the dock along its entire length, allowing the cranes to move from bow to stern and from ship to ship, stacking boxes. In 2008, a squall sent one 950-ton Jacksonville crane careening down the length of two football fields into the next, causing the steel constructs to twist and crumple into a heap of junk. It looked like spaghetti. It’s a rare event—the cranes come equipped with multiple brakes—but shows the kind of power packed in gale-force winds.

Out of the din, Eric saw Jack Jackson coming down the ramp to greet him. Jack was the helmsman on the 8:00 to midnight watch that night; he’d stand at the ship’s wheel on the navigation bridge and take steering commands from Eric. When they reached the sea buoy, Eric would disembark, leaving the captain in charge.

Sixty years old, sun-bleached yellow hair fading to white, ruddy face with a devilish grin, Jack had a wry sense of humor that could catch you off guard. He was the middle brother in a family of self-ascribed air force brats, mostly raised in New Orleans. Dad would show the kids pamphlets of the places they were moving next. Delaware! Beaches! Jack’s older sister, Jill, moved frequently; she was a restless soul. Younger brother, Glen, with his ginger hair and blue eyes, could’ve been Jack’s twin, but he was more a traveler of the mind.

When Jack and Glen were boys in New Orleans in the 1960s, there were four major shipping companies keeping the port busy. They used to ride out to the big bend in the river to watch the ships. Two sunburned boys dreaming on the banks of the Mississippi. The boats were always going somewhere, just like their family, always moving. That’s where the fascination began, Glen says.

Jack signed up with the merchant marine during the 1970s to explore the world, make some money, live free. He enjoyed the easy sea life delivering grain to Africa or going back and forth to Europe. In those days, ships would spend days or weeks in a port loading and unloading so he could get off and poke around. Just one big adventure.

Jack had a magical aura about him; people were drawn to him. He once owned a motorcycle—a Norton. One day when Jack was stopped at a red light, a girl jumped on. She said she liked Nortons. They lived together for a year. That’s how life was back then.

Jack was easygoing. He never pursued an officer’s license or tried to hustle up the ranks; he preferred to avoid the messy politics aboard. He saw how cutthroat officers were; getting ahead wasn’t worth the increase in pay and the hassle. Guys with higher ranks would sit in union halls for days waiting for work but as a general able-bodied seaman, called an AB, Jack could always get work whenever the spirit moved him. Sailing, living free.

Decades later, Jack was still shipping out, and in a way, so was Eric. But Jack had fully embraced the seaman’s life; he lived alone in Jacksonville and had never married. During shore leave, he carved sculpture out of wood and painted dreamy Edward Hopper–like scenes. He once told Eric that when he retired, he planned on throwing an oar over his shoulder and walking west until someone asked him what it was.

Eric was pleased to see his fellow traveler on duty that night. Guys like Jack made the heavy workload on these short, busy runs down to San Juan go a little smoother.

Working ships are an obstacle course of cargo, safety equipment, and machinery and as Jack led Eric from the ramp to the ship’s house, he casually pointed out anything—raised thresholds, low headers—that Eric might trip over or bang his head on.

Though El Faro had an elevator, the captain on duty didn’t want the crew using it. Someone could get stuck in there. The machinery was old and cranky, and he worried that it might stop working entirely because the shipping company had stopped paying to have it inspected. If it did quit with someone inside, the ship’s engineers would have to spend their time fixing the lift instead of tending to the ship’s ancient steam plant.

So Jack and Eric climbed seven flights of industrial stairs bathed in fluorescent light to get to the navigation bridge. Each floor in the ship’s house served a function. Ascending, they passed the galley, the crews’ quarters, engineers’ quarters, deck officers’ quarters—each door clearly labeled—to the final set of stairs, through the door to the bridge where the captain and the third mate were waiting for them.

Nearly ten stories above the waterline, the navigation bridge was a single room atop the house with seven windows framing the evening sky as the sun set over Jacksonville. It smelled like old solder and aging wiring, an olfactory blast from the 1970s, a reminder that the ship was forty years old—built before the internet, laptops, and cellphones—and nearly double the age of the average ship docked in America’s ports.

Against the windows sat a file-cabinet-gray metal console as wide as the bridge, strewn with instruments. In the middle of the console, waist-high, was a small black steering wheel, like something you’d find on a Honda Civic. It was hard to believe that such an inconsequential thing controlled the massive rudder below. A couple of solid wood grab bars were attached to the console; even on this giant vessel, things could get rough. Tucked in the corner was the chartroom; a blackout curtain took the place of a door.

Captain Michael Davidson greeted Eric. Davidson was a Yankee like the pilot. He had signed on with the shipping company—TOTE—two years ago, and the pair had met here on the bridge a few times. Davidson stood a few inches shorter than Eric and wore his white-and-gray hair close cropped, military style. He had an athletic build, sharp nose, and Scottish eyes that sloped down in a friendly, generous way when he smiled, complementing his cleft chin. A slightly imperious manner betrayed his station as master of the ship. He shook Eric’s hand firmly, calling him “Mr. Pilot.”

“Hello, Cap’n,” Eric said.

Eric opened the door to the bridge wing and stepped into the warm evening air, high above the river. Below him, a pair of pelicans flew over the stacks of containers. Eric had a portable GPS system that came with an antenna that worked best out here; he positioned it carefully on the small deck, sheltered from the wind. The antenna sent his precise location back inside to his iPad, which was loaded with a detailed chart of the St. Johns River, its depths, and live traffic information. The keel of El Faro cut a wake three stories below the waterline, a comfortable depth for the river’s forty-foot dredged channel, but at various locations, tolerances were tight.

Eric’s handheld software was more sophisticated than El Faro’s onboard technology. El Faro didn’t have an electronic chart system, soon to be required of all international deep-draft vessels. Instead, her officers relied on their paper nautical charts published by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), and a crude alphanumerical GPS interface.

Eric always steered ships with his eyes first, technology second. He knew the river like he knew the streets of his own neighborhood, but he regularly referred to his iPad to check his work.

Jack Jackson handed the pilot a cup of coffee and took the wheel at eight o’clock as two tugs below slowly spun El Faro 180 degrees to point her bow toward the Atlantic Ocean, 10.6 miles down the winding river. When she was in position, the tugs pulled their lines and El Faro glided silently forward under her own power. They were underway.

Eric stood in the dusk at the windows of El Faro’s bridge sipping his brew, watching the waterway bend before him. Lights from the houses along the shore revealed the river’s edge, but Eric closely monitored his iPad tracking the ship’s speed and position and the river’s depth. Stretched out before him was a field of red and blue cargo containers, loaded with every necessity for life in Puerto Rico, graying to black in the fading light.

At this time of night, there wasn’t much traffic on the river. The navigation bridge was quiet, illuminated only by the glow of the ship’s instruments as Jack stood at the steering wheel, watching for shrimp boats, pleasure boats, anything the huge ship could crush as it slowly made its way downriver.

In his resonant baritone, perfect for late-night jazz radio, Eric would occasionally call out a command, anticipating current changes ahead to keep the vessel on course. “Left 10.”

“Left 10,” Jack Jackson repeated from behind the wheel and turned accordingly, causing the ship’s massive rudder far below to swing ten degrees to port. The heavily loaded El Faro heeled over slightly with each turn. She was tender, sensitive, slow to right herself, but not unpleasant. That’s how this class of ship moved.

As usual, there was very little chatter among the people on the bridge, just another trip on a calm autumn evening down the coast of Florida. Mariners are comfortable standing in silence for hours at a time, staring out at the sea. It’s part of the job. Jack and Davidson talked a little about the weather with Eric. Something was brewing out there, but El Faro was a fast ship. Davidson said that the storm would cut north and they would shoot down under it.

Eric could hear Second Mate Danielle Randolph on the two-way radio overseeing the men securing the deck and organizing lines at the stern of the ship. She’d spent the whole afternoon directing stevedores and checking cargo. Soon she’d head back to her room to catch a few more hours of sleep before coming up on the bridge for her midnight watch.

“Dead slow ahead,” Eric said as they approached land’s end. When they reached St. Johns Point, just past Mayport Naval base, the coastline peeled back as El Faro moved into open waters. So far above it all, Eric could feel the thrum of the twenty-five-foot propeller turned by the ship’s steam turbine whenever they put on the rudder. By the time the ship reached the mouth of the river, stars were out. The vessel and her cargo were a black silhouette against the dusky sea and sky.

About seven miles out, just before ten o’clock, Eric retrieved his GPS antenna from the bridge wing, packed his bag, and shook the captain’s hand. Chief Mate Steve Shultz walked him down to the main deck. Eric looked over the side and saw his pilot boat pulling up alongside. He gingerly climbed down the rope ladder, made it safely to his ride, gripped the handrail of his boat and looked up. From the top of the ladder, Shultz smiled and waved. The pilot boat pulled away from El Faro and headed back toward the lights of Jacksonville.