Sketch of a Young Man at Sea
For all Destroyermen
I rode the ship out of the harbor into the unknown. There were serious men on board, men who leaned and rocked in the copper light of summer. I saw the gunners and the engineers and the men who never saw the light of day if they didn’t pollute their lungs with smoke, living and sleeping in a bath of red light below decks. I hung with the men who leaned on lifelines, forever cool. Mother Pacific granted us permission to move and the sky blew wind in our faces. They sent big rollers to us, just off the bow, and I felt the friction of 8,500 tons of groaning steel in my teeth. We loved the magic act of the disappearing shore. How did we know the helmsman wasn’t insane? It gave me a thrill as the hull touched off sea spray in cerulean and azure and tainted white, hissing in a flavor of saltwater native to the California coast. People crowded everywhere, privacy being the most sought-after commodity. Wiry men, fat men, powerful men, lean men all in blue coveralls, crowding mess decks and passageways and chow lines, dirty and stained, some with rags in the back pocket, and the omnipresent sulfur of diesel and grease lingering in the stale air within the skin of the ship. Everything had a power to it, an unrelenting force designed to safeguard us against the crushing depths of the ocean and its floor. Never again, never in my all-things-considered short life would I feel this transform inside of me like it did then – a satisfying surge of fear and adrenaline, of inner power, rising to a boil, this secret force of the soul of all the world’s oceans.