The Mighty Viking

It was dark that night, I recall that. And quiet – an odd combination of mechanical thrum and a subtle sense of quarry out there. We were all conscious of the sounds of the moment, but only two people were actually listening. It was so long ago.  

One listener was the sonar operator on watch. And the other? Me. The Sonar Supervisor for this watch. Both of us had only one ear of our headphones on, as is the habit of our craft. One ear listens for sounds from the hydrophones with the earpiece.. The other ear keeps track of the conversation between Sonar and Control. He switches ears every so often, to keep the listening ear fresh.

Speech in the Sonar shack was subdued, a tone reflective of the red lighting under which we worked. The air was a heady brew of diesel, hydraulics, the un-showered bodies of the crew ripened by weeks of submerged living, and things no one ever wanted to name, all filtered through an atmospheric control system specially designed to make every space on the boat smell equally bad. But no one could smell it, because we had been awash in it for so long.It was into this moment of focused tedium that the door quietly opened, and the Messenger of the Watch slipped into the Shack. He carried with him three cups of coffee, one for me, and one each for the operators. I wrapped my fingers around that cup and brought it close. Its waft spoke of deep things, rich, heady flavors that assaulted the senses in a way only a man acclimated to deprivation can appreciate. It smelled like Victory. It smelled like the ugly underside of Life itself. In that cramped, thrumming space alive with electronics, and the vague rocking of a submerged submarine, it smelled like Salvation. I nodded my gratitude to him as he slipped back out into the darkened passage, prompting him to reverse, stick his head back in the door to smile and say, “don‘t expect it to be a regular thing”. The same thing he had said 12 hours ago. And twelve hours before then. And so this quiet vessel slid silently through the depths of ink-black waters, far beneath the storm raging above over the North Atlantic.

A well-kept hospital is a clean place, devoid of smells except the scent of those chemicals that are busy killing something that’s busy trying to kill you. This visit was my turn to stay, as our son’s illnesses were recurrent, and his immune system vulnerable to people coming and going, so my wife and I had established a plan where one of us simply stayed, and the other stayed away.  

I sat in a dimly-lit room alive with monitors that tracked the life of my son, sick in yonder ICU bed while his body fought its battles within. The night outside was dark, but I could see through the rain the same lights of the town as I had for the last several nights. I had them memorized from this fourth-floor perch, and kept watch on both the town and the machines, a task I was oddly at ease with. The comparison to my previous life as a submarine sonarman hadn‘t fully dawned on my yet.

As I sat, not realizing all the things I wasn’t smelling, a Nurse came through and offered to bring me a cup of coffee. He had told me, earlier in the day, that he had been an Army Nurse for some years. He suddenly seemed to me that the blessed Saints had sent their own emissary. A weary smile took over my tired face, and not a word further was needed. He disappeared back out, and down the hall.

The coffee entered the room unobtrusively, and found itself sitting on the small table behind me while I was busy attending to some detail for Sean. I sat back down, and the scent of the darkened brew curled up around me sensuously, entwined itself in memories and lifted them to consciousness. The coffee, the memories of dark and dangerous places, of mission and mates, all came together in a swirling moment of satisfaction. I was back in familiar territory, a place where I knew what to do, where I knew those around me knew what to do. The weariness faded from my shoulders. And at that moment, I also became keenly aware of what I had not been smelling – anything. In this sterile hospital room – this empty crucible, the coffee‘s rarified savor was pure like God’s own Breath of Life.  

And I realized with a disturbed grin that God‘s Own Breath of Life smells eerily similar to underway coffee.

Warm August air blows across my skin.  It blows its portents, and news, and I listen to it with all my senses.

But tonight, it blows not so much with news, but with memories.

Gather round, and I‘ll tell you a tale of long ago, of a night almost completely unlike this one.

Almost.  But not quite.

The sun was so far past the horizon as to have been forgotten.  It had been weeks since I‘d seen it anyway, sequestered as I was with my crew-mates beneath the sea, silently looking for trouble.

We had found it, of course.  And as submariners do, we had teased it, toyed with it, tempted it and Fate alongside.  Trouble did not like our kind.  And there was nothing that could make us happier.

The necessities of the boat eventually demanded, though, that we sail for open water, and under cover of darkness do the things we must to continue our mission.  And so it was on that night, so unlike the one here tonight, a silent steel hull broke the surface of the water, black against the black water of the Sea, and seven men in dark gear climbed out of a hatch, onto the deck, and back into the natural world.

Our eyes, already carefully acclimated to the darkness, still struggled to see.  In that first tenuous moment, other senses rushed in to fill the demand for information.  That was the moment I felt the hot sea breeze, the only evidence of the sun‘s passage hours before. It blew across us like a riderless horse, a shell of a memory of the day.

As if timed for theatrical effect, a giant billow of a cloud drew aside to slowly expose a half-moon.  The moon‘s delicate glow revealed more secrets than it exposed, shining only brightly enough to orient us in an edgeless Sea of eternal swells, out until we could see no more.  No horizon, no land, nothing but waves, and broken clouds, and a narrow ray of moonlight illuminating the black metal sail against which we  edged our way around to the aft deck.

The boat moved through the water soundlessly.  The steel hull demanded an accompanying thrum of an engine, the song of machinery, the bustle of a ship‘s crew.  But there was none.  The ship was built for silence, and the men bred to stillness, to defend its silence.  With no shore to crash upon, the wavelets slid wordlessly into the inky black East.

With our work done, we returned to the faint red glow of the open hatch, and one by one slipped below into that foreign realm to which we had become native.  I gulped one last draught of this night, of a world so big as to render this small sphere of humanity silent and insignificant. The secrecy of that night‘s work remains sacred even tonight, decades later.  Only this one thing, this one memory of a hot breeze on a summer‘s night remains to bear witness 

I left the night sky to its own, pulling away like a departing lover.  And I left that hot, breezy August night behind, turning again towards the sounds of trouble.

It would be from the lengthening shadows of post-equinox northern latitudes that I would draw my next breath of fresh air.  Forgotten was the squandering laze of equatorial summer.

But… not quite forgotten.  

Not tonight.  

That hot air will never be forgotten.

Ah, Midrats!

You moment of freedom you, moment of choice, of living without the arbitrary rules of convention.

You culinary disaster cleanup crew of the mistakes of the day gone.
You sparker of imagination of the New Day Coming.

You don’t aspire to beautiful, but the way that you work, picking the best of what’s available, of what’s been cast off, left over, dreamed but never fulfilled – is beautiful.

Never fancy, or pretentious, you rejuvenate the mistakes of the day. You are culinary redemption, you see food for what it is, for what it could be if we didn’t hold back.

You are the salvation of the scrumptious, that was passed over for reasons that don’t matter, that should never have mattered.
Midrats, you are the gatherer of the downtrodden, the maligned food that is beautiful at its core, the giver of choices without the judgment of Breakfast, or Lunch, or Dinner.

Midnight Rations.

The gathering of leftovers, of re-creation.
The Dagwood Sandwich of meals.

How I love your style, your lack of style. The pajama party of meals, quietly conspiring with the rebels of the night shift. You revolution you.
You’re the guerrilla warfare assault on institutionalized culinary dysfunction, with bacon in places is shouldn’t be, with corned beef, or cheese and crackers, the birthplace of Cobb Salad.

The last chance to Carpe the bejeebus out of the closing Dium.

The last toast to the faded night.

The first cast of the new morning.

Midrats.   You Rogue Pirate Gastronomique.
Like it  or not, you are beautiful.

Mid-watch on the River.

Topside.

My boat, the smallest on the river, looks at first diminutive at low tide, straining downward against its mooring lines, flowing silhouette disappearing beneath the water in a graceful, agile curve. The bigger boats up and down the river seem to feel like the bigger kids, but to my guardian eye, no other boat is so beautiful, so adept at what she does. My purpose tonight is to guard her brow, to defend her honor against any comers.

Tidewater flows upstream beneath the brow, pushing her close against the pier.
Floodlight shining feebly against the giant darkness, shrinking my visible world to a field of artificial yellow halos of visual prison. Other senses step in.

The weight of the side-arm, becomes more natural against me with every step along the expanded-steel ramp that connects the submarine’s deck to the concrete pier. Ten fat stumpy lead bullets and a semi-automatic pistol tug on one side of my dungarees, and with experience become part of the subtly uneven gait: step-clomp, step-clomp. Maybe it‘s a burden, maybe it‘s just a swagger. The green webbed belt holds it snug against the dungareed hip, half covered by a warm green jacket that is never worn anywhere else but in, on, and around this boat. The weighted cadence stops midway across the span of the brow, hand resting unconsciously on the leather holster.

Turning my attention to the small halo of illuminated water, the scene below me plays out. Tiny fish hug the surface in false security, while below them a layer of larger fish pick them off one by one. Further down, a layer of even larger fish yet can just be seen, occasionally striking upwards into the medium sized ranks. And once in a while, a shadow passes deep down, not quite seen, but rather felt. All the visible fish panic, hurling themselves upward and even airborne to escape this deep-water terror.

Waves slap unseen against the far-side darkened hull, and the pier pilings gurgle with the backwash. Their chorus echoes across the river and back again, measuring the width of the river with wind waves from a squall blowing up the river from the sea. A swirling breeze chills the night, grows into a squall, and then for ten minutes rain and wind become the Only Thing to every topside watch on the river. As suddenly as it came up, it is gone,replaced by a blank space of quiet where the hour drawls past in silent doldrums.

An uncomfortable intimacy grows in the limited circle. The distinct sounds of the far shore are drowned first in the cacophony of the squall as it passes over those unseen opposing rocks, then in silent whisper of a mischevious night breeze scurrying along in the trailing skirts of the rain. Uncomfortable because of the intruding random bursts of steam relief valves, and the street-lights that occasionally shut off without warning, constantly niggling the mind of the Watch. Uncomfortable as it becomes cold, as the evening turns into morning. Uncomfortable because as much as I don‘t want to be up, I don‘t want to miss anything either. Uncomfortable because I don‘t want to love this time of day. Intimate, because I do.

The ubiquitous smell of diesel mixes with the tidal seawater to create a stench that will last for decades in the mind of the Watch. It seeps into the memory of every man who‘s stood in it, re-emerging unexpectedly years later; in a walk in the dark, or through an industrial area. It bides unnoticed, never seen nor heard, but in its time bringing back with a rush the entire moment to its unsuspecting bearer, every little detail, a time bomb of scent. A stone remembrance that takes its victim away completely to a recollection of everything, the sound, the smell, the feel of the air, the sense of the unseen darkness, of the power of the boats on the river. It is a place that once stood amidst, owns my allegiance forever.

So there I was, Green Water sweepin’ the bow.

No wait!not yet, back up. That comes later in the story.  We begin when the line handlers had laid below, and only the STASS Handling party remained topside. (for the young‘uns – on the
Shark (SSN591) we had to shove the towed array out a tube whose connection to the boat was on the after deck, topside, with a tube that ran down off the starboard side.) The whole contraption relied on two air motors that weighed 85# each, which were removed and carried below, as well as a bag of specialized tools for attaching things, working the air motors, etc.

On my first underway, my sonar chief hands me the burlap bag with a rope handle, and instructs me in the most serious tones, “Do NOT!I repeat DO NOT lose this bag or its contents under any circumstances whatsoever, Roesener. If you lose something over the side, I fully expect us to pick you up on the return trip where you will report to me personally, having retrieved the tools from the bottom of Long Island Sound, and having trod water for the duration of your mission.”

I believed him.

Of especial concern to him was a certain pin spanner wrench – a custom made wrench without which the array couldn‘t be retrieved.This was my first time on the rounded deck of a modern nuclear-powered submarine. The sum of my experience walking on a rounded, wet deck of a submarine was precisely one trip aft, one line-handling evolution, and one trip back as far as the doghouse on the side of the sail, where the Tool Bag had come out seemingly of its own accord, like the sword from the Lady of the Lake.

I never did tell my chief (whose hand it had been, extended in celestial feminine majesty) of my immediate mental image of the Lady of the Lake. By the time I was convinced that the imagery fit, I had moved on to other insults. But I digress.

I returned aft with the natural apprehension of a person who cannot see the shore, is held on to the deck only by a strap he cannot see affixed to his back, to a deck that has no clear boundary between his shoes and the Sea. A man who had yet to learn to trust non-skid. A man who still was convinced that things that didn‘t move as you walked along their surface was the norm. A latent Landlubber.

And so, I headed aft, towards the rest of the STASS handling party, who stood expectantly waiting on the bag I held. For the first time I grasped a little bit of what it meant to be a submariner – to be expected to succeed.

No one expected me to know anything more yet – but they did expect me to learn. I watched, I listened. This thing went here, that thing went there. This tool was used like this – and then went back in the bag. The deployment of the array went as well as I could have been expected to understand up to that point.

And then, as the “coffin” that housed the entire assembly was being buttoned up, the sea became rough. Swells began running at our feet down the sides of the boat. The boat itself began to roll, and the complex mathematics of swells and rolls brought one or two waves right up and into the STASS coffin. Work went through a shift into urgency, those no longer needed went below.

But I carried the bag, so I was the last, save for the chief. When the last tool clanked into the safety of the burlap, he gesticulated for me to put some speed on it, and get moving. The man who had dropped that last tool into my possession was already gone with a swiftness I wasn‘t sure wasn‘t supernatural. I began to shuffle along the deck, saddled as I was with my apprehension of the lack of clear separation between the sea and myself.

The hand in my back told me that what I was doing wasn‘t right, and so I decided to try walking as swiftly as everyone else, even though it didn‘t seem possible. And amazingly, it WAS possible. I remember thinking, “hey, this is great, I can DO this!”

Well, I thought most of it. But just as I reached the point directly beneath the fairwater planes, hand on the frame of the doghouse door, a giant swell reared up, and I was no longer on the boat.

Well, no, I was. Wait, I wasn‘t. Nope. Yup. I‘m standing on something.

No, I‘m standing on the fairwaters.

Upside down.

That‘s not “standing”.

I hung on desperately to the bag, which was now directly over my head. Or under, depending on how you want to look at it. The whole wave probably lasted two-three seconds at the outside, but it seemed an eternity. I saw underwater through clear, green. The bag had filled with water, anchoring me to the deck. I suppose technically I could have let go, but there was no chance in hell I was going to tread water for two months diving the floor of the Long Island Sound for tools. My feet floated up, but the safety lanyard on my harness – along with the water-filled tool bag – held me back.

As the wave receded I was unceremoniously dumped head first onto the rounded, non-skid-coated deck. My left hand clutched my lanyard, and my right, with the force of an army, gripped the rope handle of The Tool Bag. As soon as I was able to process the fact that I was still alive, not drowned, oriented once again into a world where right-side up was…well, rightside up, I pulled myself to my feet with the left hand and lanyard. Every move I made was gravitated around that bag, and its continued presence on the deck.

Carefully, almost reverently, I tipped as much water as I could out of the bag so I could carry it. It took that amount of time for the Chief to retrieve himself from the aft end of the safety track, and tell me to quit poking around and get the hell below. The next swell was coming, and nearly caught us out again.

I learned a lot in those few seconds – an awful lot. I learned how fast I could move on the rounded back of a submarine. I learned how much I was depended on to do the job I was given. I learned how far I would go to do it. I learned that even a nub bears more respect than a non-boat sailor. Until he fails, he is expected to succeed.

And between you and I, I learned that my chief could squeal like a girl. Just before getting doused, I thought I heard the sailplane door squeak, but I realized it was my chief, behind me, anticipating getting dunked.  We all have our “foxhole” prayers and baptisms by fire and seawater. And sometimes they are voiced with the squeal of a little girl. I’m not in a position to judge.