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Published in Nautical Quarterly6,165 Words Precisely
Fog Index Factor: 6.13
(Published Spring Edition, March, '87 as "The Lizard's Last Adventure")
Copyright 1989 TrixiePixGraphics
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE DEATH OF A SHIP
The Leaping Lizard II was a vessel hewn of wood. She was a deep belly'd, sea going design, with a long, straight keel and a high, slender bow that knifed gracefully through the lumps. She was eighty feet in length, with a traditional pilot house well forward and an unobstructed, flat deck aft. She fished-- a variety of things in her sixty years on the ocean, and she could have told tales that would have put we writers to such shame that we could never again speak of silly typhoons and piddling tsunamis.. The Leaping Lizard had led a good, full life, and had been witness to most everything there was to see, at sea. And, unscathed, she had survived it all..The cool, clear morning of twenty May in the north Pacific found the Leaping Lizard II enroute her new home port. Two men, brokers, had sold her to an anxious buyer a hundred miles to the south, and as a clause of the contract they were to skipper her the distance.. The weather service revealed no hint of inclement conditions along the route. They set the pilot and lounged about the ship while she automatically glided along on a crisp, blue sea, rolling melodically to the gentle swells. The coming of summer had warmed the air, if only a few degrees, but the newness of spring and of life itself was in the air, and in the hearts of the men. It was such a glorious place, at such a glorious time.
At fourteen thirty hours the ship had successfully navigated the island strewn protected waters of the Con Aye, and now found herself in close proximity to that invisible spot, the point of no return in the crossing of the strait. She was as far from the port astern as she was from the next protected bay two hours over the horizon.
At fourteen thirty six hours winds were light from the southwest to six knots. Skies were broken with only the occasional fair weather cumulus drifting by. There was no disturbance in sight..
By fourteen forty nine, a span, the twinkling of an eye, an eternity of thirteen minutes had passed and the world was no longer round. Groaning, trembling gusts of sixty eight knots were recorded as the initial wave of the phenomenon. The surface of the sea was plucked up as dirty carpet and strewn about until it fairly filled the air. The startled souls of the Leaping Lizard were caught entirely unaware, and their frantic calls of "Mayday" went out over the airwaves to mix and be obscured by two dozen more.. There was murder and mayhem in the miserable strait, and I considered for long, painful minutes the implications and consequences, real or imagined, of putting our rescue tugs to sea..
The Coast Guard responded first. Every vessel, every plane, every helicopter, man, woman and child, and I imagine the station's mascots as well were drafted and pressed to some task of support or actual rescue.
The eighty foot flat bottomed government boat put out from our home port, and as well a dozen or more from every port serving the area, and they streaked toward their respective destinations as only unlimited funds could make them. And the pathetic cries for help, out there in the driven brine, continued.
At fifteen hundred I made the executive decision to launch the tug, our largest boat, into the fury of the storm. With an irritating tick of an eyelid, I caused her lines to be loosed.
We set out into the din with a half hearted resignation. There was little to be done, for we were nearly beset ourselves by just rounding the tip of the cape. The ships in trouble that day would sink or live of their own accord, and when the blow had finally expired we would but count the corpses.
The Coast Guard fared no better. They darted to and about searching the vicinities of wreck sites for signs of life, and seldom were they rewarded. The ships perished as flies, and their crews nearly as often. There was little anyone could do except hang on, and hope to be spared like fate...
One of the Coast Guard vessels happened upon the poor Leaping Lizard II. There were any number of ships equally as endangered, but chance allowed the two to come together. Until now the Lizard had held her own. The bilges were filling and her planks were loose and her hull was flexing, but the main continued to beat and the rudder had not been carried away. But there was little time left. The ship could never hope to ride out the blow. Either she must find shelter, or she must perish, and her crew of two radioed their hopeless situation to the world.
It was then the lucky cutter happened along, and no sooner had the men of the Leaping Lizard acknowledged the presence than a horrendous, thundering Cyclops of a sea rose up abeam the ship as the gray hand of the Almighty Himself. With a clear resolution and purpose a thousand tons of snarling ocean crashed down upon them. The Leaping Lizard II, shocked by the blow, rolled her eyes in her head; darkness overcame her, and she fell on her back, a mortally wounded beast...
Both men were surrendered to the sinister clutch of the freezing sea. She had claimed yet another morsel, another bit of foolish human life, and she would consume it, and lick her long icy tendrils at their conclusion. But both men possessed a spark of life and of determination not reckoned on by their adversary, and they clung to their bits of floating debris as one clutching against a fall into the abyss of the devil. They begged for their lives.
For twenty minutes the exasperated Coast Guard ship maneuvered to and fro, port and starboard, up wind and down, hoping to grasp the hypothermic men from the water. But they were in danger of sacrificing their own craft, and their attempts could be accomplished only when the sea turned her gaze elsewhere, for an instant. But finally, thankfully it was done. Both men were plucked from that hell by the brave efforts of that crew. We felt a welcome pang of pride for those men --the Coast Guard, for they'd shown the world what men and the sea are all about..
By sixteen hundred the breeze had abated fully, and all ships, all ships left afloat, headed respectively for port. In all, eight vessels of varying configurations and substantiations slid in agony to the ocean floor. Sixteen men met their individual and horrifying expirations. We turned our tiny cork of a thing in a less obnoxious trough and set a course for home. We had accomplished precious nothing, except, perhaps, to have accumulated one more story to tell and to grow yet another deep line about the face. We slipped quietly into our berth, and sneaked off for our houses to lick our wounds.
At twenty sixteen there was another mayday on the general calling frequency. A new gale had moved in from the southwest, and a southeast breeze of fifty knots was being reported in the strait. A tug, the Pacific Steel, was announcing her position as twenty one miles out and taking water. She had struck an object in the froth and the dark, and her captain now aimed her for the beach.
We were again underweigh. There was no threat to life for the Pacific Steel was luxuriously equipped with lifeboats and survival suits for the men, but we came ahead at our best revolutions.
Our tug escaped the dock within eight minutes of receiving the call, and now it was a race between ourselves and the Coast Guard. We seldom won such a nonsensical contest. That government entity was compelled to spend a million dollars in the saving of some piece of property worth barely a week's interest on the sum. It was a game for them; a livelihood for us. We were reduced to expending only that amount which was justified by the value of the prize. However grand our motives we must enjoy a profit, or seek employment shaving sheep.......and thusly we slogged along at barely twelve knots while our competitor streaked seaward at some undetermined warp factor, burning in fuel the value of our tug every twenty leagues........or so.
At twenty one fifty one the government cutter reported alongside and delivering pumps to the casualty. We could stand down. No further assistance was required.
We idled along for another minute, and the grateful Pacific Steel reported she was pumping dry and was getting underweigh for her destination. But the cutter made a curious parting remark to the tug;
"Yeah, it's too bad those salvage guys can't be out here cleaning up that kind of stuff --would save everyone a lot of headaches". The comment broke and faded on the static.
Yeah, we thought, those log salvage guys really ought be out here doing their jobs, making the oceans safe and clear of bothersome logs. Where were they anyway? And we headed back to our berth. Again we had gone charging around the chuck in search of disaster, at least some disaster we could overcome, and we had accomplished completely nothing.
By the next morning the escapades of the night before were forgotten. We'd been commissioned to install a moorage system for some rich boy's forty meter yacht, and the thoughts of how the work might be most efficiently carried out occupied the thoughts of all. This particular gentleman, our customer, wished the very finest in hardware and installation techniques. A simply adequate product would not do at all; his was to be the best, the creme de la creme of moorings. It was to be the state of the art --or better --or nothing. "Damn the price!" he had said, "What time will it be ready?" And we feverishly put to it.
I was experiencing difficulty in acquiring the type of buoy requested. Indeed, there was really no specific brand or style stipulated. He had vetoed every single suggestion I offered up and stated that it must be somehow bigger, and in some way better. So it was I began to scour the shipyards and scrap mongers in search of just the perfect thing. With unlimited --or nearly so-- funds, I figured I'd just know it when I saw it, and it was on this regal hunt that I happened to stop by the local Coast Guard office.
They displayed a number of old and weathered anchors and abandon "Nav-Aids" in front of the station as a decorative gesture, and a particularly large and majestic steel buoy had caught my eye.. I inquired within as to its possible sale.....and in the midst of hopeful negotiations with the master chief therein the question came up:
"Say, where were you guys last night when we needed you?" He asked. Not understanding the question I simply stared, blank faced. "The Leaping Lizard!", he went on, "A tug rammed her in that storm, last night. Almost sunk 'im too, but we threw 'im some inch and a half'ers and got 'im goin' again."
"The Leaping Lizard?" I countered, "But she went down........what? --yesterday??"
"Well, apparently she didn't." he replied. "That's what the Pacific Steel said she hit, didn't they Mokor...?" and he motioned for one of his crew who had been standing nearby, shooting pool in the rec-room.
"Yeah, that's right," he confirmed. "They said she was capsized. They took a bite out of her keel!"
I thanked them both, forgetting all notions of ridiculous buoys and rich boy's yachts. At last there was work to be done, and I departed hurriedly on a new quest.
The head nurse questioned my presence in her otherwise sparklingly antiseptic facility. I'd been mucking about the scrap yards most of the day and was covered with rust and paint and grime and a myriad unthinkable substances, and I had arrived at her orderly establishment of healing out of breath and hardly composed.
"Those two guys!" I blurted. "The guys the Coast Guard brought in off the boat --the Leaping Lizard! Where are they?"
"Leaping Lizard?" Her eyes began to widen, fearing the worst.. And then she understood... "Oh, I'm sorry; visiting hours were over some time ago..."
"I'm sorry, it's an emergency. Are they both, uh, alive?" I asked. She gave me a queer, sideways look.
"Yes, they're in room five oh six..." and her voice trailed off as I bounded for the elevator. "But you can't go----"
I approached the two men as they lay groggily watching TV in their beds. "They didn't look so bad." I thought. But then hypothermia reveals no obvious symptoms. The men were alert enough, and peeved at having been medically detained so long. That night I cautiously inquired as to their legal status with regards the boat. They replied that the vessel had not been delivered unto its new owner, and therefore the deal was never closed. They were the proud owners of the remains.
"Would you like to sell?" I plunged ahead, and the two were mildly amused.
"There's nothing left to sell.." They regarded me oddly.
I explained that we routinely purchased the rights to lost or sunken things on speculation, in the hope that someday they would be located, and then we might raise them and refurbish or sell the remains as appropriate. Even now, our files were teeming with the ownership papers of millions of dollars worth of ships, lost and as yet never recovered. If one in a thousand eventually paid off, then the game was worthwhile.
The two seemed amazed that we would gamble so, but then I hadn't mentioned the terms of the offer; we never laid out hard cold cash, but offered only a percentage, and a conservative one, of the value of the spoils --when and if recovered.
The two men must have thought me a eccentric, or just plain mad, and the emotion that came to them was, apparently, one of pity.
"When the Lizard went down," they said, "we cried our tears, took our lumps and went on to other thoughts. If you can find her and bring her up, well, that's more than we'll ever do. She's all yours". And I was ever so prompt and assistive in the signing of the contract, which just happened to be in my right vest pocket. And in this way I had bought me a ship. Now all I had to do was find it.
Immediately the Coast Guard stations were advised of the change of ownership. It was my hope someone would report the capsized hulk adrift, and we would just drive out to her, and drag home the wreckage as some alley cat bringing home his kill. I hoped, also, that she was spotted quickly before anyone else managed to bump into her in the night, for as the new owner, I was also liable for any damage she might unwittingly cause... We worried, too, that she might lose her entrapped air pockets and silently and unseen slide to the bottom. And so against the clock we began to methodically forage about. Far into the night we poked our way along countless rock strewn shores, hoping she had been driven aground on some lee spit or shore. We employed our best notions of tide and current movements, and extrapolated their wanderings, and computed the entire mess into a grand example of dead reckoning. Such a thing does not move without a force, we reasoned, and so we endeavored to calculate every degree of every influence that could have played upon the mass during the preceding days. Every guess was explored, and every theory followed to its end. And by oh three hundred that morning, in the face of yet another savage tantrum of the sea, we began to believe that she had gone to the bottom. We had looked every place she could possibly be. We had exposed every hidey-hole that may be used by unthinking, sunken ships....and she just wasn't there.. We began to believe that she had quietly drown, out there in the night. And we struck a course for home.. Again, our net accomplishments had accrued to less than nothing...
--Not ten minutes safe and snug in bed, at oh five eleven, we got the call. It was the way of the world. The Leaping Lizard II was reported aground. Was the reporting party reliable, I inquired of the young Coast Guardsman on the line?
"Roger." he replied, still accustomed to speaking over the wireless. "I would say the party is reliable." The caller was a judge, was phoning from his beach house on the mainland forty miles distant. I returned the call. He could, he said, in all honesty and without fear of error or misrepresentation, claim that the poor Leaping Lizard was aground. All eighty feet of her... And she was blocking his view of the morning sunrise.... She had taken uninvited residence in the gentleman's front yard, tossed there in the storm! If I was the owner of the contraption, he bellowed, I was requested to come and get my thing NOW! If I please... And the line went dead.
As if satisfied with the degree of destruction wrought already, wind and sea moderated and then fell dead. We charged ahead on the silky surface of a calm sea, afraid all the while that the twitching bones of the wreck would somehow come to life again and slip away before we could arrive.
At oh nine oh six we beheld her. Our first glimpse of the site was to recall the incredible visions of a great beached sperm whale I had seen as a child. The repugnant thing had been so incongruously large, so intimidating in its hugeness, so completely out of place. Such things did not belong out of the water, and it was unnerving to see them so.
She was majestic even in her shame, yet so beaten. But as we rounded the point of the spit and her full beam's length came into view we were horrified. She lay as some warm, jerking carcass, while two hundred vulturous little men streamed through her innards, carrying away the entrails. And at that, that fine bit of mental membrane which holds back the animalistic urges and abounding savagery that sleeps in all of us was burst.
Our ship maintained a goodly bit of weigh around the point and now I enhanced the momentum with a slam to the stop of the throttle. Hard over came the wheel and within seventy yards the strong, deep step of our stem drove into the sand. Nearly before she had finished grating and grinding her way to a halt our Master Diver, Ron, and I were over the bow and stampeding up the beach. Obscene rage can lend one new found strength and an air of indomitable ferociousness, and we plowed a trail through the startled crowd to the opening in our wounded friend, the ship. Sensing our unrestrained rage, the group began to pull away. There were two score of the dirty little grubs rooting around inside the leaping Lizard as she lay defenseless on her beam, and the rest had formed an orderly line outside and leading up the beach. All had come prepared, with axes and chisels and crowbars; hacksaws to cut away her fixtures and sledge hammers to bust away unwanted or less valuable trinkets. None came with wrenches or proper tools, but with blunt and unthinking weapons of brainless destruction.
I screamed that I was the owner, and that all persons would leave my vessel now, or else storm me where I stand! Most dropped their thick instruments and backed away quickly. Others walked calmly and with great deliberation, hoping to sense some weakness that would compel them to spring the attack. But the mood of the mass was altered from one of merriment and conspiracy to one of apprehension and caution, and the more persistent of the bunch, now outnumbered in spirit, grudgingly withdrew. We stepped aboard to take in the scene, and the senses were numbed..
There was nothing left of her, at least nothing worth the prying loose. She was stripped as clean as a smooth pebble, inside and out. The galley was a series of dirty scars where fixtures had been. The wheelhouse was minus its wheel, as well the binnacle, ripped from the deck as a dandelion from soft earth. Even the throttle and gearbox controls were twisted from their mountings. The head was gone from the head, and the floorboards and bulkheads had been knocked loose and crushed so that the sewage holding tank could be extracted from beneath. In the engine room the propeller shaft had been severed aft and ahead of the intermediate bearing, and it too, was pulled loose of the keel. Any parts that could come off an engine had been plucked, and further examination revealed that the engine mounts themselves had been unbolted and carried away. Someone had made off with the steering chain, extracted, no doubt, at considerable unpleasantness. Her portholes had been sawed roughly from all compartments, and where she had been given simple windows, those too we gone. We stepped out into the light to discover that nearly all the thieves had fled, and we walked around the stern of the great, dead ship. Even her screw had been hacked at the cutless, and she began to take on the characteristics of some sacrificed and mutilated dumb beast. And we held those responsible in the same murderous regard as those who would castrate a horse for fun or religion. Had we been granted opportunity to place our cold, strong fingers about their necks, at that moment, we would have throttled them until their eyes popped from their heads as the corks of champagne, and we would have had little regret.
Then, as we gazed about the mass of the ship through eyes filled with hatred and blurred with rage, I began to softly chuckle; why the bastards had even ripped from her deck the cleats. And I could stomach no more...
As I stood, battling the sadness and mixture of profound and unprecedented anger, I was aware of a sound. A clanging, rumbling thing approached from the little road which came from the heart of the tiny seaside community. It was a tractor, piloted by a large, burly man and escorted by a small mob on foot, most bearing clubs. There was only one scrap of machinery left aboard that required such measures to steal, and that was the engine block itself... They were to have it, come hell or that other thing. I was as determined, by God, they would not.
From the wheelhouse of my still grounded tug came Brutus. It was an ungainly, functionally ridiculous thing. I'd purchased it years before for the extermination of "Six Gills" (500 pound sharks) we sometimes unwittingly caught, and I had loaded my own ten gauge shells with a bit of beef and "oomph" that would have startled a few of the great white hunters. It was scarcely twenty six inches long, from sight to stock, and I was frankly afraid to torch it off, lest it do more damage to its owner than to its victim. But fortunately, the psychological deterrent was sufficient. The approaching crew was finally convinced of the degree of my perseverance in the matter. They stopped, hesitated, and then slowly turned and scampered away, muttering insults as they went. Never did I comprehend the mentality of that aggression..
I left Ron ashore with that crude persuader, and although he would have never used such a device even in the face of his own demise, he was an effective enough token presence. I backed the tug off the sandy spit and anchored her safely offshore, and brought one of the small boats back in.
There were some decisions to be made. The Lizard, in her present predicament, stripped and defiled as she was, was worthless. More, she was worse than valueless, as the liability of her laying in his honor's front yard would far outweigh any compensation we could receive from her as firewood. And then there was the effort to remove her, and what to do with the body afterwards.
Eventually we concluded that she must be removed. We called in several trucks to begin cutting up the wheelhouse and superstructure which was nearly detached anyway, and as we sat there on the logs of the beach contemplating the best method of disposing of the rest, a small boy approached and stood awkwardly, gently toeing the sand, something held behind his back. For some minutes he attempted cool conversation, and then he mustered the guts:
"My dad said I should give it back!" he choked out. "an' he says I'm real sorry I took it." He handed forth a small brass barometer he had taken from the bulkhead of the main salon... I nearly choked myself, and Ron had a misty glint in his eye. The boy began to bawl, and we could hear his rending sobs as he turned and ran toward the safety of some scrub grass along the row of beach houses. There was truth --albeit only a shred, in the world after all..
I wanted to run after the boy and to comfort him and to tell him that I held nothing against him and that it would all be okay. I wanted to hold him and let him cry-- perhaps we'd cry together-- and erase the pain of the thing from his mind forever. But I did not. If he was ever to be a man, to be more of a man than his townsfolk, he must endure the momentary barrage of confused emotion, and to emerge stronger and more real because of it. He must endure it alone. I knew he would survive and overcome it. He must.
But the event had been witnessed by a few of the more persistent onlookers, and presently, amid their hushed and secretive murmurs, they shuffled self consciously away. It was bloody good for them, I thought. One small boy was in command of more raw guts and truth than the entire slinking community, and I turned back to the mechanical thoughts of the wreck.
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