Toiling in the weather world: a tugboat’s sense of (work)place. Jonathan Taggart info@jonathantaggart.com
Toiling in the Weather World: A tugboat’s sense of (work)place.
Marine towing and salvage has long been classified as a grueling business under-
taken by only the hardest roughnecks, in locales where one has little choice but try to eke a living from the sea (Mowatt, 1980). However, (and gendered as the industry remains), increasingly the docks and foreshores of coastal cosmopolises are plied by a new generation of hired hands: young artists and scholars for whom the occupation is a welcome break from the monotony of service-industry “survival jobs” (L. Rose, personal communication, 2011). This generation brings with it opportunities for a new workforce ethnography, undertaken with a blended empirical approach that combines visual methods with immersive and extended participant observation, where Agee’s “spy traveling as a journalist” (Agee & Evans, 1939, p. XVII) has become the researcher and photographer traveling as a deckhand.
Marine transportation is an industry defined by, and entangled with, mobility.
Historically in British Columbia waterways have held the advantage of speed and route over land-based wagon trails through rough and unyielding terrain (Harris, 2002); today tugboats ply the coast bringing construction aggregate from distant quarries for distribu-
tion in urban and suburban centers. These materials fuel the “hard surfacing” (Ingold, 2008) of the environment through the construction of cities and roads, adding further motivation and ease to urban mobility. In light of these historic and ongoing relationships it is appropriate to approach an ethnography of towboating1 from the perspective of mobilities.
In response to Gibson’s (1979) ecological approach to perception, Ingold has ar-
gued that “life is lived in a zone in which earthly substances and aerial media are brought together in the constitution of beings which, in their activity, participate in weaving the textures of the land” (2008, p. 1796). Indeed, a boat’s crew moves along the (literally) fluid face of this bringing-together, where surface and sub-surface forces act and interact upon an interface far more responsive than soil. Just as Vannini and Taggart (in press) have argued that an island’s sense of place is defined by the way islanders move, here I propose that a tugboat’s sense of (work)place can too be defined by the way towboaters move. Here, however, this movement is largely at the mercy of those fluxes of medium known as weather (Ingold, 2005).
Cresswell (2010) proposes the breaking-down of mobilities into six constituent
parts–motive force, velocity, route, experience, friction, and rhythm. Vannini (2011) has added “remove”–or effective distance–to this list. While each of these parts could stand in as categories in which to describe the ways mobility is experienced at sea, I instead use folk categories pertaining to weather and forecasting to cluster descriptions of embodied phenomena. The descriptions therein have been considered through the lenses of Cresswell’s six constituent parts and Vannini’s addition of “remove”. Images are presented here too, not simply, as Sontag has reduced it, “to illustrate the analysis contained in an article” (1973, p. 22), but to aid in thick description in hopes of conveying a nearer totality of experience (Pink, 2001). In fact, the accompanying photographs function not just as mnemonic devices for later analysis, but served in-situ as a means of understandTugboat” is an industry term, while “towboat”, “towboater”, and “towboating” are colloquialisms. I use local terminology wherever appropriate. 1“
ing, as “to take a photograph is to participate in another person’s . . . mortality, vulnerability, mutability” (Sontag, 1973, p. 15), and, I would add, mobility. Methods
Participant observation (Crang & Cook, 2007), informal interviews, and reflexive
ethnography drawing on the author’s many years of experience as a deckhand (Davies, 1999; Ellis, 2004) have been combined with visual methods–particularly photography– to construct a thick description of the lived experiences (Pink, 2001) of a tugboat’s crew. This approach was particularly appropriate given the researcher’s various identities as a deckhand and photographer, and the access and ability afforded by each. Two semi-
Plate 3. Howe Sound at 15 knots.
structured and open-ended interviews were been conducted; one with a present tugboat skipper during the course of a typical day’s (and night’s) work, and one with a former employee, with informed consent granted by way of waivers with options for varying levels of anonymity. A third interview was conducted by way of email questionnaire. Interviews have been data analyzed following the procedures of post-phenomenological research (Moustakis, 1994): horizontalizing the data, clustering units of meaning into common themes, developing descriptions of experiences and practices based on these clusters, and integrating descriptions into meanings, both experiential and theoretical. The author’s own recorded reflections have been similarly analyzed. Photographs col-
lected over the course of the researcher’s career as a deckhand are presented based on their adherence to and articulation of the meanings emerging from interviews and reflections, as well as on their artistic merit as determined by the researcher, a trained professional photojournalist. Leafs Creek Tugboats
Leafs Creek Tugboats is a small marine towing company operating from a mi-
nor inlet south of Vancouver harbour. The company employs one full-time skipper and a handful of deckhands, with a typical working crew consisting of the skipper and one deckhand. The majority of work involves the towing of empty gravel barges from Vancouver for loading at Sechelt, twenty-five nautical miles northwest along British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast, on a twelve-hour return trip, four or five days a week.
In the 1980’s Leafs Creek Tugboats hired two students through a local univer-
sity’s work placement program. While naval academies and similar post-secondary marine industry training programs do exist (the company’s current skipper is a graduate of such a program), the company president found that the university students’ erratic schedules meshed well with the company’s own unpredictable and infrequent bouts of harbour work during a particularly slow working season. “They didn’t expect full-time work like the thick-headed guys at the union hall, and they always had something interesting to talk about”, the president says of that time.
That “something interesting to talk about” proved important when the company
secured one of the regular Sechelt gravel runs in the early 2000’s. “This run is great for the company, but terrible for crew”, says the current skipper, “It’s stable but boring. The best guys to have working here are the ones that can hold a conversation”. Conversational skill has almost become part of the job description, and as one deckhand puts it, “my job is 5% untying barges/tying up barges and 95% providing the skipper with interesting conversation during long stretches of driving in a straight line with nothing else to do but talk”.
The ability to accommodate erratic scheduling doesn’t just benefit the company.
Tolerance of employee’s unpredictability is rare in a part-time job, and the flexibility allowed by Leafs Creek attracts both students and another type with irregular demands on their time: artists, including the president’s son, a Juno-award-winning musician.
“On the boat”, he says, “I’m usually replying to band-related emails, and later in
the evening I just sit there and scheme up ideas of how to further my career as a musician. What works about this job for me is the fast money - long shifts mean I can work twice a week and have more than enough to live off.”
In the last decade the company has settled into a routine that could easily accom-
modate the “thick-headed guys at the union hall”–those looking for full-time positions or on-board hours to advance industry tickets–but Leafs Creek has chosen to keep employing students and artists. As a case in point, the author has been employed as a deckhand off and on for five years in addition to outside pursuits as a student and photographer. The result of this shift from a more traditional workforce may be the dilution of the lore and mores of maritime industry (as one deckhand admits, “my overall knowledge of traditional marine skills is fairly limited . . . I’m mostly content to know only what is
required to complete my job on the tugboat”), but the anomalous nature of Leafs Creek’s workforce suggests that this threat is localized. Rather than attempt to assess this emergent culture at sea, and given the varied motivations of campus and union hall, I aim to move beyond the trivialities of task and technique (which are left out of this analysis in any holistic sense for considerations of space) to examine the shared phenomenological experiences that attempt to define and identify towboaters. (Winds Calm)
On July 29th, 2009, Vancouver recorded the hottest temperatures since the keep-
ing of records began. That night, perched above the wheelhouse in the outer command post, I experienced Gibson’s idealization of sky and earth–the open environment he acknowledged is “seldom or never realized” (1979, p.106). Ocean and sky were fused in the ambient light, each utterly devoid of undulation and texture, humid haze blending their edges at the great circle of the horizon and obscuring any hint of a headland. Below me lay the decks of the boat, more a mechanical horse or an extension of my body than a
separate entity. There was no motion but forward–unlike other days at sea where a beam swell rocks gently from side to side– and even this was nearly imperceptible.
In the wheelhouse–the 3-meter-by-3-meter dwelling space I share with the skip-
per–the windows were thrown open and four swivel-mounted ceiling fans toiled to spin the stagnant air counter-clockwise. Boots were removed; pant-legs were rolled up. Earlier the skipper and I swam off the boat as we waited for our load of gravel at the Sechelt loading depot. The water had been relatively cool, but now the only medium left in which to immerse ourselves was like a drop of infant formula on the wrist, and we moved through it without feeling it on our skin.
On nights like these Ingold’s weather world (2008) is devoid of all contour and
turbulence, and the absence of inclement weather is, colloquially, the absence of “weather” itself. Tasks aboard are performed from muscle memory, without distraction: I don my lifejacket and work gloves, check my VHF radio, pass through the wheelhouse door and across the engine trunk, flick the winch control to “on”, engage the clutch, release the winch brake and begin to grind in the barge in a fluid motion that takes only a few seconds. The attention of crew is focused within, not without, and the 12-hour shift is passed in conversation, sharing food and books, working on laptop computers, texting friends and spouses, sometimes fishing. Time passes quickly, even when traveling against tide at a mere 4 knots, and, for those for whom the job is a way to fund the next tuition installment, project, or album, a paycheck is earned not begrudgingly. From our seats in the wheelhouse we pull Vancouver towards us like Polynesian navigators pulling islands from the sea (Davis, 2009). (Winds northwest 10-15 knots)
Five nautical miles outside of Vancouver, where an imaginary line connecting
Point Atkinson to Point Grey symbolically cleaves English Bay from the Salish Sea, is Queen Charlotte Channel, the eastern point of entrance into Howe Sound. Here daily inflow and nightly outflow winds regularly build to speeds of 20 knots, and the alternate heating and cooling of land along the steep shores of the sound creates a funnel that
pushes and pulls these winds perpendicular to the predominant breezes of the Salish Sea. The waters surrounding Passage Island, where the winds of the sound and sea meet at right angles, are often turbulent, pulsing up and down rather than rolling through the center of the compass rose. At winds of 15 knots–where ocean swells just fail to break into whitecaps–passing through this junction can be quite unpleasant, as the boat’s predictable rocking degrades into bottom-heavy gyroscoping. Twice as a green deckhand this motion has sent me to the railing–once while functioning on too little sleep and too much coffee, once on too much sleep and too little coffee. Rest and stimulants may seem
trivial, but the key to riding out such swells for the part-time seafarers is in attention split between the goings-on within the wheelhouse and the motion of the vessel. Waves, small as they may be, become Gibson’s “furnishings of the earth” (1979, p. 78) in an otherwise open space, and as we plow clumsily through them we must be alert enough to stay on our feet.
Towboating in 15 knots is liminal. At the Passage Island conflux we experience
a movement away from the “mutually exclusive domains” of sky and earth rejected by Ingold (2008, p. 1802) and begin to see (and feel) an intermingling of the two. At 15
knots this admixture remains in flux, with the potential for a downgrading of dilution to 10 knots equally as possible as an upgrading to 20. At 15 knots the part-time deckhand watches the waves ahead for signs of flattening or peaking, watches distant headlands for the white water of crashing shore break, and checks their mobile for updated forecasts. Gale Warning in Effect: Wind southeast 15 to 20 knots increasing to 25 to 35 after midnight.
Winds in the Salish Sea travel predominantly along a line from northwest to
southeast and back again. In the north these winds originate in Haida Gwaii and the Berring Sea, funneling through the Johnstone Strait and bringing warm, dry weather to the northern Gulf Islands and the Lower Mainland. In the winter the winds build in the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the south, spinning north and west and bringing with them storms and gales. On winter days when the wind nears 30 knots from the southeast a tugboat shift begins anxiously at home watching the treetops for signs of abating winds. At the dock, walking past lines of fishing boats and creosoted pilings, eyes dart to the banners on the nearby bridges: banners flapping is a good sign, banners pulled taut a sign of unrelenting winds.
On deck, muscle memory is interrupted, rudely, as movements that were once
second nature are punctuated with metronomic tilts and shifts. Traversing the engine trunk becomes snake-like, more undulation than ambulation, and maneuvers with the pike–a twenty-foot aluminum pole used for lifting rope from the water–become increasingly isometric as you push against breeze and pull against sodden line. In extreme weather the ocean’s open face is transformed into a kind of Riemann space (in Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), where points that once lay on the same calm vector are folded one onto the other (although never do the points of arrival and departure feel any closure together). In the wheelhouse it becomes easier to sleep than to speak, leaving the skipper to contend with those elements of navigation that have not been automated. The skipper, for his part, only misses the conversation–after all, as one deckhand put it, “the skipper
doesn’t get seasick; the sea gets skippersick”.
In considering the nature of the organism in the weather world, Ingold supposes
that “the skin, like the land, is not an impermeable boundary but a permeable zone of intermingling and admixture” (2008, p. 1806). Illustration of this can be found in a gale upon the Salish Sea, where even clad in a yellow slicker it remains impossible to stay dry on deck. Rain pours down from above, ocean spray whips from perpendicular angles, waves crash around the feet sending cold feelers rebounding upwards. In the midst of this onslaught humidity builds from within the imperfect rubber carapace as the body works harder against increasing forces of motion and resistance. The only way to contend with this unbearable wetness of being is to imagine oneself as being connected bodily to both air and water–a state of relation in stark opposition to the mutually exclusive, “hard surfacing” (Ingold, 2008) of the moorings from whence our specific mobilities originated mere hours ago.
Toilers in the Weather World
“Inhabitants”, Ingold contends, “make their way through a world-in-formation
rather than across its preformed surface. As they do so . . . they may experience wind and rain, sunshine and mist, frost and snow, and a host of other conditions, all of which fundamentally affect their moods and motivations, their movements, and their possibilities of subsistence, even as they sculpt and erode the plethora of surfaces upon which inhabitants tread” (2008, p. 1802).
The lamentable neglect of weather phenomena in a philosophy of the environ-
ment may have as its base the logic inversion that privileges occupation over inhabitation (Ingold, 2008). However, in considering the ways in which a tugboat crew is entangled with such phenomena I propose that the act of towboating is a performance of both occupation and inhabitation; that is, a professional practice at the very center of an elemental world, and therefor in a unique position from which to comment on movement through space. Following Ingold’s dwelling perspective, Vannini and Taggart have proposed that “rather than asking what islands are, we could be asking ourselves what islanders do and how they do it” (in press). Of the constitution of a ship the fictitious Captain Jack Sparrow observes that “it’s not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails– that’s what a ship needs–but what a ship is . . . is freedom” (Bruckheimer,Verbinksi, & Marshall, 2003, 1:33:30)–freedom, the embodied and unbridled potential for mobility. Here rather than asking what a tugboat is, I have set out to describe what towboaters do, and how, and what towboaters do is move through weather in otherwise open space.
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