Ship work in the harbor: a/Jove leji. the Brooks K. McA lli ster nudges a tanker into her herth in the Kill Van Kull . A/Jove . the viewfi¡om the deck. wor/.. ing a containership. Photos hy the author.
Lookingforwardfi¡om theforedeck of"the Britannia, the bright blue citv scows mO\'e toward their destination- --an enormous landfill on Staten Island.
Then, too, landsmen of all sorts and ages seem drawn to boats , and tugs are particularly appealing. On a trip to Savan nah, we tied up at the city park on the riverfront and immed iate ly became a touri st attraction . People stroll ed by on their evening walks admiring our cheerful little red boat as if it were a centerpi ece to the park. On our way home from Savannah, we were off Cape Hatteras when the vessel shuddered and grey smoke billowed o ut from the engine room doors and hatc hes . The port engi ne had suffered a minor crankcase ex plosion caused by a fa ulty va lve dropping down into the cy linder and being bas hed to pieces by the piston . The smoke came fro m the clutch burning as the engine stopped suddenl y and the whee l (prope ller, to yo u 11011-tuggers) kept turning. Thi s left us to ro und Cape Hatteras on one eng ine. Not long after, the same valve fai lure occ urred on the way to Cape Cod. (These failures followed a mi sguided redesign by the engine manufacturer, since corrected.) T hi s time the engineer decided all the damaged parts had to be cleaned out and the cy linder prepared to receive a new liner and power pack on arriv al at the Sandwich power plant on Cape Cod. Thi s meant that whoever could fit in the porthole-size crankcase opening would spend the next six or eight hours half in side the engine. There he could pick from the hot oil , with the
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tips of his fingers, all the pieces of the old pi ston and valves, the largest of which was a little bigger than a golf ball. C ursing my size, I accepted thi s assignment. Now , there is a certain amount of filth and grime one can acc umulate on the body, but after a certain point no more will stick- you have reached maximum dirtiness and have become a new entity , part of a greater, mess ier whole. In this case, I mused, I had become an o il - and grease-blackened part of the huge hot steel eng ine-an element as essential to the ex plosive conversion of fossil fue l to energy as the hundreds of machined stee l components that surrounded me. At some point, I pulled head and shoulders out of the crankcase to see the engineer grinning widely at my state. He as ked if I' d had enough-we could always fini sh later or get the other deckhand to he lp. " He ll , no," I said. "Thi s is great!" The eng ineer seemed to share my enthusiasm and we worked on several hours more like men possessed.
At Home in the Harbor These anecdotes can' t capture what life on a tug is like dayto-day . I think of all the times I came bac k aboard a boat, arriving in the galley with my duffle and just sitting down for a few minutes to li sten to the generator hum . I'd g lance aro und with deep sati sfaction-a settling dow n of all that is stirred up and shaken loose by the cold disjointed strangeness one encounters in life ashore. We know and value our friends because of the day-to-day things; why should tugs be any different? A good boat has that quality of friendship. Just as one is at home on a tug, the tugs are at home in the harbor. It must be said that tugmen take the view towards the harbor similar to that which taxi drivers have for the city streets. They have no particul ar authority , but they inhabit spaces which others mere ly pass through . Tugmen live in the harbor and they consider it their duty to keep all mere transients full y aware of that fact. One can become possessive and even arrogant in thi s situation-and not without cause. For if every vessel shared the tugman 's understanding of the ways of those waters, life on them would be simpler and a good deal safer. t
Joseph Stanford, editor of Sea Hi story ' s Guide to American and Canadian Maritime Museum s, is currently serving as assistant carpenter aboard S/V Sea C loud. SEA HISTORY 76, WINTER 1995-96