Transiting the Canal

The Mercury arrived at the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal at 5:00am on Wednesday, June 25, 1980.  En route from San Diego, California, to Wilmington, North Carolina, she was fully loaded with a high-priority cargo for the U.S. Marine Corps, part of the American military response to the Iranian hostage crisis.  This cargo gave the Mercury precedence over several other cargo ships that lay at anchor waiting their turns to transit the canal.  Gliding easily through the placid water off the south coast of Panama, she slowed to take on pilots and linehandlers, and then proceeded into the canal entrance, past the port of Balboa, and under the large center span of the Bridge of the Americas.  Just ahead stood the Miraflores Locks.

This was the first of my two experiences with the Panama Canal.  I was very young and had a third mate’s license that was just over a year old.  Everything in Panama was brand new to me, and I found it all fascinating.  As the Mercury entered the Miraflores Locks, she was guided forward and into position by railroad locomotives called “mules” on the dock.  These were connected to both sides of the ship by heavy steel hawsers.  Then the lock gates were closed, valves were opened, and water gravitated into the chamber from the next and higher chamber just ahead of it.  Then the lock gates between the two chambers were opened, and the ship was eased forward into the second chamber.  This one was filled from Miraflores Lake, which lay between the Miraflores and Pedro Miguel Locks.  All this was orchestrated in a small Spanish mission style building adjacent to the locks.  After exiting the Miraflores Locks, the Mercury sailed the short distance across this intermediate lake to the Pedro Miguel Locks, and the process was repeated.  Here, though, there was only one step, that is, the ship passed through only one lock chamber, in order to reach the uppermost water level.

From the Pedro Miguel Locks, the Mercury transited the famous Culebra Cut through the backbone of the Latin American mountain chain.  Later renamed Gaillard Cut for the engineer who headed this feat of construction, it was a most impressive but also incongruous sight with jagged walls of rock towering along both sides of the ship.  After eight miles of this, the ship entered Gatun Lake, which stretched 23 miles across the center of the isthmus to the north.  Following a series of twisting and turning channels around islands and through the jungle, the Mercury at last arrived at the Gatun Locks.  Here the ship passed through three lock chambers in fairly quick succession and was lowered back down to sea level.  Seven miles later, she exited the canal at Limon Bay, next to the port of Cristobal.  After discharging the pilots, the vessel proceeded into the open Caribbean.  It was by now mid-afternoon; the transit had taken close to ten hours.  With Panama fading from sight, the Mercury increased speed and headed northeast into a strong wind and building waves.

Possibly unique among the world’s waterways, the Panama Canal was certainly distinctive in a manner that commanded my attention and has held my interest ever since.  On a shipmate’s recommendation, I later read David McCullough’s great book[1] about the canal’s construction, a tale replete with engineering, history, political intrigue, medical advances, and tragedy.  While the Panama Canal has been long and rightly recognized as one of the great man-made wonders of the world, it is sobering to consider the horrific price in human life that its construction cost.  We who benefit from the canal today owe an immense debt of gratitude to those who lost their lives building it.  Such thoughts came to me later in life, though.  When I was young, it just felt exciting to have even a very small part in something so famous.

My second experience with the Panama Canal took place a few years later aboard the Comet.  En route from New Orleans, Louisiana, to San Lorenzo, Honduras, she arrived off Cristobal and anchored there at 6:00pm on Monday, January 30, 1984.  The ship rested easily at anchor in very calm water, no wind, and stifling heat overnight.  Soon after breakfast on Tuesday the 31^st, a pilot came aboard, and the Comet weighed anchor and proceeded into the canal.  This transit was in the opposite direction of the Mercury’s, but was otherwise quite similar.

The pilot on this transit was an exceptionally friendly fellow.  I remember when the Comet passed from Gatun Lake into Culebra Cut he remarked to us, “Well, this is the part that God did not intend to be a canal.”  And he chatted with us about the difficulties of dynamiting a waterway out of a mountain range.  He also gave us tourist brochures complete with photographs and text that described the canal and its history and operations.  I still have this bit of memorabilia, which I found very informative.

At 5:00pm that day, after completing her transit of the canal, the Comet moored in Balboa for cargo operations.  I went ashore briefly and walked around the waterfront.  At the entrance to the docks, a taxi driver spoke to me in badly broken and heavily accented English.  He offered to bring me into downtown Balboa for “only $30.00.”  When I politely declined, he exploded angrily and cursed me out in very loud, completely fluent, unbroken, and unaccented English.  I found this performance rather amusing.

That evening, actually at 12:30am on Wednesday, February 1, the Comet sailed from Balboa.  Another pilot took her under the Bridge of the Americas and out to sea.  After he departed, the ship set a course for the coastwise run to Honduras, and I left the Panama Canal behind for the last time.

In the forty years since, many changes have come to the Panama Canal.  Foremost among these is the transfer to Panamanian ownership.  The erstwhile American colony called the Canal Zone has passed into history.  Equally important are the new and bigger locks, built to accommodate today’s gargantuan container ships and oil tankers.  The original locks, 1,000 feet long and 110 feet wide, were by the standards of their time enormous.  They are still used, of course, but supplemented by the newer and larger ones.  Additionally, two more bridges now cross the canal; the cargo ports of Cristobal, Colon, and Balboa have expanded; and webcams now monitor all traffic passing through the locks.  So I can watch all the action on a computer screen at home!

For many years I was the only member of my family that had gone to Panama.  This changed on Friday, January 8, 2010, when my son James entered the canal from the north aboard the cruise ship Zuiderdam of the Holland America Line.  This vessel transited the Gatun Locks and entered Gatun Lake, where James disembarked and then completed his transit from Gamboa aboard the ferry Tuira II.  From Balboa, he recrossed the isthmus by bus and rejoined the Zuiderdam at the Colon Cruise Terminal.

Next, my son Michael, while on a hitchhiking odyssey through Latin America, visited the Miraflores Locks, witnessed the passage of a ship through them, and then toured the adjacent Miraflores Visitor’s Center on Wednesday, December 7, 2016.

Then, Miss Patty saw the Panama Canal from an airplane on Tuesday, May 21, 2019.  She was traveling on Avianca Airlines to Brazil to assist with our newborn grandson David, and she changed aircraft in Panama City.  When she returned on Saturday, July 6, the view of the canal was unfortunately obscured by clouds and rain.

Little did I think in the 1980s that the Panama Canal would later become such a family affair!  I never imagined then that one son would sail on cruise ships, that another son would hitchhike from Pennsylvania to Panama, or that I would have family in Brazil.  Life is indeed full of surprises.  Through these surprises, though, the Panama Canal has served four of us well as a common interest and as a waypoint in our travels.  Time will tell if the rest of the family will also go to Panama.

In the preface to his great book, David McCullough pays tribute to the Panama Canal, describing its construction as

a profoundly important historic event and a sweeping human drama not unlike that of war.  Apart from wars, it represented the largest, most costly single effort ever mounted anywhere on earth…. It affected the lives of tens of thousands of people at every level of society and of virtually every race and nationality.[2]

Since its construction, the Panama Canal has affected the lives of hundreds of millions of people, including my own, as one of the world’s most vital transportation links.  More freight passes through Panama than most folks can imagine, and there is no end of it in sight.  Without Panama, the global supply chains and the world’s economies would be largely crippled. 

Finally, there remains in the annals of Panama Canal literature an additional, if tenuous, family connection.  My grandparents never travelled to Panama, but they owned an edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica which contains an article[3] on the Panama Canal co-authored by Colonel George W. Goethals, one of the chief engineers of its construction.  This prose, now in my possession, symbolically links the family, the sea, and the Panama Canal, and prompts me to recall many golden opportunities and happy memories!

Now, we have some photographs to consider: 

 

 

 

Two views of the anchorage taken from the Comet in Limon Bay off Cristobal near the north end of the Panama Canal on Monday, January 30, 1984.  I took more pictures than these, but my camera was malfunctioning, which I did not realize until later, and so only these two survived. 

The following photographs come from the tourist brochure which the friendly pilot aboard the Comet gave me.  I don't remember his name, but I remain very grateful to him for this gift.

 

In this first picture, we have an aerial view, looking north, of the Miraflores Locks and Lake Miraflores.  In the upper left corner, we can see part of the Pedro Miguel Locks.  

 

Next, we look the other way and see the canal's southern terminus, and beyond that, the Pacific Ocean.  In the center stands the Bridge of the Americas, a structure that dates from 1962.  On the left lies part of the port of Balboa.

 

Here, near the northern terminus of the canal, we see Limon Bay with its extensive anchorage and the finger piers of Cristobal.  The city proper of Colon lies to the right, just out of the picture.

 

This rudimentary map shows the basic layout of the canal, most notably its northwest to southeast layout, something that surprises many people.

 

Finally, this schematic profile, while not drawn to scale, illustrates the canal's elevated course through the mountainous terrain of the Panamanian isthmus.  A short but unlikely route for a ship!

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[1] David McCullough, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914, New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1977.  A truly outstanding book by one of my favorite authors.

[2] Op. cit., p. 11.

[3] George W. Goethals and Clarence S. Ridley, “Panama Canal,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, London: The Encyclopaedia   Britannica Company, Ltd., 1941, v. 17, p. 171-177.   In 1941 Mr. Ridley was the governor of the Panama Canal Zone.

Culture Shock

The freighter Mercury was sailing southeast in beautiful tropical weather several miles off the coast of Mexico in June of 1980.  She was  bound from San Diego to the Panama Canal with a load of military vehicles which were on their way to the Marine Corps base near Wilmington, North Carolina.  Because of the military nature of this cargo, the Mercury carried a military officer to superintend it on this voyage.  He was a Navy lieutenant in his mid-twenties, which made him a few years older than myself.  He had previously sailed aboard Navy ships and had become a fully qualified surface warfare officer of the unrestricted line.  His voyage aboard the Mercury, however, was his first experience of a civilian cargo vessel, and it astonished him.

Lieutenant Mike was an affable shipmate.  He seemed to blend in reasonably well with the Merchant Marine crew, and he displayed a healthy interest in the workings of the ship.  Some of our ways puzzled him, but he never criticized us or our methods.  This trait alone would have endeared him to the crew.  Above and beyond that, though, he was a genuinely friendly fellow and a good dining room companion.  He loved to eat, and he remarked over almost every meal, “This is even better than the Navy chow!”

One morning when I was on watch, the lieutenant came up to the bridge.  Opening the door slightly, he poked his head through the opening and politely requested “permission to come on the bridge.”   I of course bid him enter, and he came in and stood by me and chatted for a bit.  As we talked he looked around at everything with a somewhat confused expression on his face.

The Mercury had a very spacious bridge.  From where we stood, we could see everything, including out the large plate glass windows to the sea beyond and out the side doors to the also very spacious bridge wings.  The lieutenant took all of this in and realized that until he arrived, I had been all alone up there.  I was a very young third mate, all of 22 years old, and I was in charge of the ship’s movements with no one to assist or supervise me.  His astonishment at this situation soon became obvious,

In a stammering voice, the lieutenant asked me, “There’s no one else here?  There’s no helmsman?”

“It’s on automatic,” I started to reply.

But he continued as if this hadn’t registered.  “You do everything here?  You do your own radar plotting?  You do your own navigation?  You’re your own lookout?  What if something happens?  And the weather observations?  Do you do that, too?”  And so on and so forth.  He was clearly flabbergasted—and possibly terrified, too—at finding one solitary third mate on the bridge of a large cargo ship underway at sea.  This did not fit in with his Navy experience, where an army of crewmen swarmed a much smaller bridge.

I explained that this situation was perfectly normal.  We were in open water with good weather and no traffic.  Since they were not needed on the bridge, the three unlicensed seamen on my watch were working with the bosun on deck.  With my license, I was fully qualified as the mate of the watch and could do everything he asked about and more.  There really was no cause for concern.  I’m not sure that he believed me, though.

After a short interval, the lieutenant turned to go below.  He wished me well, but as he left he muttered uncomprehendingly to himself, “I don’t get this.  Only one man on the bridge?  I can’t understand these guys.  How do they do it?”  And so on and so forth as he disappeared down the stairs.

A few years later, when I was the second mate aboard the Waccamaw, something similar took place.  The ship was docked in Norfolk, Virginia, one weekend in October of 1982, and a large group of naval reservists came aboard for a tour.  These men held full-time civilian jobs and did part-time military work.  They were middle-aged in dress blue uniforms with numerous gold stripes on their sleeves.  To facilitate the sightseeing, the group split in half.  The chief mate led one tour, and I led the other.  We took them through the entire ship, from bow to stern and from bridge to engine room.  They followed closely, listened attentively, and asked intelligent questions.  A few times, though, they seemed confused by the answers they received.

Down in the pump room, one reserve commander asked several questions, and then exclaimed, “I don’t understand how you fellows can run a ship this size with such a small crew!”  He went on to explain that compared to a Navy ship, we had “so few officers” and “so few crewmen” that he just couldn’t see how we got the job done.  This led to some lively discussion, and it came out that several of the other reservists felt the same way.

Through no fault of their own, these men had been taught the Navy way of doing things and not the Merchant Marine way.  And there is a difference.  A commercial ship must operate efficiently and turn a profit in order to survive, while a military ship relies on the bottomless pit of government funding.  Also, the Navy sees a ship primarily as a floating gun platform, whereas in the Merchant Marine a ship is transportation.  These financial and operational dichotomies lead to two completely different ways of thinking and working. One might say that “never the twain shall meet,”[1] but they did in our fleet and usually with the result that the Navy men and the Merchant Marine fellows simply could not understand each other.  Each group looked at the world from its own point of view and found the other’s viewpoint incomprehensible.

One of our Church officials, Elder Dallin H. Oaks, recently made a similar observation:

Each of us has a personal lens through which we view the world.  Our lens gives its special tint to all we see.  It can suppress some features and emphasize others.  It can also reveal things otherwise invisible.[2]

My experiences as a merchant seaman crafted my personal lens many years ago.  My subsequent academic career as a college librarian and student of the humanities reinforced and enhanced this

personal lens  So, after all these years, I still view the world as if I were standing on the bridge wing of a cargo ship.  I like this view.  I see everything quite clearly from this vantage point.

Quite naturally, people do think in terms of what they know and understand, and of course this colors their view of everything outside their own corner of the world.  And when people are confronted with something radically different and completely alien to everything within their range of understanding, they typically respond with astonishment and often say the most outlandish things.

This is reflected in some of the remarks that people ashore have made to me about seafaring.  They’ve ranged from the bizarre—“Do you sleep in hammocks?” and “Do you have flush toilets?”—to the uncomprehending—“Oh, how exciting! You work on a cruise ship!”—to the demeaning—”How can you stand to live like that?!”—to the sadly inevitable and inappropriate jokes about shipwrecks.  While these remarks grow very tiresome very quickly, they do serve to illustrate the gulf that separates the merchant seamen from the laymen.

Captain Paul McHenry Washburn, the Master of the container ship Stella Lykes and a literary figure, asserted the opposite point of view:

But there are a lot of us who are here because this is where we fit in, and we don’t fit in anywhere else.  We seem to be out of step.  The square peg in the round hole.  I was out of place as a child, and now I am not looking forward to retirement.  I dread it.[3]

Furthermore, he added as he looked toward land from the Stella Lykes:

I would rather be here for the worst that could be here than over there for the best that could be there.  I’ve never felt comfortable or secure anywhere else.[4]

 

Admittedly, this is an extreme opinion that seems to border on solipsism.  After all, Captain Washburn did have a family ashore, and he cared for them all very much.  Nonetheless, his remarks do summarize the situation well.  The merchant fleet is a culture unto itself, separate and apart from life in any other profession, including the Navy.  A landsman, or for that matter a naval officer,  stepping aboard a cargo ship would experience culture shock just as much as a seaman going ashore and taking up a new occupation would.  Some things, like the proverbial oil and water, just don’t mix.

It is precisely for this reason that the seaman-turned-playwright Eugene O’Neill penned his famous lines:

It was a great mistake, my being born a man.  I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish.  As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death![5]

Another extreme position, this one not only borders on solipsism but also leans toward misanthropy.  Still, the author makes his point well, and I have thought similarly many times in social and business situations over the years.  In the end, I’ve just had to resign myself to the simple fact that going to sea has made me immutably different.  Thus, both Mr. O’Neill’s and Captain Washburn’s assessments are correct.

Yet there remains one further point which these gentlemen did not address.  In his trial before the Athenian court, Socrates asserted that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”[6]

Sea gulls and fish, with their inherently limited capabilities, cannot know how fortunate they are. Unable to think and reason, they cannot ponder the higher matters of life.  They cannot read and study the classics of literature and history and philosophy and theology or master the natural and applied sciences.  At first glance, their lives may look more attractive than that of the social outcast who can’t fit in anywhere except at sea, but the intellectual limitations of the sea gull and the fish would inevitably become intolerably crippling.  Humans, including merchant seamen, are created in the image of their Creator, and as such, they share in his characteristics, including intelligence, which enables them to learn, enrich themselves, and achieve so much more than animals.  What an honor this is, since the scriptures inform us that “The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth” (D&C 93:36).  Even the most socially misfit, solipsistic, and misanthropic merchant seaman shares intelligence, light, and truth with God.

Furthermore, with these divine qualities, there is no need to dread retirement.  I’m actually looking forward to it.  I anticipate a robust retirement filled with grandchildren, academic studies, church activities, and occasional cruise ship voyages!

Before I leave for work in the predawn hours, I often step out onto the porch and gaze upon the stars.  The constellation Orion stands out in the south.  Betelgeuse  shines on the east flank, Rigel on the west, and Sirius below.  I smile as I remember standing with my sextant on the bridge wing of the Rigel, taking sights of her heavenly namesake.  Thoughts of ships, voyages, and even sea gulls and fish crowd upon my mind, too.  But the great celestial majesty above me transcends these idle reminiscences.  Thus enlightened, my mind recalls in the great celestial language, Gloria Dei est intellegentia.

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[1] Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Ballad of East and West,” in A Victorian Anthology, 1837-1895, ed. Edmond Clarence Steckman, at www.bartleby.com.

[2] Quoted in “Spiritual awareness” (sic), Church News, June 25, 2017, p. 16.

[3] Quoted in John McPhee, Looking for a Ship, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990, p. 157.

[4] Op. cit., p. 155-156.

[5] Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 153-154.

[6] Plato, The Apology of Socrates, tr. Benjamin Jowett, in The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, vol. 1, 6^th ed., New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992, p. 824.

The Scofflaw

Captain Ray Iacabacci appeared on the bridge of the Comet with an armful of bottles.  An unlicensed seaman nicknamed Wash followed him, talking constantly and apologizing repeatedly.  As Captain Icky and Wash turned to go out on the port bridge wing, I followed them to see what was going on.  As they reached the side of the ship, Captain Icky relaxed his arm-hold on all the bottles and started pitching them into the sea far below.  One by one they dropped into the water with a splash and were left behind to sink in the Comet’s wake.  Wash became silent and appeared grief-stricken as he watched his treasures leave his possession forever.  Whiskey, gin, rum, cognac, vodka, wine, and a few beer chasers all went to their final resting place at the bottom of the Atlantic.

When the deed was done, Captain Icky stood up straight and spoke sternly to his subordinate:  “That takes care of that.  I won’t do anything else about it this time.  Just don’t ever bring any more of that stuff on board again!”

Wash replied, “Yes suh, Cap’n.  Ah mean, no suh, Cap’n.  Ah won’t do that no more, Cap’n.  Ah’ve learned mah lesson, Cap’n.  Ah promise Ah’ll be good, Cap’n.  Thank yah, Cap’n.”  He bowed and backed away submissively as he spoke.  Captain Icky grunted a dismissal at him and then both men left the bridge.  No official record of this disciplinary action was made; the offender received only a verbal reprimand and suffered the loss of his liquor.  Captain Icky had administered justice with mercy.

Such was Captain Icky’s way.  A gruff but good-natured man, he was always willing to give an offender a second chance, but he wanted the culprit to learn a lesson in the process.  In this case, it worked very well.  Demonstrating that “he that hearkeneth unto counsel is wise” (Prov. 12:15), Wash never caused any trouble again.  In a subsequent case with a different and less contrite personality, however, Captain Icky’s good nature was put to the test.

The Comet loaded military vehicles in New Orleans and then sailed for San Lorenzo, Honduras, via the Panama Canal.  Moored to a concrete pier that extended into the water from an immense jungle, the ship was unloaded by her own deck crewmen assisted by American Army personnel stationed in the area.  Because it was a high-priority cargo, the unloading continued without respite long into the night.  Most of the crew worked overtime to get everything ashore so the Comet could sail again in the morning.  A few of the fellows were able to take a couple of hours off and go into town, but most of them returned promptly and reported that there was nothing in the town that was worth seeing, let alone spending money on.  One of them lingered in the town bar, however.  His shipmates tried to convince him to return to the Comet with them, for they sensed that trouble was brewing.  But demonstrating that “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes,” (Prov. 12:15), he did not heed their counsel.

This fellow was an able seaman.  His name was difficult to pronounce, so it was often just slurred into Go Bell.  He was not a bad person, but he had a few bad habits which did not endear him to his colleagues.  Many of them found one habit in particular extremely irritating.  Quite simply, Go Bell talked too much.  He talked at people instead of to them, and he talked with affected authority and knowledge on all subjects, including the operation of the ship.  Whatever anyone else said, including his boss, Go Bell would top it.  He always knew more and knew better than everyone else.  Cynics would wonder aloud, “If he’s so smart, why doesn’t he have a Master’s license?”  He never took anyone’s advice, and he certainly never heeded the oft-repeated advice to just shut up and stop irritating others.  It was predicted that sooner or later his big mouth would get him into trouble, and in San Lorenzo, it did.

Around midnight aboard the Comet, the bosun asked Captain Icky if he could have a few of the men help him rig the heavy lift gear.  There were several oversize and overweight items stowed forward on the main deck, and they needed to go ashore.  Captain Icky was conferring with the bosun about this operation when Go Bell returned to the ship and interrupted them.

A kind stranger had rescued Go Bell and brought him back to the Comet in a taxi.  He explained what had happened.  After his shipmates had left the bar, Go Bell became the lone merchant seaman among a large group of Army men.  The only other people there were the bartenders and some young ladies who were soliciting the servicemen’s interest in additional recreational activities.  The prettiest of these girls became the center of several men’s attention, including Go Bell’s, and a dispute arose.  Go Bell made the mistake of claiming the young lady for himself while remarking to the Army men who outnumbered him on their comparative lack of intelligence and virility.  These comments were not well received, and the dispute escalated into a brawl.  Enraged by the invectives that Go Bell had directed at them, the Army men attacked him savagely.  This sober Good Samaritan intervened and dragged Go Bell out of the place after he had been knocked unconscious and likely prevented him from being beaten to death.

By the time Go Bell arrived back aboard the Comet, he had regained consciousness and was able to walk with difficulty.  All of us who saw him were horrified by his appearance.  His face, neck, and arms were covered with bruises and dried blood.  Over his left eye was a mass of black and blue the size and shape of a baseball.  This growth oozed blood and pus and enlarged to the point of forcing the eye shut and blocking his vision.  This was the spot where he had been hit by the swinging barstool which had knocked him unconscious.  Captain Icky took one look at him and ordered him to go back ashore to the local hospital.  Insulted by this unsympathetic no-nonsense greeting, Go Bell refused.  Instead, he went to his quarters and got in bed.

Captain Icky, the chief mate, the bosun, and three or four other seamen were having some difficulty with the heavy lift gear.  This was delaying the discharge of the main deck cargo, annoying some high-ranking Army officers who were waiting impatiently on the pier, and threatening the ship’s scheduled sailing time.  Into the middle of this problem had stumbled the badly beaten up Go Bell.  Captain Icky, already anxious and now angered by this new development, dispatched the chief mate to Go Bell’s bedside to clean up his wounds while the rest of them got the heavy lift gear working.  The mate returned after only a few minutes.  Go Bell had refused his treatment as well.

When the heavy lift gear finally became operational, Captain Icky left the bosun in charge of using it to unload the cargo.  Next, concerned with the possible repercussions of Go Bell’s adventures ashore, an uncharacteristically infuriated Captain Icky went to the gangway watchman and instructed him to make an entry in the logbook describing Go Bell’s condition when he arrived back at the ship and recording his refusal to accept medical attention.  In the event that Go Bell decided to file a grievance or initiate litigation after he had sobered up, Captain Icky wanted the proper documentation to hold the Comet, her officers, and her owner immune from liability.

The Comet sailed from San Lorenzo the next day.  She proceeded up the West Coast of North America, stopped at two American ports, and then went transpacific and stopped at several ports in the Far East.  Along the way Go Bell’s injuries gradually healed.  The large souvenir over his eye took the longest time to clear up; vestiges of it remained well over a month later.  The most remarkable difference, however, was the silence.  Go Bell acquired the new habit of simply doing his work without the constant talk and pretense of superiority that had long irritated his colleagues.  He seemed to have learned his lesson.  Then the Comet arrived in Pusan, South Korea.     

Once again, the Comet was delivering an Army cargo, and numerous Army personnel came aboard the ship after she arrived in Pusan.  Among these were two young men with a dog.  They came along with a special request after the ship had been docked for a few days.  They explained that their dog had recently completed training in contraband detection and that she needed some real-life experience in sniffing out such things as illegal drugs.  They asked if Captain Icky would mind if they took the dog on an inspection of the Comet for this purpose.  Captain Icky had no objections.  He welcomed them aboard but advised them, “You fellows are wasting your time here.  No one in this crew is involved with illegal drugs.  You won’t find anything on this ship.”

One of the third mates led the way as the two Army men and the dog toured the Comet’s public rooms, work spaces, and crew accommodations.  Just when it seemed that Captain Icky’s prediction would come true, the dog latched onto something in one of the crew accommodation areas.  The third mate called for the chief mate, and the chief mate called for Captain Icky.  They investigated the location of the dog’s discovery and found a package of marijuana in Go Bell’s belongings.

Captain Icky was not pleased by this turn of events.  Not only did he sternly disapprove of the use of illegal drugs, but he had been made to look foolish in front of the two Army men and their dog.  He was not the vindictive type, but if he were inclined to let the incident blow over, he could not.  The Army knew about this now.  There were procedures to be followed.  Questions would be asked and reports would be filed.  As he told Go Bell, “There’s nothing I can do for you now.  You have to go back to the office, and somebody there will decide.”  The next day, then, Go Bell was paid off the Comet and sent to Seoul by rail and then to New York by air.  Simply stated, he was fired from his job aboard ship, and it remained to be determined if he would be fired from the company altogether.  And we all thought that he had learned his lesson half the world away in Honduras.

In many General Conferences of the Church the counsel has been given that while people are free to choose their actions, they often are not free to choose the consequences of these actions.  In other words, the results often lie beyond people’s control.  Go Bell is a good case in point.  He chose to be antagonistic toward his shipmates, but they chose to be patient and not react to his provocation.  In the bar in San Lorenzo, Go Bell chose to drink too much, to participate in the dispute over the girl, and to hurl invectives at the Army men.  The resulting brawl in which the Army men beat him up so badly was a consequence not of Go Bell’s choosing but one that he nonetheless brought on himself by his actions.  Similarly, the dog’s discovery of his marijuana in Pusan was a consequence that Go Bell did not choose, but a result that arose from his choosing to do drugs.  In every case Go Bell chose his actions, but someone else chose the consequences, and whether favorable or unfavorable to him, they remained largely beyond his control.

In a world full of beauty and opportunity and interesting things to see and do and experience, I’ve long wondered why someone would want to repeatedly impair his intelligence and pollute his health by overdosing on mind-clouding chemicals such as alcohol and marijuana, among others.  As with so many of the popular vices, the desired pleasant effects wear off after a short while, but the undesired unpleasant consequences last much longer.  Furthermore, there are so many better things that people can do with their minds and bodies and so much greater good that people can accomplish when they remain unimpaired by these demonic concoctions.  As Shakespeare so artfully expressed it,

What a piece of work is a man!  How noble in reason!  How infinite in faculty!  In form and moving how express and admirable!  In action how like an angel!  In apprehension how like a god!  The beauty of the world!  The paragon of animals!¹    

President Gordon B. Hinckley made this same point more directly at a youth meeting:

I hope nobody here is on drugs.  How foolish can you be to take illegal drugs, really?  They do not help you in any way.  They hurt you.  They make you poor and weak.  They shorten your life.  They take away your control of yourself.  What a crazy thing to do, really, when all is said and done.         

The Lord has blessed us with these wonderful bodies, these wonderful minds, these things with which we think.  What a marvelous thing is a human mind.  How wonderful it is.  I put a record on my phonograph the other evening—one of Beethoven’s concertos.  I do not know anything about Beethoven. But I know that out of the genius of that mind came something really tremendous and wonderful.  The human mind—what it can do!  Your minds—don’t cloud them with drugs.²

President Hinckley hastened to add, however, that for those who have stumbled there is a second chance, that one can make a fresh start and do better:  “Get hold of yourself, get control of yourself.  Stop it, and seek help.”³  In the same way that Captain Icky had given Wash a second chance after throwing his cache of hard liquor overboard, the Lord gives all of us many second chances to not only “stop it, and seek help” but also to live up to our potential as his “piece of work” which he has made the “beauty of the world.”  He wants us to live like angels and not demons.

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¹ William Shakespeare, Hamlet, II:ii:310-313.

² Gordon B. Hinckley, “Denver, Colorado, Stake Youth Meeting,” April 14, 1996, in Discourses of President Gordon B. Hinckley, Volume I, Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2004.

³ Ibid.