When My Ship Comes in

Some folks find this a bit strange, but I like to watch the comings and goings of commercial ships. Other people watch ball games; I prefer ships. I’ve always wanted more out of life than what sports could offer, and I’ve often turned to the sea in order to reach for the higher things of life. Living inland, it’s not always possible to spontaneously visit the waterfront. With the new technologies of the internet and harbor webcams, though, watching, if not actual visiting, has become easy and convenient. Thus on Sunday morning, October 27, 2013, I turned on my computer to watch my ship come in.

Peering into the darkness at 5:30am, I beheld the docks, the basin, and the inlet of Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The adjacent satellite image of the port was dotted with markers identifying the vessels already moored. The passenger ships Allure of the Seas, Carnival Freedom, and Royal Princess had arrived early and occupied the largest berths. Two Dutch freighters, the Dijksgracht and the Spiegelgracht, appeared at the cargo docks. And three tankers, the OSG Navigator, the Hellas Endurance, and the Overseas Houston, filled out the picture at the petroleum piers. Still at sea about five miles from the inlet stood the star of the morning’s show, the Nieuw Amsterdam. She was the one I had logged on to watch.

The Nieuw Amsterdam was returning to the United States from Europe. She had spent the summer and early autumn in the Mediterranean, carrying sightseers to such exotic ports as Barcelona, Palermo, Marseilles, Tunis, and Napoli—places I had visited in my vagabond youth—as well as Istanbul, Corfu, Piraeus, Dubrovnik, and Monte Carlo—places I had missed. Now, after a transatlantic voyage of ten days’ duration from Cadiz with a stop in the Azores, the Nieuw Amsterdam was returning to Fort Lauderdale, her base of operations for the upcoming winter months.¹ This was a special arrival, one not to be missed!

I watched the video on the computer screen intently. At 5:55am, having taken on a pilot at the sea buoy, the Nieuw Amsterdam entered the inlet. She came in slowly and gracefully, and at 6:00am was fully inside the basin. By 6:05am, using her twin azipod propellers and triple bow thrusters, she was gradually backing toward her berth. At 6:17am, the Nieuw Amsterdam was still backing down when her fleet mate Eurodam entered the inlet. Arriving from Canada with an intermediate stop in Port Canaveral, the Eurodam had hugged the Florida coast overnight and followed her sister to the pilot station and into port. At 6:20am the Eurodam was clear of the inlet, and two tugs and a pilot boat then started out to meet the incoming container ship CSAV Rupanco. At 6:21am the Nieuw Amsterdam was in position and being made fast at the same berth where my family and I had boarded her a year and a half ago. The Eurodam was by this time backing toward a berth diagonally opposite the Nieuw Amsterdam. At 6:36am she, too, was in position and being secured to the pier.

After spending the day discharging passengers, taking on food, fuel, and supplies, cleaning staterooms, and then embarking new passengers, the Nieuw Amsterdam and the other cruise ships would sail again, this time for Caribbean ports. Lots of folks in diverse locations, myself included, would watch these departures on their computers in the late afternoon. It would not the same as actually sailing, but an enjoyable and inexpensive substitute.

But for now, my ship had come in. Long used metaphorically to refer to some great fortune coming one’s way, the expression “when my ship comes in” expressed people’s dreams of doing better financially in an age when the general population was more aware of commercial shipping than it is today. Cargo ships had carried the riches of the Orient and the gold and silver of the Americas to Europe. When they arrived safely after these long and hazardous voyages, their owners became very wealthy men. It was a bonanza! But as in most businesses, these voyages made a few folks rich at the expense of many who did the grunt labor while living in squalor and risking their lives aboard primitive vessels sailing on largely uncharted seas. For most people, then, “when my ship comes in” remained more of a pipe dream than anything that would realistically happen.

Ships do come in and go out again, however. I’ve seen plenty of them come and go over the years. Whether for an hour or for many months, a ship becomes part of one’s life for a time and then is gone. When a passenger disembarks or a crewman is discharged, the ship on which he sailed recedes into his past. One’s association with it is thus only temporary. Another ship may take its place, but the new voyage or assignment will one day end, too, and the cycle repeats itself. Ships simply come and go, as does nearly everything else in life. Money, jobs, houses, vacations, holidays, and material possessions all come and go. Few things in life are truly permanent.

In my family, however, our ship has come in four times, or perhaps more accurately, four separate ships have come in. Taking the metaphor on a different course, these four ships are the James, the Steven, the Michael, and the flagship Miss Karen Elizabeth. These are my four children. They arrived at intervals over a period of six years, and like real ships they have come and gone from the family home many times. One has married, appropriately aboard a ship, and will in time be operating his own fleet. The others are well underway, too. But for all their departures from home to attend school, go scouting, visit grandparents, travel to college, and so on, they always were, are now, and always will be my children. The immutable laws of biology, the natural bonds of parent-child affection, and the temple ordinances of parent-child sealing work together to ensure that my children forever remain my children. They cannot be unborn or unsealed. God himself cannot change this, nor would he even want to, having authored the biology, the affection, and the ordinances that eternally bind us together.

Like a far-flung fleet of ships, our children have grown up and left home for distant places. They chart their own courses through life now, but they remain in contact with home via mail, email, telephone calls, text messaging, and now Skype, too. In an era when such telecommunication is available, the bonds between us command its use, for people who love each other naturally crave each other’s companionship despite distances.

The scriptures inform us of

the great work to be done in the temples of the Lord in the dispensation of the fulness of times, for the redemption of the dead, and the sealing of the children to their parents (D&C 138:48).

I think the redemption work for the dead is fairly well-known, but I suspect that the eternal parent-child connection may sometimes be overlooked in this age of high-powered, dual-career couples and professional day-care institutions. Miss Patty and I were very fortunate to have raised our children ourselves. It seemed like the natural thing to do, given our feelings for them. In this way the bonds between us were nurtured as well as sealed over the years. Now, distances notwithstanding, these bonds remain strong and ineradicable, family unity as our Creator intended it to be.

The commercial fleet in Port Everglades sailed again late Sunday afternoon and evening. My ship the Nieuw Amsterdam had come in, stayed about eleven hours, and then left again. As much as I may call her “my ship” for having made one voyage with her, she really isn’t. Owned by a major corporation, registered in a foreign country, and operated by other seamen, the Nieuw Amsterdam is not mine at all, and never has been nor ever will be. Like many ships before her, she came into my life and will eventually go out of it again. But the James, the Steven, the Michael, and the Miss Karen Elizabeth all came into my life to remain permanently and to be mine forever. They are the grandest fleet that any merchant seaman could ever want to sail with.

---

¹ Voyage information for the Nieuw Amsterdam and the fourteen other ships of the Holland America Line comes from the company’s Cruise Atlas 2013-2014. This booklet contains full itineraries, maps, deck plans, photographs, and—alas!—prices.

The Temple of the Sea

The ferry Joseph and Clara Smallwood departed from her berth in North Sydney, Nova Scotia, at precisely 6:00am on Monday, June 21. 2004.  There was no noise and no commotion.  Her lines were let go, and then gently—almost imperceptibly, at first—she slid away from the dock and into the stream.  Suddenly, the whistle sounded, almost as an afterthought.  The three short blasts announced that the ship’s engines were going astern.  To anyone who had not already noticed the apparent motion of the pier, the whistle was the clarion call: we are now going to sea.  Ahead lay a fourteen and one half hours’ voyage beyond sight of land and across the open ocean to Argentia, Newfoundland.

No mere ferryboat, the Joseph and Clara Smallwood was a great ship: 587 feet long, 82 feet wide, with two vehicle decks and a capacity for 370 automobiles or 77 tractor-trailers and 1200 passengers, powered by four eight-cylinder diesel engines developing 7,000 horsepower each, and driven by twin propellers at a maximum speed of 22 knots.¹  This was my kind of ship!  For “a seaman in exile from the sea,”² boarding the Joseph and Clara was like going home again.  The shackles of the shore were broken.  The open ocean beckoned.  With a thrill the old familiar sensations of the wind in one’s hair and the vibration under one’s feet and the gentle undulating motion of the ship through the water returned.  The mountains of Nova Scotia receded and disappeared below the horizon.  Then, after nineteen years, I was home.  As Joseph Conrad so succinctly put it, I knew once again “the magic monotony of existence between sky and water.”³

The sky that morning was cloudy, the water gray.  A slight swell came from the north, the wind from the east.  Soon the sky would clear except for a few tufts of altocumulus, and the water would turn blue in the sun.  The ocean has many moods, and today’s was one of its gentlest: a fair wind and a following sea.   A canopy of blue sky and white clouds formed a dome over the floor of the water, a rotunda, as it were, with “the black speck of the moving hull remaining everlastingly in its centre.”⁴

In this great limitless rotunda of sea and sky there is and always has been something ineffable.  Some would call it a spiritual presence; others a glimpse of eternity; still others perceive it but cannot describe it.  I say they are all right.  It is ethereal and supernatural, beyond the scientific scope of oceanography and meteorology.  It is strictly ordered and logical, but beyond the impersonal mathematical calculations of the navigator.  In all the voyages of my youth, I perceived this great ineffability. As a Christian, I attributed it to the Spirit of the Lord keeping watch over the deep.  With good reason, too, for I never felt alone despite being alone on the bridge wing of the ship, whether in broad daylight or on the blackest night.  Often the heavens seemed so close I felt I could almost reach out and touch them, that the sun and moon and stars were just out of reach, just slightly beyond arm’s length.  And in addition to these mute bodies there was an unseen but unmistakably present Being who spoke, as it were, through these heavenly bodies, through the sun and clouds, through the sky and water.  I now know that this was the “still small voice” (1 Nephi 17:45).

Some have called the sea a trackless void.   They could not be more wrong.  The sea and its realm are the quintessential majesty of creation, the pinnacle of the six days’ work.  Except for the ship intruding itself into this pristine world, all that surrounds one are the elements of creation: water, sky, clouds, sun, moon, stars.  It is through these elements in this pure and natural realm that the still small voice speaks so silently and yet so majestically.  Without using human words, the still small voice makes the presence of the Lord’s Spirit felt and perceived and understood by the human mind.  One cannot help but gaze seaward from the ship and reverently acknowledge the Creator in his creation.

On a long voyage one experiences this for many days.  It does not grow tiresome.  On the contrary, it beckons one to something higher and greater.  There somehow seems to be an increased knowledge of divinity hiding just beyond the horizon, a greater glimpse of eternity slightly beyond one’s line of sight.  But although the vessel constantly moves forward, the sea and sky and the horizon separating them do not change.  No increased knowledge is found.  No greater glimpse of eternity is grasped.  At the voyage’s end, landfall comes almost as a disappointment, a settling for something lesser in place of the greater that was sought.  Despite this letdown, one knows that there is more, and the yearning for it remains.

Just as a ship both brings people together and takes them away, so does life.  Death removes those to whom we are born and later removes us from those born next.  As seafarers bidding farewell to families on the pier, we sail through life hoping—even expecting—to see again those left behind. At the voyage’s end, the travelers return to their families, whether back at the pier in this life or through the veil in the next life.  We know this much, at least, for the still small voice that comes over the sea silently asserts that there is a greater place where nothing is temporary, where the quintessence of the majesty of creation is with us always, where the voyage never ends.  Still, something more remains.

Joseph Conrad, who wrote so eloquently of the sea and of life, describes this search for the higher and greater in his varied roles of seaman and artist and writer.  He asserts that the literary artist

speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives … to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation—and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspiration, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.⁵

Achieving to some degree this “conviction of solidarity,” the ship and life both seek the binding together of all humanity, one through commerce, and the other through a more sublime means.  In the end, life, through death, delivers its passengers to that greater place.  Still, something more remains.

Joseph Conrad somehow understood this principle and succeeded in articulating it, at least in secular terms.  This stands as a remarkable accomplishment, for he was not a religious man.  He had no knowledge of the restored fullness of the Gospel, and no knowledge of the priesthood authority to seal families in the temple.  For that matter, he had no access to a temple.  Yet there it is—“the invincible conviction of solidarity…which binds together all humanity.”  Conrad further asserted as a literary artist:

My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel … to make you see.  If I succeed, you shall find there…that glimpse of truth.⁶

In the many voyages of my youth, I grasped “that glimpse of truth,” but it was only a glimpse.  I experienced the great ineffability of the sea and sensed the presence of the Master and Chief Engineer of the universe—the Creator watching over his masterpiece.  But it was only a glimpse.  I sensed—I knew—there was more than what I was grasping, but knew not how to attain it.  Then I left the sea.

In the long interval of life ashore, the Truth of the restored fullness of the Gospel found me.  A skeptical recipient at first, I finally had the good fortune of visiting several temples prior to their dedication.  In them, I felt the presence of the Lord’s Spirit and heard the still small voice as I had at sea.  In addition, I found in the temple what had been so elusive at sea, the increased knowledge of divinity that had been hiding beyond the horizon, the greater glimpse of eternity that had been just beyond the line of sight. 

In the Palmyra Temple, I was acutely aware of deceased family members waiting on the other side of a very thin veil that separated them from me.  In the Montreal Temple, I could almost see my immediate family taking its first step in binding the generations together:  the sealing that ultimately took place in the Boston Temple in 2001.  At last, what had been so elusive was grasped.  And I knew what it was:  the eternal existence of the family, indeed of all humanity, on an endless voyage. Conrad was more right than he realized.  In the temple the “invincible conviction of solidarity” becomes absolutely incontrovertible as all humanity—“the dead to the living and the living to the unborn”—is not merely “knit together,” nor even in shipbuilding terms, welded together, but sealed by priesthood authority for time and all eternity.

Interestingly, Joseph Smith uses the shipyard phrasing in discussing the vital first step of vicarious baptisms: 

there is a welding link of some kind or other between the fathers and the children, upon some subject or other—and behold what is that subject?  It is the baptism for the dead (D&C 128:18).

The first links have been welded; more remain to be done.  When all the temple ordinances have been completed, we will have the binding and welding and sealing ultimately of all the generations of our family, an eternal testament of the “invincible conviction of solidarity.” 

With this new knowledge I boarded the Joseph and Clara Smallwood to sail to Newfoundland.  My wife and children accompanied me.  While at sea with my family, it occurred to me that this voyage was somehow different.  I looked at the horizon, but this time I knew exactly what lay beyond it—not just more water, or eventually, another land mass—but what ultimately lay beyond the horizon and, for that matter, what lay beyond the horizon of this life and beyond the horizon of most people’s knowledge and understanding.  We had gained the additional knowledge and understanding, for we had been to the temple.  We had been sealed.  We would remain a family forever, extending beyond the horizon of the sea and into the horizon of eternity.  The still small voice came over the sea again as it had always done.  But this time it had a greater intensity.  It conveyed a greater sense of everything it had conveyed years ago.  On this voyage the Spirit of the Lord confirmed all the experiences of the temple.  It yielded no mere “glimpse of truth” but silently asserted “my voice is Spirit; my Spirit is truth; truth abideth and hath no end” (D&C 88:66).  And likewise, my family hath no end.  No mere glimpse indeed.  The still small voice gave a clear and unmistakable sense of being in the temple while at sea. 

Aboard the Joseph and Clara Smallwood on that beautiful, calm, and sunlit day, the Atlantic Ocean became the greatest celestial room in the world.

---

¹ Information from Marine Atlantic, operator of the ferry lines connecting Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.  For more information visit www.marine-atlantic.ca.  

² Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, Garden City, New York:  Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1920, p. 2.

³ Ibid., p. 6.

⁴ Ibid., p. 12.

⁵ Joseph Conrad, the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, in Frank W. Cushwa, An Introduction to Conrad,  New York:  The Odyssey Press, 1933, p. 224.  Despite the problematic title, Conrad’s book about the Narcissus is a classic tale of life aboard a merchant ship in the 19^th century.

⁶ Ibid., p. 225.

Love at First Sight

On a beautiful summer day, the General Hoyt S. Vandenberg steamed slowly into the anchorage in front of Georgetown, Ascension Island.  Several of us watched from the town dock.  When the ship was securely anchored, a local launch service took us and our luggage out to the meet it.  It was crew change time.  We went aboard, met the fellows we were replacing, and got to work.  A little while later, these men went ashore in the launch.  The ship spent the afternoon loading cargo and supplies.  When that operation was complete, she weighed anchor and sailed.

            I was a young third mate with a still almost-brand-new license when I joined the Vandenberg.  I thought I knew exactly what the future held for me: sailing on more ships, upgrading my license at appropriate intervals, and hopefully attaining the ultimate license of Master by age thirty.  In the process I would learn the craft of the sea thoroughly and travel to as many parts of the world as possible.  When all this was done, I thought I might attend a university and study history and languages just for fun, but that was not definite yet.  For the immediate future, I was content to set sail and accumulate sufficient sea time to qualify for the second mate’s exams.

The Vandenberg sailed southeast from Ascension Island.  A range instrumentation vessel, she spent three weeks in the South Atlantic on special operations.  Following this voyage, she returned to Ascension Island, conducted more special operations, paid a visit to Monrovia, Liberia, conducted yet more special operations, and eventually returned to the United States, docking in Port Canaveral, Florida.  Compared to other assignments, the Vandenberg was a clean and easy job with lots of time at sea and in good weather.  But that was about to change.  Bids had been put out for a shipyard overhaul, and the contract was awarded to the Todd Shipyard in Brooklyn.  The ship then sailed north from Florida, out of the balmy southern seas and into the late November chill of the American Northeast.  This was close to home for me.  I enjoyed that part of the new schedule, but I could have done without the cold.  Warm weather cruising had become mildly addictive.

With a few days off in early December, I went to Maine to visit a few school friends.  Admittedly, this was a lark, a fun thing to do with no long term repercussions.  I would return to the ship the next day, go back to work, and that would be that.  Famous last words.

While in Maine I had the completely unexpected pleasure of being introduced to a very special young lady.  Of course, we had never seen each other before; in fact, we had never even known of each other’s existence.  As total strangers, then, we became so thoroughly engrossed in conversation that, for my part at least, it overshadowed everything else in life.  On my return to the Vandenberg in Brooklyn the next day, my attention to the business of the ship was only half present.  The other half of my attention remained focused on the young lady in Maine.

For reasons that are difficult to articulate, Miss Patricia Kathren Rivard impressed me as a fascinating person.  If nothing else, Miss Patty’s background was certainly atypical of one from Maine.  A lifelong American citizen, she was born in Nürnberg, Germany, to an American military father and a German mother.  She grew up in a bilingual household, lived in both Germany and the United States, and was educated in both Army schools and American public schools.  Since then, her father had retired from the military.  The family lived in Sanford, Maine, Miss Patty’s father’s hometown.  He had settled his wife, three children, and mother-in-law there several years earlier when the Army had required his presence in Vietnam.  Included in Miss Patty’s household, then, was her German grandmother, her Oma.  A few blocks away lived her father’s parents, her Memere and Pepere who were Quebecois by birth.

My return to the Vandenberg in the shipyard in Brooklyn quickly followed my receipt of all this information.  We promptly initiated a lively correspondence by both mail and telephone, and we carried it on through the long winter months of the Vandenberg’s overhaul.  Additionally, Miss Patty traveled to New York for visits twice during the winter.   When the cold weather was nearly finished, so also was the shipyard work.  On its completion, the ship sailed south again, back to its base of operations in Florida.

            The poet Robert Frost once wrote of the many junction points that we come upon as we amble our way through life.  Each of these junctions requires us to make a decision that concerns not only the road we will follow, but also the direction our lives will take:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth.¹

After an interval in Florida to be spent loading supplies, catching up on maintenance, and re-crewing, the Vandenberg’s schedule called for her to leave the United States on a long voyage of about nine months’ duration.  I was free to remain on board, make the voyage, and add to the accumulation of sea time and experience that I needed to qualify for the second mate’s exams, or to leave the ship before she sailed and take my vacation.  Had I never met Miss Patty, I most certainly would have stayed aboard and gone back to sea.  But the thought of this very special young lady in Maine shed a different light on these two options.

This decision was the junction point where, metaphorically, the two roads in the woods diverged.  I could not travel both, and so I looked down not just one but both of them as far I could before making this important decision.  If I made the long voyage aboard the Vandenberg, I would accelerate my career advancement. If I took my vacation, I would become better acquainted with Miss Patty and in all likelihood accelerate my marriage prospects.  We had already seen that coming, anyway.  In essence, it came down to a question of values.  What was more important, marriage or career?  The pundits aboard ship argued in favor of making the upcoming long voyage.  Women were a dime a dozen, they asserted, hardly worth sacrificing a golden opportunity to return to sea and accumulate the experience necessary to qualify for the second mate’s exams.  That was much more important.  A romantic entanglement would only impede professional advancement; it could wait until later—much later.  I knew something was seriously wrong with this line of reasoning even before I learned about eternal marriage and that families are forever.

Looked at in this light, the choice became much easier.  I’m happy to report that I took my vacation.  In that interval, and with the approval of Miss Patty’s parents and grandparents, we announced our engagement.  Then I went back to sea for a time aboard a different ship, the Mercury.  It never occurred to me way back then that I would tell this tale ages hence, but the simple truth was that

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.²

Eventually, after sailing aboard the Mercury for a time and then aboard the Wilkes and the Victoria, I did take the exams and upgrade my license to second mate.  So in the end, I did not lose anything; on the contrary, I continued in my professional career at a reasonable pace and eventually upgraded my license to chief mate with a limited-tonnage endorsement as Master.  Much more importantly, though, I was blessed to receive in marriage the very special young lady in Maine not just once, but twice.  Twenty years after our wedding, we were sealed for time and eternity in the new Boston Temple.

---

¹ Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken,” in The Poetry of Robert Frost, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969.

² Ibid.