The Dead

The Waccamaw sat quietly alongside one of the supply piers at the naval base in Norfolk.  There was very little activity on board.  Many of the men had gone ashore, and the mood among those who remained aboard was introspective and philosophical.  With good reason, too.  The Waccamaw had sailed from this same pier the day before, but on seeing the violent state of the weather on the open ocean had turned around and returned to port.  Since then, however, news of the most tragic sort was received concerning the fate of another ship that had not turned around when confronted with this storm.  This other ship was the 605 foot long coal carrier Marine Electric.

Operated by Marine Transport Lines, the Marine Electric had sailed from Norfolk with a full load of coal and a crew of 34 shortly before midnight on Thursday, February 10, 1983.  She dropped off the pilot at the Chesapeake Bay entrance at about 2:00am on Friday, February 11, and once clear of the traffic lanes, set a course to the northeast toward her destination of Somerset, Massachusetts.  The weather conditions into which the Marine Electric sailed were poor and rapidly deteriorating.¹

The Waccamaw sailed several hours later, between 8:00 and 9:00 in the morning of Friday, February 11.  Captain Derric F. Linardich, substituting for Captain Rigobello who was on vacation, commanded the ship for this voyage.  Scheduled to remain at sea for a week, the Waccamaw would be conducting underway refueling of several Navy ships in the western Atlantic.  Then she would return to Norfolk for tank cleaning and a shipyard overhaul.  Fully cognizant of the sea conditions and the weather forecast, the powers that be in Norfolk had authorized Captain Linardich to proceed to sea or not according to his assessment of the sea state upon arrival at the pilot station at the Chesapeake Bay entrance.

The weather in Norfolk and on the Chesapeake Bay that morning involved a low overcast, a strong, cold wind from the northeast, a short, choppy sea, and intermittent precipitation.  The Waccamaw sailed into the teeth of this fury as she headed eastward toward the Atlantic.  On arrival at the pilot station where the Chesapeake met the open ocean, the weather conditions became more intense.  The Atlantic was very rough with high winds and heavy seas.  Even allowing for the time of year, the sea conditions were much more violent than usual.  Captain Linardich studied the scene before him as the Waccamaw sailed past the Cape Henry Lighthouse toward the head of the traffic lanes where she would drop off the pilot.  He had serious reservations about continuing to sea, and he shared his concerns with the pilot and with me, his second mate.  We could say what we thought, but the decision to proceed or turn back was the Captain’s and no one else’s.  With a very serious expression on his face, Captain Linardich stared into the storm as if transfixed by it.  Then he announced his decision.  The Waccamaw would make a u-turn around the CBJ (Chesapeake Bay Junction) buoy at the head of the traffic lanes and return to Norfolk.  The old ship would sit this one out.  The same pilot remained on board and brought the ship on a reverse course through the lower Chesapeake.  Two hours later, the Waccamaw came back alongside her pier and was made fast.

Later that afternoon with most of the crew ashore, Captain Linardich lamented to me over dinner about the ship’s inability to “keep her commitments” to the Navy in such weather.  The mission missed had not been a critical one, though.  Furthermore, the Waccamaw had not been carrying a full load of oil, and a half-full-half-empty hull would guarantee a rough ride at best in that weather.  Carrying out an underway refueling with smaller and lighter military vessels in such sea conditions would have been extremely difficult and dangerous—unnecessarily so, in fact, since it was an exercise and not a fuel shortage emergency.  So his decision to opt out of the mission and return to port had been a sound one.  No one could fault him for choosing safety over unnecessary risk.

With the ship safely moored and the decks quiet, I slept for a while before taking over the watch from midnight to 8:00am on Saturday, February 12.  The weather continued to howl over the Atlantic.  Secure and warm in port, though, I scarcely gave it a thought until much later in the day when the first news reports came in.

On her voyage north, the Marine Electric plowed into an intensifying weather system.  Wave heights and wind speeds increased, but the ship sailed steadily on—just another rough night on the Atlantic.  But then something unexpected happened.  During the night of Saturday, February 12, when I was safely in port and on watch aboard the Waccamaw, the Marine Electric started taking on water as the waves crashed over her foredeck.  Seawater accumulated in her cargo holds, eventually causing the ship to capsize and sink.²  Unable to successfully launch lifeboats, most of the crew ended up in the water.³  Distress calls had been sent out over the radio, but by the time assistance arrived, all but three of the thirty-four crewmen had perished. In forty-five degree water, twenty foot waves, twenty-eight degree air, and forty knot winds, these men had almost no hope of survival.⁴  That three of them did in fact survive was incredible.

These news reports came in piecemeal and were sketchy at first, but in time they became more clear and accurate.  Aboard the Waccamaw, the reports of what had happened to the Marine Electric were horrifying, and all the more so because the Waccamaw had followed her into the same storm but had turned around and come back to port!  Many of us were simply stunned by this news.  What could anyone say?  The bottom line of the tragedy spoke for itself and needed no commentary.  A merchant ship had sunk with horrendous loss of life.  That we had been in the neighborhood, so to speak, only compounded the grief.

In general, merchant seamen do not like to talk about shipwrecks.  The loss of the Marine Electric was discussed only minimally aboard the Waccamaw.  I did not mention it in letters or telephone calls home.  I vaguely remember telling my wife about it in private some time afterwards.  Despite this reticence, however, events such as these are never forgotten.  The circumstances of the Waccamaw’s departure and immediate return to port because of the storm highlight and even personalize to a degree the loss of the Marine Electric and her crew, even though I did not know any of them.  This is the brotherhood of the sea.

In the Marine Board of Investigation that convened to ascertain the cause of this tragedy, it was revealed that the Marine Electric had been allowed to sail in an unseaworthy condition on numerous voyages.  The old ship was plagued with leaky hatch covers, cracked deck plates, inoperable watertight doors, and makeshift repairs, among other faults.⁵  In this sense, then, the ship was an accident waiting to happen.  Litigation and regulatory reform resulted from the disaster, and in the end much good was achieved in the updating and improvement of safety standards aboard American merchant ships.⁶  But at what a price in human life!

Unfortunately, the loss of the Marine Electric was not the only tragedy to befall the Merchant Marine in my time.  Three years earlier, on October 24, 1980, the 522 foot long cargo ship Poet, operated by the Hawaiian Eugenia Corp., departed Philadelphia bound for Port Said, Egypt, with a load of corn.  After she dropped off her pilot near Cape Henlopen, at the entrance of the Delaware Bay, the Poet was never seen nor heard from again.  She simply disappeared without a trace somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean.  Her entire crew of 34 perished with her.⁷  A former school acquaintance of mine, Mark S. Henthorne, was the third assistant engineer aboard the Poet.⁸  I believe he was 24 years old when he was lost with the ship.  Despite an extensive search for survivors and debris along her intended route by the Coast Guard, nothing was ever found.⁹  At the time of the Poet’s sailing and disappearing, I was berthed in comparative comfort and safety aboard the survey ship Wilkes, which was undergoing repair work in Norfolk.

After the loss of the Poet, it was revealed that she, too, had a very poor maintenance record and that she had also made numerous voyages in an unseaworthy condition.  But with no tangible evidence, it could not be established in a Marine Board of Investigation that this was the cause of the Poet’s demise.¹⁰  In the case of the Marine Electric, however, the deteriorated physical condition of the ship was demonstrated to be the cause of her loss.  Her sinking was a preventable accident, caused by ill-fitting and leaking hatch covers that enabled seawater coming over the bow to drain into the cargo holds.¹¹  The Waccamaw, which by comparison was very well maintained, would not have experienced this problem if she had continued to sea.  But such forensic analysis does not change the bottom line facts.  In the two shipwrecks of the Poet and the Marine Electric, 65 merchant seamen perished.  Their families suffered grievous loses.

The Merchant Marine as an institution suffered grievous loses, too.  Despite the seamen’s natural reluctance to discuss such events in casual conversation, these deaths were felt.  Everyone knew someone or knew someone else who knew someone who was lost.  All these men, whether they were personally known to each other or not, were involved with the sea and formed a part of the brotherhood of the sea.  Their loss was therefore a loss to all.

Perhaps the English metaphysical poet and Anglican clergyman John Donne said it best:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.  If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were.  Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind.¹²

In this broader sense, then, it is not only fellow seamen who are diminished by the loss of life aboard the Poet and the Marine Electric, but all humanity.  Happily, however, using a literary analogy, the author sees a bright conclusion to the tragedy of death:

All mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated.  God employs several translators; but God’s hand is in every translation.¹³

It is easy to see the Christian belief in the brotherhood of mankind above and beyond the brotherhood of the sea in these lines.  For this reason, Dr. Donne argues, when the bell tolls for the dead at a funeral or a memorial service, it really tolls for those still living who are diminished by the other’s death:

Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.¹⁴

Because we are brothers and sisters and because we are involved with mankind, we want to bring all of our fellows to a knowledge of the Lord and his gospel.  For he has told us;

I am the way, and the truth, and the life: no one cometh unto the father but by me (John 14:6).

Furthermore, we want to give all of our fellows, both the living and the “translated,” the opportunity to receive the fullness of this knowledge and reach their maximum potential even above and beyond the “better language” that Dr. Donne envisioned.  This we do in the temple.  The Lord has entrusted to us the opportunity and the obligation to carry out his work in the temple in order to facilitate bringing all his people, both the living and the dead, back to him.  With the tragic loss of the Poet and the Marine Electric, there are now 65 “translated” merchant seamen who stand in need of having their temple ordinances done for them.  Though they are dead, it is not too late; their spirits live on and wait.  Their last voyage remains yet unfinished.

After the sinkings of these two ships, funerals and memorial services were held in various locations.  Some of these were religious, some secular.  One in particular for the crew of the Marine Electric stands out.  This took place at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts.  As the name of each deceased crewman was spoken, a ship’s bell tolled once.¹⁵  It tolled for the dead, of course, and it tolled for the living as well who were diminished by the deaths of the men for whom they grieved.

I would like to think that this bell also tolled for every temple-attending Latter-day Saint, not as a call to mourning but as a call to action.  So many millions of people have lived and died on this Earth who need to have their temple work done for them.  Now, two ships have been lost and 65 men have perished at sea.  They, too, need to have their temple work done.  The tolling of the bell is the summons.  It is calling us to the temple so that we may turn tragedy into triumph.

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¹ Robert Frump, Until the Sea Shall Free Them: Life, Death, and Survival in the Merchant Marine, New York: Doubleday, 2001, pp. 20-22.

² Frump, op. cit., p. 34-37, 55.

³ Frump, op. cit., p. 48, 54-55, and Associated Press, “3 Crewmen Survive Loss of Coal Vessel; Fate of 8 Uncertain,” The New York Times, Feb. 13, 1983, at http://www.nytimes.com.

⁴ Frump, op. cit., p. 23, 55, and Associated Press, op. cit.

⁵ Frump, op. cit., p. 172-173, 177-179, 211-218; Associated Press, “Doomed Ship’s Crewman Tells An Inquiry of Holes in Hatches,” The New York Times, Feb. 17, 1983, and “Crewmen Testify about Surviving Ship’s Sinking, The New York Times, Feb. 20, 1983, both at http://www.nytimes.com.

⁶ Frump, op. cit., p. 315-318, 326-327, 341.

⁷ Author unknown, “Remembering the Poet, 26 Years Later,” Seafarers Log, Dec., 2006, at http://www.seafarers.org.  This is the newsletter of the Seafarers International Union.

⁸ Robert J. Pessek, The Poet Vanishes: An American Voyage, n.p., 1^st Books Library, 2000, p. xi, and U.S. Coast Guard, “Marine Casualty Report: SS Poet: Disappearance in the Atlantic Ocean after Departure from Cape Henlopen, Delaware on 24 October 1980 with Loss of Life,” at http://www.uscg.mil/hq/cg5/docs/boards/poet.pdf.  This is the report of the Marine Board of Investigation.

⁹ “Remembering the Poet,” loc. cit., and United Press International, “Planes Seek Missing Ship with 33 Americans Aboard,” The New York Times, Nov. 11, 1980, at http://www.nytimes.com.

¹⁰ Frump, op. cit., p. 171-172, 197-198, and “Marine Casualty Report,” loc. cit.

¹¹ Frump, op. cit., p. 299-300.

¹² John Donne, “Meditation XVII,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 1, New York:  W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1962, p. 795.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴Ibid.

¹⁵ Frump, op cit., p.206.

The Screamer

Screaming Pete, as he was called behind his back, commanded the Victoria for a time.  It was his last assignment before he retired, and it seemed that he wanted to go out with a bang.  When I joined the ship someone warned me, “This Captain screams at everyone a lot.  It doesn’t mean anything, so don’t take it personally.  He just likes to scream.”

This fellow was quickly proved right.  Screaming Pete lived up to his nickname, especially in port.  The Victoria was a fairly busy ship, so something was always going on during port visits.  Loading and discharging cargo, repairing machinery, training of new crewmen, shifting between berths, scaling and painting the decks—the Victoria did it all.  With all this activity and a multitude of contractors streaming on and off the ship, it was inevitable that things would get mixed up once in a while.  Whenever this happened, Screaming Pete let loose.  Those who did not know him well either cowered in fear or ran away in terror.  Those who did know him responded by telling him what he wanted to hear and continuing with their work.  This method always restored peace.

At sea, Screaming Pete was much quieter.  He seldom raised his voice, and he was clearly more relaxed and less stressed than he was in port.  The sea soothed him, even when it involved a rough North Atlantic crossing.  Only on one occasion did he do any serious screaming, but strangely, he screamed about something that had not gone wrong but was normal procedure.

On the first leg of her voyage from Charleston, South Carolina, to Holy Loch, Scotland, the Victoria rode the Gulf Stream.  This current always added a few knots to the ship’s speed, improving fuel economy and putting the vessel a bit ahead of schedule at the outset.  Getting ahead of schedule early in the voyage was good, because anything could happen subsequently to cause delays.  One afternoon on the twelve to four watch Screaming Pete came up to the bridge and examined the chart with me to see where we were and how we were doing.  Dismayed that the ship was not as far ahead as he wanted her to be, he started looking for a reason.  Glancing in the logbook, he noticed that the recorded propeller revolutions were slightly lower on the four to eight watch than on the others.  Deciding on the spur of the moment that that was the cause of the problem, he threw a screaming fit.

“What’s wrong with that second engineer?!” Screaming Pete shrilled.  “He’s dropping turns!  No wonder we’re losing speed!  He’s dropping turns!  What’s he thinking?!  What’s wrong with him?!  Why ever would he do this?!  I’m gonna have a word or two with the Chief about this!”  And he stormed down the stairs shrieking, “Chief! Chief!  We’ve got a problem!” as he went.

Unable to get a word in edgewise, and in fact knowing better than to even try, I could not remind the Captain that the second assistant engineer had to blow tubes twice each day.  Screaming Pete knew this very well, and had he been reminded, he would have immediately understood.  In the boilers, soot built up on the banks of water pipes, called tubes, that carried the water which would be boiled into steam and then used in the turbines.  Blowing tubes involved diverting a small amount of this steam, which reduced the propeller revolutions very slightly, and using it to blast the soot buildup off the boiler tubes.  If this were not done, the soot buildup would eventually become large enough to constrict the flue and prevent the combustion gasses from escaping.  They would be trapped in the combustion chamber and prevent sufficient oxygen from reaching the fires.  Left uncorrected, this condition could eventually shut the whole ship down.  Neither Screaming Pete nor any other Captain would want that to happen.

Screaming Pete’s voice trailed off as he hurried below to chase down the Chief Engineer.  After a few minutes, both men came up to the bridge, and Screaming Pete showed the Chief the logbook entries that indicated the average propeller revolutions for each watch.  Very calmly and patiently, the Chief explained the necessity of blowing tubes twice a day, especially on an older vessel like the Victoria that carried less than state-of-the-art machinery.  Screaming Pete listened quietly.  When the Chief finished his explanation, Pete authorized him to blow tubes as often as necessary.  Then he and the Chief thanked each other and went their separate ways.

Screaming Pete had been going to sea all his adult life.  He held an unlimited Master’s license, and he most certainly knew all about blowing tubes.  The rest of us also knew about blowing tubes, and we knew that Screaming Pete knew.  Why all the commotion about such a routine thing, then?  Some of the guys speculated that the old man was dreading retirement.  Whatever the reason, the rest of the crossing was peaceful.  Once in port again, though, the screaming resumed at full volume.

In all fairness to Screaming Pete, he was not the only screamer in the fleet, and neither was the Victoria the only ship to reverberate with such din.  A few other examples come to mind.

One afternoon when the Waccamaw was undergoing overhaul in the shipyard in Norfolk, I came across a fire station on the main deck that was gushing water.  Someone had left the valve in its fully open position, and the water just poured out and flowed all over the deck collecting sandblasting debris and making a muddy mess as it went.  Not finding any evident reason for this, I figured that it must have been an oversight before the water pressure was restored to the ship.  No sooner had I closed the valve than the first assistant engineer materialized out of nowhere and started screaming.  “What do you think you’re doing?!  Who do you think you are?!  Who said you could touch that valve?!  Since when do we need your help?!  Why can’t you mates mind your own business and leave the rest of us alone?!”  He stomped his feet and shook his fists as he shrieked these interrogatives at me.  Then he quieted down and mumbled for a brief moment.  Regaining his breath, though, he continued even louder and shriller than before. “Get outta here!! We don’t need you!!  Get outta here right now or I’ll take this fire axe and cut your arms off with it!!”  He turned toward the axe on the bulkhead and started to reach for it.  Two shipyard workers who were standing nearby exchanged horrified looks.  I didn’t wait to see if he would really use the axe on me.  I found the chief mate and told him that one of the engineers had gone off the deep end.  The altercation was later resolved in Captain Rigobello’s office.  Denying everything, the engineer asserted that I should take up a second career as a writer of fiction.

On another afternoon when the Saturn was undergoing an overhaul in Mobile, Alabama, a shipyard worker with an acetylene torch was about to burn an access hole in a steel bulkhead.  He had the torch fired up and was just about to apply it to the steel when Captain Aspiotis happened to come along and asked him what he was doing.  The yard guy explained, and then Captain Aspiotis asked him, “Did you look on the other side of this bulkhead to see what’s there, to see if it’s safe?”  The yard guy had not.  The Captain went with him, and they both found that the other side of the bulkhead was a linen locker.  Shelves filled with towels, tablecloths, napkins, sheets, pillowcases, aprons, and mess jackets ran from the deck to the overhead on the other side of the bulkhead.  If the yard guy had started in with the acetylene torch as he had been poised to do, all of this would have gone up in flames and could possibly have set a large part of the ship ablaze.  Captain Aspiotis blew up like a torpedo.  He screamed in Greek and English, called the yard guy more terrible names than any of us knew existed, and made himself heard all over the ship and on the pier as well.  He outscreamed Screaming Pete, and with good reason.  If he had not come along at just that moment when the shipyard worker was about to start in with his torch, a disaster would have resulted.  Besides the obvious property damage, people could have been seriously injured or even killed.

But that was an extreme case.  Most of the screaming that took place aboard ship was prompted by lesser causes such as mess hall disputes or poker games gone bad.  Only Screaming Pete screamed about everything and anything, and none of that was life-threatening.  Furthermore, most of the screaming sessions took place in port.  At sea, things were different.

I think the main reason for this was that being at sea was just different from being ashore.  The water had a soothing effect on almost everyone aboard every ship.  There were a few exceptions who would not be soothed by anything, but only a few.  The vast majority in every crew were glad to get underway and escape from shoreside entanglements that often cost too much money and produced unpleasant results.  Some of the fellows said that they felt safer on the ocean than they did ashore, often meaning that they were safe from themselves and their impulses when they were at sea and away from temptations.  Besides that, however, peace and quiet reigned at sea.  There were no man made distractions; there were only the basic elements of the sea and sky.  These elements with their atmosphere of peacefulness combined to form a place that was set apart from the everyday noise and commotion of human activity.  Even in heavy weather with the ship taking a mauling from the wind and waves, the sea remained a place set apart. 

There are places on land like this, too.  Often, one must travel far from the populated areas in order to find such peace and quiet or to find a natural setting unsullied by human hands and thus set apart.  Mountain ranges, river valleys, forests, meadows, and lakes often serve as places set apart for people seeking relief from the noise and commotion of life.  Many people report that they can engage in quiet and reverent meditation and feel the Spirit in such locations.  For me, however, the great waterways of the world were, and still are, the places set apart for quiet reverence and feeling the Spirit.

But there are exceptions.  The most obvious one, of course, is the temple.  Special events take place in the temple, and it has been my family’s great privilege to participate in hundreds of temple ordinances for deceased ancestors and relatives.  We could not avoid meditating in quiet reverence and feeling the Spirit during these ordinances.  Furthermore, we experienced the ineffable sense of accomplishment that comes from getting something extremely important done.  This was always particularly so in the baptistry, where the ordinance work started, and in the sealing room, where the ordinances were concluded.  The peace, the quiet, the serenity, and the sense of being in a place set apart from the outside world all contributed to the sacredness and specialness of the temple ordinances.

A few other locations of this nature also come to mind.  First is the Sacred Grove.  My initial visit there took place before I joined the Church, actually, before I had any intention of joining the Church.  I had previously read about the First Vision that had taken place there in 1820, and I believed in it.  When I walked into the Grove, a sensation which at the time I could not describe came upon me.  I received the impression that the Grove was a very special place, a unique place, hallowed ground, and that I was extremely fortunate to be able to go there and visit it.  I came to understand later that I had felt the Spirit there.  I did realize at the time, however, that the Sacred Grove was the perfect place for quiet and reverent meditation.  Seizing this opportunity, Miss Patty and I gathered the children on a bench near the entrance to the Grove, and she quietly read the Prophet Joseph Smith’s account of the First Vision to them.  The children were all very young then, and they found this fascinating.

Outside the Sacred Grove, of course, life went on.  Occasionally we could hear traffic noise on the local roads and the whistles of trains as they sped through Palmyra.  These sounds were very distant, though, and they did not seem at all intrusive.  Something about the acoustics in the Sacred Grove had a mitigating effect on these outside noises.  A much more prevalent sound was that of birds chirping—a cheerful, uplifting, and musical sound that added to the ambiance of the Grove.

Another such set apart place is the nearby Hill Cumorah.  Just as in the Sacred Grove, peace, serenity, and an overriding calm sensation reigned there.  Like the Sacred Grove, the Hill Cumorah is hallowed ground, a special place that filled a unique and critically important role in human history.  It also lends itself to quiet and reverent meditation, to a contemplation of the singular events that occurred there and their significance for the entire human family.

Finally, several sublime sites that are set apart from the secular world and serve a purpose above and beyond the commonplace are the various cemeteries my family and I have visited in the course of our genealogical research.  All of these are oases of peace and quiet, plots of hallowed ground dedicated to the repose of our deceased ancestors and relatives.  Visiting these cemeteries is like entering a temple.  An atmosphere of quiet reverence prevails.  People follow a certain code of conduct.  They pray.  They converse quietly.  They place flowers on the gravesites.  They show courtesy to each other and deference to the grieving.  They are on their best behavior.

The one cemetery we visit most often is Holy Rood in Westbury, Long Island, in the suburbs of New York.  My grandparents are interred there.  A fairly large property, one end of Holy Rood borders on downtown Westbury, which is always busy.  The other end borders on an even busier six-lane traffic nightmare that connects suburban shopping centers.  Ironically, this street is named Old Country Road.  When turning off this road to enter Holy Rood, it always feels like we are entering a different world.  Holy Rood is always peaceful, quiet, and serene.  It is also a house of order.  Designed and maintained to the highest standards, it is immaculately clean.  Tall trees and strategically placed shrubbery blot out both the sight and sound of most of the traffic.  Flowers decorate many of the grave sites, and a carpet of thick green grass seems particularly inviting after driving on acres of ugly pavement.  It is truly an oasis, a place set apart from the noise and commotion of the secular world.  Like the Sacred Grove, the Hill Cumorah, or any temple, Holy Rood is an ideal place to engage in quiet and reverent meditation.

In a world that is all too often filled with noise and commotion, the opportunity to escape from it all, even for a short time, raises us to a higher spiritual plane.  As President Boyd K. Packer has remarked,

There are few places now that offer an opportunity to meditate in quiet reverence.  What a privilege it is to sit quietly without conversation and direct the mind to reverent and spiritual thoughts!  It is a refreshment to the soul.¹

A long voyage across an ocean which by its very nature is set apart from the mainstream of human activity is one of the best situations that offer such an opportunity.  The sea repeatedly demonstrated to me its ability to calm even the most hot-tempered and hard-headed personalities.  It even had the power to settle Screaming Pete down.  Unfortunately, it’s not readily available to everyone.  What a shame.  The majority must then look elsewhere for this refreshment.  But such set apart places that invite quiet meditation and reverence do exist; one need only search out a site that resonates with one’s spiritual leanings.  Wherever that may place be, it will serve as a refuge from the noise and commotion that the secular world constantly screams at people.  It will be an oasis of peace and quiet that even the most strident screaming cannot penetrate.  It will prove the prophecy of Isaiah:

In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and confidence shall be your strength (Isa. 30:15).

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¹ Boyd K. Packer, The Holy Temple, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1980, p. 58.

The Water

Extending in a general eastward direction from Manhattan, Long Island begins at the edge of the East River and ends a bit over a hundred miles later at two points marked by lighthouses.  These are Orient and Montauk.  Between these points and the East River lie city, suburbia, and farmland.  Surrounding it all is water.  In my youth this water attracted me, and I decided that the sea was where I wanted to go as an adult.

This water attracted previous generations of my family as well.  My parents and grandparents enjoyed sailing on the Great South Bay, a shallow body of salt water protected from the Atlantic by the barrier beaches.  As children, my brother and I went sailing with the adults, and it was in these formative years that my affection for the sea developed.  In my adolescence I considered the sea as a career choice; eventually, it became my chosen profession.

It ran in the family, too.  As a young man my grandfather operated the ferry that connected the then-small village of Babylon with Oak Island across the bay.  Titles never impressed him, but I sometimes think of him as Captain Robert Burns, Master of the Henry Ludlow of the Babylon and Oak Island Ferry Service.  This would make him the first merchant seaman in the family.  He did not pursue this as a lifelong career, but he did maintain a lifelong love of being on or near the water.  The career he did pursue, research and development engineering, called him to technical conferences in Europe many times in the 1950s and 60s.  He and my grandmother almost always travelled to these by sea.  They came home by sea, too.  Only rarely did they fly, and they did not like it.

Thus the sea was in my genes, so to speak.  As water was not in short supply where I grew up, there were ample opportunities to be on, in, or next to it.  Point Lookout, Jones Beach, Fire Island, Captree, Massapequa, Babylon, Oyster Bay—in these and other spots like them I came to love the sea.  In New Jersey, too, we went to the waterfront.  Before it became a gambling mecca, Atlantic City was a haven for families on a seaside holiday.  Cape May, at the south end of the state, was surrounded by water.  We spent several vacations there during my teenage years sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean and the Delaware Bay.  The highlight of these holidays was riding the ferries across the bay to Delaware and back, a round trip of three hours’ duration.

The workings of such commercial vessels and the history of commerce by sea appealed to me as well.  The art and science of navigation, the behavior of the sea in its tides and currents and weather, and the methods which humans have devised to travel on the sea in relative safety also contributed to my youthful enthusiasm for going to sea.  Beyond these rational fields of interest, though, there lay something else.  I sensed somehow that there was something special out there on the water.  I didn’t know what it was, and if even I did, I could not have articulated it intelligently.  I just knew that I wanted to go to sea, and at the time, that was enough.

Of course, there were others who shared my aspirations.  They, too, loved the sea and pursued careers in the Merchant Marine.  Whether on the bridge of the ship taking sightings of the heavenly bodies, or far below in the engine room tinkering with machinery, these fellows were a breed apart.  They were personalities not suited to living out their lives on land.  They marched to the proverbial beat of a different drummer.  This typically showed in their oft-repeated disdain for long periods ashore, their admitted inability to fit in socially anywhere except at sea, and their oftentimes emotional attachment to the instruments of their profession.  I recall engineers whose casual conversation revolved around an unselfconscious affection for boiler tubes, turbine blades, and atomizing nozzles, for example, and mates who spoke lovingly of their favorite constellations and who could only with difficulty extract themselves from a chart table littered with plotting sheets and pages of spherical trigonometry.  For most of these fellows, working aboard ship was the both the opportunity of a lifetime and a labor of love, and they would not have had it any other way.

This did not mean that they did not love their families, however.  The ones who had families loved them very much, cared about them deeply, and missed them terribly.  But it took a special kind of family, particularly a special kind of wife, to endure the nomadic nature of the work.  Not every woman was suited for marriage to an itinerant husband who worked an irregular schedule in an irregular business and didn’t fit in socially on land.

I realized that a life in the Merchant Marine would expose me to people and places very distant and different from my own rather unremarkable, suburban, middle-class, American childhood.  I also knew that I would associate with others who shared my interests and ambitions.  I wanted it this way, too.  What I did not anticipate, however, was just how wide the range of personalities and how diverse the range of their backgrounds and values would be, and how these differences would interact with one another aboard ship.  As it happened, though, these personality clashes formed one of the most entertaining aspects of the vagabond life of the Merchant Marine. 

Others, however, do not make me laugh.  These are the ones who deliberately “waste[d] the days of [their] probation” (2 Nephi 9:27) or were in their ignorance “blinded by the subtle craftiness of men” (D&C 123:12).  Either way, the results were not good, and too much human potential went unfulfilled.  Regardless of how they lived, however, these children of the sea are also children of the Lord.  He would want, and in fact does want, what would be good for them.  For the majority who will probably make their final voyages without ever knowing of the restored fullness of the Gospel and the opportunities it provides, their next great occasions will likely come through the kindness of strangers doing ordinance work in the temples.  Then their ship will come in, and its sacred cargo of temple ordinances will bring these men more happiness than they ever imagined possible.

In retrospect, I think the temple was the “something special” that I sensed on the sea.  For the temple is the place where everyone fits in socially, where everyone belongs, and where everyone gathers in the Lord’s presence.  There are no social outcasts in the temple.  No one is left to wander the trackless sea bereft of either human or divine companionship.  The temple is the one place on the Earth that is truly for everyone.