“I wasn’t ever a spook, but something in the back of my mind got a little itchy when they told us to replace the fuel line. I remember thinking it was strange that the higher-ups okayed a repair like that so late in the season. I mean, their priority was always bottom-line tonnage.” He paused, scratching the back of his head. “I chalked it up to the engine being new and the brass just not knowing how reckless they could be. But I was still uneasy about it.
“Twenty-two hours we sat there while a contractor put the new line in. We gave the crew fourteen hours’ leave and watched them all hump into Two Harbors.”
“I bet they did their best to hump once they got there, too.” Olaf smiled. “They usually did.”
“In Two Harbors, though?”
“You’d be surprised.” Olaf smiled again, shook his head, and then turned more serious. “Some of those boys lived up there. Bjorn did. He had a baby girl and a sweet little wife. I’ll tell you what, he was off that goddamn boat in five minutes.
“The boys who didn’t live there got pissed in the bars up on Willow Street. I’d venture to guess that more than one or two of those fellas had a pretty good time that night.” Olaf smiled again, as if to admit that despite his age, the memories of those little Great Lake ports, the run-down pubs that filled them, and the sailor-loving girls who knew the ship schedules like their multiplication tables hadn’t escaped him even now.
“The next morning, when they came back aboard, it was like watching a zombie parade. I remember the days before I met your mother, before I became an officer, too, and the shit we used to get ourselves into.” He smiled again. “Those boys knew how to dig it up. They were all red-eyed and pale, sweating in spite of the weather. Goddamn.
“The boys who lived up there, though, they all looked happy as clams. Walking lightly, you know,” he said and winked. “But not Bjorn. I didn’t know him well, but he looked like two different people at once. You could see he was happy — must have been thinking of his little girl and wife — but he also looked resentful as hell, probably about shipping out again. He was one of those guys who got tricked into his life on the boats. He was just dumb enough not to be able to do something else and just smart enough to hate what he did. There were a lot of guys like that on the Lakes.”
Noah scanned his memory for the men he knew from his father’s trade. Having had it put so simply, he could recognize the split in many of them. Some of the men, like Luke, stood out. They were single-minded types, gruff and bigger than life. But the majority of the men he remembered — men from his childhood cruises on the boats with his father and from his time slumming down in Canal Park with his high school buddies — were just ordinary guys.
“I’ll bet you put them right to work,” Noah said.
“Of course. We had to get the deck cleared and only had a short window of time to do it.”
“Because of the weather?”
“One front had already passed — the one that left a foot and a half of snow on our deck — and another one was coming, a nor’easter. We knew the seas would be rough and that it’d be cold as hell, so we wanted to get loaded and in front of the weather. It was no fun to be out there latching the hatches when it got below zero.”
“Didn’t the forecast warrant sitting tight for a few hours?” Noah asked.
“We could see it coming, we could feel it, too, but we never would’ve backed down on the basis of the weather reports we were getting.”
“Were they wrong?”
“Not wrong,” Olaf said. “When the wind turned around and the flurries started out of the northeast, we all got that sinking feeling. When the lake started crashing over the breakwater and the harbor water got choppy, we knew it was going to be a mean day, but it would’ve taken more than we saw to keep us in port.
“Anyway, we knew we could hug the lee of the Minnesota shore if we had to. There were also three ships ahead of us, a French freighter full of lumber. .”
“The Lachete,” Noah said.
Olaf looked at Noah sideways. “Yeah, the Lachete. There was also one of our boats out there, the Heldig, and one of the boats from the Cleveland Cliffs fleet.” He tapped his bushy lip, thinking.
“The Prudence,” Noah said.
“Was it you there or me?” Olaf asked.
Noah grinned.
“All three of those ships were updating us on the weather.”
“And each of them talked about seeking shelter from the time they left port. What did they tell you that made you think getting started was a good idea?”
“It didn’t matter what they told us. We were going to go or not go on the basis of Jan’s gut, not on what some goddamn Frenchman had to say about the wind.”
“What about the Heldig? Didn’t you have any confidence in her?”
“You see, it was never a question of the confidence we had in the reports the other boats were sending. They were instruments, that’s it. It was always just a simple question: Did we feel like the Rag could handle what the lake was giving? If the answer was no for the Heldig or the Prudence or any of the other boats out on the Lakes, it didn’t necessarily mean it was no for us.” There was no vanity, no posturing, in what his father said. Noah knew this as simply as he knew the story itself.
Olaf gazed over his shoulder at the stove.
“Don’t tell me you’re cold.”
“No, no,” Olaf said, looking up at him. “I was just thinking about how it felt to be on that ship,” he said. “Standing on the bridge, even in the worst weather, it was easy to stick your chest out — to puff it up — because we knew that no matter what was in front of us, the Rag was behind us.
“She was six hundred and ten feet long. Sixty-two feet abeam. The hull alone — hull number 768—weighed five thousand tons. Loaded as she was, there were more than eighteen thousand tons—eighteen thousand tons— of steel lugging it up that lake under two thousand horsepower,” Olaf said, raising an eyebrow. “The bridge was forty feet above the surface of the lake, and still we had to keep the wipers going in order to see out the damn window. Despite all this we were making better than seven knots. Under normal conditions and with a normal load we would’ve made twelve knots, thirteen on a good day. But seven was a hell of a pull, all things considered.”
“Seven knots makes for a long day up Superior,” Noah said.
“Better than sixteen hours to Rock of Ages light.”
“As opposed to?”
“Ah, nine or ten,” Olaf said with a wave of the hand. “The point is she wasn’t normal.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she shouldn’t have been making that time. The other ships were thirty or forty miles ahead of us and they weren’t making a third of the time we were.” Again he shook his head. “But that’s just how the Rag was — above the weather, above the seas, those things just didn’t bother her, they didn’t stop her.”
“Why?”
Without a touch of embarrassment Olaf said, “She was a goddess, I guess.
“I remember storms she weathered that would’ve sunk other ships in a second. On Erie we sailed through the worst lightning storm I ever saw. Took two bolts right on deck. Lost one coaming thirty miles from safe harbor. The pumps were working that night.
“Another time we hit a real beast coming out of Whitefish Bay, heading up to Marquette. When we got to the Soo they were all set to close her down until it blew over, but when they saw we were next in line to pass, they let us up. Eight or ten boats had to wait out a twelve-hour blow in the St. Mary’s River while we chugged out onto the lake. Now that was a storm we might’ve sat out.