A Captain's Duty

you’re a sailor, you return to an ancient rhythm. The sun tells you when to get up and when to go to bed. It bookends your day with these incredible sunrises and sunsets. I couldn’t wait to get out on the water. This is why you go to sea, I thought, as I looked out over my ship. I knew that every day on the water would be different. It always is. The sea would never look the same, its color changing from a granite black to vivid blue to an almost transparent green. Men go to sea for a lot of reasons—for the chance to work in the open air, for love of the oceans, because their father and their grandfather did it, or because they think it’s easy money (it’s not). But if you don’t like mornings like this, when the whole voyage is ahead of you, you might as well stay home and go to work in a factory making toasters. When you’re a seaman, leaving port always reminds you why, despite the danger and the boredom and the loneliness, you wanted to be one in the first place.
    As we got ready to depart, I was up on the bridge talking with the port pilot, who would guide us out of Salalah harbor. The pilot called out, “Dead slow ahead,” and the third mate answered, while I watched the RPMs on the engine, wanting to keep it well under our maximum. Within half an hour, we’d cleared the harbor, dropped off the pilot, and were gliding out of Salalah into the glassy Indian Ocean.
     
    Every time I left a port, I thought about how I’d gotten into this profession, how unlikely it was that I’d become a sea captain. If it hadn’t been for a sailor who wanted to meet some girls and have a good time, I might never have even heard of the merchant marine. In fact, growing up in Winchester, Massachusetts, outside Boston, there were plenty of people who doubted I’d get farther than the corner bar.
    My main problem was that I was a little wild. My nickname in high school was Jungle, and I have to say I earned it. My friends and I would occasionally end up in bars in the rougher parts of Boston or Cambridge and sometimes have to fight our way out. Once, in the early seventies, my buddies and I had a few beers and were roaming around Boston when we came across this huge group of people. “Carnival!” we thought in our stupor. We waded through the crowd until we got to the front and realized we were at a Mau Mau rally where a militant loony was preaching revolution. When the speaker saw us, he just froze. We were lucky we made it out alive, but it was just another night for the boys from Winchester.
    You had to be pretty rugged to survive in Boston in the sixties and seventies. I grew up in a neighborhood with its share ofmilquetoasts and bookish nerds. But it was also full of guys who were throwbacks to a different era, guys who had no problem smacking you in the face as a way of testing what you were made of. And I didn’t flinch. I was known for being someone who didn’t back down from a fight. If you were soft, you stayed in your room until it was time to go away to college.
    Some of my tough-mindedness goes back to my paternal grandparents, I’m sure. They lived in the Fidelis Way projects in Brighton, which was a tough area then and still is today. They’d come over from County Cork and arrived in America just in time for the Depression. Those dark years had affected them deeply. My grandparents probably didn’t have that much more growing up in Ireland, but what amazed me was that they made everything and wasted nothing. They made their own soap and their own bread and their own curtains and they probably took a shot at making their own clothes at one point. I was one of eight kids, four girls and four boys, and my brothers and sisters used to hate going to Grandma and Grandpa Phillips’ house. There were no second helpings at dinner, so you’d better eat what you got because there wasn’t going to be anything else. I seldom saw my grandmother smile.
    It’s funny. I never thought of it at the time, but seeing how hard my grandparents had worked just to survive must have sunk into my brain. They’d built a life from the scraps the world had given them. One thing that my family never lacked was a work ethic, and in them I saw where it had begun.
    My mother was from West Roxbury, then a pretty well-to-do part of Boston. Her parents were both teachers and she brought to the family the belief that you get an education, nomatter what. I wasn’t much of a student but at least she made me into a reader,