A Captain's Duty

went slack. I felt blood spurting out between my fingers and running down my face.
    Holy shit, he really did it, I thought. He shot me.
    My vision was blurred but I looked up at the vertical and horizontal green strut on the bulkhead wall. It looked likea cross, and just staring at it had settled my fears before. As I looked at the cross, the strangest thing came into my mind. I’m going to see Frannie, I thought. Frannie, my dang dog in Vermont, a nutcase from the pound who never once obeyed any of my commands. She’d been hit by a car in front of our farmhouse a month before I left. Now I was going to see her.
    Then I heard Musso. “Don’t do it!” he shouted. “No, no!” I looked up. Blood from my head had spilled onto the white knots. Musso was freaking out.
    I took a deep breath. I didn’t know if I’d dodged a bullet or what had just happened.
    I really should have told the pirates: I’m too stubborn to die that easily. You’re just going to have to try harder.

ONE
-10 Days
    PIRACY FIGURES UP 20 PERCENT IN FIRST QUARTER OF 2009: A total of 36 vessels were boarded and one vessel hijacked. Seven crew members were taken hostage, six kidnapped, three killed and one missing—presumed dead. In the majority of incidents, the attackers were heavily armed with guns or knives. The use and threat of violence against crew members remains unacceptably high…. Waters around Somalia continue to be notorious for hijacking of vessels and the abduction of crew for ransom.
    —ICC International Maritime Bureau Piracy Report, First Quarter, 2009
    T en days before, I’d been enjoying my last meal stateside with my wife, Andrea, in one of the most beautiful towns in Vermont. All you see from the front door of my converted farmhouse are rolling green hills, munching cows, and more rolling hills. Underhill is the kind of Vermont town where young farmers propose to their local sweethearts by spray-painting RACHEL, WILL YOU MARRY ME ? on bales ofhay. It’s a place where you can walk for three minutes and be lost in a forest so deep and thick and silent you’d think you’re going to trip over Daniel Boone. We have two general stores and one Catholic church, St. Thomas, and the occasional tourist up from Manhattan. It’s as different from the ocean as the other side of the moon is, and I love that. It’s like I get to live two completely different lives.
    As a merchant mariner, I often work three months on and three months off. When I come home, I forget about the sea. I’m 100 percent into being a dad and husband. When our kids, Dan and Mariah, were young, from the moment they got up to the minute they went to bed, I’d take care of them. Neighbors and friends would ask me to babysit, so I’d have five or six kids in tow. I’d make dinner: French toast by candlelight, my specialty. I’d do Rich’s Homework Club. I’d take the kids on class trips. Whatever I do, work or home life, I do with everything I have.
    When I leave my family, it’s for a long time. You need to do something special for them before you ship out, because it might be the last time you see them. When he was growing up, my son, Dan, would goad me, “Oh, I don’t have a dad. He’s never home. Guess he doesn’t love me.” We’d laugh about it—Dan is exactly like I was when I was nineteen: a smart aleck who will find your weakness and hammer it home until you give in and laugh. But what he said about my never being there would come back to haunt me. Because there’s a kernel of truth there. My daughter, Mariah, and Dan would see me every day for three months and then I would be gone to some far-flung corner of the world. It didn’t matter to them that there were other merchant mariners who stayed onboard even longerthan I did, that I knew one guy, a radio operator, who was aboard one ship for two years straight.
    As a sailor, you have to put your real life on your kitchen shelf and pick up your merchant marine life. Because on the job, you barely have a personal life. You’re on call twenty-four hours a day to do whatever the ship needs. You eat and sleep and work and that’s pretty much it. It’s like you’ve died and gone to sea. Then you come back and take your real life off the shelf and start living it again.
    You develop rituals to get through the transition from land to sea. Sailors have a phrase, “crossing the bar,” which means leaving harbor for the unknown on the oceans (it also can refer to the death of a sailor),