A Captain's Duty

and you have to get yourself mentally prepared to go across. It’s a stressful time when fears start creeping into the minds of your loved ones. It was probably the dangers of my job that were on Andrea’s mind that cold March—pirates, rogue waves, desperate people in third-world ports. All the while, I’d be thinking like a captain, running through a checklist with a thousand things on it: What repairs do I need to see to? Are the guys on my crew dependable? I used to start doing this a month before I left, which would drive Andrea around the bend. Now, after thirty years at sea, I wait until I hit the deck of my ship.
     
    Andrea and I have a tradition when I’m getting ready to leave. First, we argue. About nothing at all. In the weeks leading up to my leaving, Andrea and I always have arguments about little things, about the car or the weather or her hitting her head on the old ship’s bell that hangs near the clothesline in our backyard. She must have smacked it three or four times while putting up fresh laundry to dry, and she always comesin and yells at me to take it down. (It’s still up there, too—sentimental value.) But in those weeks before a job, we get on each other’s nerves, which is nothing more than her being anxious about my leaving and me being anxious about leaving her.
    Andrea is an emergency room nurse at a hospital in Burlington and she’s a fierce, opinionated, loving Italian girl from Vermont. I love her to death. We’d met in a Boston dive bar, the Cask ’n Flagon, down near Kenmore Square, when she was in nursing school and I’d been around the world a few times already as a young sailor. I noticed this cute frizzy-haired brunette girl sitting at the bar, and I just had to talk to her. Andrea was talking with the bartender, since they’d just discovered they had mutual friends. Then, as she tells it, this tall guy with a beard appeared out of nowhere and sat down next to her.
    “You have a problem,” I said.
    Andrea thought, Well, he’s cute enough. I’ll play along.
    “What’s that?” she said.
    “Being the best-looking woman in every room you walk into.”
    “Thanks,” she said. “There are three women in here. Not a huge compliment.”
    I laughed and stuck out my hand.
    “I’m Rich,” I said. “As in ‘filthy.’” That was one of my better lines in the early eighties.
    Andrea cracked up. Then she let me buy her a drink.
    Years later, after we were married, Andrea told me that she thought I was funny and easy to talk to. Like most people’s,her only knowledge of the merchant marine came from Humphrey Bogart movies. I guess that’s why she let me tell her so many stories. “You made it sound intriguing,” she said.
    After we met, I had to ship out and Andrea didn’t hear from me again for months. She moved to a new apartment after her first year at nursing school. Then one night at about 1 a.m., there was a rap on her door. When she opened it, there I was, smiling like I’d won the lottery. She was floored. She figured I must have walked all over Boston, trying to find her new address. She wasn’t far off.
    Andrea was twenty-five and very focused on school. Nursing was going to be her life. I was on her radar, but only a blip on the edge of the screen. I would ship out and she would get postcards and then letters from these ports all over the world. Then I’d come back to Boston and take her out to dinner and the movies and pick her and her friends up at seven a.m. the next morning and drive them to their first classes. All the while, I’d have a new batch of stories to tell her about storms off Cape Hatteras or typhoons or good or crazy shipmates.
    To me, it was just life on the seas. But she loved getting the postcards and the sudden reunions. “It was romantic,” Andrea says to this day. “It really was.”
     
    The night before I shipped out for the Maersk Alabama, Andrea and I jumped in our car and went to our favorite restaurant, a place called Euro, in the nearby town of Essex. Andrea had the shrimp scampi and I had the seafood medley and we drank a bottle of red wine we brought with us. It’s cheaperthat way. I’m three quarters Irish and one quarter Yankee, but that one quarter controls the money. I’ve been known to be tight with a dollar, and I don’t mind saying so.
    The next day, March 28, Andrea dropped me at the airport, like she always did. There was nothing out of the ordinary in those last hours together. “Everything is