That means, as third cook; my task the washing and scouring of greasy
pots, pans, and dishes ... and waiting on the firemen and deckhands at
meals.
The _James Eads Howe_ took on a cargo of rust-coloured iron ore at Twin
Harbours ... the gigantic machinery grided and crashed all night,
pouring the ore into the hold, to the dazzling flare of electric
lights....
Here for the first time I conceived myself to be caught in the great
industrial turmoil. If I were to derive song from this, it would be song
for giants, or rather, for machines that had grown to gigantic
proportions from the insect world ... diminutive men made parts of their
anatomy as they swung levers and operated cranes....
We kicked outward on the long drop down Lake Superior, the largest of
the five Great Lakes. It was like an inland ocean. The water of it is
always so cold that, when a ship is wrecked there, good swimmers who
might otherwise keep up till rescued, often perish of the cold....
Day and night the horizon was smoky-blue with forest fires ... one
afternoon our deck was covered with birds that had flown out over the
water to escape the flames....
And once we saw lifted in the sky three steamboats sailing upside down,
a mirage ... and, once, a gleaming city in the clouds, that hung there
spectrally for about five minutes, then imperceptibly faded out....
"That's a reflection of some real city," explained the tall
Canadian-Scotch cook ... "once I recognised Quebec hanging in the sky
...--thought I even saw people walking and traffic moving."
Half-way across to the Soo Canal we ran into my first lake-storm.
"The sailor on the Great Lakes has a harder time than the ocean sailor.
He can't make his ship run before a storm. He's got to look out for land
on every side."
Right over my bunk where I slept, ceaselessly turned and turned the
propeller shaft. The noise and roar of the engines was ever in my ears,
and the peculiar ocean-like noise of the stokehold ... and the metallic
clang of coal as it shot from shovels....
The night of the storm the crashing of the water and the whistling
impact of wave-weighted winds kept me awake.
I jumped into my clothes and went into the fire-room. Hardly able to
keep their feet, the firemen toiled away, scattering shovels-full of
coal evenly over the fires, wielding their slice bars ... greeting with
oaths and comic curses the awkward coal passer who spilled with his
laden wheelbarrow into the slightly lower pit where they stood.
I quit the _James Eads Howe_ at Ashtabula, after several round trips in
her, the length of the Lakes.
I freighted it to Chicago, where I shipped, again as porter, on a
package freighter.
* * * * *
The captain of the package freighter _Overland_ should have been
anything but a captain. He was a tall, flabby, dough-faced man, as timid
as a child just out of the nursery.
We had taken on, as one of our firemen, a Canuck, who, from the first,
boasted that he was a "bad man"....
He intimidated the cook right off. He punched in a glass partition to
emphasise a filthy remark he had made to the head engineer. He went
after me, to bully and domineer me, next.
It looked as if we were in for a hard voyage to the Georgian Bay.
The Canuck, at the very first meal, terrorised the crew that sat down
with him. I looked him over carefully, and realised that something must
be done.
He flung a filthy and gratuitous expression my way. Silently I stepped
back from the mess room, untied my apron, and meant to go in and try to
face him down. But at that juncture, my courage failed me, and instead
of inviting the rough-neck out on deck, as I had tried to force myself
to do, I hurried to the captain's cabin.
The captain said, "Come in!" to my knock. He was sitting, of all things,
in dirty pajamas, at a desk ... though it was mid-day ... his flabby,
grey-white belly exuded over his tight pajama waist-string ... the
jacket of the pajamas hung open, with all but one button off.
I complained to the captain of the bully--repeated how he had bellowed
at me to tell the unmentionable skipper he would receive his bumps
bloody well, too, if the latter did not stick to his own part of the
ship.