Reflections on a Freighter: Anecdotes and Observations on Life and Literature

By William S. Kilborne

Kilborne takes you on a journey from his childhood in New York City through adventures, disappointments, delights and death. Lovers of literature will revel in the allusions to Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson and E.B. White. And of course there's some of Kilborne's own poetry as well, irreverent and poignant.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 1, 1900
• ISBN: 9781667885025

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Reflections on a Freighter

© 2007 William S. Kilborne

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN: 978-1-66788-501-8

eBook ISBN: 978-1-66788-502-5

Acknowledgements

The people that I am acknowledging here did not give Reflections on a Freighter a cursory glance, smile, and say, Very nice. They spent many hours editing, proofreading, and commenting on my early drafts. Combined, they produced thousands of words of criticism, from which my manuscript has profited enormously and for which I am deeply grateful.

Jim Beckman

Kathy Flories

Preston Gillam

Robert Hudnut

Frances Kilborne

Sarah Kilborne

William S. Kilborne III

Ellen Kurtzman

Theodore Mack

Diane Orr

Albert and Helen Viola

Jim Walworth

Frederick Waterman

Contents

Acknowledgements

Day One

Day Two

Day Three

Day Four

Day Five

Day Six

Day Seven

Day Eight

Day Nine

Day Ten

Day Eleven

Day Twelve

Day Thirteen

Day Fourteen

Day Fifteen

Day Sixteen

Day Seventeen

Day Eighteen

Day Nineteen

Day Twenty

Day Twenty-One

Day Twenty-Two

Day Twenty-Three

Day One

I have been on this freighter a few hours. It is longer than three football fields and I am the only passenger. 28 days to go. From Long Beach to Shanghai and back. Six months ago on October 1, 2005, I drove Irene to the U.T. Southwestern Medical Center. The rim of the sun barely showed on the horizon. As I held the car door open for her, she turned to me and said, Tawny, I’m never going to leave this hospital. She had a tiny cancer on her left lung. The surgeon would remove one lobe - a garden variety operation he called it. Five days later she had a pulmonary embolism. She died October 30. Marriages are never static: they are always either getting better or getting worse. After 44 years, ours was getting better. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut was fond of saying. So it goes.

All my life I’ve wanted to book passage on a freighter. I have a manila folder bursting with items about freighter travel. It’s not the ports that interest me; it’s the ocean that I love. Journeys are more interesting than destinations. Irene never had the slightest interest in freighter travel, so at one level, I am doing something that I couldn’t have done without being away from her longer than I would have been willing to. For a while I will be spared the niggling plethora of tasks which I faced as the independent executor of Irene’s estate - paying bills, establishing a power of attorney, changing the beneficiaries in my life insurance policies, providing my lawyer with a list of debts pending on the date of Irene’s death, balancing the checkbook (like a physics assignment that I know is beyond me) - the list is endless. And I will also be spared the constant reminders of her absence: the curtains that she chose and hung, the pictures that she framed and placed, the furniture that she so carefully arranged, the pillows that she needle-pointed, but on this freighter, there are books to read instead of bills to pay, and my task is the one I have just assigned myself - to write about this journey and the thoughts and memories it triggers. I look around and I see a comfortable cabin, and when I step outside, I do not see the landscaping she worked so hard on but the ocean.

This account will be all I’ll have to remember it by. I do not take photographs for four reasons. First, when I do, I focus so much on the recording process that I fail to savor the raw experience. Second, I never look at those old photos and slides (nor do I want to look at other people’s; I especially don’t want to look at pictures of other people’s children: I am always tempted to say, Maybe they’ll be better looking when they grow up. Third, photography has become so sophisticated and computerized, that it fills me with fear and trembling. Fourth, I firmly believe that a few well-chosen words are worth a thousand pictures.

In travel, after planning - a non-threatening, harmless procedure - comes packing, an art which I am unlikely to master in this lifetime. Maturation, I am fond of saying, consists largely in discovering one’s limitations, but lately these discoveries have become disconcertingly frequent. Irene did all the packing in the family. She used to hold forth on the difficulty of packing well, which put me in mind of Michael Jordan talking about the difficulty of shooting baskets.

I packed four bags - two for clothes, one for shoes, and one for books (biographies of Mark Twain and Ogden Nash, two novels - Fallen by David Maine and The Lighthouse by P.D. James - three nonfiction books, A Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, Our Inner Ape by Frans De Waal, and Teacher Man by Frank McCourt. I could not carry all my luggage . Was I setting myself up for failure? If I gave up one, could I survive a vacation barefoot? Like Blanch DuBois, I would depend upon the kindness of strangers.

Yesterday at Long Beach, the luggage was delivered about three blocks from where the taxis waited. This is not the sort of situation I like to be confronted with. I do not regard it as a challenge; I wondered whether it was God’s punishment for my taking for granted Irene’s packing skills all those years. I abandoned my luggage, a heap of Hartman likely to tempt any light - fingered, heavily-muscled passerby. I walked three blocks, found a cabby who looked as though he worked out, took him to my heap of Hartmans (I was gladder to see them than I ever was to see a relative at an airport), and we carried the bags to his cab.

The cabby was an interesting fellow. Traveling alone, one engages people in conversation far more than when one travels with a companion. I learned from him that the adjective Iranian refers to a political entity while Persian refers to a culture. He spoke four languages - Persian, Japanese, Turkish, and English. One day after he arrived at Long Beach, he set himself up as a taxi driver. Here was a man who, unlike his passenger, enjoyed a challenge. He surveyed ten global positioning systems, all with both an audio and a visual component, bought the cheapest, a Chinese model for $750, which was known for breaking down but which he got to work by hooking it up to another device. I love gadgets, he said. Do you? No, I replied in a futile attempt to cut short a technological explanation that I knew I could not understand even if I wanted to.

He drove me to the Westin Hotel. The Westin folk believe in the power of the word heaven. My bed was not just a bed but a Westin heavenly bed; instead of a do-not-disturb sign, the sign at the Westin read Can’t come to the door right now. I’m in heaven. If I ever decide to take my own life, I’m going to go to a Westin hotel just so I can hang that sign on the door. The pillows are heavenly, the bath is heavenly, and they offer heavenly gifts - slippers, robes, sachets - which are neither heavenly nor gifts since there is a charge for them. Sometimes merely to report is to satirize.

As per a new trend in hotel design, the restaurant is right in the middle of the lobby, as if the architect had grown up in the sixties when open classrooms were all the rage. So often people equate change with improvement. The replacement of living telephone operators with recorded messages which are imbedded in other recorded messages which are imbedded in other recorded messages is another case in point. There is a cheerleading convention going on. Absurdly gussied-up young girls who have been trained to make loud noises in unison practice their routines. Their mothers hover, encourage, and applaud, making Mama Rose from Gypsy look shy and retiring. A prepubescent blonde jumps high in the air, scissoring her legs, not ten feet from my calamari. My extra dry, Bombay Sapphire martini stirred not shaken with a twist is insufficient to enable me to tune out this crassness. I order another. I have never seen so many people in one place whom I have no desire to meet.

A cab takes me to the Hanjin Long Beach Container Terminal. It is a city unto itself. Containers stacked skyscraper high stretch as far as the eye can see. Politicians talk about having them all inspected; it would take an army the size of the one we should have sent to Iraq to do the job. Civilian vehicles are not allowed in a container city, so I take a shuttle bus driven by a fellow who from the neck down looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger. I stand beside the Hanjin Phoenix and look up up up to its lowest deck. A retractable metal ladder stretches from this deck to the terra firma upon which I will not tread for the next twenty-eight days. Its rungs appear to have been manufactured by someone unfamiliar with the design of the human foot. My Arnold look-alike picks up my clothing bag and my book bag - the heavy ones - and scampers up the ladder with a simian grace and ease. I follow, teetering and tottering, my playwriting materials in one hand and my shoes in the other. A rope just about the right height for a small child would have provided additional support had I a free hand. I arrive on the deck exhausted; Arnold is not even breathing hard. My God, I say, you must be in good shape, squeezing his enormous right bicep. I am, he allows. I wonder whether to tip him. Sometimes people take umbrage when you offer them a tip, and I wanted to keep this fellow as far from umbrageousness as possible. He accepted a five spot.

A young Filipino officer helps me carry my luggage to my room, which is large and comfortable and includes a table and chair, a private bathroom, and a double bed. I think of Faulkner saying that all he needed to write was a stack of yellow pads, a couple of boxes of Number Two pencils, and a case of bourbon. Happily, the Captain had for sale just enough bourbon to provide me with inspiration for the entire journey. If you are considering a freighter cruise, don’t count on the ship’s providing the booze. My ship had no hard liquor other than what I consumed. I was lucky, as I have been all my life, that the Captain’s supply exactly matched my thirst. You can ship liquor to the ship in advance; the company agent may tell you you can’t, but the captain told me the agent has to accept it.

I discover that freighter travel is the cure for writer’s block. Hell, there’s nothing else to do, except read. Actually, I’ve always regarded writer’s block as a self-indulgence. Why do you suppose there isn’t a salesman’s block or a janitor’s block or a painter’s block or a doctor’s block or an executive’s block? If you’re a pro, you do what you have to to get paid. Too many amateurs in this business. We writers sometimes take ourselves too seriously.

Day Two

This ship is so vast it’s unbelievable. From my porthole I think I am looking at stacks upon stacks of containers in the shipyard; then I discover that I am looking at the containers on the ship. I get into trouble twice - once for being too close to the loading of containers, once for setting off an alarm in the engine room. Surely the alarm signaling a terrorist attack could not have been louder. While exploring, I wander onto the bridge. What a commanding view - like a king’s on his highest parapet, not unlike the view that my two grandsons, age ten and twelve, had from the Empire State Building a month before I boarded the freighter. It was a mob scene; ninety-nine percent of the people went to the balcony on the eighty-sixth floor. For an extra fourteen dollars a person, we went to the observatory on the 102nd floor, and it was like a private club: there couldn’t have been more than ten people there. We chatted and got to know one another, pooling our knowledge of what we were looking at on a crystal clear day. We all felt terribly superior, above the madding crowd both physically and spiritually. Surely fourteen dollars is not too much to pay for such pleasurable snobbery.

I meet the man immediately recognizable as the Captain - fair, good-looking, weathered, gracious; central casting might have just sent him over to act the part. He is the only person on the ship whose English is good enough to permit a relaxed conversation. I suspect we will have many meals together and become good friends. He, like me, even read the Captain Horatio Hornblower books when he was a kid, though he read them in German.

As one might expect on a ship whose high-ranking officers are German, hierarchy matters. The crew from Kiribata, not far from Christmas Island, eat in their own mess hall and converse in their own language. In the second mess hall there are two tables, one for the Filipino officers and one for the German officers, separate but hardly equal. The German table puts me in mind of the 102nd story of the Empire State Building. When these distinct linguistic communities communicate with each other, they use English - the most frequently spoken second language both on the ship and on the planet.

I have never been good at understanding people with heavy accents; frankly, they irritate me. I know this is unfair, and I try to compensate by being polite to them. Figures on public radio are especially annoying. I want to say, Learn to speak English properly; then air your opinions. Even the Captain’s constant references to his wessel get under my skin; you would think after the twenty-fifth correction, he would improve. Of course, it is possible that my corrections annoy him as much as his mispronunciations annoy me. The man speaks four languages. Everyone on the ship speaks at least two, except me. I recognize I am in no position to condescend to any of them.

Actually, I am unapologetic about knowing only one language. Learning new names for things is not the same as learning new information about the world around us. The more primitive a culture, the more undisguised the confusion between names and things. Sir James George Frazer in The Golden Bough makes this point