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week.
    A police officer with coconut palms on the lenses of
her eyeglasses admitted us to the Columbus Street Terminal, Old Charleston. We walked across acres of paved open storage under heavy-lift sheer-leg cranes. The dock was three-quarters of a mile long. The dimensions of the Sea-Land Performance were Panamax (fitting by inches in the locks of the Panama Canal). As we approached the gangway, Andy remarked that his “basic ambition” was “someday to be the skipper of a ship like this.”
    While he put in his eight hours making rounds—chronicling the opening and closing of hatches, noting degrees of inshore list, checking the ullage and innage of ballast—I did what I could to stow the vocabulary (if your gas tank is all ullage you are going nowhere), and I talked to the captain, Kenneth Ronald Crook. He was behind a desk in a spacious office, reachable by elevator, near the top of the house. Across the room, I sat on a couch by a coffee table. Like everyone else in the Merchant Marine, he told sea stories. One or two were a touch macabre. He said he had been on a Calmar ship that made regular runs to Los Angeles from Baltimore with steel. One of the ordinaries could not keep his hands out of the food. That is, time after time he walked the cafeteria line, reached across the cutting board, and sank a hand into a tub of food. Finally, the chief cook could not contain his rage. One day, as the hand moved over the cutting board, a cleaver came down and cut off the hand. The chief mate used a blowtorch to cauterize the stump.
    On the same ship on a beautiful day with long low swells in the Pacific, a seaman was standing in the rigging
on a ladder that was not tied down. As the roll of the ship reached its maximum angle, both the ladder and the sailor went over the side. A life ring was thrown to him. He got himself into it. A lifeboat was lowered. When the man was taken from the sea, only half of his body was there.
    At least he was employed. Without a modulation of tone, Captain Crook went into the horrors of the search for work. “In those days—as third mate, second mate—I was shipping off the board. There were too many mates and not enough ships. I drove from York, Pennsylvania, where I lived then, to Baltimore every day, looking for a ship. There were job calls every two hours, so I was in the hall all day. Weeks would go by with no job called. Then a job would come along and I’d get beat out by someone else’s card.” After he got a ship or two with Moore-McCormack Lines and became a permanent chief mate, he discovered that working for shipping companies was not unlike working for magazines. Established structures (Moore-McCormack, the Saturday Evening Post , United States Lines, Life , Seatrain, Look ) tended to collapse beneath you. After the Moore-McCormack ocean fleet was absorbed by United States Lines, in 1982, Crook “sat on the beach for seven months basically without a job.” The union forced United States Lines to hire him. In 1986, United States Lines went bankrupt. “Thirty-some ships came to a screeching halt. That put an awful lot of people on the beach. A lot of the older skippers retired. Sea-Land purchased about twenty ships, including this one. I sat on the beach from the middle of February until November 17th. I was in the dentist chair
in Montana. The union called from New York. I was to be captain of an old stick ship called S.S. Galveston Bay, taking food to the natives in Africa. Right down my alley. That job led to this one. From zero income to a six-figure income makes a difference.” The difference was the ranch he had his eye on in Montana, with its hundreds of acres and its trout streams.
    By midnight, Andy and I were on the bridge of the Cygnus, at Wando Terminal, on the Wando River. The air-conditioning on the ship had failed. The temperature was above a hundred. Through thick dust weighted with fumes, Army tanks rolled onto