May 18
I wrestle my bike into Mike’s minivan. Then we drive down to the freight ship terminal in Chester, just south of Philly. The highway swings up and over a steampunk landscape of smokestacks and chemical tanks; a rusting robot planet that hisses at us from a thousand leaky gaskets.
Penn Terminal sits along the Delaware River. There used to be a big shipyard here during WW2, but that closed down a long time ago. Mike pulls up to the security guard shack. Beyond that, there’s a parking lot stacked with multi-colored shipping containers and a single freight ship— the Independent Venture— tied to the pier.
“See you in a few months,” I say to Mike.
“Yeah,” Mike says, eyeing the freight ship I’m about to board. “For sure,” he adds with something less than total conviction.
I toss my bike and my saddle bags into the back of the security cop’s pickup truck and we drive a couple hundred yards to the ship.
“Where y’headed,” the guy asks.
“Antwerp,” I say.
“Where’s that?” he asks.
“Belgium,” I say.
The guy frowns and shakes his head.
“I wouldn’t do it,” he says. “You heard of the Titanic, right?”
We pull alongside a rickety stairway lashed to the side of the ship. A sort of glorified rope ladder. It’s not how I’d imagined this moment. In my dreams, I imagined pedaling onto the ship over a sturdy gangplank possibly lined with an honor guard of admiring sailors. But the sailor in the bright yellow hardhat who shimmies down the ladder to meet me gives me a look that it’d be a stretch to call admiring. He grabs my saddle bags and tells me to follow him. I hike my bike onto my shoulder and start to pull myself up the wobbly stairway. My handlebars keep getting caught in the ropes, so it takes me forever to lurch my way to the top.
The Independent Venture is mostly a floating warehouse for freight containers. The crew is housed in a white tower at the back of the ship. Inside the tower, a narrow staircase connects one deck to the next: from the Boat Deck to the First Bridge Deck to the Second Bridge Deck to the Superstructure Deck to the Captain’s Deck to the Bridge. My cabin is on the Superstructure Deck. The window in the cabin looks out over the front of the ship. I spend the rest of the evening watching the loading cranes swinging four ton shipping containers like toy blocks and stacking them higher and higher on the foredeck.
Around midnight, the ship shudders. Like it’s stretching. Waking up from its little nap along this pier on the Delaware River. The ship is commanded by German officers, so we cast off right on schedule. The crane operators and the forklift drivers have all clocked out and the security guard is slumped in his guard booth fast asleep, so no one is shipside to wave us off. Instead, we sneak away like a cat burglar. Silent and stealthy. Like we’ve just robbed America and we’re tiptoeing away with the stolen goods.