May 22.
For the last couple days, we’ve been rolling over big swells. Gravity swirls and eddies through the ship like an invisible ocean of its own, turning my cabin into a physics experiment for inertial forces. Without warning, a book will launch off the coffee table while the ashtray stays put, or a water bottle will tumble onto the floor while the glass sitting next to it doesn’t move. On dry land, I rarely give the center of gravity of things much thought, but on the ship, it’s hard to ignore.
Up on the bridge, the subject is ballast. It’s all Christoph talks about. He’s obsessed with ballast. By filling and emptying giant water tanks that run the length of the ship, the first mate can control how the ship rides on the sea. This is a matter of some urgency when the seas are rough and the ship is pitching and rolling.
“Ballast is all physics,” Christoph tells me. Then he punches the fist of his right hand into the palm of his left with a little thwack. “It’s all forces and counterforces.”
Christoph is running things. No one has seen the captain for a few days. Every morning in the officer’s mess, Paul the steward lays out a half grapefruit at the captain’s place. By lunch, it’s still sitting there. Then Paul swaps out the grapefruit for a plate of cold cuts covered with plastic wrap that sits on the table till dinner. I point this out to Sue and Mark one night.
“Should we be worried?” I whisper.
They appraise the plate of cold cuts.
“Maybe he’s on a diet?” Sue offers.
We leave it at that.
Passenger Sue bought a box of Warsteiner beer from the ship’s store. “The Queen of Beers,” it says on the bottle in German. It’s way too much beer for one person to drink, so for the last few afternoons, she has invited me to her cabin to help her drink the Warsteiner and watch old episodes of 24. That's the tv show where Jack Bauer spends his days mowing down terrorists and gun smugglers. At the end of Season 5, he even gets kidnapped by foreign operatives and stashed away on a freight ship heading to China. There are no fancy-schmancy ideals in Jack Bauer’s world. No social institutions to protect you or enlightened principles to inspire you. There’s just violence. In Jack Bauer’s world, you’re on your own. After a few days, I decide that 1. aside from the terrorists and gun smugglers, the world of 24 is uncomfortably close to life on a freight ship, and 2. I’m getting sick of beer.
There’s no shortage of beer or booze in general on a freight ship. Everybody drinks. It’s what passes for rest and recreation, not to mention self-medication. It’s the cure for what ails you on a long voyage: loneliness, homesickness, boredom. I ask Christoph what he thinks of all the drinking on board. He shrugs.
“Sailors drink,” he says.
He tells me he’s not sure if sailors drink more or less than they used to, but one thing has definitely changed over the years: shore leave. Shore leave is when sailors head ashore to whoop it up and blow off steam, then return to the ship with bleeding tattoos and black eyes. But nowadays, the cargo is containerized, which means a ship can be loaded and unloaded a lot faster and sailors don’t have as much time for shore leave. Some sailors barely leave the ship. They just hang out below decks watching dvd’s and drinking beer till their contract runs out and they can take a few months of vacation time. Some sailors don’t even do that. Instead, they hop from one nine month contract to the next, and send what money they can back to their family in Manila, or Bucharest, or Kiev. For those sailors, the voyage never ends.