B1025-1 Surprised

We were moving quite slowly. I would guess we were doing perhaps five turns. Some might have said dead slow. But we were hardly moving at all. We picked our way through assorted craft varnished by the bright, angular sun: a late afternoon flotilla come out to see the sea. We passed the Ambrose Lightship, rocked gently by the wash, stilled by duty, tensioned by intransigent anchors. And then slowly - almost imperceptibly - our ship came to a stop.

A buzz of speculation flickered through the crowd of soldiers leaning on the gunnel. Some thought that we would spend the night there. And others thought that we would go into the harbor and slip into the slip. No one really knew for sure. The minutes passed and nothing seemed to be happening. Everyone gawked at the New York Harbor to see who might be coming out to pilot us to our berth. But all we could see was the squint of the low-setting sun.

When nothing much seemed to be happening, I went below to the forward head. There was no one else there. I sat on the toilet and studied the line of stools opposite me: each stool was perched on a four-inch pipe that connected to a drain with the sea water running through it. I thought about those who had wadded up dabs of toilet paper earlier in the day, and set them on fire, and threw them into the bowls. Then they watched the progress of the fire as each person’s keister was startled by the flames as it flowed down the pipe. In my mind it was certainly a childish diversion for soldiers bored by the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Troop ships have such simple enjoyments, you see.

As I sat there and traced the tesserae of black and white tiles on the floor with my foot, suddenly the ship dropped anchor. The chains roared through the hawse-pipes and hawse-holes with such a sound that I imagined a massive floe of ice crashing through the hull - the RMS Titanic quickly meeting her end. I looked toward the bow, expecting to see an alien prow coming through the side of our ship as an unwelcomed guest - the MS Stockholm impaling the SS Andrea Doria. You could not imagine how loud those chains were in their flight through those pipes.

But this I will tell you for sure. It definitely got rid of my hiccups!