And so on. I dont want to bore the reader with all this stuff about Greenland.
III
Just suffice it to say we went farther north and entered a fjord just about 100 miles latitudinally north of north tip of Iceland and went in and came to an airbase. The workers got off and went to work, bulldozers were hauled out of the Dorchester’s cargo-hold side doors, men went ashore with saws, nails, hammers, lumber, electrical wiring, generators, whiskey, bay rum, hopeful cundroms and started to hammer off a gigantic landing field with gigantic barracks for everybody. The Coast Guard cutters, two of them that in nighttime joined us, invited us aboard to see movies. I mean the seamen of the SS Dorchester. We went on board and sat on the deck and watched Stanley meeting Livingstone in the middle of Africa, of all things. I remembered how my sister and my mother always loved the dimples of Richard Greene in that picture.
Then me and a seaman called Duke went ashore under the pretext of wanting to eat in the construction crew’s mess hall, which we did, tho, but then took off to climb a nearby tall rocky mountain. We accomplished it. His name was Wayne Duke. He was a haggard youth who had been torpedoed off Cape Hatteras and who carried the shrapnel marks of the blast in his neck. He was a congenial guy but the frenzied mark of tragedy still lingered in his eyes and I doubt whether he’d ever forget the seventy-two hours he spent on the life raft and the fellow with bloody stumps at his shoulders who jumped off the raft in a fit of torture and committed suicide in the Carolinian sea . . . So one midnight, at dawn, I stood on the silent deck and gazed and thought ‘What wild lusty country.’ A frozen dawn rose between two cliff flanks, layers of delicate color in perfect parallel lines, reaching from rock to beetling rock and then I heard the white-gowned ladies of Greenland singing down the ice field just like in Berlioz or Sibelius or even Shostakovich . . . Haunting witches, not a woman for 1,000 miles, so me and Duke said let’s go climb that sonumbitch mountain. I slept until two on that dare. When I awoke the fellas informed me one could go ashore on the launch, which went back and forth every half hour. About forty of us piled in that same kind of boat used by commandos, does fifteen knots. As we split the waves shoreward, the Army gun crew began its gunnery practice with the two-inchers on the two turrets up forward in front of the bridge. We heard the POW of the discharge, watched the geyser of sand on the distant north beach, slid swiftly past the big freighter called the Alcoa Pilot (carrying all that lumber and aluminum) and bumped softly in the raw new pier built by our construction five hundred drunkards, a small thing thrown up for the sake of immediate necessity, you see, and for the first time in a month, we were on land! Unfortunately I cant say that it was ‘solid old earth’, it was a bed of sagging spring moss, mostly swamp and rivulet, one had to leap from moss mound to moss mound, clusters of wild flowers, however, greeted my tired sea eyes, and I thought of the Rhodora. Wayne Duke asked me if I would now consent to join him on that little mountainclimbing excursion . . . the rest of the guys were all heading over the slope of the meadow to see the lake there. There were occasional signs that the workers had begun a ditch, some boards of lumber, barrels, they were just getting started on the whiskey but let me tell you before they were done they done Spitzbergen Luftwaffe airfield in.
Duke and I headed the opposite way from the rest of the guys who were headed for the Eskimo settlement, it was not long before we had joined in a discussion on mountainclimbing as being more immediate than trying to lay some old blubber-smeared monster so we decided to go, dead serious, a peak of nice height covered with recent evidences of land and snow slides, boulders, rocks, so up we went. Straggling over rocks, walking doggedly, then resting for a smoke, and then the slope rose steep, we had to begin to use our hands. Mountainclimbing was a difficult feat for me that day because I still had my sea legs, O Gary Snyder.
That is to say, were I to stand on level land in that condition, I would nevertheless sway as tho on deck at sea. But we made ground. The fjord just below began to diminish in size. The two ships, the Dorch and the Alcoa freighter, looked like toy ships. We climbed on, in extreme physical distress, but soon, we had reached a ledge upon which rested enormous boulders in a precarious position. These we readily pushed over and watched them drop 1,000 feet and roll and thunder 1,000 more. Then we went on up, stopping several times for a drink from some virgin streamlet, then let it be remembered that Duke and I meanwhile were the first white men to climb this mountain. That’s why today it’s called Mount Duke-Duluoz (Mount Ford-Kerouac). The Dorchester and the Alcoa Pilot were the first ships to drop anchor in this fjord except perhaps for some explorer ships from Eric the Red to Captain Knutsen. If they would have desired to climb a mountain they would have picked out a higher one than Mount Duke-Duluoz which is near 4,000 feet. So it is ours, because we topped it, and we did not attempt after a half hour of scrambling and dangling on promontories, perhaps 3,000 feet to a sheer drop below, to climb the last little ‘flint edge’ of the mountain. It was too narrow and thin, like a Sumerian tower. We had no equipment whatever except the fire of adventure in Wayne Duke’s breast.
And there we were, on top of the world, not 800 miles from the North Pole of the earth’s axis, surveying our dominions of sea, land, and tremendously high free sky. We discovered from away up there as we sat on strange black rocks and smoked cigarettes casually not a few inches from a drop of half mile, that there was a valley of boulders below on the other side, with a hidden lake, south of the fjord it was, seaward, which must be 1,000 feet above sea level. The Lake of Mystery we shall name it, for who knows what this lake knows, who lived on it, what’s its legend? A lost race of Norse-Men? Neolithic lake-dwellers?
Stragglers of the Spaniards? Let us call it Lake of Mystery. Then Duke and I retraced our steps and almost lost our lives when I stepped on a loose boulder and began to roll off a sloping ledge with it, thus bringing an avalanche down on poor Duke below me, the boulder thundered over his head, while I, smiling with mad confidence, grabbed hold of the sliding fall with the very muscles of my buttocks and held and stopped sliding just at the edge, as Duke ducked under a leaning rock. Later both of us had further close shaves, it was definitely a matter of life and death, but we made it and went back down to the launch and on over on our boat for big supper of pork chops, potatoes, milk and butterscotch pudding.
IV
Duke was great guy. On the ship was another guy called Mike Peal who gave me my first taste of what a professional Communist agitator talks like. In my diary it says ‘Mike, diminutive, intellectual, quick, clever, Communist. Fought for Loyalists in Spain, went to Russia, has met Sheean, Hemingway, Matthews, Shirer. Fought with John Lardner in Spain. Abe Lincoln Brigade. Wounded. Wife worked in Russia; in America, social work. Apartment in Greenwich Village; lived on Left Bank Paris. Art a “suppressed desire”, he says. Bounced out of CCNY in Freshman year for inciting student’s union flareup. Now an NMU union delegate, Seamen’s Union, CIO. Hates Hearst, Henry Ford, DuPont, all the Fascists. Hates Jan Valtin. Worked in Soviet Union and at the Soviet Pavilion in 1939 World’s Fair. Middle height, twenty-nine, sandy hair and blue eyes. Van Dyke beard. Rings the bell over linen in the swaying linen shop.
I showed him part of this diary I’ve been quoting to you and he actually censored it.’
V
I dont wanta go into it too much because there’s so much else and too much to tell, but our sister ship the SS Chatham was torpedoed and sunk at about this time off Belle Isle Strait, I believe, with a loss of many, many lives, about a thousand. We had steamed out of Boston Harbor together. The Chatham and the Dorchester were very valuable old tubs and finally they got the Dorchester too.
VI
On our return trip to Boston Harbor, without the weight of the five hundred construction workers and a lot of their earthmoving equipment in the hold, and the construction dynamite and all the stuff, we were as light as a cork and bobbed in a huge October tempest, the likes of which I only saw fifteen yea
rs later. Me god and bejesus but what a blast of wind and waves. We werent scared really, but me and some of the boys went upstairs to the old dormitories where the workers had slept and started a big pillow fight with all the pillows in sight on hundreds of bunks. Feathers flew everywhere in the dark ship as she thundered in the night. ‘Night aint fit for man nor beast.’ It was a walloping storm. I went out on deck and practiced the halfback jumpoff practice run so I could be ready for Columbia College football the following week. There’s this nut practicing football on a bounding deck in the howling Arctic gales. But we made it to Sydney Nova Scotia where I wasnt allowed to go ashore on leave because of that mountainclimbing episode which had been officially recorded as AWOL because we were absent at noon work. Didnt bother me, but at little old Sydney everybody including Captain Kendrick went ashore on bumboats and I was left alone as ‘watch’ on this empty ship with a cook or two and a pilot or somebody I dunno who, I couldnt find anybody. So I went up to the captain’s bridge and pulled the goddam rope calling a bumboat from the harbor of Sydney. A little boat shining warm human lights came rushing to the ship. I ran down from the captain’s bridge (where I felt as guilty, from pulling that rope, as I did later on the railroad in California pulling the engineer’s rope for the crossing call, BAAA BAAA BUT BAAA). But okay, for fifty cents they took me ashore. I think the whole ship was entirely abandoned. Everybody and his uncle was drunk and got drunker.
It’s a nice little town, with collieries, miners, guys with grimed faces like in Wales, they go underground, etc., with little lights on their hats, but there were also little wartime dance parties and a lot of booze and bars and I went ashore AWOL for real this time. After several whiskeys I saw thru a haze that several of my seaman buddies were sore at Wallingham because he was hiding in a shack on the pier with a big bottle of whiskey and wouldnt come out and give us any shots. ‘That sonofabitch,’ yelled Fugazzy, ‘we’ll teach him a lesson or two! Come out Wallingham or you’re going to take a swim.’ This was a shack sitting on the edge of the pier in Sydney Harbor. So Wallingham wouldnt come out. So we all heaved together and pushed the goddam shack in the drink.
He swam out through the hole in the ceiling, bottle and all, and made it to the Jacob’s ladder on the pier, climbed up, and walked off silent.
Only thing to do was go downstairs and buy some drinks. We wrangled in alleys over dollars owed from card games and from loans and such and I wound up with two of my young buddies wandering around the dance halls and clubs, when we got sleepy we saw a nice house and went in and there were two Indian prostitutes I think you call em De Sotos. From there, satisfied, with the wind beating on old windows threatening all that gentle female warm flesh, we went to another house and I said: ‘Let’s go in here and sleep, looks like a mighty good blub.’ We went in, found sofas and easy chairs in a front parlor type room, and went to sleep. In the morning to me utter horror I hear that there’s a family of husband, wife and kiddies making breakfast in the kitchen by the hall. Husband is putting on his miner’s hat, picking up his lunchpail and gloves and’s saying ‘Be back home Mum by five’ and the kids are saying ‘I’m orf to school Mum’ and Mum is washing the dishes and they dont even know there’s four drunken American seamen in their parlor. So I make a little noise and the old man comes out to check and sees us. He says ‘Yanks a-sleeping in here? How’d you get in here?’
‘Door was unlocked, we thought it was a club.’
‘Well, go on sleeping boys, I’m goin’ to work, and when you leave do so quietly.’
Which we did after two more hours of napping in that patriot’s home.
No breakfast required.
VII
Just whiskey downtown. I got so grumbled up and bloffered I didnt even know where I was or the name of my ship, all I remember is that at some point I guess in a USO club I heard Dinah Shore beaming over from the radio in USA, singing ‘You’ll Never Know Just How Much I Love You’ and felt a languid nostalgia for good old New York and blondes. But somewhere I stumbled, and first thing I know I’m in an alley somewhere and the MPs or SPs are shooting a revolver charge over my head into the sky saying ‘Halt or we’ll shoot you!’ So I let them arrest me and they take me to the Canadian Naval barracks and put me in a room and tell me to wait there, I’m under arrest AWOL. But I look out the window after a short nap and see all these Canadian idiots trying to play baseball with gloves, bats, balls, and I open the window of the ‘barracks jail room’ and jump out, grab a glove and ball and show them the way to really wind up and throw a nice sweeping curve. I even teach them batting tricks. The sun is going down cold and red in old Nova Scotia. They’re very much interested. Soon’s I realize who I am and where I am I saunter away casually and go back down town for more drinks. By now I’m broke so I’m cadging drinks off perfect strangers. Finally I wenangle my way down to the dock, call a bumboat, and go back riding sheeping to the Jacob’s ladder of the SS Dorchester.
Master-at-arms or whatever you call him is glaring at me: ‘He’s just about the last of em, I think there’s two more, and then we can sail to New York.’ Sure enough, inside an hour, the last two AWOL stragglers of the Dorchester ship’s crew come aboard from a bumboat and off we sail south.
We’ve had our shore leave I’ll tell you.
For this I get a little onionskinned paper that says on it:
EXTRACT FROM OFFICIAL LOG.
SS DORCHESTER.
SEPTEMBER 27th, 1942. –
JOHN DULUOCH SCULLION ARTICLE #185 IS HEREBY FINED TWO (2) DAYS PAY FOR BEING AWOL (ASHORE WITHOUT LIBERTY) IN A FOREIGN PORT. $5.50
(A COPY OF THIS EXTRACT HAS BEEN HANDED TO JOHN DULUOCH)
LBK/EGM
MASTER L. B. KENDRICK.
VIII
I forgot to mention that while we were anchored in one of those fjords in Greenland an Eskimo came up in his kyak, with his big red brown face and brown teeth grinning at me, yelled ‘Hey, Karyak taka yak pa ta yak ka ta pa ta fat tay ya k!’ and I said ‘Wha?’ and he said ‘Okak.’ He then proceeded to take his paddle, hit it hard on the right of his sea cow-skin kyak, and did a complete underwater turn, or whirl, and came up on the other side all wet and grinning, a tremendous canoe trick. Then I began to realize he was trying to trade with me. My head was sticking out of my foc’sle porthole. So I opened my locker, after giving him the sign ‘Wait a minitz’ and I came back and dangled my old Number 2 Horace Mann football jersey with all dem touchdowns I told you about attached to it. He nodded yes, I dropped it to him just as he handed me up a fish harpoon. It had Swedish or Danish steel on it but was connected with bone joints, and wood, and thongs.
So we sailed south from Nova Scotia and to my surprise, instead of hitting Boston Harbor we suddenly woke up one morning and saw, in the fog, the good old Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. ‘Send me your wretched’ indeed. Then, after anchoring awhile, and it’s October and news of New York football and all-American football, and Fartsy Fay is laughing at me because I’m tellin him I’ll be in next Saturday’s game against the Army, we go sailing under the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge and Williamsburg Bridge to a great cheer of hero flagwaving crowd above. How could you believe it?
And into Long Island Sound and by God at about 8 P.M. we’re steaming busily up the Sound off the shore of West Haven Connecticut where Ma and Pa and I had that cottage and where I’d swum out into the sea and they thought I was drowned, and where I’d looked inward into Neptune’s heart and saw silver nails in a blue field and the little boat called ‘We’re Here’ . . . recall?
But what a trip, no submarine trouble, up the Sound to Cape Cod Canal, thru that canal (under the bridge) and up to Boston where we landed at before dawn and winched up, slacked in, tied up, and slept until payoff time at 9 A.M.
And what a payoff! The barefooted Indian deckhand had one of his gambling enemies in a Strangler Lewis hold and choking him to death demanding two h
undred dollars, a fistfight was going on across the mess hall between so and so and such and such, and myself, here I was faced being given my pay by Gus J. Rigolopoulos of the US Coast Guard who said ‘How come you didnt answer my note early this morning? Didnt you have no feeling for me?’ And as I pick up my four hundred seventy dollars, there’s Sabbas Savakis at the gangplank saying ‘I’ll ride you back on the train to Lowell, what’s that you got there? A harpoon?’
‘Yep, traded it to a Mexico’ or some such inane reply and off we went to my Pa’s house in Lowell.
IX
At home there was a telegram from Lu Libble of Columbia football team saying ‘Okay, Jack, now is the time to take the bull by the horns, we’re waiting for you here, we expect you to make up your chemistry deficits and credits and play some ball this year.’ October 1942. So all I had time to do was tell my sweet mother Ange that I had never appreciated before so much the washing of pots and pans she’d done all her life for lazy old me, that her pots and pans were infinitely cleaner and smaller than those on that hellship, and I bought a ticket on the train to New York City and went there with my college packed suitcase.
On the next run out of Boston, with me at Columbia, the SS Dorchester sailed out loaded this time with two or three thousand American soldiers of the Army and was sunk in Baffin Bay by Karl Dönitz’s submarine command, with a loss of most of the soldiers and most of the crew of the Dorch, including Glory. Later when I explained it to a writer friend and told him what a surviving shipmate told me about it in New Orleans, that all the boys were calling for their mothers, he laughed: ‘That’s typical.’