Safe from the Sea by Peter Geye Page B

knew we could hug the lee of the Minnesota shore if we had to. There were also three ships ahead of us, a French freighter full of lumber . . .”
    “The Lachete ,” Noah said.
    Olaf looked at Noah sideways. “Yeah, the Lachete . There was also one of our boats out there, the Heldig , and one of the boats from the Cleveland Cliffs fleet.” He tapped his bushy lip, thinking.
    “The Prudence ,” Noah said.
    “Was it you there or me?” Olaf asked.
    Noah grinned.
    “All three of those ships were updating us on the weather.”
    “And each of them talked about seeking shelter from the time they left port. What did they tell you that made you think getting started was a good idea?”
    “It didn’t matter what they told us. We were going to go or not go on the basis of Jan’s gut, not on what some goddamn Frenchman had to say about the wind.”
    “What about the Heldig ? Didn’t you have any confidence in her?”
    “You see, it was never a question of the confidence we had in the reports the other boats were sending. They were instruments, that’s it. It was always just a simple question: Did we feel like the Rag could handle what the lake was giving? If the answer was no for the Heldig or the Prudence or any of the other boats out on the Lakes, it didn’t necessarily mean it was no for us.” There was no vanity, no posturing, in what his father said. Noah knew this as simply as he knew the story itself.
    Olaf gazed over his shoulder at the stove.
    “Don’t tell me you’re cold.”
    “No, no,” Olaf said, looking up at him. “I was just thinking about how it felt to be on that ship,” he said. “Standing on the bridge, even in the worst weather, it was easy to stick your chest out—to puff it up—because we knew that no matter what was in front of us, the Rag was behind us.
    “She was six hundred and ten feet long. Sixty-two feet abeam. The hull alone—hull number 768—weighed five thousand tons. Loaded as she was, there were more than eighteen thousand tons— eighteen thousand tons— of steel lugging it up that lake under two thousand horsepower,” Olaf said, raising an eyebrow. “The bridge was forty feet above the surface of the lake, and still we had to keep the wipers going in order to see out the damn window. Despite all this we were making better than seven knots. Under normal conditions and with a normal load we would’ve made twelve knots, thirteen on a good day. But seven was a hell of a pull, all things considered.”
    “Seven knots makes for a long day up Superior,” Noah said.
    “Better than sixteen hours to Rock of Ages light.”
    “As opposed to?”
    “Ah, nine or ten,” Olaf said with a wave of the hand. “The point is she wasn’t normal.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean she shouldn’t have been making that time. The other ships were thirty or forty miles ahead of us and they weren’t making a third of the time we were.” Again he shook his head. “But that’s just how the Rag was—above the weather, above the seas, those things just didn’t bother her, they didn’t stop her.”
    “Why?”
    Without a touch of embarrassment Olaf said, “She was a goddess, I guess.
    “I remember storms she weathered that would’ve sunk other ships in a second. On Erie we sailed through the worst lightning storm I ever saw. Took two bolts right on deck. Lost one coaming thirty miles from safe harbor. The pumps were working that night.
    “Another time we hit a real beast coming out of Whitefish Bay, heading up to Marquette. When we got to the Soo they were all set to close her down until it blew over, but when they saw we were next in line to pass, they let us up. Eight or ten boats had to wait out a twelve-hour blow in the St. Mary’s River while we chugged out onto the lake. Now that was a storm we might’ve sat out.
    “I remember eating dinner that night. We had pork chops and applesauce—that’s it. Nothing that had to be cooked on the stovetop because we were rolling