RATTLESNAKE DREAMS is a memoir, so is more than war stories. In 1971 one of my nightmares booted me out of grad school, and out of my academic career. I was on the road for a while, drifting, then ended up as a deck hand
on a commercial albacore boat...
Hauling Anchor in Shelter Cove
on a commercial albacore boat...
Hauling Anchor in Shelter Cove
The albacore, and a small fleet of jig boats following them, were off the California coast outside San Simeon, where William Randolph Hearst had his castle built. It had begun to blow, with gusts in the range of thirty to forty knots. That made the seas too nasty for fishing from these boats. The wind itself made the trolling lines pretty useless anyway; they flailed about and jerked the lures out of the water too much of the time.
A dozen or so boats made for the anchorage at San Simeon. Dick Mathews pointed the bow of the Anna Marie a little north of east, and we pulled in among the other boats already at anchor about midafternoon. He found a space open enough for the boat to swing on its anchor cable with a change in tidal current, and we dropped the hook. I stayed on deck to keep watch, lest we or a nearby boat should drag anchor and head toward its neighbor. Dick and his wife Ella went into the wheelhouse and relaxed with the two kids, taking their time and making an evening meal for all of us on the galley's diesel cook stove.
Shelter Cove was a good enough anchorage, but it wasn't perfect. It offered only partial protection from northwest winds, which was what we were trying to escape. And as darkness came, more and more boats slipped into the cove from outside, so that it would have been considered pretty crowded even in calm weather.
The weather wasn't calm. Though we'd escaped the brunt of the blow that was still howling offshore, the wind in the cove itself was maybe twenty knots, which is a little gnarly for being at anchor anyway. And the swells from outside continued to roll in under us, slide up the beach, and turn into a surf that pounded the rocks well within sight and hearing. No one, on any boat in the cove that day, could have been without some fear of dragging anchor and being swept onto the rocky beach. Dick got on the “Mickey Mouse” - the short range CB radio - and talked with skippers of a couple of boats near us. They all agreed to keep a continuous watch.
We ate our dinner as it got dark, and took our time cleaning the dishes and galley. Dick and Ella put the kids to bed in the forecastle, and we sat and talked awhile. Our conversation ranged here and there, to people we knew, places we'd been, schools we'd studied at - Dick had graduated Summa Cum Laude after three years at Harvard - but the talk kept circling back to where we were, and to the wind. We kept hoping the wind and seas would die down, but they didn't.
Our anchor was holding in the sandy bottom. So, apparently, were those of the boats near us. Things looked not great, but not terrible either. We all agreed that we could sleep, which we needed badly after bucking several days of heavy weather outside, but that I should bring my sleeping bag up and roll it out on the hatch cover, to keep a closer eye and ear on the boat, the weather, and the sea.
Sometime during the night, I started awake, feeling something wrong but not knowing what. Dick burst from the wheelhouse door, half dressed.
The anchorage was a snarl of frenetic activity. The wind had suddenly picked up, and just as suddenly changed direction 180 degrees. Boats pivoted too fast and too far on their anchor cables. Diesel engines roared into the wind as skippers maneuvered their boats up to now-dragging anchors and raised them, while trying to avoid collisions with other boats attempting the same maneuver. Radio channels crowded with urgent voices as men shuffled who should move through which opening first, in the scramble to get under power and out of the cove. Too preoccupied to go into detail, Dick said something about having heard about occasional contrary winds that would swoop down one of the canyons that footed on the cove, then quickly die out and give way to another such wind howling down a different canyon from a different direction.
Dick started the main engine. Ella and I went forward to the bow to watch for other boats and make sure the anchor cable coiled properly onto its drum. Dick engaged the anchor winch. Nothing happened. The winch whirred, but the cable didn't move, didn't pull the Anna Marie toward her anchor, not a foot.
Just when we needed it - desperately - the anchor winch had failed. There had been no warning.
The kids woke up. An emergency at sea sends shock waves through a small vessel; something beyond unwonted noises or motions of the boat will snap sleeping humans back from any momentary forgetfulness that they are, after all, at sea, and that the combined power of wind and water can take you down quickly, without warning.
Dick and Ella at first thought to put the kids back in their bunks below decks, so we'd be free to work. But they looked at each other and I could see agreement pass between them. Hunh-uh. Not below decks, not now. Ella got them into their life jackets and told them to wait in the wheelhouse, where they could see us through its forward windows, and we could see them.
While she did that, Dick had been looking over the winch, trying to find the problem. He turned to us with apology, and the beginnings of panic, on his face. He directed a questioning look at me. "I'm not much of a mechanic," I said. I'd spent time at sea in the service, but as a Marine aboard ships of the "gator navy," not as a seaman. The Anna Marie was my first experience as a deckhand, and I'd only been aboard a couple of weeks since Dick and I had met at the Mermaid Tavern.
We knelt at the winch, while Ella made nervous trips from rail to rail, watching for other boats, pausing to reassure Christina and Alec at the wheelhouse window, tow heads sprouted from orange life jackets. I felt her conflict: one instinct told her to stay with the children, to hold them, to shut out the world for them. Her knowledge of that world told her in equally strong terms that the survival of her children depended more on avoiding a collision with another boat than on comforting them. So she had to endure the yawning distance of several feet from them, had to bear their pleas like a cross.
"What's wrong with it?" I asked Dick as we knelt by the winch housing, the size of a kneeling man, bolted to the foredeck immediately in front of the wheelhouse. "What's supposed to happen isn't happening," he said. I didn't know if I could help with the mechanical situation, but it was becoming apparent that Dick was beginning to be afraid that his spirit of adventure had gotten him in over his head, and that his life and that of his wife and their two very young children might be in the balance. But he was still the skipper, the only one who could really handle the boat. Somehow, I would have to help him, to inject some calmness into his bloodstream so that we didn't lose what was still our most valuable resource: our captain. As we knelt by the anchor winch, neither of us could avoid hearing the surf crashing on the rocks not far astern; nor could we shut out the knowledge that the wind was dragging us toward them.
"These two are supposed to engage," Dick was saying, putting his hand on the side of the winch where a heavy cylinder about a foot and a half in diameter rotated freely in the housing. The rotating part was connected to the winch's motor, and was turning fine. But the larger ring that was concentric with it, with a separation of an eighth of an inch, wasn't moving. That ring was the drum that, when the lever was thrown to engage the winch, was supposed to rotate along with the cylinder at its core, and reel in the anchor cable with enough power to haul the Anna Marie up to her anchor.
The winch housing was a smooth casting, with no way to even see inside it short of unbolting the whole thing from the deck and lifting it off, a job that would require a crane, and much more time than we had. That was drydock work.
"So, if this..." I pointed to the spinning cylinder – engages this..." – I put my hand on the larger stationary ring – "...and turns it, then the winch will work?" I asked. "Should," Dick said.
"Do you have any of those little steel wedges we use to drive into the end of a hammer or axe handle, to tighten a loose head?" I asked.
"No."
"Got any spikes, or big nails, or any other soft steel?"
He brightened a little. "Nails, I've got nails."
"Got a cold chisel?"
"Yes."
"Get me nails, cold chisel, hammer, hack saw if you got it, a pair of channellocks or visegrips to hold the nails."
He disappeared below, obviously grateful to be doing something, and for the appearance of another shoulder under his load.
I knelt on the deck by the large steel cleat between the anchor winch and the bow. Dick came back with the nails - 16 penny bright commons - and the tools.
"These your biggest nails?"
"Yes."
"They'll have to do."
Ella continued her patrol, slipping past us as she moved from one rail to the opposite one, stopping where the kids still had their heads and arms stuffed through open windows of the wheelhouse. She made an occasional quick detour aft to check for danger there.
I shut out the world of wind and seas and other boats. They were Ella's responsibility now; she would handle it. The world narrowed, slowed. Long instants, like fat ripe fruits of time, floated before me to be picked. The universe was a small ellipsoid with two focal points: the cleat and the winch. I used the cleat for an anvil.
"Dick. Hold this nail with the pliers, here." I hammer end of nail into wedge, cut it off with cold chisel. One blow, one cut. Quick, deliberate. Each piece a wedge. Blacksmith rhythm now, WHAMPta, WHAMPta, WHAMPta.... A small pile of steel wedges. "Dick, disengage the winch. Drive these wedges into the crack, the ring between the cylinder and the cable drum. Ella. Need another hammer. Dick. Place each wedge across the circle from the last one; always opposite pairs, points of a compass. Try it now, engage the winch. "It turns! ah, slips again. Okay. Disengage. More wedges. Try it again. It turns, it turns!"
But it turned with only enough power to pull in slack cable. When the slack was taken up, and the boat's tonnage straightened the cable, it slipped again.
Ella, Dick, and I talk about options: we can hacksaw the cable, kiss off thirty or forty fathoms of cable, the anchor chain, the anchor, get the fuck out of this maelstrom. But then we'd be back out in the weather, with no anchor to get us behind shelter somewhere else, in case the wind out there gets even worse than it is now.
Can we pull it in by hand? Can we get a few feet at a time, use the winch to take up the slack cable, pull again? The cable has to go on the winch. If we just take it up and drop it on deck, it will turn into an unmanageable snarl. A coil or two falls overboard, slides aft, gets caught in the propeller, rips the drive shaft out through the hull, down we go, glub glub.
In a safe harbor, in quiet water, one strong person can get a line on a piling and brace against a boat's rib or a deck cleat and lean into it and move – very slowly - a boat the size of the Anna Marie. With no opposing force but the friction of the water, and no hurry, it can be done, a foot at a time.
In Shelter Cove, we were in a frenzy of forces so much bigger than our physical selves that we were toys, rag dolls tossed by a nasty sea.
What source of power do we have? We have the engine. "Ella. We're stronger. Take the wheel." (This is Dick talking now, he is the captain again). "Pull us forward, slowly, a little bit, until I say stop. We'll pull a few yards of cable onto the forecastle by hand, then you hold that position while we coil the slack cable with the winch. Then we do it again."
Ella tried mightily, concentrating, forcing herself to ignore her children in order to save them, trying to feel the wheel and the throttle and to translate our shouts into the right movements of her own hands. But Dick had always handled the boat in harbors and anchorages, in any touchy situation, the captain's job.
She couldn't do it, she hadn't been trained. She missed the timing, the Anna Marie lurched against its cable and made our wedges slip; or she went too far forward and the cable looped down in the water, slid aft along the gunwale, too close to the propeller. Dick would have to take the wheel. Ella and I would have to pull the cable. There was no other way. They traded places, remorse smudging both faces as they passed.
Dick got on the horn, tersely told nearby skippers our situation. They took responsibility for staying clear of us. They all hauled their anchors and turned out to sea. They kept in touch with us. One or two pulled away but stayed within sight, using their engines and rudders to buck this way and that into winds that would change direction ninety degrees or more in a minute.
O what a nice touch Dick had. He became inspired, a poet of throttle and kingpin. He relaxed, he rode the seas, he read the seas, he felt the tension on the cable, he watched the meager coils of cable we'd dump to the deck, he took my shouts and headwags as if made by parts of his own body, turning them into just the right easing forward, just the right holding of a position relative to the anchor. He timed the rhythm of his throttling with the rise and fall of the seas, so that when the bow dropped into a trough, Ella and I would have several feet of slack that we didn't have to fight for, and when the bow started to rise on the next sea, he'd ease off so we wouldn't get yanked overboard, or have our hands slammed into the bowstem, or lose all the cable we'd just earned.
Ella pulled cable like John Henry's wife drove steel. We bent beside each other, on either side of the cable, each bracing both feet against the point where the two sides met at the bowstem, and we pulled, four gloved hands on the cable. She didn't care about the leather of the gloves tearing, she didn't care about her hands tearing on the broken steel strands, she just pulled, she didn't care about the slamming of her kneecaps against the bow, she didn't care about the ominous compaction of her vertebrae when her refusal to slide her grip, to give up cable earned, suddenly transferred the pull of a tricky wave along the cable to our coiled backs. She wanted every inch of that cable, she would by God have it, she didn't care about the hair in her eyes, she didn't care how she looked, she didn't seem to care about the fact that we were both pulling on the same cable, and that the bulkheads we were braced against formed a sharp corner at the bow which made a tight pile of our four rubber-booted feet and jammed her body against the body of a man she hardly knew, she didn't care that she mingled straining arms with me, she didn't care that she butted heads with me.
That, she laughed at. She laughed and pulled.
We would get some coils on deck; Ella would jump over and engage the winch. Dick would keep us steady. I’d hold the cable to keep it from sliding back overboard. We'd reel the slack cable onto the drum. Then we'd pull in more cable, and dump it in slack coils on the fo’c’sle deck.
Slowly, over the minutes or centuries or whatever game Time was playing then, the angle of the cable, where it snaked down into the water from the bow, changed. It steepened.
Finally, the cable pointed straight down. We were directly over the anchor. Shit. We hadn't thought this far. It was one thing - one groaning, tearing, tissue-sacrificing thing - to haul fathoms of cable aboard the Anna Marie till she was above the anchor. But could we lift the anchor? "What does it weigh?" "175 pounds." "What does the chain weigh, the fathoms of heavy links between the cable and the anchor?" "I donno. Probably more than the anchor."
But now we have to raise it. We're no longer anchored- the pick is bobbing up and down in the blackness above the ocean floor - and we can't get under way either, because our forward motion would sweep the anchor aft, now hanging free on fifteen fathoms of cable and chain, and draw the cable into the prop. We can't stay in one place; the seas will put us on the rocks.
We must haul it. Ella and I look at Dick, at each other. We all know. I move my hand up and down, in the same rhythm as the seas. Dick nods. He comes out of the wheelhouse. The engine is at idle, which means we are drifting toward shore. The three of us lean over the cable, wait for the bow to drop into a trough, then scramble to beat gravity, to take advantage of the momentarily lesser weight of the anchor and chain and cable to take in a few feet more, then brace for the moment when the bow starts up the sea on the far side of the trough, making the weight we're holding multiply itself. The plummeting weight crunches us against the bulkheads, against each other, slams us to our knees on the plank deck, steals some of the cable we've just earned.
The Anna Marie, no longer under power, turns slowly sideways, lying in the trough, her bow shaking side to side like a terrier killing a rat. We can't handle the combined violence of up and down and side to side. Dick has to go back to the controls, has to wrestle the throttle and the rudder and the wind and the seas and the position of the cable and himself until we are again facing into the seas, with the anchor dangling directly below the bowstem. He must stay there. Ella and I must haul the anchor and chain. We are drifting closer to where the surf is crashing on the rocks.
Ella and I work with the rhythm again, stealing precious feet of cable from the ocean as the bow drops. One of us has an idea. Just before the boat starts to climb the side of a new sea, multiplying gravity's effect and tearing the cable through our hands, we push down hard on the cable just inside of where it crosses the bowsprit, so that it crimps just enough to give us a mechanical advantage. We become a two-human ratchet, able to hold against the extra weight.
We are pulling the cable and it stops dead, before we hit the bottom of the trough. Something's wrong, something mechanical. We crimp it and wait for the next trough, poke our heads over the bow, look down. The first fat link of the anchor chain is lodged against the steel plate at the point of the bow. "Dick, the chain! the chain!" We're only a few fathoms from the anchor now. There is plenty of space between the protective plate and the ring that arches over it like a ferrule on a fishing rod to keep the cable or chain in place. But the increased diameter of the chain means that we'll have to get the first link of the chain several inches higher, and without tension, to pass it through the ring.
For that we need slack.
"Ella. Next trough, I'll reach over, lift chain and anchor from outside, give you slack. Get the first couple of links through the ring, then crimp it down and hold for your life, that's all we need the first time is two links inside and hold."
We do it, I heave one lunge, she drops the links inside the bowstem and holds them, risking her hands. I swing one hand inside to hold with her, the weight tears the chain out of my other hand as the Anna Marie hits the far side of the trough and lunges skyward.
But we have captured the beginning of the chain. We keep working that way, pulling in the chain. It is very different from the cable. It gives us a better grip, and holds more surely when crimped. But slippage of a chain that size, pulling a committed grip across a steel plate, does not mean torn tissue. It means mangled hands, missing fingers.
More of the weight is coming aboard now. Our load is lightening. The coils of cable on the anchor winch are covered by coils of chain. Now comes the anchor, rusted flukes dipping in and out of the water. Ella and I lean over and just haul, straight up, knowing this is it, knowing that the few feet of chain still out aren't enough to reach the propeller and foul it, that our remaining danger is to leave the anchor dangling from the bow where it could knock a hole in the planking, but ho, there is no fucking way that fucking pick is not coming afuckingboard now, we reach down and grab the anchor together and heave it like Judo wrestlers up and over the bowstem, we fall in a wet clanking heap with it to the fo'c'sle deck. Dick guns the engine, the Anna Marie shakes her fanny at the rocky beach, we head for open sea, one woman, two men, a little girl named Christina, a little boy named Alec, and one GMC 671 diesel engine all screaming into the wind.
Weeks later, after I had hired on another boat, Dick and I ran into each other in the Caravan Bar in Monterey. We got to swapping stories. After he'd told me about putting Ella and the kids ashore in Bolinas and fishing alone for a few days, I told him about my new skipper and boat, Doyl Myers and the Dora B. We paused. Dick wanted to talk about the night in Shelter Cove.
He said he'd been scared, that he hadn't had a clue as to what to do about the anchor winch, that mostly he'd just had this dreadful feeling that things were falling apart, and that nothing he could do as skipper or husband or father would be able to hold his world together. But I had found a way, he said.
"How did you do that?" he asked.
I thought for a long moment. My answer surprised both of us. "Vietnam," I said. What did I mean, he asked. I said it had been like combat. I told him about things moving in slow motion, about there being enough time to move, about getting inside the fear and snuggling it and about making the situation into a technical problem rather than an emotional one. I told him about the time after Tho An when Captain Love had told us to be ready to assault with fixed bayonets into a village which sounded like it had two or three .50 caliber machine guns on the enemy side, and I'd slept soundly for eight hours so I'd be ready.
The other thing I learned about war that night in Shelter Cove I don't think I told Dick during our talk in the bar. It came to me gradually over the years. It was that working as we had on the boats, especially as Ella and Dick and I had done hauling the anchor, had satisfied some of the deepest hungers in me, needs that I've come to know had sent me to war more surely than the reasons I'd been given, and which I had given to myself at the time: the need to be in danger and to perform my way out of it, to save something or someone precious, and to be recognized for having done it.
