Escape from Archangel: An American Merchant Seaman at War

Prologue: Just an Old Bridgetender?

Prologue:Just an Old Bridgetender? Quietly a man came home from the sea, from more than thirty years at sea. He had sailed across all the oceans, past all the islands, round all the continents of earth. Home to Biloxi, Mississippi. Home because he grew up there. Home to care for his aging mother.Home. He found Biloxi relatively unchanged from his last visit. There were fewer of the stately old hotels, true, displaced by the so-called progress of sprawling motels. There was a new building or two here and there, and the tawdry beach strip now sported everything from all-girl revues to putt-putt golf. The fishing fleet was still there, but the old sailing schooners which used to crowd the Back Baywere gone. The old canneries had dwindled away one by one; no longer did the loud long whine of their whistles awake the cannery workers,— French, Slavs, Danes, Austrians, and Bohemians, the schoolmates he had grown up with—to a long day of backbreaking -3- work. Their children now owned fishing boats or shops, or had become the professional citizens of Biloxi. But, all in all, Biloxi hadn't changed much. He was not so much a stranger to the place ashe was to himself—a stranger to the boy he had been when he left home late in 1942. So long ago. In appearance the man looked weathered from years spent aboard ship. He had laid telegraph cable across the Atlantic, worked on a whaling ship, fished off the Grand Banks, and served in the Merchant Marine during three wars. His skin had been toughened by the wind, sea, and salt. His hair, an undefined color somewhere between light blond and silver gray, was no longer the flaming red of his childhood. His eyes were still bright blue, ifdimmed alittle by uncountable hours spent scanning endless horizons, and he was still tall and thin. But he was older than his years. Asa young man he had had to deal with that certain kind of rapid mental and physical aging thrust upon some by uncommon adventure. He still had his health, except when it got cold. He didn't like the cold. He would never forget the cold. He could not simply retire, at least not at first. Morethan thirty years of being constantly on the go had molded apattern which he could not easily break. He would have to ease himself into retirement. First work on being home, then on being retired. After a few months he was offered a job as tender on the old bridge across Back Bay. Some might not have wanted it, but his grandfather and his father had been bridgetenders after their retirements. ForJac it was the perfect job. He was on the water, and he had time to fish, to think, to sort out his life. It was easy to come to Biloxi physically; the time he -4- spent on the bridge would help him to come home in his mind. He was no stranger to the old Back Baybridge—the twolane concrete ribbon set on aging wooden pilings, its 1920s lamppost rusting, most of the once-graceful lamp globes broken by vandals or storms. Sowhat if it was slated for replacement ? He liked the solitude of the bridge and the beauty of Back Bay: noon bright or moonlight, the dark waters ever changing reflections of shoreline and cloud. He ignored the automobiles that zoomed across, uncaring, but he waved genially to the boaters, shrimpers, oystermen, fishermen, sailors, and water skiers of Back Bay, and theyusually had time to return the waves and occasionally to exchange spoken greetings. There is a tradition of courtesy common to those who travel by water; it comes about from the necessity of depending upon others, often strangers, for survival, from the respect for one's fellows learned by those who have seen the tricks of the sea. Recreational boating was the rage, he found, but manyof the new sailors who went down to the bay in plastic boats lacked a knowledge of seamanship and a sense of the traditional courtesy of the sea. Jac was not very tolerant of poor seamanship. One day,a speedboat full of careless young revelers forced a shrimper to ram the bridge fenders,in order to avoidhitting a fallen water skier. Jac let them know what he thought of their recklessness. And a lifetime at...