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behind the everlasting and immutable messinesses and clutter of the shore life. For these a wise Providence has provided the sea; otherwise I hardly know what would become of them. Even then I felt that life on the oceans was the only life worth living, the sea seeming to me, even at the earliest age—that surely but sensed dimly then, certainly put in no such grandiose terms; looking back I could but see the fledgling shoots for present, substantiated, full-grown certainty—to possess a purity, a simple straightforwardness, a rectitude, a scrupulousness, yes, a clear aristocracy, that stood in contradiction to the unnumbered corruptions of the churlish and plebeian land and the land life, with all its hustling, its tedious and incessant hype, its seemingly essential duplicities and deviousness, its insect busyness, its insatiable avarice, all in zealous pursuit of goals I did not judge worth having if, when, attained. I never hesitated and was off at the first chance, never looking back. Nothing that had happened since had shown wrong these early glimmerings, in any way of substance, any that mattered. That rare case perhaps where adult fact verifies boyish imagining. On present knowledge I would add this: The real call of the sea is in the life of the mind. I find myself unable to explain this. Perhaps it is that the mind, finding itself emptied of the unceasing flurry and enterprise, the all-devouring encumbrances of the shore, is simply rendered uncluttered and left free and pristine to explore, or merely to rest. The thoughts that the mind then engages may or may not be profound. The point is not to claim for sailors the musings of philosophers—the intelligences of seamen, as with other mortals, varies from the rudimentary to the exalted—rather it is to speculate that the mind is somehow rendered uncrippled, on its way to becoming healed, when the land is left behind and one is enclosed, on all sides, only by the immense and unfettered sea. From then on, of course, it is up to the individual man how he chooses to fill the space thus left empty. But perhaps this fact has to do with that other one: No place so surely brings self-discovery as a life at sea; so inescapably reveals to himself, and to others, what a man is made of.
    And from the beginning also, the sweetest and most fervent of those longings had been to hold command of some ship that sailed the great waters, and now I had reached that pinnacle. In inner satisfaction, in the unqualified knowledge that this was right for me, that anything else would have been so wrong as to have tossed life away, it had all come out true as the long look ahead had envisioned it to be. I had liked commanding a ship. I was qualified for it. I was a good mariner. I knew the sea and her eternal inconstancy perhaps as well as a man ever can; that is to say, I was forever learning new things about her, with eagerness voracious and undimmed. I knew the ship on which I stood. I felt I knew my ship’s company as only one can who wishes above all to protect them, to give them a sense of security, to care for them. Knew, I felt, when to be gentle with men, when to come down hard; in short, to be a ship’s captain. Shipmates we were: In all the lexicon of the sea there is no word so sublime, so full of meaning. I do not believe there is any closer, more committed human relationship to be found on earth. The sea, the ship, the ship’s company: They were all, they were one, and embraced in its bosom, I stood as fulfilled in that unity as it seemed to me a man could be. All of this surely enhanced by a particularized love for the
Nathan James
herself. I was a plank-owner, present during her building stage in the Litton/Ingalls Shipbuilding yard at Pascagoula, Mississippi, and three years aboard as her two-striped navigator; after two years of shore duty in Naples assigned as XO on another DDG, shore duty in Washington, then with that tremendous surge not short of exaltation