Dirty Work

by Bull, Rod;

  Our first trip was down the west coast taking supplies to a Catholic mission. Most of the time I spent hiding out in the engine room pouring cold water on the bearings, which were getting very hot, and checking the fuel levels from time to time. There were two fuel tanks. When the level got low in the main tank, I was supposed to pump the fuel from the reserve tank into it. Easy, you would think.

  The problem was that there was water in the main tank, so even though it looked as if the tank was a quarter full, with the pitching and rolling of the boat water would mix with the fuel and stall the engines. This was really bad news in heavy seas, as it was a landing craft and had a flat front, so was easily pushed around by big waves. Anyway, to cut a long story short, sure enough the inevitable happened, and the engine stalled and stopped.

  The Captain came flying down the stairs, which was amazing as he only had one leg. He quickly looked at the tank levels and seeing that the main tank was really low, he balled me out, calling me a “stupid pommie bastard,” and started pumping frantically. Somehow I had turned one of the valves completely around and had shut it off.

  “What kind of engineer are you!” he was shouting. “Get out of here!”

  He could not throw me off the boat, although Carl probably would have. We were about one hundred miles offshore. He just told me to go work with the deck hands, shouting that I was no engineer. He was certainly right about that.

  Working with deck hands was similar to working with cane cutters. They were crazy. Even though the Captain was missing a leg, he would move fast enough if he needed to. The cook was Portuguese and had a very hot temper. One of the deck hands was a bushman who seemed to hate anybody who wasn’t an Aussie. He was always calling me a pommie: whinging pommie, as in cowardly, red-faced, English pomegranate, or pommie bastard.

  My new job was mostly cleaning and painting. There was a lot of rust on the boat so there was a lot of beating and scraping to be done. This was punctuated with shifts in the wheelhouse.

  My first shift was at night. I had never done this before, and it was quite difficult to keep on course. Staring at the compass all the time was very tiring, so the mate told me to pick a star and then keep it sighted between the grids on the loading ramp. This is great for a while until you take your eyes off the star. Looking up again, there are a million stars. Which was the one? They all seem to be as bright as the one I had been looking at.

  So I went back to the compass, which was off about 10 degrees. You just need to bring it back 10 degrees in the opposite direction. This is not like driving a car, as a compass needle already goes in the opposite direction. Just as I thought I was back on course, the needle swung right around. At that moment, the cook charged into the wheelhouse.

  “What the fuck’s going on! I haven’t had a drink tonight, but the stars are spinning around!” He had been in his hammock on deck trying to sleep.

  He told me to look out the back of the boat and as there was a full moon, I could see the wake from the boat, making a full circle. Luckily, we were nowhere near land or anything else. Luckily, everyone else was asleep. After calling me a lot of foul names in English and Portuguese, he got us back on course.

  Recovering from the dizziness of spinning the boat around, I managed to keep on course for the rest of the night, and to my amazement was able to steer the bloody thing in a straight line. At last I felt I was mastering something. I was feeling fairly confident that things seemed to be going well when suddenly the cook burst into the wheelhouse, grabbed the fire axe and proceeded to chase the bushman around the deck until our one-legged captain caught him, wrestling away the axe.

  That evening at dinner, there was still a lot of tension between the two of them. Suddenly the bushman said to the cook that he could not cook a barbecued chicken! The cook grabbed a meat cleaver and lunged across the table at the bush-man, but again our heroic captain saved the day, grabbing the cleaver. One of the problems was that the boat was so small. It was hard to get away from each other so the feuding went on. Amazingly, no one was ever killed.

  Eventually we reached our destination without further mishap. The Catholic mission was in the estuary of the Allegheny River. While we were unloading the supplies, a bunch of Aboriginal kids came up to me and started touching me all over. I was only wearing shorts and this made me feel very strange. Was it because I was white? Later at dinner someone said they are looking for scars on your body. Scars stay around, so they can recognize you if you return later on. I was also told that the reason island tribes tattoo themselves is so that after a battle they would not eat of their own tribe.

  The kids were amazing. They learned things very quickly at the missionary, but around the age of fourteen, they went back to their tribes.

  We stayed for one day and then went to a small island to pick up some wild ponies. It was the job of the bushman and myself to get the ponies onto the boat, which was a very difficult task as the splashing water spooked them. So the bushman said in his gruff voice, “Do what I do.” As a pony came close to the boat, he just wrapped his body around one of the front legs of the pony, yelling at me to do the same. I’m not sure if I was more frightened of him or the pony. Anyway, I flung myself around the other leg and we walked the pony up the ramp and onto the boat. We had to do this with about half of the ponies. I was amazed that I did not get kicked, bitten, or thrown. After this madness, the bushman had a little more respect for me, but only a very little.

  There is an expression used a lot that says, “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”

  “No,” the bushman said, “A man’s misfortune is his fortune.”

  I never really understood what he meant until misfortune struck. It strikes at your very being, where you can really learn something. It wakes up something inside.

  Working with this Aussie started me thinking again about how we misjudge people. Without having any real under-standing of someone else, or putting yourself in their shoes, we tend to misjudge each other. Somehow there seems to be a direct reaction to something in yourself, like a mirror image. Is there something we hate in ourselves, and therefore hate in others? What are we trying to cover up, what are we afraid of finding out? What does “a man’s misfortune is his fortune” really mean? What could I learn from my misfortune? Was I doing something wrong, or was this something from my distant past? Or was it stupidity, not learning from my mistakes? Maybe I just liked to suffer, like a moth to the flame.

  The bushman pressed all of my buttons; but in a weird way, it was very releasing, like owning up to something, set-ting something free. I certainly felt a lot lighter. It was a kind of cleansing. This basic, raw being, more like an animal than me, started to appeal to me. I can’t say I liked him, but somehow he was reflecting my own primordial, clear energy back to me. Could I learn something from this, or would it be just another brilliant experience gone to waste?

  Trying to put oneself in another’s position seems difficult. For some reason, it’s hard to remember to do it. Why is this? Is it that we are so busy planning our lives, imagining what we will do in the future, that we never seem to be present to what is going on right now?

  After unloading the ponies, we set out for Darwin. It was nighttime when my shift at the wheel came, around 11:30. No moon. Pitch black. Suddenly, the boat felt as though it had hit a wall. Maybe we had hit a big wave, as the boat had a blunt bow and big waves could almost stop it.

  Suddenly, the cook was in the wheelhouse again, and then the captain. He looked at the compass; it was right on course. I was meant to change course at midnight. It was only 11:30 p.m.

  Looking around, the whites of the waves were breaking all around us, glowing in the dark. Shit. We’re on a reef! Luckily, this was not the case. It was just a sandbank. At that point the captain took over. He managed to work the boat off by reversing one of the engines, working it backwards and forwards and sideways, until slowly, we got off. He did not say a word to me.

  Later I found out what had happened. The c
aptain had tried to save time going to Darwin. He tried to cut a corner by not going out far enough and not allowing for the 25-foot fall in the tide. He had cut it too fine. He was trying to get back early to surprise his wife who he thought was having an affair. He was right, but nearly drowned us in the process.

  The whole thing was pretty obvious. She would come on board with very short skirts, parading around. I felt sorry for the captain who just could not handle it. He was always trying to prove something, and so getting us into all kinds of trouble. He had what they called a “mud ticket,” good only for navigating coastal waters, not for the open sea.

  He was very good at getting into tight places. On one trip, we were going down the west coast with seismic equipment for finding oil. We had trucks and bulldozers on board. The shoreline was sand for hundreds of miles. It looked the same: no houses or hills, just sand and bush. Suddenly the captain turned towards the shore.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “Look through the glass,” he said. There was a whiter spot on the white beach. “That’s what we’re aiming at,” he said. As we got closer, I could see something white on the shore. The captain had to start zigzagging through the wave troughs to get close enough to the beach. He tried everything. Reversing, spinning, saw-toothing, and we got within a hundred feet.

  The first vehicle off was the bulldozer. Suddenly, it started to go down. All we could see was a jet of water shooting into the air between the driver’s legs like a giant piss. This was from the flywheel. Slowly, he started to come up, just making it to the shore. We had to try and get in closer for the trucks to get off.

  We lowered the ramp further down. I was on one side winding the crank, which suddenly let go, and the handle started to spin really fast. I could not hold it. It just shot into the air and into the water, never to be found. We were trying to use the ramp as an anchor to drag us closer to the shore. We tried again to get one of the trucks off, and it was just able to make it to shore. Eventually, we got everything off.

  The white spot on the beach was a line of refrigerators left there by American oilmen. They were kerosene-powered and were always malfunctioning, so they would keep bringing in new ones, while the old ones were left on the beach. There must have been twenty or more. It was a bizarre sight, as there was nothing else to be seen for thousands of miles. In this kind of situation, our captain was number one.

  Headhunters & Big Dick

  On another voyage, we had to cross the Coral Sea to Port Moresby, in New Guinea. For this, a pilot with an oceangoing ticket was needed. The waters there were tricky. Little islands, reefs, very strong currents.

  The pilot who took us over had a copra-trading business. He traded with the Cuckoo-Cuckoos, a tribe of mountain headhunters. His crew was all women. He had a very large cock, which he would show off when the dinner bell was rung. He would drop his shorts and swing his cock right around at us. He definitely needed it for all those Polynesian women.

  On our way, we stopped at some small islands. One was just sand. Apparently we were looking for turtles to sell at Port Moresby. They did not show up, thank God. I didn’t like the idea of trying to catch them, flipping them on their backs and dragging them onto the boat so that they could be made into soup.

  One of the islands we stopped at was called Thursday Island. I think one of the reasons we stopped was so that the captain could visit some of his lady friends. We were left to wheel and deal with the locals, mainly for beer or sex.

  When we started again, the two captains were taking sextant readings, so I asked them when we would be arriving in Port Moresby. Our one-legged captain said that we would be there around 8:00 that evening. Eight o’clock came, nothing. Ten o’clock came, nothing. The next morning: nothing. In fact, for a whole day we didn’t see land. I guess that’s why he only had a mud ticket. When I asked the pilot, he said that we wouldn’t be there for another two days.

  One morning while looking out for land, I saw an island with steep white cliffs. Getting closer, it seemed to be moving. How could this be? Were my eyes playing tricks? Then I realized it was a pearling lugger, in for a sail. An amazing sight! Water was running over the gunnels.

  As we got closer, they hailed us to pull alongside. Apparently they wanted to do some trading, pearls for dollars. A lot of haggling went on, and we ended up spending most of the day with them. It was fascinating to watch the pearl divers operate using antiquated equipment. All dented helmets and very old compressors. All this and going to amazing depths, they could only work on the bottom for a half an hour and take eight hours to come up, trying to avoid the bends.

  The divers were mainly Japanese-Polynesian. Something about their necks made them brilliant divers, but they had short lifespans. The bends always got them, mainly because there were no decompression chambers. One of the things my old boss Carl Atkinson was pushing for was to get decompression chambers for the pearl divers.

  One of my jobs on this trip was trying to catch fish. We used a long thick pole sticking out from the side of the boat with a long line and a big spinner. We would catch all kinds of fish, from very large mackerels, sometimes six feet long or more, to 500-pound sharks. It would sometimes take two or three of us to pull them in. If they were not dead, we would have to kill them very quickly or they could take off a hand or a foot.

  On one occasion, I found that the pole had snapped. I tried to pull the line in, but it was hopeless. It took four of us, and we eventually pulled up a barracuda. That thing could really fight! Its mouth was almost the size of its body, with a huge array of teeth. It kept lunging at us and snapping. Its energy was unreal. It just wouldn’t die. There was something demonic about it, reminding me somehow of the pirate Blackbeard, who with ten gunshot wounds, and an arm and his head cut off, still managed to swim around the boat!

  At last, as with every living thing, the barracuda died. Why do some things just not want to die? Why are we so afraid of death? Is it the unknown? A great deal of life is suffering. Why would anyone want to live forever? Could it be that we have some knowledge of what might happen to us?

  I had read about people who have had near-death experiences, seen beings, white lights, and visions, and soldiers who had premonitions about future events. The Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico painted a portrait of a man with a red spot on his forehead. When asked about the red spot, he said that it was a bullet hole. Sometime later, he died of a bullet through his forehead.

  This stuff was all pretty creepy to me, but does anyone really know what happens when you die? The Christians talk about Heaven or Hell, but it all sounds a little simplistic, as well as moralistic: right and wrong are not always so clear-cut.

  I had heard mention of something called “The Book of the Dead” but had never seen a copy, and quite frankly, it scared me! But the nagging feeling remained: What is our real condition, what is really going on?

  As predicted by our pilot, we arrived in Port Moresby that evening. We all went to the bar and stories started to fly. Our pilot told us about headhunters that he had traded with.

  “You see all these villages around us?” he asked. “They are built on stilts over the water.”

  The reason for this is so that when the headhunters come down from the mountains on their raids, the villagers would just jump in their canoes and paddle out to sea until their enemies were gone.

  An American guy I met in Darwin had sailed around the world twice on his own, surviving two hurricanes, being dismasted and becalmed for thirty-three days, all this in just a 42-foot sailing boat. He seemed like a man who was totally free, afraid of nothing. When he lost the mast off the coast of Africa, he and his wife noticed something on the shore. They man-aged to get closer and saw that it was parts from an old square-rigger. With his wife tapping at one end of one of the boom, he listened at the other for the sound to carry, which meant that there was no rot in the wood. He used it to make two masts and was able to sail again.

  I listened to these stories in awe. It seemed
so far from my own abilities. These people were men! Anyway, that’s how it seemed to me. Would I ever achieve my rightful place in the human chain? I had this lurking feeling that I would not.

  What I really liked about Carl, the pilot, and the Yank is that they each seemed totally in control of their own destinies. Unlike myself, just being blown around by the wind.

  Somehow nothing made any sense to me. Doing all these things and then just dying. Nothing in the human experience seems to prepare one for this. We do things for a reason—to make money, have sex, have fun—not to have things just disappear. Is this what we were designed for? Even if nature wanted it this way—what about some way of defeating death? Some people say that only by facing with one’s own death will the true understanding of life arise.

  We spent a few days in New Guinea hanging out drinking beers, taking in the scenery. Houses were hiding in the ponds, and the roads were very difficult to find. They were just really tracks through the jungle.

  After about a week we found out that our work was done. The boat was going in for a complete overhaul. The oil company that owned the boat and employed us would fly us back to where we came from. I decided to go to Sydney.

  Body of Light

  After many attempts and failures, I started to get the hang of the body of light thing. At first, I got out of my body, but no farther than the room I was in. The whole object of the exercise was to try to reach other realms, to find out, hopefully, what the dreams I was having were about, and maybe what was causing things to keep going wrong in my life.

  One of the puzzles was where to look. Should I try to find that house with no doors that kept appearing under hypnosis? Or should I try to get into the dream realm, to find out what those dreams were about?