Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Rescued
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
Thirty-eight years before today, in the time travel of my mind, I commanded a coast guard cutter. In churning Arctic waters, my ship crushed through glacial icebergs to bulldoze safe shipping lanes for the marine travelers under my protection. My crew and I rescued ships in distress, saved lives, guarded what needed guarding and did not fear to travel uncharted waters.
I was eight years old then. Each night before falling asleep, my dozy thoughts shipped out aboard a coast guard cutter that I had made from a Revell model kit. From my post on the bridge, I conjured up the crackling, crunching sounds of the splitting ice floes.
For hours, while other children spent playing sports or doing homework or watching television or talking on the phone, I played in my private shipyard, my door shut. Hundreds of battleship gray preformed plastic bits, tubes of gluey Duco cement and complicated instructions with diagrams enthralled me.
My ship was majestic and manly, powerful and purposeful. Strong, solid, substantial. It held a place of honor on the highest shelf in my room.
Landlocked and far from the salted sea, my sea-faring fantasies launched me into a world beyond myself, beyond the dusty pavements of my neighborhood and the terrorizing bullies of the schoolyard. The innate human instinct to help others, to be in the service of a cause, to chart a life course guided by the sailor’s golden rule—every sinking boat deserves a safe harbor—stuck to me like a barnacle.
Later in life, armed with an adult vocabulary, I learned that every coast guard captain is a public employee. Every coast guard ship is powered by the collective decision-making funded by a tax-collecting, rule-making government. Goodness—like open shipping lanes—is not a private sector enterprise.
When I went to college, never again to live at home, my room was requisitioned for a variety of prosaic parental purposes. My model collection disappeared into a thick layer of attic dust.
In my adult travel years, I’ve devoted wistful hours to watching ships ply in and out of natural and manmade harbors. I’ve peered through binoculars at vessels passing under bridges or through narrow locks. I’ve seen tugboats maneuver massive transatlantic liners. I’ve marveled at freighters, gunnels low to the water line, cargo-laden with shipping containers, chug into bays and inlets.
In Quebec City, in the very early hours, standing at my fourth story window in the Chateau Frontenac, still half asleep, watching the drifting ice floes on the St. Lawrence River, a Canadian coast guard cutter steams into my line of sight. Confident, steady, resolute.
As if I were plunged into the frigid waters, my breath quickens. The ship is my ship. The model ship I captained.
In every way she is indistinguishable from my boyhood boat. Identical deckhouse structure. Same hull configuration. Matching red and white paint job. Even a helipad with a rescue helicopter cantilevered off the stern.
Excited, I wave. Rescue me, please, rescue me.
