14 January 2004

Overhead

OK, I'm a traveling man. Or was. I enjoy the motion, and have a limited attention span which enjoys stimulation. I can be happy enough staying in one place and I like my ruts as well as the next. I have not traveled officially since a strange trip to a conclave of Indians on the Northern Plain. It was still warm there in Region Six, but I could see the winter coming.

If you want to take a metaphor out of that, be my guest. I've got plenty.

As the winds from the west brought the winter to us from Canada I have been hunkered down in a new career, and there are many new possibilities coming my way. I have found that the Corporation for which I toil is an avaricious bunch. No surprise there, Capitalism has its claws, nature of the beast and all that. Travel without billable time is overhead, and overhead cuts profits, and thus overhead is bad.

Mentorship at the Corporation is important to the leadership. They want to teach us the culture, inculcate us with the values of this business model. It is a particularly avaricious one. Rewarding for those who produce, and stunningly abrupt for those who do not. That is how it works. My mentor has now given me a complete education in the company values. They informed him yesterday that he was "overhead," and he had better make plans to be moving on.

He may wind up in Baghdad in a few weeks. They have some billable hours there, and if you keep your head down you might even come home to spend it. They are also in the process of easing out the guy who hired me. He has become overhead, too, like a particularly virulent virus sweeping through the office.

I am still a sailor, down deep. That is what formed the core of my identity, and I will be that again when they wheel me away. Deckplates and bulkheads, overheads and ladders, they will always be part of me. So I was curious when my favorite cousin sent me an e-mail announcing that she had entered the cruise industry. Mothering is a little like being a sailor. It is a job for a young person, and it takes a lot of energy. The length of career is about the same, too. A couple of decades and the nest is empty, and a full-time parent is overhead.

So like me, she is striking out in a new direction. I looked at the web-link to her business page. I looked at the Queen Mary 2, the gigantic Cunard Line floating sky-scraper with the marvelous black hull quotation of the original, now retired at Long Beach, California.

I scratched my head, having a hard time wrapping the salt-addled brain around the twin ideas of "going to sea" and "having a great time" simultaneously. Considering the epidemic of "overhead" going around, it seemed prudent to have an alternate plan.

I took a quick ramble through the destinations and have always wanted to cruise the Greek Isles and see the coast of Turkey. I was once supposed to be there, but some sailor from the Coral Sea ruined it when he made a spectacular demonstration of drunken disrespect to Mustafa Kemal Attaturk, founder of the modern secular state.

The ruins are supposed to be pristine, if that is not another incompatible image, and would love to experience the bounding blue without flight quarters fourteen hours a day, endless command-and-control drills, nuclear loading exercises and boredom so profound that it seems at times eternal. The thing about a Navy is that is the ultimate in a nation's overhead. There are indirect benefits to the taxpayer, I am confident. But "ending fascism" or "guaranteeing the freedom of the seas" are a little ephemeral to put on a bottom line.

I enjoyed it, gloried in it. One of the positive things about traveling on a big ship is that whole continents appear alongside and then the doors are thrown open for exploration. Down to the Acom Ladder to the liberty boat and then ashore. To Al Iskandria, Haifa, Naples, Marseilles, Toulon, Barcelona, Rota, Subic Bay, St. Thomas, Freemantle, Mombasa, Tokyo, Pusan, Sasesbo, Pearl Harbor, Pattaya Beach, San Diego and San Francisco and Cannes. They all showed up in turn outside the ship and we blinked at them as we stumbled out into the fresh air. The Pillars of Hercules and the tip of Sardinia all slid by, as did Bali and Singapore, and the cliffs of Oman in the last red light of the day were the last solid thing we saw for over two months.

There is nothing quite like watching a storm at sea, or watching the sun set upon it, hoping for the elusive Green Flash.

And of course the ports were only the gateways to the world inland. Mombassa lead to Nairobi, and Marseilles led to Paris. Al Iskandria led through the Roman ruins to the chaos of Cairo, Sasebo offered entry to Hiroshima, Haifa led to Tel Aviv and Holy Jerusalem and the Dead Sea and the summit of Masada. Naples led to Rome and Freemantle led to Perth and the endless Outback. Pattaya Beach led to the road to Bangkok and San Francisco....well, that is the point, isn't it?

It was the last that sticks in the mind. Odd that a portcall in your own country could be so special. The occasion was Fleet Week, a sentimental journey to commemorate the closure of the vast Navy complex in the Bay. When we left, we left San Francisco forever. The Navy presence in Baghdad by the Bay, begun by Sir Francis Drake, had been determined to be redundant and thus overhead. The people were great, and the party went on for nearly a week. Or maybe it was special because it was my last visit as part of a ship of war.

I scrolled through the destinations on my cousin's site. I haven't been to the Greek Isles (unless you count Cyprus, and there is some controversy with the Turks on that matter) nor to any of Latin America south of Panama. I have been restricted by matters of national security interest in the past but no longer. I would like to see B.A. and Montevideo and Santiago and the bustling Port of Rio de Janeiro. The town sailors named for the River of January has a certain appeal this cold day in North America.

To be able to do whatever you want in-between port calls is an astonishing thought. Reading by the pool or just sleeping, wrapped in the soft haze of a the gyro-stabilized motion. It is actually quite appealing.

There used to be a phenomenon that occurred when we walked up the gangway and into the vast ships. You immediately yawn, thinking of a nap, a bit hungry, and curious as to what the evening movie might be.

Conditioned response, I suppose. Considering the rash going on, I think I would like to just go back to sea. Out there, "overhead" is just what covers the passageway.