(Amidships superstructure, ex-USS Olympia. Photo Socotra)

If you did not party hard for New Year’s last night, the start of the US Government’s Fiscal 2011 spending year, I can understand. Those terrified members of Congress have fled the District without doing their jobs, again, and we will be under a Continuing Resolution until they slink back into town after the elections next month.
 
This will be briefer than I would like, since my younger boy is going to bring the police cruiser around at ten to start the journey north to Newport, RI.
 
Funny, in 27 years of Navy service I never made it there. He is headed for induction into Officer Candidate School on Sunday. The goal is to arrive minutes before the 1100 deadline. I am sure that there is some young person out there victim of airline schedule and distance, who is going to be there the day before, and find themselves subjected to the fury of he newly elevated Candidate Officers ready for their commissioning.
 
He wants to get a good start on things, since he wants to be in a place where he can watch his beloved Spartans play at 3:30 tomorrow.
 
It will be the last relaxation he will have for at least nine weeks. He will be assigned his own personal USMC Gunnery Sergeant, which in my experience, is a truly transformational life passage.
Funny how things seem to be working in parallel. The newly found passion for the Old Nay of the Protected Cruiser Olympia, and the admiration for Captain Harry Burkhardt and his band of volunteers.
 
They are tricing up he ship tomorrow, and were it not for the other Navy commitment, I would be there in Philadelphia to help. So there is the Navy business working in parallel, past, present and future, and the matter of Captain Harry’s ghost crew.
 
The volunteer work is to have Olympia looking her best for the professional Ghost Hunters of cable television, and the exposure that will provide a forum to plead for eh funds necessary to save the crumbling hull of the proud old lady.
 

(Rust Never Sleeps on Olympia’s waterline. Photo Socotra.)
 
I authorized a nightwatch on Raven, the wily but unfocused husk of my father. He is looking for something, and I think there is a link between what he is doing, alive, and what may be the residual energy of those who have passed. I don’t know. We are complex beings, with astonishing capabilities, and who knows where it all goes.
 
I think people who are happy at the end of things may be able to dissipate themselves with love, which may account for our uneasy relations with the paranormal. The ones who are still emanating energy undoubtedly had some powerful- and unhappy- focus at the end of things.
 
Or the whole thing is a fraud. But I am convinced that there is something to all this.
 
When Captain Harry escorted me up the ladder and back into the world of the living, the Ship swung back into this time, this moment. There were tourists on the berthing deck, asking dumb questions. Harry was dismissive with one young man in a black t-shirt who asked if he could see he engine room from whence we had just come.

“Impossible,” said the Captain. “Only do the engine room tour the first Saturday of the month.”
 
I had to smile.
 
The public spaces of the old lady are lovely, all rich wood and gleaming brass, with astonishing Technical innovation. The mess decks are clearly recognizable for what they were; there is an ice machine capable of producing a ton of ice a day, and a scuttlebutt that had chilled water.
 
Useful for a ship whose crew had to fight in the tropics.

(Chilled water on Olympia’s Mess Decks. Photo Socotra.)
 
 
Harry and the volunteers have done a remarkable job. I ran a picture of Admiral Dewey’s Flag cabin in the story yesterday: it is amazing to see the formal desk, armchairs and crystal flagon and glass next to the serious business of a five-inch naval rifle. When they went to war, all the wood was thrown overboard.

(Dewey’s Cabin. Photo Socotra)
 
In the case of the battle of Manila Bay, Captain Gridley had the paneling struck below, and what is here today dates from that decision to save the precious flammable wood.
 
Anyway, here is a plea to support Captain Harry Burkhardt. I am going to set up a regular (albeit small) donation. I would be sad if her and her ghost crew were not in this world any more.
 
Captain Harry can be contacted at:
phillyriverrat57@aol.com

Save our Ship!
 
Have a great weekend, you all. I wil tour the great houses and waterfront of a historic Navy town, while waiting for the implacable arms of the service to envelop my second-born, and am back in town late Monday, I think I am getting a tattoo on Sunday in Northampton, Mass, but that is another story altogether.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Subscribe to the RSS feed!