67° N
I stepped out on the bridge tonight after my watch. For the first time this
week the sky was clear and the sea was calm. The dusk, which here north of the
Arctic Circle, lasts until nine, was fading in heavy storm clouds on the horizon.
Directly overhead, the broken clouds drifted across the universe, through the stars
and among the curtains of shallow light which are common to the polar regions.
The Northern Lights lit the sea like moonlight, striking the white curl at our bow
and were cut by the black lines of our masts and spars.
Steaming independently of the formation, our signal bridge seemed lonely
without the rush of flag hoists, the clatter of signal lights, and the calls of the
signalmen and quartermasters.
Forward, the voices of the Officer of the Deck and the other people there
were like ghosts in another world.
“Right ten degrees rudder.”
“Right ten degrees rudder, sir,”
“Passing two-six-zero, sir.”
“Steady on two-seven-two.”
“Steady on two-seven-two, sir.”
Precise, distant. A funereal cadence.
The mechanical voice of the squawk-box. Coming from the Combat
Information Center, a room of quiet confusion, the endless sweeping of yellow-green lines
on slow pace around the radar scopes, of lighted marks on dark boards.
The rasping voice was insistent in the still night:
“Bogey Alpha-seven-two, one-four-zero, four miles.”
I looked up and saw the bright contrail, crossing the majestic pillars of Northern
Lights, passing among the wisps of high cloud, seeming to be a part of the stars;
another place than the sea.
A pilot, lonely, homeward bound from the fjords of Norway, bound to a
carrier a hundred miles to the north. Coming home with three thousand pounds of
fuel and a few liters of oxygen, yet still God-like, returning to another ship alone in
the sea amidst a hundred others.
Our ship blew tubes, belching two columns of black soot out over the waves,
masking the stars and the Northern Lights.
And then the clouds came again, as black as the soot over the sky. The storm
returning to the now calm sea.