A November to Remember

This story began as a tempest long ago. Time changes almost everything, but for a ship near a stormy coast, the sands of time are always on the move . . . above and below the surface of every ocean.

After the November hurricane, the beach was a mess. The cabanas were trash piles of lumber, hard work, and dashed hopes for a different future. The beach that was standing before the storm was now awash with scattered debris and river-like troughs cut deep by the latest storm.

What was new, however, was the ribs and wooden frame of a ship that suddenly lay open and exposed for everyone to see. Before the storm and the violent erosion, the ship was under a century of sand and walked upon by thousands who never knew her story.

The first call went to the police because no one knew who else to call. The ribs of the ship were rising out of the sand like dinosaur bones in an adventure movie and were demanding attention from everyone. The standing ruins of the wooden vessel were screaming for inspection. The spine and the keel bolts of the old ship were clearly a tribute to something other than rusting iron and a forgotten tragedy.

When the ship was new and into her earlier years, she was a trading vessel plying the waters between the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. Sugar, dry goods, and rum were her cargo, and she swam like a swan upon the sea for many seasons. When she began to age, so did her captain and the heroes that were her hardy and happy crew. 

When the bookkeepers of a new century began to nag that the money was not enough, and the voyages of the schooner were wasteful without the modern methods that were so efficient in the new age, the crew felt the strain of anguish and the slow torture of despair. When the original crew quit the ship for better wages, the captain began to buckle under the pressure and began to wonder what the administrators could possibly know about keeping good sailors and caring for a ship at sea.

After a hot and brutal summer of storms, heat, and endless bad news, the exhausted captain fell ill, and the new and surly crew buried him at sea without a ceremony. When the first mate assumed command, his group of supporters were only a few. The cook, however, was popular among the crew and was quick to criticize everything. The cook had his favorite cronies and was fast to control the bellies and the ears of many of the crew.

With every task, deed, and daily chore that supports the ritual of a life at sea, the sailors on the ship grew more apart. The new captain and his followers were easy to blame for their every action, while the cook and his mates were more often than not the subjects of continuous ridicule and punishment from the new captain and his vengeful cohorts.

When the ship fell into the doldrums of hot weather and a slow and rough passage, the new captain was the subject of whispers in the galley. “Obviously,” the cook ranted, “A lack of good seamanship was the fault for charting a poor course.”

After a spar broke and fell to the deck, injuring one of the new captain’s favorites, the accidental mishap was obviously the fault of the cook and his favorites among the crew. “This was no accident!” The new captain chided his supporters. “This could have been much worse, and will, if the crew does not worker harder. This ship will certainly run afoul of danger or death. We need a crew who knows what they are doing!”

After a meal from the cook was the harbinger of sickness to only the new captain and his supporters, the tension and mistrust on the ship became unbearable. After another round of meals became suspect, along with a cask of tainted water, the crew was divided even more and openly hostile to one another. The cook would not speak to the captain and coached all of his followers to defy the misplaced authority over the ship and the crew.

The captain did not trust the actions of the cook and his cronies and considered their every action to be deceitful, mutinous, and ungrateful. As the ship sailed on through even more tumultuous waters, the atmosphere and morale of the sailors became even more toxic.

When a tempest began to build, the ship began to suffer under the wind and the waves, and the actions of a fighting and divided crew could not cope with the approaching storm. The storm warnings fell silent and were unanswered. The cooking fires in the galley went out.

When the ship was new, the crew would always rally together to save the day. A crew that could forgive trespass and work together after fighting was a crew that was a family. A crew that knew to drop grudges was a crew to be free of wasted effort.

When the ship with the divided crew began to face the unexpected storm, the moments they could have saved the ship and worked together were lost in the growing hate that never won a battle over anything.

The ship that was lost on the stormy shore waited until another tempest raged to reveal the standing ribs and the iron spikes that were once a product of harmony. When the police and the townsfolk came to see the remains of the ship that rose out of the sand, the actions and results of a divided crew were nowhere to be seen.