2 - Her Maritime Dream

The Sound Is The Sailor’s Laughter

A Novel

For Andrew

e-book: “The Sound Is The Sailor’s Laughter”

The Sound Is The Sailor’s Laughter By Corinne Devin Sullivan

ISBN 979-8-9909558-0-6

© Corinne Devin Sullivan. 2024. All rights reserved.

Publication made by: CORINNE DEVIN SULLIVAN BOOKS

Published in the United States of America, in November of 2024.

Chapter 2: HER MARITIME DREAM

The one letter from 1998:

Dear Floyd Ladd,

I am so very happy to receive your letter in response to the one I sent to you last year. I am completely thrilled to be there next. It’s my dream!

I can’t believe what you endured in Haiti. I had no idea in the world you had been taken hostage. Thanks for sharing the behind-the-scenes of your new TV series. Your optimism is famous now! I hope one day I can say that I have saved another person’s life. That was a personal ambition of mine forever ago.  

I had so much fun reading the idea your people have for your next television series. What a big responsibility everyone there must have. I think television will be better for the work you are doing. It would be nice to have something all the people can watch that isn’t the same trash-talking. I like to feel good about things instead of just arguing about them.  

I don’t mind being at the front of this project, either. 

All the times I thought I might die after shaming myself in front of the entire world meant nothing unless someone I loved noticed what I had done. Standing on my parents’ front porch with my dad, or my brothers, and having them point out some little characteristic I have, without noticing, then telling me why I’m just an inbred prostitute they picked up on the side of the highway, and that’s why I’m so “special”… it’s stuff like that which is hard to take. The biggest anger I feel in my soul right at this moment is for the bigger publications who smear artists like me, and they really don’t care much if I live or die. After all, I’m seventeen now. 

Ohhhh, hey! There’s another Meade! My mom gave birth last week, and it was unbelievable to watch it happen. The baby is named Ted. Actually, it is Theordore Phinneas Gallegher Meade, II, after my dad’s youngest brother.

There is also another “episode” from Chief Engineer Declan Aidan Meade with this letter! He wrote a bunch of stuff for the big movie plan we have. I haven’t had a chance to read through it but I promise you, it’s good. Everything he says is absolutely 100% true. Hope you will one day consider making this stuff into a movie! 

Everyone in my family can’t believe I’m going to be staying in Los Angeles for the entire month. I am waiting for the word “go” before I arrive. Looking forward to a phone call or an email… 

Completely competitive but dutifully side-lined as needed on your request, 

Fiona (the crispy one who won’t behave)

What happened to be enclosed with the aforementioned letter was this here print-out…

Dad, You can write any story you want about the ocean here… CLICK “SAVE” PLEASE!!!

…as well as this here documentations and such:

Fiona,

This thing is going nowhere, as far as I can tell. Last thing I remember discussing was New Jersey. Remember all the blueberries no one bothered to harvest (you, too, brainiac)? Everybody was angry at me. I didn’t deserve it if I was paying for it all, and I was. I figured it was best if I stayed away. I worked on the ocean, for more than a year. Work didn’t come very easy. 

Fiona, you and your mother and all your brothers are perfect, as far as I am concerned. You guys are the best thing that ever happened to a guy like me. Let’s be clear on that. 

Be sure to delete the note before printing this. Don’t send strange things off to your big-shot friend in LA.

With lots of love from your father, Meade!!!

(Delete this if you mail it).

Stories from my time at sea. Written for wonderful Fiona, my daughter. (header)

It was the middle of the Eighties. I needed more money to cover family expenses. Aoife was pregnant. We were looking forward to another Meade. However, it also meant a higher cost margin overall. 

After waiting for something better, I left the union and started doing a lot of work for oil companies. The very first job happened to be on an English ship working off of the coast of Africa. The people in charge don’t just hand over a license for that type of work. I needed to get a waiver, and I had to get my deep-sea diving papers from the Navy up-to-date.

The oil rigs are in the middle of the sea. They are all equipped with transportation difficulties. Getting on and off can be catastrophe. Everyone has to stay alert. A helicopter flies people up to the rig’s platform, three hundred feet in the air. The chopper has to be ready to take off fast, in case things kick up with the wind or with the water below. The rig has a service boat traveling back and forth, from shore to land. It stops at a partially submerged staircase on its bottom deck.    

There was another oil rig I had worked on, and it had a big crane that carried you up in a little basket. You stepped on it in a boat, and then the crane brought you straight up. You had to hold on tight inside because the minute they lifted it off the ground the thing would be blowing back and forth. At the end of that, they kind of swung the line. It threw you upward and onto the platform. Looking down, the vessels below looked like postage stamps in the water.  

Riding in the basket was about as scared as I had ever been. You got a good idea of what not to do. At its peak, there were a few hundred feet down to fall. Big, gnarly men grabbed hold of the basket’s handles to secure it, as soon as it came close enough for them to reach. Then you got out on the deck fast. That was how you finally were on-board the oil rig.

This isn’t bragging, Fiona. I’m telling you that for certification in disasters such as helicopter escapes, they flipped a helicopter up and onto us five times, in the water, and we had to get out of all kinds of different things. We were in the training for a week or two, with fifteen other people, and everything was sinking. We were practicing escaping from a water vessel. We had to get into a life-raft, but it was a bitch with a guppy suit on—that’s a wet-suit that covers your whole body and you look like Gumby—and I was doing that when I was about fifty years old.

The company had me and another sailor called Kingston Riggs put up in a nice hotel during our training. We were the same age. Riggs was a laid-back kind of sailor. He was easy for me to tell a joke to, but not sarcastic about it, at all. 

When we were newly requalified, our first stop was a mandatory doctor’s examination in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. They gave both of us the micro chloride medicine. I had it earlier, in the Eighties. They had been using it with the merchant marines to protect us all from malaria for some time.

We flew to Paris, France, from Florida. Then, we flew across the Sahara. It was a ten-hour flight where you didn’t see anything but sand and the sky looked like it was half-dead. All throughout the long hours we spent together in the air, Kingston Riggs explained how important the oil industry was. 

Close to landing, we circled once out over the ocean. I saw there were dozens of oil wells there. They were huge. They worked day and night, all along the coast. Our job was scheduled to be handling the Engine Room of the Well Cleaner ship as it moved around from rig to rig. It looked like thousands of rigs off the western coast of Africa. Every one of these needed to be cleaned regularly.

The plane was ready to land. The nose touched down in Malabo, a city on Bioko Island, off the coast of Equatorial Guinea.  

I saw a whole bunch of planes pushed off to the side of the airstrip: 727s, 737s, 707s. Inside, I asked around to find out. An official running the airport told me the man in-charge had set something up so that whenever a company didn’t pay its bills he just had their airplanes pushed off into the ditch. Equatorial Guinea has dealt with big human rights abuses. It made my skin crawl looking at those abandoned airplanes.

When an oil rig is working and it’s pumping, a certain amount of wax builds up. I was going to work for the company that was hired to flush out the build-up. I would be an engineer on one of their many vessels.  

The company put me up in a beautiful five-star hotel while I waited to board. They told me to eat everything I wanted at a five-star restaurant on its first floor.  It had been a good company to me, so far, but I couldn’t believe the red tape. Took me three days to get that squared away with my “Okay To Board”. 

The first rig for cleaning was located two miles out in the ocean. A helicopter flew Kingston Riggs and I to the platform of the rig, three hundred feet up in the air. From there, we waited for two days until the Well Cleaner could take everyone on board. There was a hole in the middle of the ship called a Moon Pool. Divers and vessels accessed the water and were launched through the pool.

The company owned seven or so underwater pressure vessels. They were all in operation while I was there. On lunch breaks, I talked a lot with the ship’s skipper. He knew all about the work being done by their divers.

What they did underwater was pretty incredible. It was mixed-gas diving. After a twelve-hour shift, the divers returned to a pressure vessel parked a couple hundred feet deep. They slept inside and then another shift would take over. Those divers never did get out from under pressure during the time I was there. They did all sorts of things deep underneath the ocean. They flushed the valves and hooked a hose to the rig. They handled the BOP—the Blow-Out Preventer. The BOP had been in the news each time there was terrible trouble on any oil rig because it should be able to prevent oil rigs from ever having a disaster during drilling. 

He told me, “A lot of money is spent cleaning up oil wells, and picking stuff up. There is just an enormous amount of money in the industry. The owners pay a million dollars a day for this ship, I kid you not. And it is at work eight months out of the year.

“Listen: in a week, production from drilling is going to pay for all of it. In a week. You just wouldn’t believe the type of money in this industry. Gets to be something like millions by the day. Some will bring in twenty million or more a day. Difference in production after they clean a well—just one of the wells—more than pays all of its costs for the whole year. We’re going to clean about fifty wells this trip.”

This type of work was a different type of thing than what I’d dealt with in my industry before. The technology was enormous. Divers would dive down, hook their hoses up and flush things out so the machinery would operate well. They would shoot liquid kerosene at it—or whatever the hell they used. They shot it in there and it flushed the wax out of it.  

The oil business is incredible to see. It doesn’t compare to what people worry about in the United States. There was an enormous amount of oil wells, when I was there. They were burning gas off all the time.

I was required to leave my berth’s door open except when I was in bed, asleep. 

Normally, you get something you need to throw out, you throw it away. On this vessel, you had to leave it outside the room. I couldn’t keep a trashcan in my room. Theoretically, it was so you didn’t have a fire, but that was not honestly the case. 

On that particular vessel, Kingston Riggs and I were the only Americans. The Scots listened to everything we said. They never enjoyed hearing about America’s politics, but they loved talking sports.

The ship was headed north when we departed Africa’s waters. We went up to the Azores located off of Portugal. Then, we went up to Scotland.  

I kept talking to Aoife and all of you kids whenever the ship was in port. You remember me calling every few weeks or so? But even if I missed my family, I was back at sea pretty fast, and so then I fell out of touch sometimes for more than a month.  

“How’s things at the place?” I often asked Aoife when we finally had time for a phone call together. Aoife had given birth to Marcus on her own, while I was away at sea. I never forgave myself for missing that.

“I’m having a decent time,” Aoife would often tell me. A lot of the time she even laughed at my jokes. There was another time where she cried because she missed me so much. 

Truth is, when I was at sea, I was kind of “on the job”. With whatever I was in the middle of, I had a lot to worry over. I got absorbed. That’s why I stayed cool with everyone. 

Inside, I had already died when I saw all the trouble. My family never got into anything other than fights, when I was growing up. Now, my own wife and kids were having the exact same trouble as I did when I was just a kid. 

Aoife told me she had succeeded in getting every one of you kids into a private school type of thing. Supposedly, what she went through, by doing it, was such a big deal to everyone in the city who she hoped to impress that some people wanted her elected to the education board. I was impressed by Aoife. I never finished high school, at all. Neither did Aoife, in truth. 

I would have liked to have spent more time with my kids when everyone was young. With the pressure of covering the mortgage and paying for the schools and covering all the blueberry farm expenses, I couldn’t stay long in any way.

Fiona, you sent me a card every month. It was something you had to make in art class. It had something smeared on the front like “You’re the best dad in the world.” It was usually something pretty hippie looking, but a lot of them got me to cry. 

If I could get you an address for a port, you often sent a bucketload of your cards half way across the world. But if I didn’t have any address to give you, or if the ship took off before your cards had arrived, everything went to my union. Those little cards would stack up back at the union hall in San Francisco, and then I’d get them there. I’d be standing at the front of a line, trying to shove them into my briefcase, without spilling any. I’d read every one of them the first night I got there. I would be sitting in a Motel 6, waiting for someone to buy me a plane ticket home, and your cards cheered me up. 

Not a glamourous story, but this is the life I have lived. It would have been nice to say I lived the dream, but things didn’t happen that way for me. I wish I could have been around for you and your brothers when everyone was growing up. 

For me, I wanted to continue paying the bills so everyone got a chance to do whatever they needed to. And everyone was into getting a brand new pair of shoes every few months. At the very least, I could keep the show on the road from far away by staying at sea and earning money.

I was reading Steinbeck. I found a full collection in a vessel’s book depository. Titles like “Of Mice and Men” and “The Pearl” were all there—pretty much everything the guy had ever written. I made it through all of them. He was a standard fortune teller. I liked it all. 

Obviously, some trips were made home. Most were productive, Fiona. How else did your mother and I get you Marcus and little Ted to take care of? You know that whole thing and how it works. 

There weren’t that many times I stayed home more than a few days or a week. With my kids attending a private school, and a wife who could pretty much move mountains if she felt the need to with the city, and a blueberry farm that looked nice from any angle of the road as strangers drove by it, I started to feel like I was finally the winner.     

My one trouble became a need to abandon working for the oil companies. I only walked into that field because I had these absolutely crushing bills to pay at home. At the time, I didn’t dare risk losing my marriage for them. 

Still, after almost a decade working with oil, I still didn’t trust any of the boys there. I didn’t like them, either. But, I didn’t see any other choice than staying. The bills were always coming in so I did it. 

WRITTEN AND PUBLISHED BY CORINNE DEVIN SULLIVAN

ISBN 979-8-9909558-0-6 e-book: “The Sound Is The Sailor’s Laughter”

© Corinne Devin Sullivan. 2024. All rights reserved.

Publication made by: CORINNE DEVIN SULLIVAN BOOKS “The Sound Is The Sailor’s Laughter” Published in the United States of America 2024. First Final EBook. Design by C.D.S. Website: www.corinnedevinsullivan.com