THE LAST VOYAGE OF ARTHUR AND BOBO A different kind of love story by Pat Shannan
Nearly half a century ago I was on a Farrell Lines freighter bound for Australia. The proposed route out of New Orleans was to take us south through the Gulf of Mexico into the Caribbean, west through the Panama Canal into the Pacific, and then southwest to Sydney. ETA: “about thirty days.” However, cargo has priority over passengers on a freighter, and, before we got beyond the borders of the Twelve Mile Limit, the Captain received orders to proceed to Houston to pick up a load of motorboats for delivery in Papeete, Tahiti. Freighter passage is for the traveler who 1] is in no hurry and has no schedule to which to adhere, and 2] likes the surprise of unscheduled stopovers. After two seafaring days, we were still in the United States. We must be the only group in seafaring history who ever took an ocean-going vessel to a football game at the Astrodome, but following an afternoon movie, it was the best way to elude the tedium of waiting of our ship to load its new inventory – this time a dozen motorboats bound for Tahiti.
Contrary to popular belief, Freighter travel has many advantages over cruise liners, including greatly reduced cost. The meals are terrific, often slanted towards the cuisine of the nationality of the chef. Ours was Latino on this particular trip, and his spicy concoctions suited my asbestos palate just fine, enabling me to enjoyably gain fifteen pounds in just thirty-five days. Freighters have passenger quarters for only twelve people (Maritime law requires that a ship travel with a doctor on any vessel hauling more than twelve fare-payers) which means by journey’s end, one has gotten to know everyone on board. There was a library with both old and new publications as well as a couple of chess boards and numerous decks of cards. On such a long jaunt, all of these become warriors in one’s battle against boredom.
Shortly after rocking through the backwash of Hurricane Beulah and recovering from the sea-sickness, I met and befriended an unforgettable elderly, Australian gentleman on deck, who was wrapped in a blanket sipping his hot tea in the cool, misty morning air. Arthur Owen was eighty-one years old and completing his thirty-first annual sailing trip around the world. Having begun before the “second big war” (he had witnessed them both) and continued after that “minor interruption,” this one would be his last. He and his wife had begun this annual odyssey shortly after he had retired at age fifty from his appliance business in Parramatta, NSW, in the western suburbs of Sydney. Because I had seen and spoken to him in the dining room a day or two before and he had seemed very friendly, I didn’t hesitate to sit down in the deck chair next to him and begin to chat. Headed to Australia to spend what turned out to be a couple of years, I was eager to speak with a native before arriving.
Modern culture in America is upside down in many respects. Ours is not a society that honors age. James Michener tells that at age 65 in Japan, one receives a red kimono as a badge of honor and becomes an elder in his community whose advice is sought. Native Americans place their elderly in a position of honor, make them chiefs, and are solicitous of their wisdom. We stupidly hide ours away in nursing homes the week after we decide they have become a burden. Yet gerontological scientists give us the amazing statistic that there are more older people alive in the world today than the total of all the older people who ever lived in the world before. And there is a body of medical opinion which holds that the mind does not reach its full capacity until about sixty. From sixty to eighty, the brain’s mental efficiency declines slowly, which means that a person at eighty can be as productive mentally as he was at thirty, with the considerable advantage of accumulated information, which when coupled now with experience becomes wisdom.
Mr. Owen told me it was his first trip ever that his wife was not with him. “BoBo” had died earlier that year. I respectfully changed the subject and asked him about himself. He had seen me bring my guitar on board and mentioned that he had been a musician, too, as a young man in England. He had traveled with Music Hall, the British version of vaudeville, before migrating to Australia in 1915. With a few saved dollars he had started a retail music store — instruments, sheet music, accessories — later expanding to radios in the 30s and 40s and televisions in the 50s and 60s. Although he had retired from the workplace long ago, he still retained control of most of the business and all of its major decisions. “Hemingway,” he said, “called `retirement’ the most loathsome word in the English language, and I agree. Your outlook and your frame of mind as you advance in years is what matters most.”
Arthur Owen was a sprightly little man with the impish smile of a practical joker, a role he later admitted having played often as a younger man. Although soft-spoken, he “carried a big stick” and expressed his opinions as intently as a tyrant. While I imagined that his employees over the years had both loved and feared their boss, he said that neither of those features is significant in an employer-employee relationship. “The only important earmark to leadership is respect,” he said. “If a person respects what you stand for, he will follow your lead, even if he hates your guts. This is true in war and business. Whose side do you want to be on when the brawl breaks out — the guy you like, or the guy who is going to win? Now I know loyalty may place you on the wrong side sometimes, but you will have a sore head for several days to remind you.”
With our new cargo securely loaded, we sailed into the Caribbean and past Jamaica the next day, wondering which boats were making drug runs, and into the tropics of Central America. Our first stop was Cristobal, at the eastern entrance of the Panama Canal. Only one night in the wino/wharf-rat/prostitute-laden bars of that dismal port was sufficient. The next morning we began our half-day excursion through the intricate locks of the canal, built before my daddy was born.
Mr. Owen became the immediate target of playful mockery by others on board when he appeared dressed for the heat in his tan, military shorts and pith helmet. With his spindly legs protruding from the oversized shorts, and the wire-rimmed glasses covered with clip-on sunshades, he was a comic caricature of an older version of Stan Laurel about to film a safari. In the baking heat, he looked kind of cool, in more ways than one.
“Dr. Livingston, I presume,” I said, leaning against the rail next to him.
“Good morning, my friend,” he said, flashing his infectious smile and amusedly accepting my impulsive greeting for what it was — frivolous but not rude. A quarter of a century older than the captain and a half century older than most of us, he must have found it difficult to fit in, but he wanted to be “one of the gang.” Without my asking but acknowledging my irreverent poke at his attire, he began to explain to me that although a pith helmet appears to be very warm in the hot sunshine, the spacing between its inside layers and separation from the top of the head actually makes it the coolest headpiece ever invented. Even a wet towel will soon become so unbearable in the equatorial sun that one would have the inconvenience of re-soaking it every few minutes in order to stay comfortable. Together we stood and watched the workers, scurrying like ants on the pilot ship and locks, preparing us for passage through the isthmus.
I remarked that I never realized the intricacies of sailing through the Panama Canal. I remembered from school days the hardships of construction, the loss of life due to accidents, and the yellow fever epidemics; but I thought, once it was completed, all a ship had to do was sail right on through. Wrong. I was about to get an unexpected education in a whole new field and from a rare teacher who already had sailed through these locks thirty times.
As we stood at the stern, leaning on the railing, and watching the water level rise, he explained to me that, because of the marvelous canal, the trip from New Orleans to San Francisco had been shortened by over 8800 miles. It is only fifty miles from one end of the canal to the other — from Cristobal to Balboa — but, with the time spent traversing the locks, the trip takes about seven hours, sometimes longer. In order to get from the Atlantic sea level to Gatun Lake, which is 85 feet above sea level, then down to Miraflores Lake, which is 54 feet above sea level at the other end, before arriving back at sea level upon entering the Pacific, the ship must enter a dozen locks a thousand feet long and 110 feet wide, which then undergo an intricate filling and draining process with millions of gallons of water, raising and lowering ship as necessary. Electric locomotives draw the ships through, thus avoiding the danger of damage to the locks, which would be almost certain if ships were allowed to proceed under their own power. I was fascinated as we watched. The process is an engineering wonder to behold.
After a few hours I noticed that the sun was moving away from us instead of ahead. “Mr. Owen, the sun still sets in the west down here doesn’t it?”
He chuckled. “I wondered if you were going to notice that. It’s just one more bewitching fact about the canal. I will need to show you on a map, but the Atlantic is actually farther west than the Pacific at this point, so we sail east to go west.”
Kind of like the mouth of the Mississippi in New Orleans, I remembered, where the river takes a dipsy-doo, placing people who live on the west bank actually on the east side of the river, and thoroughly confusing to any stranger visiting.
The man was a walking encyclopedia, and I almost asked him how he could know so much about the canal, having spent his life a half a world away from it. Then I realized that, with all his world tours by boat, he had been through here more often than most ship captains. That night in the ship’s library, I checked his information from an old set of Compton’s. Sure enough, the canal is 50.7 miles long and, because of it, the distance from New Orleans to San Francisco by water is 8,868 miles shorter than it used to be. His other facts had been correct, too. There are precisely twelve locks, each 1,000 feet long, 110 feet wide.
Mr. Owen had computed that 23 laps around the small deck measured a mile and this became his daily exercise — a morning stroll of one mile, except when it was raining. Then, he would do sit-ups on his cabin floor. Uncomfortably aware of my recent weight gain, I began to join him in his walks. We would have in-depth discussions concerning every subject important to the times. Politically, we were poles apart. I didn’t understand Parliamentary procedure, and he didn’t understand the Electoral system. A “Liberal” in Australia is a member of the Liberal Party, which is actually far more conservative than their Labor Party, the one we Americans would call the liberal or “Left Wing” one. On Vietnam, I had agreed with General Curtis Lemay that we should “bomb ’em back into the Stone Age, and get the damned thing over with.” He disagreed. “I wonder if you would feel that way if you were a poor farmer over there trying to eke out a living from the land and minding your own business,” he said as he chugged and puffed along the deck. “One day, I believe, you will change your mind about that.” He was right. One day I did. It was the evening nearly a decade later when I sat down in a Columbus, Georgia bar next to a tormented young man — a defrocked lieutenant — by the name of Bill Calley. But that’s a whole ‘nother story.
Mostly my old new friend and I talked about life and business. I liked the idea of making a lot of money in Australia, and he could tell me how to do that. He had already done it. Cocktail hour is an ideal place to discuss business, if you stick to generalities and save the details for morning. In vino veritas, said the ancient Romans. “In wine, there is truth.” Mr. Owen always had one highball, and then one glass of wine with dinner. Never any more. Coupled with my strumming of the guitar and the inept, impromptu attempt at harmony by several of us on the scene, it was all he needed one night to be moved to dance the Irish Jig; as we tried to remember the words to “A Jug of Punch,” that familiar pub sing-along from the “Auld Sod.”
Although I was to follow none of his business advice, he told me that appliances — color televisions, microwave ovens, trash compactors, and all the new successes in America — would be the rage to shortly follow in his country. And central air-conditioning. Most of the commercial buildings at that time, not to mention the homes, were still cooled by fans, even in the muggy tropics of Queensland. His prophecy could not have been more “right on.” Some of the young acquaintances I made the next year are millionaire, retired businessmen today, because they took advantage of those precise opportunities.
One evening at cocktail hour we shared a table together. “What would you do differently, Mr. Owen?” I asked, while several others were hoisting their glasses around his table. Realizing that he had an audience and he was in the spotlight, and with the show business forever in his soul, he could not resist a farcical retort. “Smoke less and drink more,” he said, exuding a thunderous stage-cough before touching his glass to the captain’s and flashing his puckish grin. When the laughter died down, he added a more sincere note: ” . . . and I would grab life by the nape of the neck and throttle the daylights outa’ her.” We all could see an ever so slight, misty dream of unrequited aspiration in his eye. George Burns defined it for us a few years later when he sang, “I Wish I Was Eighteen Again.”
The South Pacific is a lonely place. We Americans think Texas is big. One could walk across Texas in less time than it takes to sail the Pacific. It’s thirteen days to Tahiti and eleven more to Brisbane. Thirteen days of nothing but water. No land. No birds. No newspapers. The only occasional friendly visitor being a bouncing dolphin playing in our wake. And the unfriendly sharks angry at our intrusion and reminding us not to sink. The only source of outside information was “Sparky,” our radioman from Boston. He told us the Red Sox had finally won a World Series. He lied. The Cardinals stopped them cold in the seventh with “Bullet Bob” Gibson’s third win.
Finally, I knew we were close to land when an albatross gleefully pooped on my shirt, then laughingly screeched away. Seeing Mr. Owen in his customary deckchair, I knew he would get a hoot out of that. But when I sat down to show and tell him, he didn’t.
His mood was pensively out of character this day, as was his attire. He said little as he lounged in his finest suit of clothes, topped off with a black bow tie. He held a neatly wrapped package on his lap, maybe a cubic foot in size. He appeared to be headed for either a wedding or a funeral, but I made no comment. His melancholy, misty eyes and somber reticence telegraphed to me that it was not the time to say anything at all. I just sat, and we both remained silent for several minutes. Eventually he spoke.
“Sixty one years it would have been at Christmas time,” he said. “1906. I was twenty and she nineteen. Caught hell, too, from her father when he found out I had run off with his only daughter. I don’t think he forgave me for nearly thirty years, until I bought him that house in the height of the depression. When everybody else was losing theirs, he had a brand new one.” His eyes twinkled the nostalgic beam of a proud smile through his misty tears. I could say nothing. What could I offer up of any pertinence at this moment? Suddenly, I didn’t want to be there — I had stumbled into his private solitude — but I didn’t think I should make an abrupt exit, either. And I sensed he really wanted someone to talk to at this moment.
“God, she was beautiful. I am so lonesome. We traveled all over the world together, and this was her favorite spot on earth. These peaceful waters just outside of Papeete. Twenty years ago, she said she wanted to be buried here. I bet she thinks I forgot that. We used to throw bread balls to the dolphins, and she would love it when the circling seagulls would zoom in and steal it just inches from their grasp. I can still hear her laughing.” The tears were streaming down his leathery old cheeks now, and my eyes were getting a little misty, too.
During the next few minutes I mumbled only enough polite replies to acknowledge I was listening. For three weeks he had been supplying me with information and advice. Who was I to give him sympathy? I was the student, he the teacher. Now I was learning about everlasting love. But then too I began to realize that this had been the sole purpose of his final trip around the world, and he did not desire consolation, only someone to share it with.
Finally, a seagull appeared. Then another. “This is it,” he said. “This was her spot.” Still leaning back in the lounge chair, he began to slowly unwrap the box, delaying the inevitable for whatever time was within reason. His fingers trembled, his lower lip quivered, as he removed a black urn from the box. He stood and gently cradled her in his now-steady hands as he strode, almost with military precision, to the railing. I stood, out of respect, but did not proceed to the solemnity of his inner sanctum at the corner of the stern. He paused for a full minute, clutching the vase firmly to his breast, and uttered some words to the seagulls or maybe to God, before removing the lid from the urn. Then he gently sprinkled the ashes of his beloved “BoBo” into the air and watched them flutter down and disappear into her watery grave.
After another few moments of reflection, he backed away, then turned to take only a step or two my way before, on the spur-of-the-moment, he marched back to the railing and furiously flung the porcelain vase as far as his weakened old arms would allow, and he did not even wait for it to splash. He didn’t blubber foolishly — such would have been beneath his dignity — he just turned around for the last time slowly walked toward me. Upon reaching my position as I stood still by our chairs, he extended his hand and dry-eyed, sober, and sincere said, “Thank you for attending my wife’s services. I will see you at tea time.” He picked up his paper scraps and returned to his cabin. It was over. He would never visit here again.