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(click “scan” above for photograph of Coast Guard Cutter Mojave)
Mafalda was suddenly quiet at the commercial pier it had been moved to for offloading its cargo of saltpeter. The excitement had ended with the voyage. There was no noise, save for the creaking and moaning in the painful joints of worn-out ship’s parts. She was a very old lady, beyond the help of an expensive emergency room. This workhorse was never designed or built to resemble the long, narrow racing lines of a blue-blood clipper-ship. And now Mafalda, in her rocking chair, simply moved imperceptibly up and down, up and down at the dock.
Johannes, becoming more a “John,” and less a “Johannes,” and some of the crew sensed that they were becoming caught in a web of nearly forgotten harbor rhythms as they left behind the missing rhythms of the sea. They wanted to get going, but they were all lost, a polyglot ship’s population of the young and the dumb. All smart and no wise. All the killers were innocent. Some of the crew were farmers, who missed the smell of cow shit under their fingernails. Others were permanently wounded and psychologically damaged war survivors. PTSD was part of nobody’s language. To claim such a thing invited accusations of cowardice, as it still does among the ignorant. There was even a war-free pharmacist’s son, looking for adventure on the open seas, in addition to clean, wonderfully-smelling, maddeningly beautiful girls in every port. He was, of course, from Norway, which is a land of such people.
Some of the boys were all these things, and much more. All were trapped in a pre-post-modern painting, with touches of the ancient and the abstract created by a few street lights, often filtered through visions of alcohol.
None of these children knew any of this, of course. For John, definition was determined largely from postcard to postcard, and how he thought others might perceive him via that medium. “Dear family. I am here. There are no apes in the palm trees. Mafalda may not return to Norway. I do not know where she sails to. Is grandfather still alive?”
Lacking philosophers, they had to depend on dreams, nightmares, and gossip, with an occasional insight that went beyond the place where they stood at any one time. The future was dependent on the next impulse. Johannes grew thoughtful after he dreamed about being trapped in a sinking sailing ship, though he knew enough to not think of the dream as a nightmare. Nightmares were trouble, and he was not looking for trouble. He had had plenty of fear…enough of anxiety, and was unaware of the kind of thinking necessary for insights. But, in fact, he was growing up, gaining definition, earning recognition, and making new mistakes. He was developing a shadow of his own.
Shipboard, nothing rolled on the deck, and the rigging got slack as it slowly began to deteriorate in the sun and salt air. The crew stopped yelling, and began to speak in low tones. No one knew quite what to do and where to go. At first, the men laughed as they went ashore and attempted to walk a straight line after months at sea. The captain tried ordering some make-work, but the crew knew they were no longer at sea, and that real seamanship was no longer called for. Jobs like scraping paint only caused grumbling, and soon, the crew, by ones and twos, collected its pay and drifted away. Harbor authorities came and went, but they paid little attention to things like passports and papers. All over the goddamn insane world, millions of people walked the earth with their passports in their feet. In Hawaii, in this day of prohibition, the government search was for illicit rum, gin, opium, and other drugs, which spilled over the lush landscape.
The calms and the storms had became soft breezes, filled with the magical scents that none could have imagined in any of the places they had come from. Most of the crew did the one thing that all were infected with: the need to wander. Johannes and his pal, Smith, began exploring Honolulu as they waited for all their pay, and to find out whether or not Mafalda would return to Norway. It would not.
The United States Coast Guard.
One night, John and Smith wandered into town. They found a favorite bar, began smoking and drinking okolehao, and soon got into a strange, very funny contest. They decided to show off how cows, often resting in the forest at night, were called to the milk barns of Finland and Norway at milking time. These sounds, with the volume exaggerated, soon attracted other sailors, who felt compelled to join in. The contest didn’t end until two American navy shorepatrolmen, batons in hand, ordered a stop to it. A pair of local beauties then walked into the place, wondering what those strange noises were all about. No one could believe how well their cattle calls had worked, which created yelling, laughter, and a near-riot.
The next day, our two sailors, quiet now, were walking around Honolulu when they passed a military recruitment office. Without thinking, they went in to get out of a rain shower. They had never heard of the Coast Guard, but were instinctively drawn to a poster showing a large motor vessel on the open sea. They thought it was all about the U.S. Navy, but did not care, since neither sailor intended to be in the military service of another country.
As they sat in the Coast Guard office, a clean-cut young coast guardsman, assisted by a Filipino serviceman with a stack of forms, plied them with coffee and rolls. This was wonderful. They were no longer drunk, and someone was giving them coffee and food. In what seemed like a moment, each of the young sailors had filled out various forms, had their pictures taken, and could not believe their luck. All they had to do was serve a few months in the U.S. Coast Guard, and they would automatically become American citizens, with passports and all. This is what the officer promised, and their limited knowledge of English simply confirmed what they did not really know. They knew nothing of this version of being shanghaied. No billy clubs or spiked drinks, and no one was beaten or kidnapped, like they did, according to rumor, on those British vessels! And best of all, pay was in dollars, U.S., which meant little because the promise had little meaning for the boys.
That night, John went to a tattoo parlor. He looked at the designs, and chose something that did have meaning: He put a blue anchor, with attached line curved around it, onto his left forearm, where it remained for the rest of his life.
Some days later, having drawn uniforms and shoes from a quartermaster, John and Smith boarded a 240 foot cutter, and threw their duffels under their bunks. The ship was the Mojave, with something new and unique called “turbo-electric transmission.” She was one of four new, identical cutters built in Oakland, California, in 1921. John found himself as a gunner’s mate, manning a deck gun called a six-pounder, located just under the bridge. In the following few days, the sailors practiced reading manuals, learning terminology, and how to fit the scene. The skipper ran a tight ship, and nothing was ever clean enough. The vessel had stricter rules and regulations than Mafalda, and both men missed their big sailing ship, from where they retrieved their things while saying goodbye to friends.
They were fairly sure that, the sea being the sea, their new ship and new flag would be just the solution they needed to repair the unease they had begun to feel out there in the world. They had a home, new friends, and a job. The food was good, and it did not take long to make personal adjustments. Yes, they thought they were treated as children, but their new ship was a constant source of interest, and there was much to learn on the short training cruises.
In the months to come, Smith would stay in the Coast Guard. Among other missions, the Mojave went north into the Bering Sea to prevent illegal seal hunting, while making various attempts at slowing smuggling operations. After a year or two, he turned down a promotion and returned to Porsgrunn. The Mojave was transferred to the east coast, never to return to the Pacific (See the photo above, showing the Mojave entering Boston Harbor). After World War II service as a weather and rescue vessel, the cutter was decommissioned in 1947, sold to private parties, and finally scrapped in 1964.
When John learned that the Coast Guard lied about the promised citizenship, his genuine Finn-lock mind mechanism told him that he and the Coast Guard would soon part ways. All bets were off. When the Mojave sailed to the Bering Sea in 1922, John was not on board. It happened that while the cutter was in Oakland to prepare for the voyage north, John went down the gangplank, and started walking. He had no checkbook and, of course, no credit cards. With little money and no plans, he assumed that, sooner or later, he would be discovered and arrested.
John with coast guard buddy, Smith, Porsgrunn, Norway, 1965.
On a return to Finland in l965, John stopped in Porsgrunn, and stayed with Smith for a few days. They spent the better part of one day walking the dock where they had worked to rig Mafalda for her long voyage. They actually saw themselves on the old ghost ship as they talked, and as forgotten memories re-emerged.
It was heard that John spent some time in Idaho, working as a shepherd on a ranch in the panhandle. In any case, he eventually returned to Oakland, where he went into men’s clothing, and learned how to pose as Rudolf Valentino on the front fender of a car parked at a Russian River resort. But that is another story.
Right. The citizenship. In 1966, I was on my first Air Force assignment at the Aeronautical Chart and Information Center, St. Louis, waiting to get security clearance to work behind the storied (exaggerated!) Jefferson Barracks “green door,” where madame l’armee de l’air americaine kept her innermost secrets in an old fruit jar. One day, I was in Colonel Custer’s office, and he told me that I was refused clearance by the FBI because my father was not a citizen. Apparently, John had never bothered with the formality of it all. If the Colonel had a feather, he could have knocked me over with it.
So, I called my illegal immigrant father, who called an old family friend in Los Angeles, and in a few days, dad had his citizenship (he already had a passport, renewed several times), and I had my clearance. It seems that if you paid your taxes, owned a home and a business, and carried a passport, becoming a citizen was a piece of cake.
the harmonium 