Excerpt: The Last Leg

The Last Leg
© 2008 CW Kelson III (Tad)

Thirty five hundred feet of steel, copper, plastic, canvas and majesty pulled into the busy and hectic harbor on the morning tide. The pilot had gone out, in the slight chop, to embark and lead the lady to rest at her accustomed berth. The deck crew had done their accustomed tasks, mostly hidden below decks working the mechanical winches, hoists, pulleys, and capstans to send forth the mooring lines, making fast the mighty anchor not needed once again. With it made fast they could start the daily tasks of cleaning the spaces, checking the chain links for microscopic imperfections, which could impair the efficiency and safety rating of them come any surprise inspections conducted by the United States Coast Guard.

The old terms and ratings were pretty much a thing of the past. The boiler tenders, coal shovelers, line handlers, pursers, able seamen, officers, cleaning staff, kitchen help, and the other myriad of professional and untrained staff that made the older ships the darling creations that they were have given way to computer controls, RFIDs, bar code scanners, PLCs, and programmers for many of the more ordinary of tasks. There are still many ships crew on every vessel. Someone to cook, to fold towels, to run the laundries, serve the alcoholic beverages, sing in the many lounges and clean up after the vacationing and spoiled that dot and populate the average attendee to a cruise.

There are the long-term residents. Those that have figured out that a life on a large vessel is actually less of a burden than living on their own, maintaining houses, paying rents, and the many other minutia details of the modern consumerism life.
These are the eternal wanderers, those that rarely leave the ship. Instead finding solace in constant magnificence of the sunrises and sunsets of the wide open ocean or the far corner of the seven seas. These are the true denizens, change much less often than the contract employees the line employed to reduce the cost of paying benefits, a constant training and turnover, always a headhunter looking for someone coming off a cruise to sign on from another line, all the better if they are a careerist that paid their own medical costs while ashore and with only minor discomforts while on the job.

This is the merest snippet of the life on the oceans. Long nights cleaning and preparing for the next day of schedule fun and activities for the paying customers. Each and everyone of the constant influx and outflow of spray tanned wannabes and over wrought wage slaves deluding themselves that a week, or even a three night four day . The beauty staff all worked full days, a constant movement of worn out and tired people getting the most professional care possible in attempting to undo the damage of years of life in the fast lane, deluding themselves into thinking it would be enough. Tired mothers away from their homes, kinds, work, schedules and commitments. Executives and ladder climbers, hoping the latest peel and skin treatment will take away the specter of melanoma that lurks on every golf course across the globe.

Down in the bowels of the vessel, a different sort of celebration was taking place. This ship was so large, so old, so updated and yet so archaic as to have a multitude of secret and hidden locations. Once used passages had somehow been obscured, covered over, re-purposed into storage or just plain forgotten. The plans had been altered so many times, there could not be a single set of drawings that would correspond to any semblance of the reality of the ship. This makes it an anachronism among her kind. Most are all mathematically precise and drawn down to the closest inch possible, all CADD and straight lines as well as the most economical in practice for construction.