The extract below gives a flavour of Wendy Thomson's
autobiography, "Summon the Tiger".
Anyway, I dropped
out of college at the end of the summer and walked away
from that amazing scholarship. By the time I got to
the ship, my parents and sister were already there, my
dad having sold his practice and the house on the
lake. I boarded the boat in November 1970 with all of my
meager belongings in tow and left the Motor City for
parts unknown.
******
CHAPTER
THREE
LIFE ON A FREIGHTER
******
I never
considered staying back like my brother did. I could not
conceive how I would stay in school, how I would get back and
forth to my grandparents, if they would even have had me. I
could not imagine being happy at school anymore, though. Rick
and Al were gone, Sharon dropped out to get married to her
high school sweetheart, and after Susie’s admission of
outright using me I became a bit gun-shy of friendly people. I
should have known… there was no logical reason why Susie would
try and take up with me – we were so different. I had exactly
two dates in two years, and I never got invited to a party.
Academics were not a challenge… I just thought that while I
didn’t know what I was getting into boarding the ship, I knew
that MSU was not doing it for me anymore, on any level.
Besides, now that my dad was pursuing a dream he seemed to be
in a much, much better mood. He was chatty and sang to himself
– it was wonderful. That was such a huge relief.
******
The boat was
moored at Miller Marina in St. Clair Shores. While I was
living in LaSalle my dad took to a major ship renovation. He
had a metal bulwark built over the aft hold, so that it was a
two-story space inside for our new home. There was also some
engine work that was needed: my cousin Tom told me that on the
trip from Montreal to Detroit, someone would have to go down
to the engine room and sprinkle gritty cleanser on a brake
belt so that it would stop slipping. The ship was
re-christened the Brigadoon, and we painted the hull bright
red. The pilot house and the trim were painted black and
white. I remember hanging over the side and scrubbing off rust
with a very stiff metal brush.
******
The ship had a three-cycle Brons
engine that would totally permeate a body with its slow,
rhythmic “CHUG-chug-chug-CHUG-chug-chug” day and night. The
engine room door was accessed on the port side, aft of the
pilot house door. It was very stereotypical, rounded edges and
a very large handle square in the middle, maybe a foot long,
that swung up a quarter turn to unlock the lever. When you
swung open the door you could see that someone had painted a
crying Donald Duck, hat in hand, on the inside of the door. My
sister became the mechanic, scampering down the gangway ladder
when required. I became the navigator, learning both Loran C
and celestial navigation. We had on board three young men,
Warren, the son of the man from whom we procured all of our
electronics, Jimmy, a young man that worked with my mother at
the furniture store, and Charlie Brown, the welder that would
be finishing up some work and getting off in Welland. Charlie
tried to teach me how to weld – now that’s a craft with which
I could never make a living.
******
Jimmy and I had the graveyard shift in
the wheelhouse. We had a cassette tape player, and while we
were chugging along, in the dead of night, he and I would
listen to James Taylor… Sweet Baby James. Jimmy announced the
day before we set sail that he was red-green color blind. Oh
boy… not anything you want on a ship. My dad had run out
of outfitting time, so when we cast off we were the last ship
to leave the Detroit River. The great plans for a two-story
house in the rear hatch were quite incomplete: there was an
open stairway and not a whole lot else. We stowed a Rolls
Royce and the Mustang convertible in the front hold, along
with all of the furniture. We were left using the original
crew quarters far aft. This craft, built in the 1930’s, was
very much a ship that could have been used in a King Kong
movie. The crew quarters were all varnished wood, with the
bunks very narrow and protected with a raised edge so it would
be difficult to be dumped out in heavy seas. My mother and
sister had glued colorful fabric on some of the walls, and the
stateroom Jimmy and I shared was decorated in an orange and
pink paisley fabric. Jimmy took the top bunk. There was only
standing room between the bunks and the door – I became quite
able to slip a long flannel nightgown over my head and get
completed dressed within it.
******
The pilot house had a huge oak wheel –
it was nearly as tall as I was. There was a three or four foot
tall brass cylindrical gear shift sticking out of the floor on
the side, but it only had three gears: forward, neutral and
reverse. We only had a single prop, but that engine had
tremendous torque. The gangways aft were very narrow, circling
the arced aft deck. You couldn’t go fore from the pilot house
directly: you had to go down the gangway first. The pilot
house sat a good seventy feet from the bow and was fifteen
feet above the main deck. The Brigadoon had two cargo holds,
and the superstructure only went over the one mid-section of
the ship. The forward cargo hold was flush with the deck,
and fore of that were the anchor and chain lockers.
******
Our send-off
from Detroit was well-publicized: all the local papers covered
this great adventure. So we took off one cold November morning
and headed east, out of Lake St. Clair and into the channel.
The Detroit River is not particularly wide – at its narrowest
it’s only a half mile wide. It takes a significant amount of
freighter traffic, and it has islands that dot the middle.
Every one of us were in the wheel house that November
morning as my dad piloted the ship. We sailed around Belle
Isle, under the Ambassador Bridge, and headed towards Lake
Erie. And then trouble began. We were downriver, and foreign
freighter “Manchester City” was headed west (Detroit is
actually north of Windsor: the river runs east and west at
that point). At 9:26 PM the Manchester City, having missed the
entrance to the East Outer Channel, corrected course – right
across our bow. We ended up with a 12” hole in the starboard
chain locker. I ducked under the chart table, Warren took off
his glasses and sat on the floor, Tracy grabbed on to the
wheel. It’s the strangest thing seeing a monstrous ship
running into you. You simply seem to accept the fact calmly at
the time and act accordingly – afterwards, my mother started
picking up things. Warren and Jimmy went fore to assess the
damage. And I went to the radio-telephone and hailed the
nameless ship: “This is the Brigadoon WZR2964 calling the ship
we just hit.”
******
So there we were,
Day One of our Great Adventure, heading out to Lake Erie with
a very crumpled bow. We should have stayed in port, though: we
ran right into a huge gale. Lake Erie is relatively shallow,
and so waves can’t get huge and rolling – they get very choppy
and angry. Thousand-foot long lake freighters have been known
to crack in two - riding up and down large swells is easier
than surviving significant short chop. We lost communication –
lots of ships lost communication. We could occasionally hear
the Coast Guard calling for us, but they couldn’t hear us
answer. We ended up taking shelter in Long Point Bay as best
we could, and bedded down for the night – and stayed there for
two days. The next morning there was an entire string of lake
freighters across the entrance of the bay – thirteen of them,
getting in as close as they could. We only drew ten feet – I
am sure those huge lake freighters drew much more. We found
out later that one of those ships called in that we had not
sunk.
******
........../Continued
