The Snapping Of a Wire
The summer I turned 15 my first job was as deck hand on the Shell oil tanker Arctic Trader out of Montreal. (Please don’t ask how I got that position, it is a long story) I was mostly overwhelmed by my surroundings. Everything was steel or rusty steel or grease. Everything smelled like gasoline. I had yet to finish growing and stood only 5’6” among some very large men. As a deck hand, when I wasn’t painting something, I had a few tasks to learn. One was running the hydraulic winch that held the one inch thick wires used to tie up the ship. The loop of wire was passed out through the fair lead (a swivelling set of pulleys) on the side of the ship. A line with a ‘monkey’s fist’ (a block of wood wrapped in cord) was attached and heaved down onto the dock (I had to learn that throw and remember to tie it to the wire first) where the loop was passed over the bollards on the dock.
The winch was simple. It had a wheel which you turned one way to pay out and the other to winch in. It also had a hand brake you could pull to pay out faster. I thought it a fairly simple task until the day we were docking in Montreal in a high wind. We were at the bow on the starboard side and the first mate (the boss of the deck) was standing on one side of the fair lead and a senior deck hand stood on the other with the coil of rope and the monkey’s fist. His first throw landed on the dock and the Mate began his ‘Queen Elizabeth’s wave gesture which meant ‘Pay out the line’. This part was usually just the hand brake so I pulled it back and held onto it. When the line was hooked over the bollard on the dock the wire became immediately taught. The fair lead started smoking with the friction of the wire and the Mate’s gesture speeded up and then speeded up again. I was just holding the brake off when he turned and yelled ‘Faster you fucking idiot’. I let go the hand brake to turn the hydraulic wheel and just as I reached for the wheel the one inch wire snapped with a huge bang and a whipping sound. The mate swore again and then turned around and calmly asked me “How long have you been here?”
I managed to say. “Three weeks.”
“That should just about pay for it.”
I don’t remember much after that except being lost in a fog of despair. To think about what I had endured in the last three weeks and to not make any money; I was crushed.
My savior was Angus, the bosun. The bosun is the head deck crew member who has no aspirations to be a Mate and have the responsibilities associated with the running of operations. He is the liaison between the crew and the officers and he gets things done. Angus looked ancient to me and he had a glass eye which wept a kind of pus that unnerved me. A few days after the parting of the wire, I looked out onto the deck and there was Angus sort of Quasimodo hunched over the end of the parted wire. He had created a new loop and was using metal spikes and a hammer to break open one part of the wire so that he could splice the other end into it. I was mesmerized. I did not know anything like that was even possible. I wondered if it would be as strong as the original. He assured me it would. He let me help for a few minutes and then sent me off to paint something. In the end they didn’t dock my pay.
So why tell this story and how could it relate to Mediation?
As someone new to significant breaks I learned that parting is painful but not permanent. Parents must part in order to become co-parents. The broken strands must be grieved. The process of reconnecting in a different way can then begin, aided by someone who knows how to recreate bonds. A mediator works to splice a relationship of co-parenting which will be most beneficial to the family.