#JUNK JACK RETRO STRONG LADDER CRACK#

Then the radio popped, crackled, and through the heavy static the heavier voice of terror from the Louise. As the storm blew itself out, the crew hacked ice. Adrian had no steam hoses, but it had fire axes and hammers. He stood watch on watch as his ship added weight. On the bridge Levere stood like a slumped, hawk-faced monument. The crew cursed with fatigueвЂ¦ a comfortable cursing because they knew the ship and this was not desperate weather. Lamp fretted, made coffee and hot sandwiches, muttered either prayers or spells. Portside hatches were lashed partly open so that ice would not immobilize them. It circulated through the ship and stretched even through the grates of the fiddley and into the engine room. Cold smoked from the sea, as if the waves were dry ice. The covered winch swelled with ice, bulking in the stern like a great dog huddled against the wind. Stanchions bulged with rime like stubby posts, and chains stretched between them as thick as dismembered arms linked in futility against the sea.

The trawler Mary Rose was now safe in Rockland, but it was little comfort that one crew was drying its socks while another crew was under.ДЄdrian skidded before a quartering sea, the steep swells piling and breaking with a rush on the fantail. The voice from Redstart still echoed in the ears of the bridge gang. Rockland fell below the horizon at noon on a day when the gray light was absorbed into the gray sea so that only white spume blown from the tops of waves suggested the seam between wind and water. Enough weather remained to supply a sleigh ride. The storm was abating as cutter Adrian cleared the Rockland jetty. On the coast, nine more crosses were planted along the cliffs, bearing the worldвЂ™s most lonely legend. Cutter Abner beat a hopeless box search, struggling to stay alive, scaling the waves like a small white toy indifferently tossed into a riptide. Somewhere a cartographer placed a small red x on a chart. Fishermen, lighthouse tenders, seamen and fishermenвЂ™s wives from Newfoundland to Boston hovered helpless and voiceless and tense, with radio transmitters idle in their hands, as a nearly laconic voice from Redstart gave its last loran readings and was cut off in midsentence. Souls of the coast would remember that week as the week of the Redstart. Jensen carried a submersible pump aboard AdrianвЂ™s ancient acquaintance, the fishing vessel Louise, on the day it sprang the last of its legendary leaks.ДЄdrian received the distress call while homeward bound from Rockland during one of those weeks God makes for drownings. Still, in some minds there is a difference between life and property. Well, then true, no doubt, and if old men still believe the proposition, perhaps that is only because it is easy to believe from the depths of a comfortable chair. Let us suppose that the weight of belief makes that awful proposition real and-although it will not here be held-that when the earth was railed by horizon, and flat to seamenвЂ™s perceptions, that their belief made it flat-but in matters of the abstract.

In some men they bring out the underlying romance, for seaman cynics are secretly romantic believing the tradition of вЂњyou have to go out, you donвЂ™t have to come backвЂќвЂ¦ and let us say-for a chance-that the tradition is not a myth, but true. Those calms are, in their way, as treacherous as ice on superstructure. At the time no one doubted that he would make it, and Jensen (who was not religious, but who may have been good) most likely died while losing a bet with himself.ДЄ day of calm saw him under. Also religious and good.вЂќ By the time Lamp would tell the tale in its hundredth version, the figure of Cecil Jensen acquired the stature of major saint on LampвЂ™s calendar. вЂњNo,вЂќ Lamp would say, and always he was serious. вЂњCrazy?вЂќ In later days at the Base it would always be a young voice asking that.

#JUNK JACK RETRO STRONG LADDER CRACK#

Downeasters know such days, when the North Atlantic seems gathering its forces to crack holes in the planet. In that past winter of treacherous seas there were occasional days of alarming calm. Jensen was an idealist with occasional poor judgment, and now he was a drowned idealist.

He had not been a fool, this dead man who would shortly become the nemesis of Ernie Brace.

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