This Month's Story
In last month’s “Story of the Month” (“The Tree Fishermen”), I told about my sailing aboard a Hawaiian Ocean Research ship. The story centered about that fact that I was the only “howly” or “round eye” on the ship (the rest being of Japanese, Hawaiian or Korean descent).
The fact is that while being familiar to working with howlies ashore, my being the sole one working beside them day after day as an equal despite the obvious fact that I was also a highly ranked civil employee made each of them initially pause. However, as the ship’s ocean survey went for day after day for a little over a month, they became used to me working closely with them and our cultural differences slowly faded.
I realized this one day after we had been at sea for about a week, when I, as usual, went back to the aft “wet lab” to make sure the other night-time watch stander and I had left everything in proper shape for the day crew that would take the day’s ocean stations.
Each day as I passed the small open ocean hatch just forward of the stern’s wet lab, I saw the ship’s engineer standing in the hatch just high enough to rest his arm pits on the hatch rims. I soon realized he was standing on the hatch’s vertical ladder and his purpose there was just to see the sun come up. The rest of the day he would be busy in the engine room, coming out just to eat or, at the day’s end to disappear in his stateroom to sleep or read.
Evidently, this early morning emergence to see the sun come up was a valuable part of his day and my going aft to check the wet lab soon became a part of his morning as well. He would watch me walk by and when I returned about a few minutes later to go to the mess hall for breakfast, I would usually find him gone.
Well, as I said, a week went by. Then one morning as I went by, he asked me how I liked my eggs. I didn’t really know what to say, so I said “over easy.” He grunted and then, when nothing further was said, I went on to the wet lab.
When I returned about twenty minutes later, the engineer was standing on the ladder in his usual place, only this time he held out a dinner plate with two beautiful cooked eggs and a side order of three strips of bacon.
Thanking him, I took the plate and sat down on the steel deck beside the hatch. He smiled and as I ate, we watched the rising sun.
This became a habit in the following days that we both enjoyed (It turns out he had a hot plate down in the engine room attached to a boiler that could cook the food sizzling hot in seconds). However, my morning meal changed slightly the day after we caught several large Mai Mai (yellow fin tuna). That night the whole crew happily feasted on the fish that night at supper.
The next morning as I returned by the small hatch, the engineer with a broad grin, handed me the usual plate of two exquisitely cooked eggs and a side order, not of bacon, but rather a small slab of raw Mai Mai. I sat down beside him as I usually did and smiling broadly, ate every bit of the fried eggs and raw fish.
Slowly, I was becoming used to the ship’s oriental style of living. One day, when we had to wait an unusually long time for the instruments in our deep (two thousand meters) cast to come to the same temperature as the water at that depth, my fellow watch stander handed me a long handled trident attached to a line. Seeing my quizzical look, he pointed his own trident to the spot lit water brightly illuminating the wire descending down to depths of our deep cast. In the light the surface water teemed with squid feasting on small fish attracted to the bright circle of light.
Satisfied that I knew at what he was pointing, he climbed up on the ship’s railing over the brightly lit cast and holding on to a ledge overhang from the deck above us, began to watch the swirling mass of squid. Suddenly, he hurled his trident at one of darting squid (one end of the trident’s line was attached to his wrist). He missed!
This was too much. I climbed up on the railing a few feet away from him and watched the swirling mass. At what I judged to be the right moment, I hurled my trident at a swiftly moving target. To my surprise I speared him. I happily pulled up my prize, realizing at the same time my watch mate was glaring at me.
A crew member, standing nearby to watch the fun, began yelling “Cookie! Cookie!” In seconds, the ship’s cook was on deck and began unhooking the squid from my trident. The squid meanwhile had grabbed my arm with one of its tentacles. I yelled at the cook who, looking at the lone tentacle, whipped out his knife and cut it free from the rest of the squid. I stared at my arm still wrapped with the squid tentacle. In the dark it pulsated, changing colors as it did so. Despite being separated from the invertebrate’s main body, it was still alive!
My watch mate had meanwhile had also speared a squid and after handing it to the still waiting cookie, he came over to where I was staring at the tentacle. He looked at me for a moment and then said, “What are you waiting for? Eat it!” With that he climbed back on the railing and began successfully gigging several more squid.
I’m embarrassed to say that I finally did get enough nerve to bite a piece of the tentacle. It was a little rubbery, but tasted like the calamari you would buy in any fine restaurant. We and the crew ate several of the squid we caught that night in a soup we had for lunch the next day. No one seemed to think it unusual.
When the trip was over, I hijacked a friend’s office to write up my trip report. It didn’t take long. There were a few things I thought needed changing, but little else. I strongly made a note that the ship carried no spare scientific equipment. At the beginning of the cruise, when I asked them why this was so, they replied that nothing ever broke down. I didn’t say anything, but I remembered the occasion of one of the many trips I had headed as chief scientist. On that cruise, I brought, beside the main Lidar, two spare lidars. When the main lidar broke down, I energized the first of the two spares. It stopped working after about an hour. When I energized the other spare, it quit several hours later.
But my report as a whole was quite complimentary. After having done the work I had been sent to Hawaii to do, I decided to join several of the ship’s crew for several rounds of beer after work. We were enjoying ourselves settling down in a small beer parlor, when the crew member next to me looked admiring at the waitress. When she departed with an order for more beer, he spoke to me in a low voice, “When she comes back, ask her for some po po.
I sat there shocked!! I would never say such a thing!
When she came back with our new order, I said nothing, despite his looking at me puzzled. When she left one of the others in our group shouted out “where was our po po.” My companion looking angry at me, shouted at the departing waitress that we needed some po po.
She turned flustered and said she’d be right back.
When she returned she had another waitress with her, each carrying a large platter of seafood! I quickly found out po po was Hawaiian for free lunch and that bar we were in had the best po po’s in Waikiki. We visited that bar several more times in my stay and enjoyed ourselves and the bars po po each time.
Five years later I returned to Hawaii to coauthor an oceanographic book that was to be printed by the University press. On the morning of my second day I went to the lab where the ship’s crew recorded and arranged the data collected from each of the ship’s oceanographic cruises for analysis. After five years, I was hoping some of the original members of my earlier cruise would still be around.
When I arrived I was surprised to see that most of the crew was still there and they, in turn, were both surprised and extremely happy to see me. After asking the purpose of my return to Oahu, they quickly asked if I was free for lunch. I said yes and they then asked me to return at about 11:30 and we would go out to lunch.
I went back to my office and finished my morning’s work and then hurried back to the lab. I found, however, that something else was happening. There were several women there, evidently wives of several of the crew. Soon more wives came and in a little while the small lunch I had been invited to had swelled to more than twenty people.
We left in a cavalcade of about five cars. When we stopped at a rather fancy eating place, we stayed for about an hour eating hors d’oeuvre and drinking wine. Then we abruptly left and went to a smaller restaurant and had more of the same, only the food there was uncooked and I was surprised when we were presented with numerous small dishes, including one of chopped pieces of calamari tentacles. This going from restaurant to restaurant went on for some time always accompanied by the crew and their wives singing and laughing. I soon lost any sense of time, retaining only the wonderful feeling that I was having a superb time.
Suddenly, the car I was riding in stopped in front of my hotel and I was pushed out with screams of laughter. I found myself standing alone on the sidewalk with a half glass of whiskey in my hand and the realization that the “lunch” was over and that it was one o’clock in the morning.
As the car pulled away from me, the front car window was rolled down and someone yelled,
“Ask the women at the front desk for some po pos.”
