Philadelphia to Antwerp - Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World - page 3

these bags to the passengers' cabins, make sure everyone's safely on board, and then point the way to the
pasta buffet.
There's no such service as we board our freighter. Instead, a single Filipino deckhand, wearing a blue
jumpsuit and orange hardhat, leads us in a scramble a hundred feet or so up a temporary metal ladder that's
been lashed to the side of the ship. At the top of the ladder, we step over a yawning precipice and onto
the freighter's deck. Here we're briefly introduced to the ship's first and second officers—one German, the
other Romanian, both far too busy to pay us any mind. The deckhand leads us up a dimly lit interior stair-
case, then down a claustrophobic hallway lined with mysterious clamped hatches. He points to a door and
nods. Apparently, we've arrived at our cabin.
I actually prefer this gruff efficiency to the icky sycophancy of a cruise ship's hospitality workers. In
fact, Rebecca and I are sort of pleased that we're not—as we would be on a cruise ship—the central focus
and purpose of this journey. We're just two ancillary pieces of cargo that the crew needs to deliver safely.
Despite this lowly status, our cabin turns out to be relatively posh. It's high up in the ship's superstruc-
ture, with windows looking out in three directions. We have a bedroom, an en suite bathroom, and a private
sitting room with couches and a coffee table (all riveted to the floor, of course, so they won't tumble if
the ship starts pitching). There's even a brass plate on the outside of our door that says “Owner's Cabin.”
Given that this shipping line is based out of Hamburg, I can't help but imagine a portly German burgher
suddenly materializing to evict us and huffily reclaim his quarters.
Out our windows, we can watch the container-loading process. We've been told we'll be loading at least
five hundred containers before we leave. Each box is forty feet long, eight feet wide, and eight and a half
feet tall. The container stacks reach from the ship's deck far below us right up to our cabin windows' lower
edges. They stretch the length of a football field from the superstructure toward the ship's bow.
We go outside to a railing for a better look at the action. What's happening down on the loading dock
is like the wildest fantasy of a six-year-old boy. There's an entire fleet of large, deafeningly loud vehicles,
each one with its own specialized job. They zip to and fro, hauling and lifting, beeping their safety signals
when they chunk into reverse.
To suss out the routine, I follow a single container waiting on the dock: First, an oversized forklift picks
up the container from the pavement and then places it on the back of a flatbed vehicle called a transport-
er. The transporter brings the container right alongside the ship, parking underneath one of the enormous
dock-mounted cranes. These cranes tower over the ship. They roll on tracks that run along the pier, parallel
to the freighter—so the crane can slide up toward the bow or back toward the stern to place the containers
in different rows.
High above us, the crane operator—suspended in his little glass-walled cockpit—looks down at the
transporter. He aims his four-cornered spreader bar (or, as I prefer to call it, “grabber”) so that it lines up
with and locks onto the four top corners of the container. Once the container gets lifted and maneuvered
out over the ship, the operator carefully lowers it down onto the deck. Meanwhile, another transporter rolls
into place. It has a new container ready for loading, impatiently awaiting the crane's attention.
An experienced crane operator can load twenty-five to thirty containers per hour—or about one every
other minute. Today we have three cranes loading simultaneously. Along with the coordinated movements
of the transporters and the forklifts, the whole scene makes for a synchronized ballet—a ballet in which the
objects hoisted gracefully aloft are not ninety-five-pound women, but thirty-five-ton steel boxes.
This dock choreography repeats, over and over, for the next several hours. When we've seen our fill, we
retire to our cabin to unpack, settle in, and eventually drift off to sleep. Around midnight, I'm stirred by the
sound of the ship's engine firing up. I feel thrusters push us away from the dock. The propeller whirs to life
and, gathering momentum, we start chugging down the Delaware.