Below is a monologue heard while finishing my sixth beer at Danny’s bar in Westview. I find it a fitting new year’s Eve post. The man is about 31 and is very strongly built with an iron wrestler’s grip and ham hock shoulders, under a tight red, thermal shirt.

It used to be great, being a Coastie. But it started to change just before Covid in 2019. Two things happened to keep me from re-upping. It would be easy to stay in the Great Lakes your whole career. Nobody wants it. To far north, cold.

The Great Lakes

In 2014 it was the first time in like sixty years that the Great Lakes froze over. It was a big news story. I was one of the youngest on board and it wasn’t my shift. I was on a cutter with a barge. For ice breaking we’d leave that barge behind. But the Captain said, “Get Smith up here,” because I had steady hands.

The lady news reporter for Night Line, a national show, is on board up in the pilot house. We all have sun glasses on from the ice. [Points out of an imaginary pilot house window.] The white glare will blind you. I was pulled up there and didn’t have mine on. It’s getting dark early, like five, six. The Captain is looking over my shoulder asking me if I can see the marker and I’m pointing it out. Then it occurs to him since he had been distracted by the lady reporter, that it was dark and he had his shades on. It was one of those uh-o moments when five guys in the pilot house all slip their shades onto their head!

The funny thing was, we had ordered bison testicles for dinner. You do this ahead of time, and if you don’t use the commissary budget, it gets eaten by the Guard. We had also been out drinking all night in Buffalo. When we see the video my hand is on the Captain’s Wheel—you use the throttle of the wheel, but on ice, the wheel is the way to go. You can see a bar stamp from like a dozen different bars on the back of my hand—well, we’re sailors!

Erie is the worst. The ice breaker is shaped like a football to begin with and that lake, aside from being a sess pool, is so shallow that when you are sailing west to east, or west to Detroit you take squalls broadside. We were also using all old stuff stolen from the Navy. My boat was made in 1962! That included the navigation equipment.

We had this new gung ho, “Go Guard” captain on board and he wanted to override the auto pilot, which is sketchy as shit, during that moment when the semi-intelligent rudder bearing on its coarse is overridden and this guy is, saying, “Here, no there.” While that is happening we get hit by the squall and go pilot house over, in the water. We thought we were going down! We had 14 people down puking. I was brought up—it was all hands on deck—and we had enough men not puking to right her. There is not a lot you can do while heaving your guts up.

Then the female thing. We only had one female sailor, 4’ 10” and 90 pounds. She was great with the communications. But if you were in the water and had to have her throw you a line, you were going down. She could only cast 32 feet! Sweet girl, but she avoided the use of force training. Not all of us are certified law enforcement on the lakes—or weren’t. This started as Hamilton’s revenue cutter service, going after smugglers.

Eventually the captain was like, “All of us means all of us,” so she has to get certified in boarding and use of force, my backup! And its shit show. She could not handle getting maced—and she was my back up. But, fortunately, when you are boarding on The Lakes, in the Chesapeake, its the drunkest assholes on the water holding up their life preservers and glad to see you so they don’t drown.

Erie is terrible, scares most people away with the waves and the squalls. Huron is a really nice lake. Michigan is great. It is amazing how clear the water is. [Shows us a smart phone video of the crew diving and swimming.] You can see the screws of the cutter 200 feet off under water. Superior is just as clear. It freaks you out though, because it’s so deep. We have a beacon on the boat that tells you when the bottom is too deep for your anchor to hit bottom, which is 500 feet, and its going off all the time in Superior.

The Chesapeake

So, I’m senior sailor on a Chesapeake cutter and we get this part timer, weekend guardsman, who has gone full time and outranks me and he’s a Go Guard type. It has been stressed all through training that we were not supposed to write tickets as a priority, that we were there to save lives and if you are gong to be heavy handed with tickets drunks will be unlikely to call you in.

So, this new captain, who is in command at the moment, but I can pull rank in a pinch, he tells me that his goal was to be the first man to write a ticket for navigating under the influence. It is a separate crime from operating the boat under the influence. There is this older couple who are drunk on their pontoon and their sixteen year old son, who is perfectly capable, is driving them in. We board and he is asking the father how his son is going to know where to go, trying to walk him into a navigating under the influence charge. I interceded and told the son, because you can see the parking lot! “We are going there. You are staying on my bumper,” and a canceled their cruise. The captain and the father were pissed. But after I took the father aside and told him he was being set up for a navigation charge he understood. I told him he could wait two hours and go out again.

So, just before Covid, we have in invasion of this cop mentality, this ticket writing priority, which was against our basic training. Drugs in the Chesapeake, we intercepted them in container ships out at sea and sunk them. Just bring a sample of the dope in. We did have a boarding party out in the Atlantic that got doused with a five gallon bucket of liquid cocaine. That was so sketchy we began to be issued Narcan, and told to save it for personnel and not for use on civilians.

What really convinced me to leave, was a use of force clinic. It’s all about wrestling for the normal boarding party. We are not supposed to be shooting people from fifty feet. We are on board. So the two Guard Cops, the training officers, who this is all they do, they are not even sailors, are demonstrating arrests, two officers on one subject. They asked for a volunteer from our crew that was going to wear the red man suit and fight all out. The crew were all pushing our Captain, who was a stand up, old school, hard core guy, “Put Smith in!” because I had wrestled my entire life. Our school did not have a good basketball team, but a great wrestling team.

These guys are the boarding party, like me and my 90 pound female back up! I’m the bad guy in this padded suit and they can punch and kick and do whatever they want. They have the plastic training guns in the holsters, and its on! It was really a lot of fun. They couldn’t wrestle for shit and I’m national level, right? So, after a little bit, I’m going for them. After about five minutes I have them stacked up, these two bad ass cops, and I’m sitting on them stacked one on top of the other: and I have both their plastic guns!

They wanted to cite me, to have me broken back in rank and brought up on assault! My Captain was not having it. But it made me think, if I re-upped and I had a Captain like the Nav Ticket prick, that would have been it.

So, I’m a plumber, keeping what’s left of Western Civilization from drowning in its own shit.

Name’s Tyler, sir, nice to meet you.