January 14, 2001
Long Beach, California (pt. 1 of 2)
Steve and Cat, my Los Angeles hosts, drove me to the
Long Beach port in the afternoon. I was nervous — we
had no firm evidence that the ship — ANZDL's "Direct
Kiwi" bound for New Zealand and Australia — had not
already left. The last information I had received
suggested that departure would be later that night,
but there had been conflicting reports all week.
The berths on Terminal Island were not clearly marked
from the freeway, but somehow we stumbled onto Berth
302. The "Direct Kiwi" was there, surrounded by an
astonishing, gigantic industrial landscape. Mounds of
coal were across the parking lot, feeding into giant
pipelines, or perhaps just adorning them. Huge cranes
resembling Imperial Walkers lifted containers off of
trucks and fed them to my ride, as well as to the
dozens of other nearby ships. And all around Berth 302
were similar setups. There seemed to be hundreds of
them, all busy with various transfers. The ships
carried the flags of many different countries, and the
crews were multinational. We were getting a look under
the hood of the infrastructure of the world.
It's there!
"Imperial Walker" cranes
I shouldered my way-too-heavy backpack and Steve took
my "just for the ship" bag of supplies. A shuttle bus
took us across the work area to the gangway.
Steve and Cat
"Excuse me," I stopped the first person I saw on
board, a young Russian man in a white uniform. "I am a
passenger on this ship. Where do I go?"
He took us to a man in street clothes, who didn't ask
for my name or my ticket. He just took us to my cabin,
room 408, four stories above the main deck. We passed
a lot of men on the way, and they all stared at me. I
was the new girl, a subject of curiosity. I was happy
for the rubber doorstop Cat had given me.
The cabin was small, twice as big as my bedroom back
in New York. The en suite bathroom was small but
immaculate, with mint green tile on the wall and
gray-green on the floor. There was a desk, a small
refrigerator, a phone for inter-ship calls, a
wardrobe, and a sitting area with a table. A framed
print of a shipwreck decorated the room. Two windows
looked out of the front of the boat. The cabinets and
door were lockable, and I was handed the many keys.
The mattress, Cat noted, was below the level of the
bed, a Captain's bed. Maybe it stops people from
rolling out of bed during bad weather.
Bad weather would be a problem. I get horribly
seasick at the slightest waves. Maybe this twenty days
on a ship thing wasn't such a good idea after all.
The ship at night
NEXT: Long Beach, CA part 2 of 2