Christopher Buckley: ‘I Was Deck Boy Aboard a Norwegian Tramp Freighter’
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 11.15.10 | 4:33 PM ET
In 1970, Buckley shipped out for a year of adventure. His remembrance in the Atlantic is beautiful:
I remember standing in the crow’s nest as we entered the misty Panama Canal, and the strange sensation as the 4,000-ton ship rose higher and higher inside the lock. I remember dawn coming up over the Strait of Malacca; ragamuffin kids on the dock in Sumatra laughing as they pelted us with bananas; collecting dead flying fish off the deck and bringing them to our sweet, fat, toothless Danish cook to fry up for breakfast. I remember sailing into Hong Kong harbor and seeing my first junk; steaming upriver toward Bangkok, watching the sun rise and set fire to the gold-leafed pagoda roofs; climbing off the stern down a wriggly rope ladder into a sampan, paddling for dear life across the commerce-mad river into the jungle, where it was suddenly quiet and then suddenly loud with monkey-chatter and bird-shriek, the moonlight lambent on the palm fronds.
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
