The Chief spent his whole Navy career on ships. The only shore duty he ever had was the diving barge in San Diego and that was afloat. So when we left Hawaii in 1962 to return to San Diego, he assumed he would get another ship to finish out his 20. Wrong. He was assigned to North Island NAS to a desk...in the safety office. No more diving, or metal craft, or any of the things he loved about the Navy...just a whole lot of the stuff he hated. Paperwork. Desks. And worst of all...he was made the chief safety inspector on the base. THE guy everyone hated worse than the Master at Arms or the Marines. So his last two years were not the happy last ship he anticipated. And retiring on a base meant you were lumped in with all the other guys that were retiring at the same time and had one ceremony for them all. On a ship, when a chief retires, man...it is a whingding HOA. He played it off like it didn't mean anything...but it did and we (loyal subjects that we were) knew it.
So the group ceremony was on a Friday. Saturday afternoon, the Chief began to have a private celebration...how is that different than any other Saturday, you ask? Well...this Saturday the Chief was no longer the Chief...he was (shudder) a civilian. Long about early evening, I , with my two best buddies, came into the house for some reason or other in preparation for an evening of the time honored Southern California tradition...cruising. (Back in the day we jumped in cars and drove for hours in search of cars full of girls to flirt with ..nowadays "cruising" has a different meaning...let's not confuse the two, please.)
The Chief was well into his solo celebration when we arrived. During the normal small talk required of such occasions, one of my friends asked the Chief if he was going to miss the sea. He started to try to describe to us what the sea had meant to him. "The Sea is a beautiful thing..." he started...describing flat horizons, white sand beaches on tropical islands...the glassy stillness of the Antarctic Ocean...slow rollers slamming the coast of Australia...the smell of the Sargasso Sea...jumping dolphins playing in the bow wave...seeing squalls in the distance...the ice cap in Greenland...ice bergs...how a breeze would pick up and start forming white caps on the surface...the roll and pitch of the deck...how a stiffening wind would start to snatch the tops off of the white caps and send stinging spray across the deck.
As he went on, he became more intense. Waving his arms as he tried to make us picture the whitecaps building into waves...the wind gusting into the superstructure and causing the above decks to shudder with it's power...then the troughs would form between the waves doubling their size. The ship would have to steer right into the waves to keep from being capsized...racing down the backside of giants up to 30 feet tall only to plow bow first into the next monster...tons of green water roaring over the decks stripping away anything not secured properly and lots of things that were. Winds howling so loud you had to yell below decks to be heard. Midnight dark in the early afternoon...the sheer power of the raging water could tear a steel ship in two...had put more than one good ship into mothballs in Philly or Norfolk with bent keels...and many more sent to the bottom with all hands.
By this time he had gone from the nostalgic, misty eyed, almost quiet retiree who began this answer to a mirror of the sea he was discribing. He paused, eyes wide, sweat on his upper lip and brow, breathless and just a little desparate...then he yelled, "The sea is a terrible thing!"
My buddies respected my Chief and were polite enough to hold their laughter until we were out in the car.
There you go, HBW. I used to love telling this story because the old sailor matched the sea as he told his tale. The more dangerous the sea became, the more animated and loud the Chief became. My buddies and I had many a guffaw over it and variations of it embellished by teenage sillies. But anymore it is just sad. The Chief died in September of 1997. I later found out that Mike, buddy #1 died about the same time. Cuck, buddy #2, died the next July. The last time I saw Mike was 1970. The last time I saw Chuck, was when I was home for the Chief's funeral. We had lunch together and kicked around old times and making some new times. We went over to the Chief's house and sat around remembering stuff like a couple of old gascantations do...Chuck pointed to the dining room that used to be the living room and said, "That's where he told us about the sea." We both looked over there then smiled at each other and in unison said, "The sea is a terrible thing."