Best Summer Job - Sailing the High Seas at 16

I’m a little surprised that the Web isn’t crawling with sites reporting on details of the best summer jobs ever. Given that millions of North American youth are entering this temporary job market every year, I thought there would be much more cyberspace activity recounting exploits of adventure, good fortune, quirkiness, or incredible earnings.

I’ve been giving some thought to those summer job days as my 17-year-old daughter has recently been sizing things up in a trendy footwear store. After pounding the pavement looking to earn some money and gain valuable experience and life skills, she’s landed on her feet serving customers looking for that elusive pair of je ne sais quoi.

Back in the mid-70s, I had a number of great summer jobs – ones that got me away from home, paid me well, or offered an adventurous twist. There’s no doubt though that I snagged the best of the best in 1974 as a steward on board the Canadian Coast Guard Ships the Edward Cornwallis and the Louis S. St. Laurent.

I was still 16 when I signed on to the Edward Cornwallis in drydock at Ferguson Industries in Pictou, Nova Scotia. My arrival in front of the ship’s purser on a scorching early June day was the culmination of serendipitous good luck.

Ditching classes that day with my best pal, we ran into two older friends who had dropped out of school a couple of years earlier. They were high – no pot required – floating along, euphoric on just having landed full time jobs on a boat down at the shipyard. They said we should get our asses down there to see if there were any more going around. We did. There were. Right place, right time. Our seafaring days were about to begin.

That summer I cleaned heads, swabbed decks, served and cleared crew and officers meals, waited on the captain’s table, did duty steward on night watch, buttered toast, washed dishes and polished so much brass I was verging on addiction to the solvent. My five months in the service of the coast guard paled in comparison to Richard Dana’s exploits in Two Years Before The Mast but it certainly qualified as an adventure for a small town teen in the 70s.

I had the cruises of my life during those few months. South of the arctic circle the weather was spectacular and the waters calm. Bobbing off the Nova Scotia coast or chugging up the St. Lawrence en route from Montreal to Halifax was a sweet way to make money. On more than one occasion, between wave swells when I wasn’t in a brasso-induced stupor, I had to pinch myself to see if indeed it was all really happening.

Well it turned out that it was. There was a whole lot of seafaring manliness going the rounds. Tiny was a dear archetype who stood about six foot two and could unhurriedly pace his way through a quart of rum while pegging to victory at crib. He’d push back from the table with no swagger and not a hint of a stagger, not one unbalanced step even in rough seas – he could replicate this night after night and show no outward signs of being in less than top form the mornings after - routinely performing his heavy and sometimes dangerous seaman duties on deck. Tiny’s gentle quiet masked an unspoken promise of menace if his peace or person were disturbed.

Gary, the meanest-spirited son of a bitch on board, was always looking for someone to bully, to fleece, to bilk. If your money was in his pockets at the end of a night of cards and you were no match for him physically, his goading and gloating were sure to endear him to you for life.

One night though it went a bit awry, not at all according to script. Following a gambling dispute, he punched Dougie the steward – the youngest of the crew - in the face and returned to his room calling it a night. Moments later he had to barricade himself in because Dougie arrived wielding the largest cutting knives from the galley wildly screaming that he’d “kill the fucker” that had humiliated him. They managed to co-exist for the rest of the voyage but only just.

Then there was our very own movie-of-the-week - a berserker engine room oiler who thought he had the perfect strategy to get off the boat and flown south. He decided to barricade himself in his room with plenty of alcohol and refuse to work.

Neither the Chief Engineer, nor the Old Man bought into his delusion. Our oiler’s stash of special elixirs - lemon heart rum 151 overproof and beer – couldn’t stand up to his prodigious thirst. Before too long there wasn’t enough monkey juice left to fill a shot glass.

Just before running dry, our stupefied oiler lad exploded out of his room, a couple of lurches beyond the pale and drunkenly pawed at fire axe number 42 quickly liberating it from the bulkhead. He waved number 42 about like a crazed troll and chased a couple of the crew around the laundry room. There were a few abortive lunges but no personal injuries resulted from his sortie. It was a strange escapade, a rampaging, axe brandishing surge of madness that no one saw coming.

Our oiler star never did resume work, nor did he get flown south. He did the whole North trip secluded in his cabin. By the time we got back to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia he owed a tidy sum of money to Her Majesty as the Old Man had decided to charge him room and board for his leisure cruise to the arctic. This former shipmate went on to later notoriety and court-imposed incarceration following an armed hold-up of a Dartmouth Holiday Inn.

The coast guard was a world apart, tiny communities adrift at sea. I’ll recall some more of my best summer job ever in the coming days.