Ship ahoy

My new year started with the flu, which came over me somewhere between the Christmas celebrations and my dear friend's birthday/New Year's party.  Then, in that same interval, my grandmother died, as unexpectedly as one can die when one is 86 years old.  I flew home to Kentucky on a couple of days' notice, with a confabulation of the normal aggravations and misunderstandings of a hastily booked cross-country trip, to spend one of the coldest weeks in recent memory at that sad family reunion.  I returned to Oregon sooner than I wanted, lost the more stable of my two jobs within a couple of weeks, and started a new one a week after that in an office in one of the buildings in this photograph.

It's been a rough start.  It's too easy to say that, like the winter weather, my year so far has been full of unpredictable storms and treacherous conditions.

One of the things the new job affords me is a lunch break walk along the waterfront, if I so choose.  So here's this shot, early afternoon, with that peculiar kind of polarized clear light that settles in just after a storm, while the clouds are still dark and low and you can taste the rain in the air if not feel it drizzling on your skin.  The oldest building in Portland, of course, is there on the left, shackled in one or more of its mid-century remodels, and clumsy in its somewhat modern shell.  And that mast, almost like a land-bound lighthouse standing against the heavy sky.

Even the casual passerby knows it's the mast of the USS Oregon.  That's easy enough with a quick look at the signage, and it makes sense that we would have the mast of a ship with such a name in a public park in Portland.  The spiffy paint almost makes it look new, or at least no older than many of the ships sailing even now under the US flag.  This mast, however, dates back to when the Oregon was built by a San Francisco company in the early 1890s, and was launched in 1893, with Daisy Ainsworth of the Portland Ainsworth clan as its sponsor (interesting side note: as the daughter of a steamboat magnate, Miss Ainsworth had a riverboat that was named after her as well).  The two accompanying stacks are in storage elsewhere in town.

The ship's story gets interesting almost from the moment she left the dry docks.  She spent a little time at first in the Pacific, but the Spanish-American War was calling almost even before she felt the water on her hull, and within two years of her commission the infamous explosion of the Maine occurred in the Havana harbor.  The Oregon was needed, but she was needed on the other side of the continent.

http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/h79000/h79900k.jpg

The shortest route, even just 100 years ago, was around the tip of South America and through the Straits of Magellan.  And if you learned anything about the Straits of Magellan in your history classes, you probably learned just how treacherous a route that is.  It was no different for the Oregon.  Witness a small excerpt from the diary of G. W. Robinson, a fireman aboard the ship:

Apr 8th; Still bucking head seas that come clear over the turrets. I never saw a ship take such seas before, if she was any thing else but a battle ship a sea like some of these would crush her like an egg.  Came near losing two of our men today, the Carpenter and Blacksmith, as it was they were washed into the Scuppers and badly injured. All boats have been thoroughly secured long ago, and man who falls overboard now is gone beyond all hope. A life boat couldn’t live in the weather we have had any way.
Have had fire in the bunkers nearly all the way. Its just Purgatory.

In fact, at one point, the needs of the ship were so dire that the boilers were given the only fresh water remaining on the ship, and the crew was asked to drink the warm processed water that was left over.  The crew consented, and pushed on.

A slightly less romanticized image, from the day she left for the Atlantic. http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/h79000/h79900k.jpg 

The Oregon gained some fame for making the trip from California to Florida in just 66 days, a good bit shorter than the average tour route tracing the tip of Argentina, which, not too many years before, was considered speedy if it was twice as long.  14,000 miles.  It's nothing to sneeze at in the world before airplanes, before interstate highways, before the diesel engine, and even before most gasoline-powered engines.  Heck; it's nothing to sneeze at now.

The Oregon became symbolic in the war-driven public mind of the possible successes of modern industry because of this journey.  Simultaneously, she also became a reminder that even our best, even our best which far exceeded our expectations, wasn't good enough.   It was the realization that even two months of sea time was too long to wait when assembling a navy which helped gain some of the last much-needed support for the completion of the Panama Canal, which shortened the coast-to-coast travel demands to less than a third of the distance it had been before, and perhaps a quarter of the time.

Think about this for a second: how many of us have gone jetting across the country on a day's notice, for personal reasons?  How many times has there been a situation outside of our immediate reach which demanded our presence, not next month, not next week, but as soon as possible?  Sure, the cost may hurt those of us without an excess of savings.  The flights may be delayed, the car rentals canceled, the accommodations uncertain.  But the point is, it's possible.  It's within our grasp.  The USS Oregon is remembered by this monument not just because of its name, but because of the role it played in making such trips even thinkable...before they were possible.