Photo of the Captain Kidd Bar, Woods Hole, MA
Chapter One
"Once upon a time, there was a tavern, Where we used to raise a glass or two
Remember how we laughed away the hours, Think of all the great things we would do."
-"Those Were the Days," Gene Raskin, Mary Hopkin
It was late August 1978, 2:15 a.m., and I was sitting in the dark on the back porch of the bar while they kicked the last of the regulars out. We had to be down to the staff and selected inner circle before my going-away party could start. While waiting, I started to think about the next day. I would be taking a flight from Providence, Rhode Island, to Virginia, starting a whole new life in the U.S. Coast Guard. I thought about how often you pick up hints, see signs, and receive subtle messages that tell you when to make the big decisions.
I remembered my father saying, "What the hell’s wrong with you? Are you gonna work in a bar your whole life?" Not so subtle perhaps, but certainly a sign.
My reminiscence of Dad’s words of wisdom was interrupted when an eighteen-year-old celebrating his birthday decided he could join in the nightly after-hours party, staggering to the dark porch after bouncing off both door jambs of the four-foot-wide door. Backlit by the bar lights, the six-foot five bouncer, Bill Wixon, looked disturbingly like Frankenstein, even without the neck bolts. He was in hot pursuit of yesterday’s minor celebrating his induction into the drinking majority. Bill told the young man, "Come on, the night’s history. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here."
When order was restored, my mind wandered to the amazing day when I was a senior in high school and they lowered the drinking age to eighteen. I’m not sure of the logic behind the change in the law, but it went something like this: with the Vietnam War winding down, not enough eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-olds were dying, which was depressing the mortuary industry, so our lawmakers figured they could augment war fatalities with DUI deaths. By all statistical measures, their plan worked surprising well.
In response to the increased market, entrepreneurs started to buy old bars, nightclubs, and pubs. Two guys from Boston, Michael Shers and Bill Crowley, bought the Captain Kidd in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The first selectman, the New England equivalent of a town mayor, told them that, when the drinking age was twenty-one, nineteen-year-olds were drinking and now that the age limit had been lowered he didn’t want to see any seventeen-year-olds drinking. If the establishment got caught serving the under-aged, the bar would immediately lose its license. One night, when I was in the bar, they offered me a job as doorman because they figured that, as a high school senior, I knew approximately how old everybody was —my job was to keep the minors out. I remember once carding my high school English teacher just for the hell of it.
I had two other things going for me: I was a 240-pound defensive lineman, and my Uncle Arthur Robichaud was night captain of the Falmouth Police Department. In a pinch, a few connections wouldn’t hurt.
Before Sher and Crowley bought the bar, it was frequented by sailors, fishermen, Coast Guardsmen, and bikers. These entrepreneurs wanted to turn it into a preppy bar. The transition was bumpy.
The Captain Kidd Bar was named after the famous pirate, Captain William Kidd, who derived most of his notoriety from his protocol for dealing with classified information. Legend has it that, after he accumulated his bounty and buried it somewhere along the East Coast, he killed all his diggers under the concept that "dead men tell no tales." He was a highly literate sea captain who was a privateer in the employ of both King William III, a.k.a. King William the Turd as he was generally known by his subjects, and the colonial governor of New York. In fact, Captain Kidd, not unlike the pirates working there today, frequented Wall Street.
∞
The Captain Kidd was graced by a full-sized wall mural of the burying of the treasure, painted by Captain Joe, a very popular bartender and personality at the Casino Bar and Nightclub in Falmouth Heights. When I was six, Captain Joe once gave me a quarter after church. I always liked him after that. The bar’s front door opened on Water Street, the main street of Woods Hole, and the bar was a long, narrow room, behind which was a screened-in porch standing on pilings over Eel Pond. The bar itself —ornate with brass and marble and dark mahogany, a marble bar-rail, a beautiful mirror, and ornate finials —Rumor had it came from a 1930s speak-easy in Baltimore. The tables and chairs were far less valuable. The seats were old barrels covered with carpet, and the tables were just bigger barrels covered with varnished wood.
The dining room was along the street, and people wondered why they hadn’t built it facing the harbor. The original owner explained that his patrons were all fisherman and sailors and most of them were sick of a water view. They wanted to look at land and cars, but mostly they wanted to watch girls walking down the street.
The jukebox selection was eclectic: some BB King and Hank Williams for the rustic clientele, and for the preppies that came to watch the rustics, Springsteen, Gordon Lightfoot, James Taylor, and Jimmy Buffett. For the late-stage hippies we featured Dylan, Cat Stevens, and for irony, Loudon Wainwright III. Thank God, no Barry Manilow in this man’s bar, except… of course… "Weekend In New England." Recognizing that they were becoming the main attraction, many of local rough characters started going down the street to the Leeside.
∞
My six closest Kidd colleagues finally joined me out on the screened porch to commemorate the evening of my matriculation into the real world. Smelling the familiar mix of salt air and stale beer, I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and thought, "What the hell am I doing? I’m starting to feel seasick already."
Being the youngest of five kids, no matter how dire the situation and no matter what the odds, I’d learned to always fight back, which was the only thing my brothers respected enough to quit torturing me and let me live. I reminded myself that I was signed into the military, and there was no backing out in my family. I had to go.
We started to tell our old stories again. Even though we knew them by heart, they still made us laugh until we cried. The bar crew had earned the nickname "Captain Kidd Rescue Squad." Once, a sailor had a little too much to drink and took a sharp right on the gangplank leading to his ship and fell between the ship and the wharf. His companion went for help. Bill Wixon and Terry Smith, fellow bartenders/bouncers, heard the call and raced to the dock. They climbed down the dock ladder and were able to retrieve the unconscious former patron. Pulling a 200-pound person up a ninety-degree ladder that’s covered with slippery algae was no mean feat, and they had issues with his head getting stuck between the ladder rungs on the way up. Terry, who was a trained EMT, was able to revive him on the dock and bring him back to life. Terry Smith was Falmouth’s star hockey goalie and later played for Boston College, but this was perhaps his greatest save. The merchant mariner came out of it with no more than a bad hangover and a confusing series of bruises on his chin and forehead.
Steve Dodigan, another bouncer, was driving home at 2:00 in the morning when he saw smoke pouring out of a shed attached to a house on Woods Hole Road. He stopped his car and started peering through the window to see if anyone was in the house and saw a woman sleeping. He banged on the door and started yelling to wake the lady. She was so terrified of a huge guy banging on door she hid and wouldn’t come out. We enjoyed telling Steve that his looks could keep woman from coming out of a burning house. Steve insisted that she yet to smell smoke. Steve reverted to plan B and then dashed off to the fire station and banged on their door. They quickly got out to the house and convinced her to leave and put out the fire. Rescues are never easy.
∞
And then the conversation on the screened porch turned to Bill Wixon’s less auspicious rescue, one I could eloquently recite due to my excellent vantage point from the shoreline. He had spotted another one of our former patrons struggling in the water behind the Kidd and jumped in to pull him out, but the guy started fighting with him. Bill ended up pulling off his arm, which it turns out was prosthetic, a fact that Bill remembered one second after having the shit scared out of him. It was fun to hear a former professional football player scream like a little girl. He was probably strong enough to actually rip an arm off, and for a moment there he clearly thought he had. He and the patron were still flailing around in the water when Bill realized they could just stand up. So he pulled the guy onto his feet and walked back to shore with the guy cursing him all the way. Not everyone wants to be rescued.
∞
Not everyone liked the Captain Kidd Rescue Squad. Once, after a particularly vicious fight resulting in an unceremonious patron-bounce into the gutter, the bouncers and bartenders had locked the door and settled down for a calm nightcap when they saw a pickup truck pull up in front of the Kidd. Just as somebody said, "Hey, doesn’t that truck belong to…," they heard the sound of a two-stroke engine starting up and wondered what it was. As sawdust suddenly shot across the floor, followed by a chainsaw blade emerging through the locked front door, all employees were headed for the unmarked emergency rear exit, the windows overlooking Eel Pond. Four huge grown men perched themselves on the windowsills like giant pigeons, ready for a desperate escape leap into the pond. They figured a chainsaw wouldn’t work under water. The assailant simply carved a large X in the door and went home to sleep it off. He was probably going for the mark of Zorro, but a person should never drink before spelling with large power tools. The assailant, a carpenter/fisherman but not the peaceful kind, was barred from the Captain Kidd for a month, and he had to pay for the door. The manager even let him install it himself to keep the price down.
The Captain Kidd Rescue Squad didn’t have as rich a history of saving lives as the U.S. Coast Guard did, but the intent was there and their hearts were in the right place. Everyone wants to be a hero. I particularly wanted to be able to save someone. I’d lost my mother that year.
This should have been a good year, graduating from college and getting engaged, but my mother wasn’t there to see my graduation and she wouldn’t be there to help plan the wedding. None of us had a chance to save her, but it would have changed everything if we could have. My mother was always the idealist in the family. Her favorite quote was President John F. Kennedy’s "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." My being a Coast Guard officer would have made her proud.
I shouldn’t be hesitating to take this step, I told myself as the others continued to tell stories. It’s time to go and take that shot at saving lives, in respect to her memory.
When each of my brothers had come of age, I remember that Mom recited from the Bible: When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish ways. While not an exact quote, it got the message across. I had been working for five summers. I was a repeat offender, a person who took an extra summer before joining the real world.
∞
Normally, there would have been a lot more people at my party, but they had thrown my big going-away party the previous summer. I did not attend. It was going to be a surprise party, and the person assigned to take me there failed at his duty, felled by too much ice tea, Long Island-style. In the bar business, all parties start at 2:00 a.m., and my friend who was supposed to take me to the surprise venue had passed out at about midnight. I had gone home, a little disappointed that nobody threw me a party, but perhaps it was good that I missed the party. I avoided about thirty cream pies, the would-be hurlers, paid assassins —I mean pie assassins —lying in wait for me.
The truth is I deserved the pie treatment. The prior summer, I was paid to protect the judges at a "gong show" talent contest at a local bar. The judges got wind that they were going to be hit by pies, so they hired me to guard them. Before the show, the pie-throwing act approached me and told me the only talent they had was in ambushing people with pies, and if they didn’t get the judges, the show would be a flop and nobody would laugh. So, for the sake of show business, I allowed the pie assassins to attack the talent judges, as long as I had two of my own to throw.
On the occasion of my first going-away party, the pie assassins finally gave up waiting for me and the whole event turned into a pie-flinging orgy. The judges, who were from Boston, were hungry for revenge, but the next morning I went away to college for the fall football season. I was saved by the mistake of someone with diminished capacity. Maybe I was just saved by pure serendipity.
In the beginning of the season at Brown University, one of my teammates asked if I would switch numbers with him. His high school number was the same as mine and he wanted to maintain it. I was willing to switch, so he proudly wore our shared high school number and I became Brown Bruin #71.
Toward the end of the season, as I ran through the tunnel at Harvard Stadium, I saw a big commotion behind me. Some Boston ticket-holders were getting kicked out of the stadium and my teammate was covered in cream pie, almost obscuring our venerable #70.
I’d innocently escaped another assassination attempt, dodged the Boston cream bullet, but I was living on borrowed time. The pie wars got out of hand and went from good-natured cream up the nose to the potential for broken noses from excessive delivery force. The word "arrest" was starting to be tossed about, and so the pies stopped flying. The Cape Cod bars figured that, if the Viet Cong and the Americans could call a truce, we could, too. Thus, I successfully avoided getting hurt in two major conflicts.
As I sat out on the Captain Kidd deck with my friends, overlooking the water and telling sea stories, I realized that I was starting to sound like Richard Dreyfuss in his role as the marine biologist trying to compete with Robert Shaw’s character, Quint, in the movie Jaws. While they sat there chumming and waiting for Jaws to attack, Quint retold the story of the greatest shark attack in human history: the USS Indianapolis had just completed the top secret mission of transporting key components of the nuclear bomb when she was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. The cruiser lost 300 men in the attack, and 880 men entered the water without lifeboats. Because it was a top-secret mission, and because of the incompetence of the commanders who received the mayday, no one responded to their cry for help. Four long days went by, and more than 500 men died from being ripped apart by white-tip sharks or from dehydration. When Quint finished his shark tale, he crushed his beer can. When Richard Dreyfuss told his much tamer story, he crushed his paper coffee cup for emphasis. I wondered whether I would ever have a story that would justify crushing a beer can after the telling, or even a story worthy of crushing a paper cup.
There had been another going-away party the night before the storytelling session, where I said goodbye to my fiancée and my family. Tonight’s party was just my Kidd colleagues, who happened to include my sister Bethanie, a part-time waitress and full-time scientist. Bethanie chimed in that her fiancé was under contract with the Marine Biological Laboratories, so he was out in the middle of the night chumming for sharks to see what attracted them.
I said, "I know what attracts sharks: blood in the water or swimming at night; at least that’s what I always imagined when I was in the ocean and couldn’t see what was heading my way"Bethanie replied "That’s what people think, but blood attracts them from far away…it’s electric current that attracts them up close and makes them attack. The Navy is spending millions trying to figure out exactly which currents sharks react to so that they can stop them from attacking their underwater remote sensing buoys."
Bethanie’s day job was draining blood from horseshoe crabs. She missed her big shot at fame one night at the Kidd when a guy ordered a drink while he was waiting for the Martha’s Vineyard Ferry. He asked my pretty blonde sister, "How would you like to get eaten by a shark?" She instantly replied, "How would you like to get slapped by a waitress?" As it turned out, the dude was part of the advance team from California for the movie Jaws, which was filmed on the Vineyard. She still claims that was the worst pickup line ever, although I kind of liked it.
My sister had moved back home to help when my mother died, and she was working two jobs while trying to keep Dad company. She probably would have thrown over the waitressing job for the movie spot in a heartbeat. With four brothers, she was always good at playing the victim, and she would have been a perfect fit because there was a history of show business in our family. She must have watched the movie version of Benchley’s Jaws with a profound sense of regret mixed in between the moments of theater terror.
The highlight of my family’s show-business background was Dad’s stint as a professional wrestler before World War II. During the day, my father was a butcher at the A&P in Nantucket, but he spent his nights in the Nantucket makeshift open-air wrestling arena. His stage name was Blondie Ryan. While blonde, he definitely wasn’t Irish.
This was not Greco-Roman wrestling. This is the kind of wrestling where the bad-guy wrestlers spit into the crowd and only eye-gouge when the referee is not looking and the crowd is. Keeping in character, Dad preferred the role of villain. There were nights when the Nantucket fog was so thick in the open arena that the crowds could barely see the wrestlers. It was a great place to drink fresh homemade beer, meet new people, engage in lively conversation, and then end the perfect evening with a small brawl. Often, because they really thought my father was evil, he would have to fight his way out of the arena.
∞
We were still drinking and sitting on the porch as the sky started to lighten, and we all realized that my nights at the Kidd were over for a while. It was time to leave, and all my old friends, these people I had grown up with, were now giving me slightly boozy advice.
"Don’t volunteer for anything."
"No more knocking people down. They take that seriously in the real world."
"Be safe."
"Do what you’re told and nobody gets hurt."
"All good dogs are black." This was from my brother’s best friend, Steve Dodigan, the other Kidd bartender/bouncer. He was referring to his dog, Jet. He and Jet grew up in my house as much as in his own, so I had to agree. In fact, in Falmouth and Woods Hole and Martha’s Vineyard, nearly all mutts were black, a fact memorialized by the Black Dog Tavern and hundreds of thousands of Black Dog T-shirts worn as far away as Abu Dhabi. Being black is a real advantage for a dog that is in the cold water a lot because it can warm up quickly through solar energy. But it’s not such an advantage in the Arizona desert or for a roaming dog when he encounters his number one predator, the car, at night. Only the most vigilant black dogs survive.
My brother Bill had already given his advice before he went out to sea: "Keep your head down and don’t stick out. Then you’ll be fine." As I was leaving, all my friends wished me luck and told me to be careful, but I wasn’t worried.
The night before, my brother Chris had given me the advice that stuck with me the most. Chris, a safety expert who worked for the U.S. Navy in New London, Connecticut, said, "Even though you’re in the military, if you don’t smoke, you don’t drink and drive, and you wear your seatbelt, you’ll probably be safer on average than most people in the United States."
So we all staggered to our cars and drove home.
The Error Chain
The truth is, we really don’t understand the probability and the negative impact of hazards, also known as risk. If we are what economists call rational humans, we generally prefer to avoid risk —especially when death or grave bodily harm might be the result if we don’t avoid it. However, we are instinctively driven to take risks for fun, for personal gain, for the sake of others, or for duty. My dad used to tell my brothers and me, "Don’t take stupid chances."
Good advice, but at the moment when one must make a choice, it’s hard to distinguish a stupid chance from a regular chance. The difference is only, and always, brutally clear in retrospect. While mistakes were tolerated in my family, repeating mistakes was not.
However, most of us will take chances to rescue another human being, even if that person took a stupid chance to end up in danger. Bill Wixon did rescue the amputee, so it wasn’t a true error chain incident, but Bill’s save was actually harder than the other two —it just wouldn’t make a good newspaper article.
It’s hard to rescue the unwilling or the panicked, let alone someone who qualifies as both, even in shallow water. In fact, almost two-thirds of all drowning deaths occur in water that is not over the victim’s head. Most of these happen in one of the most dangerous places in the world —the bathroom. These victims are people who can’t stand up: the baby, the invalid, and the drunk. The most unfortunate individuals in this statistical group didn’t drown in the bathtub. An unlucky segment of this population drowned in the toilet. What are the odds you could drown in toilet? Not bad, when you consider that most people who hug the toilet, taking the porcelain bus for a spin, are really drunk and on the verge of passing out.
Unknown or unfamiliar conditions certainly play a role in most major accidents, but so does alcohol, which plays a role in almost 45 percent of all accidental deaths. Statistics tell us it’s not good odds to be a drunk invalid alone in the bathroom. My Uncle Frank pointed to another perspective on this statistic: "Since most people drink, it’s those darn teetotallers who cause the majority of accidents."
All the people who were saved by the Captain Kidd Rescue Squad were drunk, saved by the not-so-sober. Who else is up at 2:00 a.m. to save anybody? Diminished capacity rules the night.
Chapter Two
I remember talking to my Uncle Frank, whose son Franny had joined the Marines, about joining the Coast Guard. He said it made sense for me because I was tall and if the boat sank I could wade back to shore. Compared to the Marines, the Coast Guard had a reputation for being a relaxed branch of the armed forces. However, the Guard brass had recently decided to take discipline more seriously, beginning with inductee training by experienced Army and Marine drill sergeants. This information was only revealed to me about one month after I signed up for OCS. The importance of timely intelligence was immediately clear to me. The Coast Guard personnel comprise less than 2 percent of the total U.S. military in uniform. The Coast Guard is greatly overshadowed by the Navy, which is twenty times larger. Now that I was signing up, I was about to agree to the proposition that was the unofficial motto of the U.S. Coast Guard: "You have to go out; you don’t have to come back."
... BEARING DRIFT
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"Once upon a time, there was a tavern, Where we used to raise a glass or two
Remember how we laughed away the hours, Think of all the great things we would do."
-"Those Were the Days," Gene Raskin, Mary Hopkin
It was late August 1978, 2:15 a.m., and I was sitting in the dark on the back porch of the bar while they kicked the last of the regulars out. We had to be down to the staff and selected inner circle before my going-away party could start. While waiting, I started to think about the next day. I would be taking a flight from Providence, Rhode Island, to Virginia, starting a whole new life in the U.S. Coast Guard. I thought about how often you pick up hints, see signs, and receive subtle messages that tell you when to make the big decisions.
I remembered my father saying, "What the hell’s wrong with you? Are you gonna work in a bar your whole life?" Not so subtle perhaps, but certainly a sign.
My reminiscence of Dad’s words of wisdom was interrupted when an eighteen-year-old celebrating his birthday decided he could join in the nightly after-hours party, staggering to the dark porch after bouncing off both door jambs of the four-foot-wide door. Backlit by the bar lights, the six-foot five bouncer, Bill Wixon, looked disturbingly like Frankenstein, even without the neck bolts. He was in hot pursuit of yesterday’s minor celebrating his induction into the drinking majority. Bill told the young man, "Come on, the night’s history. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here."
When order was restored, my mind wandered to the amazing day when I was a senior in high school and they lowered the drinking age to eighteen. I’m not sure of the logic behind the change in the law, but it went something like this: with the Vietnam War winding down, not enough eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-olds were dying, which was depressing the mortuary industry, so our lawmakers figured they could augment war fatalities with DUI deaths. By all statistical measures, their plan worked surprising well.
In response to the increased market, entrepreneurs started to buy old bars, nightclubs, and pubs. Two guys from Boston, Michael Shers and Bill Crowley, bought the Captain Kidd in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The first selectman, the New England equivalent of a town mayor, told them that, when the drinking age was twenty-one, nineteen-year-olds were drinking and now that the age limit had been lowered he didn’t want to see any seventeen-year-olds drinking. If the establishment got caught serving the under-aged, the bar would immediately lose its license. One night, when I was in the bar, they offered me a job as doorman because they figured that, as a high school senior, I knew approximately how old everybody was —my job was to keep the minors out. I remember once carding my high school English teacher just for the hell of it.
I had two other things going for me: I was a 240-pound defensive lineman, and my Uncle Arthur Robichaud was night captain of the Falmouth Police Department. In a pinch, a few connections wouldn’t hurt.
Before Sher and Crowley bought the bar, it was frequented by sailors, fishermen, Coast Guardsmen, and bikers. These entrepreneurs wanted to turn it into a preppy bar. The transition was bumpy.
The Captain Kidd Bar was named after the famous pirate, Captain William Kidd, who derived most of his notoriety from his protocol for dealing with classified information. Legend has it that, after he accumulated his bounty and buried it somewhere along the East Coast, he killed all his diggers under the concept that "dead men tell no tales." He was a highly literate sea captain who was a privateer in the employ of both King William III, a.k.a. King William the Turd as he was generally known by his subjects, and the colonial governor of New York. In fact, Captain Kidd, not unlike the pirates working there today, frequented Wall Street.
∞
The Captain Kidd was graced by a full-sized wall mural of the burying of the treasure, painted by Captain Joe, a very popular bartender and personality at the Casino Bar and Nightclub in Falmouth Heights. When I was six, Captain Joe once gave me a quarter after church. I always liked him after that. The bar’s front door opened on Water Street, the main street of Woods Hole, and the bar was a long, narrow room, behind which was a screened-in porch standing on pilings over Eel Pond. The bar itself —ornate with brass and marble and dark mahogany, a marble bar-rail, a beautiful mirror, and ornate finials —Rumor had it came from a 1930s speak-easy in Baltimore. The tables and chairs were far less valuable. The seats were old barrels covered with carpet, and the tables were just bigger barrels covered with varnished wood.
The dining room was along the street, and people wondered why they hadn’t built it facing the harbor. The original owner explained that his patrons were all fisherman and sailors and most of them were sick of a water view. They wanted to look at land and cars, but mostly they wanted to watch girls walking down the street.
The jukebox selection was eclectic: some BB King and Hank Williams for the rustic clientele, and for the preppies that came to watch the rustics, Springsteen, Gordon Lightfoot, James Taylor, and Jimmy Buffett. For the late-stage hippies we featured Dylan, Cat Stevens, and for irony, Loudon Wainwright III. Thank God, no Barry Manilow in this man’s bar, except… of course… "Weekend In New England." Recognizing that they were becoming the main attraction, many of local rough characters started going down the street to the Leeside.
∞
My six closest Kidd colleagues finally joined me out on the screened porch to commemorate the evening of my matriculation into the real world. Smelling the familiar mix of salt air and stale beer, I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and thought, "What the hell am I doing? I’m starting to feel seasick already."
Being the youngest of five kids, no matter how dire the situation and no matter what the odds, I’d learned to always fight back, which was the only thing my brothers respected enough to quit torturing me and let me live. I reminded myself that I was signed into the military, and there was no backing out in my family. I had to go.
We started to tell our old stories again. Even though we knew them by heart, they still made us laugh until we cried. The bar crew had earned the nickname "Captain Kidd Rescue Squad." Once, a sailor had a little too much to drink and took a sharp right on the gangplank leading to his ship and fell between the ship and the wharf. His companion went for help. Bill Wixon and Terry Smith, fellow bartenders/bouncers, heard the call and raced to the dock. They climbed down the dock ladder and were able to retrieve the unconscious former patron. Pulling a 200-pound person up a ninety-degree ladder that’s covered with slippery algae was no mean feat, and they had issues with his head getting stuck between the ladder rungs on the way up. Terry, who was a trained EMT, was able to revive him on the dock and bring him back to life. Terry Smith was Falmouth’s star hockey goalie and later played for Boston College, but this was perhaps his greatest save. The merchant mariner came out of it with no more than a bad hangover and a confusing series of bruises on his chin and forehead.
Steve Dodigan, another bouncer, was driving home at 2:00 in the morning when he saw smoke pouring out of a shed attached to a house on Woods Hole Road. He stopped his car and started peering through the window to see if anyone was in the house and saw a woman sleeping. He banged on the door and started yelling to wake the lady. She was so terrified of a huge guy banging on door she hid and wouldn’t come out. We enjoyed telling Steve that his looks could keep woman from coming out of a burning house. Steve insisted that she yet to smell smoke. Steve reverted to plan B and then dashed off to the fire station and banged on their door. They quickly got out to the house and convinced her to leave and put out the fire. Rescues are never easy.
∞
And then the conversation on the screened porch turned to Bill Wixon’s less auspicious rescue, one I could eloquently recite due to my excellent vantage point from the shoreline. He had spotted another one of our former patrons struggling in the water behind the Kidd and jumped in to pull him out, but the guy started fighting with him. Bill ended up pulling off his arm, which it turns out was prosthetic, a fact that Bill remembered one second after having the shit scared out of him. It was fun to hear a former professional football player scream like a little girl. He was probably strong enough to actually rip an arm off, and for a moment there he clearly thought he had. He and the patron were still flailing around in the water when Bill realized they could just stand up. So he pulled the guy onto his feet and walked back to shore with the guy cursing him all the way. Not everyone wants to be rescued.
∞
Not everyone liked the Captain Kidd Rescue Squad. Once, after a particularly vicious fight resulting in an unceremonious patron-bounce into the gutter, the bouncers and bartenders had locked the door and settled down for a calm nightcap when they saw a pickup truck pull up in front of the Kidd. Just as somebody said, "Hey, doesn’t that truck belong to…," they heard the sound of a two-stroke engine starting up and wondered what it was. As sawdust suddenly shot across the floor, followed by a chainsaw blade emerging through the locked front door, all employees were headed for the unmarked emergency rear exit, the windows overlooking Eel Pond. Four huge grown men perched themselves on the windowsills like giant pigeons, ready for a desperate escape leap into the pond. They figured a chainsaw wouldn’t work under water. The assailant simply carved a large X in the door and went home to sleep it off. He was probably going for the mark of Zorro, but a person should never drink before spelling with large power tools. The assailant, a carpenter/fisherman but not the peaceful kind, was barred from the Captain Kidd for a month, and he had to pay for the door. The manager even let him install it himself to keep the price down.
The Captain Kidd Rescue Squad didn’t have as rich a history of saving lives as the U.S. Coast Guard did, but the intent was there and their hearts were in the right place. Everyone wants to be a hero. I particularly wanted to be able to save someone. I’d lost my mother that year.
This should have been a good year, graduating from college and getting engaged, but my mother wasn’t there to see my graduation and she wouldn’t be there to help plan the wedding. None of us had a chance to save her, but it would have changed everything if we could have. My mother was always the idealist in the family. Her favorite quote was President John F. Kennedy’s "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." My being a Coast Guard officer would have made her proud.
I shouldn’t be hesitating to take this step, I told myself as the others continued to tell stories. It’s time to go and take that shot at saving lives, in respect to her memory.
When each of my brothers had come of age, I remember that Mom recited from the Bible: When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish ways. While not an exact quote, it got the message across. I had been working for five summers. I was a repeat offender, a person who took an extra summer before joining the real world.
∞
Normally, there would have been a lot more people at my party, but they had thrown my big going-away party the previous summer. I did not attend. It was going to be a surprise party, and the person assigned to take me there failed at his duty, felled by too much ice tea, Long Island-style. In the bar business, all parties start at 2:00 a.m., and my friend who was supposed to take me to the surprise venue had passed out at about midnight. I had gone home, a little disappointed that nobody threw me a party, but perhaps it was good that I missed the party. I avoided about thirty cream pies, the would-be hurlers, paid assassins —I mean pie assassins —lying in wait for me.
The truth is I deserved the pie treatment. The prior summer, I was paid to protect the judges at a "gong show" talent contest at a local bar. The judges got wind that they were going to be hit by pies, so they hired me to guard them. Before the show, the pie-throwing act approached me and told me the only talent they had was in ambushing people with pies, and if they didn’t get the judges, the show would be a flop and nobody would laugh. So, for the sake of show business, I allowed the pie assassins to attack the talent judges, as long as I had two of my own to throw.
On the occasion of my first going-away party, the pie assassins finally gave up waiting for me and the whole event turned into a pie-flinging orgy. The judges, who were from Boston, were hungry for revenge, but the next morning I went away to college for the fall football season. I was saved by the mistake of someone with diminished capacity. Maybe I was just saved by pure serendipity.
In the beginning of the season at Brown University, one of my teammates asked if I would switch numbers with him. His high school number was the same as mine and he wanted to maintain it. I was willing to switch, so he proudly wore our shared high school number and I became Brown Bruin #71.
Toward the end of the season, as I ran through the tunnel at Harvard Stadium, I saw a big commotion behind me. Some Boston ticket-holders were getting kicked out of the stadium and my teammate was covered in cream pie, almost obscuring our venerable #70.
I’d innocently escaped another assassination attempt, dodged the Boston cream bullet, but I was living on borrowed time. The pie wars got out of hand and went from good-natured cream up the nose to the potential for broken noses from excessive delivery force. The word "arrest" was starting to be tossed about, and so the pies stopped flying. The Cape Cod bars figured that, if the Viet Cong and the Americans could call a truce, we could, too. Thus, I successfully avoided getting hurt in two major conflicts.
As I sat out on the Captain Kidd deck with my friends, overlooking the water and telling sea stories, I realized that I was starting to sound like Richard Dreyfuss in his role as the marine biologist trying to compete with Robert Shaw’s character, Quint, in the movie Jaws. While they sat there chumming and waiting for Jaws to attack, Quint retold the story of the greatest shark attack in human history: the USS Indianapolis had just completed the top secret mission of transporting key components of the nuclear bomb when she was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. The cruiser lost 300 men in the attack, and 880 men entered the water without lifeboats. Because it was a top-secret mission, and because of the incompetence of the commanders who received the mayday, no one responded to their cry for help. Four long days went by, and more than 500 men died from being ripped apart by white-tip sharks or from dehydration. When Quint finished his shark tale, he crushed his beer can. When Richard Dreyfuss told his much tamer story, he crushed his paper coffee cup for emphasis. I wondered whether I would ever have a story that would justify crushing a beer can after the telling, or even a story worthy of crushing a paper cup.
There had been another going-away party the night before the storytelling session, where I said goodbye to my fiancée and my family. Tonight’s party was just my Kidd colleagues, who happened to include my sister Bethanie, a part-time waitress and full-time scientist. Bethanie chimed in that her fiancé was under contract with the Marine Biological Laboratories, so he was out in the middle of the night chumming for sharks to see what attracted them.
I said, "I know what attracts sharks: blood in the water or swimming at night; at least that’s what I always imagined when I was in the ocean and couldn’t see what was heading my way"Bethanie replied "That’s what people think, but blood attracts them from far away…it’s electric current that attracts them up close and makes them attack. The Navy is spending millions trying to figure out exactly which currents sharks react to so that they can stop them from attacking their underwater remote sensing buoys."
Bethanie’s day job was draining blood from horseshoe crabs. She missed her big shot at fame one night at the Kidd when a guy ordered a drink while he was waiting for the Martha’s Vineyard Ferry. He asked my pretty blonde sister, "How would you like to get eaten by a shark?" She instantly replied, "How would you like to get slapped by a waitress?" As it turned out, the dude was part of the advance team from California for the movie Jaws, which was filmed on the Vineyard. She still claims that was the worst pickup line ever, although I kind of liked it.
My sister had moved back home to help when my mother died, and she was working two jobs while trying to keep Dad company. She probably would have thrown over the waitressing job for the movie spot in a heartbeat. With four brothers, she was always good at playing the victim, and she would have been a perfect fit because there was a history of show business in our family. She must have watched the movie version of Benchley’s Jaws with a profound sense of regret mixed in between the moments of theater terror.
The highlight of my family’s show-business background was Dad’s stint as a professional wrestler before World War II. During the day, my father was a butcher at the A&P in Nantucket, but he spent his nights in the Nantucket makeshift open-air wrestling arena. His stage name was Blondie Ryan. While blonde, he definitely wasn’t Irish.
This was not Greco-Roman wrestling. This is the kind of wrestling where the bad-guy wrestlers spit into the crowd and only eye-gouge when the referee is not looking and the crowd is. Keeping in character, Dad preferred the role of villain. There were nights when the Nantucket fog was so thick in the open arena that the crowds could barely see the wrestlers. It was a great place to drink fresh homemade beer, meet new people, engage in lively conversation, and then end the perfect evening with a small brawl. Often, because they really thought my father was evil, he would have to fight his way out of the arena.
∞
We were still drinking and sitting on the porch as the sky started to lighten, and we all realized that my nights at the Kidd were over for a while. It was time to leave, and all my old friends, these people I had grown up with, were now giving me slightly boozy advice.
"Don’t volunteer for anything."
"No more knocking people down. They take that seriously in the real world."
"Be safe."
"Do what you’re told and nobody gets hurt."
"All good dogs are black." This was from my brother’s best friend, Steve Dodigan, the other Kidd bartender/bouncer. He was referring to his dog, Jet. He and Jet grew up in my house as much as in his own, so I had to agree. In fact, in Falmouth and Woods Hole and Martha’s Vineyard, nearly all mutts were black, a fact memorialized by the Black Dog Tavern and hundreds of thousands of Black Dog T-shirts worn as far away as Abu Dhabi. Being black is a real advantage for a dog that is in the cold water a lot because it can warm up quickly through solar energy. But it’s not such an advantage in the Arizona desert or for a roaming dog when he encounters his number one predator, the car, at night. Only the most vigilant black dogs survive.
My brother Bill had already given his advice before he went out to sea: "Keep your head down and don’t stick out. Then you’ll be fine." As I was leaving, all my friends wished me luck and told me to be careful, but I wasn’t worried.
The night before, my brother Chris had given me the advice that stuck with me the most. Chris, a safety expert who worked for the U.S. Navy in New London, Connecticut, said, "Even though you’re in the military, if you don’t smoke, you don’t drink and drive, and you wear your seatbelt, you’ll probably be safer on average than most people in the United States."
So we all staggered to our cars and drove home.
The Error Chain
The truth is, we really don’t understand the probability and the negative impact of hazards, also known as risk. If we are what economists call rational humans, we generally prefer to avoid risk —especially when death or grave bodily harm might be the result if we don’t avoid it. However, we are instinctively driven to take risks for fun, for personal gain, for the sake of others, or for duty. My dad used to tell my brothers and me, "Don’t take stupid chances."
Good advice, but at the moment when one must make a choice, it’s hard to distinguish a stupid chance from a regular chance. The difference is only, and always, brutally clear in retrospect. While mistakes were tolerated in my family, repeating mistakes was not.
However, most of us will take chances to rescue another human being, even if that person took a stupid chance to end up in danger. Bill Wixon did rescue the amputee, so it wasn’t a true error chain incident, but Bill’s save was actually harder than the other two —it just wouldn’t make a good newspaper article.
It’s hard to rescue the unwilling or the panicked, let alone someone who qualifies as both, even in shallow water. In fact, almost two-thirds of all drowning deaths occur in water that is not over the victim’s head. Most of these happen in one of the most dangerous places in the world —the bathroom. These victims are people who can’t stand up: the baby, the invalid, and the drunk. The most unfortunate individuals in this statistical group didn’t drown in the bathtub. An unlucky segment of this population drowned in the toilet. What are the odds you could drown in toilet? Not bad, when you consider that most people who hug the toilet, taking the porcelain bus for a spin, are really drunk and on the verge of passing out.
Unknown or unfamiliar conditions certainly play a role in most major accidents, but so does alcohol, which plays a role in almost 45 percent of all accidental deaths. Statistics tell us it’s not good odds to be a drunk invalid alone in the bathroom. My Uncle Frank pointed to another perspective on this statistic: "Since most people drink, it’s those darn teetotallers who cause the majority of accidents."
All the people who were saved by the Captain Kidd Rescue Squad were drunk, saved by the not-so-sober. Who else is up at 2:00 a.m. to save anybody? Diminished capacity rules the night.
Chapter Two
I remember talking to my Uncle Frank, whose son Franny had joined the Marines, about joining the Coast Guard. He said it made sense for me because I was tall and if the boat sank I could wade back to shore. Compared to the Marines, the Coast Guard had a reputation for being a relaxed branch of the armed forces. However, the Guard brass had recently decided to take discipline more seriously, beginning with inductee training by experienced Army and Marine drill sergeants. This information was only revealed to me about one month after I signed up for OCS. The importance of timely intelligence was immediately clear to me. The Coast Guard personnel comprise less than 2 percent of the total U.S. military in uniform. The Coast Guard is greatly overshadowed by the Navy, which is twenty times larger. Now that I was signing up, I was about to agree to the proposition that was the unofficial motto of the U.S. Coast Guard: "You have to go out; you don’t have to come back."
... BEARING DRIFT
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