Red, Right, Returning
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University of New Orleans ScholarWorks@UNO University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations Dissertations and Theses 8-7-2003 Red, Right, Returning Peter Geye University of New Orleans Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td Recommended Citation Geye, Peter, "Red, Right, Returning" (2003). University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations. 30. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/30 This Thesis is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by ScholarWorks@UNO with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Thesis in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. 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RED, RIGHT, RETURNING A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in The Department of Drama and Communications by Peter Geye B.A. University of Minnesota, 2000 August 2003 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .....................................................................iii PROLOGUE .................................................................................................................. 5 PART ONE: RED, RIGHT, RETURNING ..................................................................... 21 PART TWO: BY ANDROMEDA’S LIGHT .................................................................. 73 PART THREE: THE RAG IS BURNING ................................................................... 130 PART FOUR: THE DARKEST PLACE IN THE NIGHT .......................................... 202 PART FIVE: DEAD RECKONING ............................................................................. 288 EPILOGUE................................................................................................................. 354 VITA .......................................................................................................................... 361 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author would like to express his sincerest thanks to the following: Joseph Boyden, Richard Katrovas, Bill Lavender, and Patricia Hampl for their guidance and tutorship; Bill Harris and Perry Moriearty for their help with their native cities’ geography; Sandy Stark, Kim Bradley Barzso, and Laura Jean Baker for their eyes and ears, you’ve all been magnificent readers; and Sandy and Dale Hofmann for the use of their cabin in Wisconsin, without the quiet weekends there I might never have finished. And special thanks to my parents, especially my father who answered more questions than he thought he had answers for, and to my wife, Dana Hofmann-Geye, for everything. This book is dedicated to her. iii No broad breaker will fall Nor waves of blue, And you will come safe From the sea. From The Saga of the Volsungs iv 5 PROLOGUE 6 There were two photographs of his father in the maritime museum in Duluth. The first was an eighteen-by-twelve-inch, black-and-white of the crew of the SS Ragnarok, huddled dockside in front of the black-hulled freighter during a late winter snow squall. It was taken in March 1967, the day of her first cruise that shipping season. Most of the thirty faces were blurred in the snow or covered with the wool collars of the crew’s standard issue pea coats, but the image of his father’s face – the expressionless gaze peering back at Noah – was unblurred by the snow and unhidden by his collar. Noah was last at the museum on a blustery December day six or seven years ago, while back in Duluth for the wedding of a childhood friend. He’d spent the couple of hours between the ceremony at the church and the reception at Fitger’s in the museum, whimsically and unaffected, as if in a dream. For half an hour he’d stood still, shifting his eyes between the picture and the windows that looked out onto Lake Superior, reluctantly reliving moments of his childhood through the image of his father’s middle-aged face. He remembered snowy afternoons at the ski jumps in Chester Bowl, mid-winter breakfasts of blueberry pancakes dripping with his mother’s homemade rhubarb-butter in their house on High Street. His father used to sit across the kitchen table reading the newspaper, sneaking approving glances at him. Noah’s tennis-shoed feet didn’t even reach the black and white checked floor. He remembered mid summer mornings, too, when he missed his father’s face across the table with such an adolescent longing that to think of it now, to think of that longing through the filter of his memory, made a comedy of all the wasted emotions. That December day at the museum, looking at his father’s face distinct among the blurry others, Noah was intent on absorbing all the memories as something outside of his experience – as someone who never knew his father might. The years had done their work. 7 The placard beside that first photo said: THE CREW OF THE ILL-FATED SUPERIOR STEEL SHIP SS RAGNAROK, MARCH 1967. THE SHIP IS AT BERTH AT THE SUPERIOR STEEL DOCKS IN DULUTH HARBOR, NEAR THE MOUTH OF THE ST. LOUIS RIVER. THE RAG WOULD FOUNDER OFF ISLE ROYALE EIGHT MONTHS LATER IN A GALE. TWENTY-SEVEN OF HER THIRTY HANDS WERE LOST. It also listed, in parentheses, each of the men, from left to right, front to back. The second photograph was of the three survivors: Luke Lifthrasir, Bjorn Vifte, and Olaf Torr, Noah’s father. Bjorn was little more than a lump of wet wool blanket being attended to by a couple of men in Coast Guard uniforms. Only his pained and exhausted face was visible. His beard was covered with white ice. Luke was being moved up the glazed boulder beach on a four-handled gurney, his gauze-covered arm raised triumphantly in a frostbitten fist. Olaf was sitting in the edge of the picture, alone, his shoulders slumped over his knees, the small of his back resting against an ancient cedar tree that grew inexplicably from a cleave in the bedrock. There was blood frozen in parallel lines on his cheek. In the background there was a photographer aiming his camera at the wrecked lifeboat, the same lifeboat that was on display in the museum, directly behind Noah as he stood looking at the photographs. The second placard said: THE THREE SURVIVORS OF THE WRECK OF THE SS RAGNAROK, ASHORE AT LAST, HAT POINT, WAUSWAUGONING BAY, LAKE SUPERIOR. NOVEMBER 6TH, 1967. The rest of the museum, which was empty but for Noah and a freckle-faced kid sitting behind the information desk, might as well have been a memorial to his childhood reveries. There was an unending series of ship models and photo montages chronicling the nautical history of Lake Superior; there were glass cases of artifacts recovered from Great Lakes shipwrecks – forks, lanterns, life vests, hammers, a tea kettle, a sextant, a pair of black boots, an oil can, a coal shovel, a pocket watch; there was a row of small rooms replicating the cabins of different ships, a sort of timeline of living conditions aboard Great Lakes freighters; there was a steam turbine tugboat engine, circa 1925, twenty feet tall, that sat on the main floor and towered into the second floor of the museum; and finally, what must have 8 been considered the museum’s centerpiece, a model pilot house complete with an antique wooden wheel, a chart room, and a brass Chadburn set to full steam. From behind the wheel Noah looked out onto the channel running into Duluth harbor. On his right, beyond the canal and breakwaters, and through the bare boughs of an oak tree, the lake fell away. On his left, the hills stretched above town, shrouded in the chrysalis of early winter fog. Behind him, he knew, the aerial bridge was looming like a skeleton. After a few minutes behind the wheel he decided to leave, but as he was walking out, he noticed the television monitor behind the information desk scrolling the schedule of ship arrivals and departures across its aqua blue screen. ‘The ships are still running?’ he asked the kid behind the desk. The kid grunted and motioned to the monitor. ‘So, yes?’ ‘Yes what?’ ‘Yes, the shipping season hasn’t ended yet?’ ‘Nope, the shipping season hasn’t ended.’ ‘And that’s the schedule there? The Er-in-dring,’ Noah sounded out the name of a Norwegian ship, ‘she’s leaving in forty-five minutes?’ ‘Yep,’ the kid said looking over his shoulder to confirm what Noah was reading from the monitor. ‘That’s what it says.’ Noah turned and walked out without thanking him – only mildly bothered by the kid’s rudeness – and headed for the canal. He checked the harbor to see if the Erindring was visible at any of the docks in view. When he saw that it wasn’t, he decided to head up Lake Avenue a couple of blocks to a bookstore he’d noticed on the way in. It was a quaint little place, brimming with Duluth guidebooks, paperback bestsellers, and coffee table books, but in the corner there were a few shelves of books about the lakes. Among them was a sun-bleached copy of a book titled, Fire and Ice: The Story of the SS 9 Ragnarok. Beneath the title, which was printed in a bold black font, was a third-rate artist’s rendering of the Ragnarok plowing melodramatically through heavy seas. It always annoyed Noah that the wreck had become such a novelty act, that the tragedy his father survived had been capitalized on by a city desperate for excitement. It wasn’t just the paint- by-numbers book covers either, but the t-shirts and hats with screen-printed images of the Rag pasted across them and the folksy banter of the East End denizens that bothered him.