Prop wash.
The last view of Baltimore Harbor.
The moonrise at dawn on my first morning ever outside U. S. territorial waters.
An empty frieghter, about two-thirds the size of our ship, coming into port as we were heading out. The ship's radio operator added to the warnings of rough weather we were hearing from other maritime weather reports.
Sweltering heat as the barometer fell.
Still thick humid air in the afternoon.
Chop.
Increasing winds.
Pitch.
Heaving seas.
Mountainous waves (1):
Mountainous waves (2):
Mountainous waves (3):
We experienced these conditions for an entire week.
No one was allowed on deck for several days.
An empty Russian coal frieghter, north of the Azores, heading east toward the U. S.
Rising barometer -calming seas, nearing the English Channel.
The prow of the Dora Oldendorff as we were sailing into the English Channel.
The English Channel north of Belgium. At anchor, waiting to be towed up the canal to Ghent.
Jardin des Tuileries.
View of Paris from the observation deck of Tour Montparnasse. 1994
While selecting the images for the sequence, I came across this picture. It was taken in the engine room, where they kept a spare piston and cylinder, by the ship's engineer, Wilson Patenassarane.
At the age of 25, having grown up in Kansas, I had never seen the ocean. Once I had committed myself to emmigrating to France, the choice of
making the passage on a coal freighter became evident. It was the same price as a plane ticket.
When I told William Burroughs of this he instructed me to take a dense book, "A Russian novel, Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. Read 'The Brothers
Karamozov'."
I awoke before dawn one morning in late September of 1985, as the Dora Oldendorff was sailing east out of U. S. territorial waters on the
second day of the trip, and read this:
"A true realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find the strength and the ability not to believe in a miracle, and if faced with a miracle as an
undeniable fact, he will sooner disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. And if he does admit it, he will admit it as a natural fact hitherto
unknown to him. In a realist faith does not arise from a miracle, but the miracle from faith."
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from "The Brothers Karamozov"
There was only one other passenger aboard, a guy returning to Japan from a year studying painting in a Midwestern US art school. I had recently gotten my painting degree at KU. He didn't speak English very well, was friendly but reclusive, refused to let me make a portrait of him and he was terribly seasick the whole trip. At the end of the voyage, going through customs in Belgium, the captain pointed out the we were both born on the same day of the same year: November 5th, 1959.