There is a small creek that runs by my childhood home called “Big Creek” (pronounced “crick”) and the family home was in Big Creek Township. For some unknown reason, the name was changed to “Wolf Creek” years ago. Whatever the name, my childhood friend Dana (still a friend; but not a boy. And not a girl, in case you were wondering. A man.) decided that we would build a boat in the shop to tame the Crick. Somehow we got our hands on two vintage 1940’s Chevy hoods from a junk yard and lugged them to school. There, under the strict supervision of the shop teacher, Mr. Bullis, we welded them together so that when turned over, they formed a solid steel, canoe-like, leak-proof (good welding on my part), indestructible, shallow draft vessel. Occasionally, during high water events, it would break loose and sail downstream, and Dana and I would wade north until we found it and put it back into service. It was my first “service at sea.”
This successful venture must have planted a seed in my teenage brain that I was destined to be a sailor. When President Johnson threatened me with drafting into the infantry, I quickly—and apparently thoughtlessly—enlisted in the Navy. (Dana did not, but that’s a story for another day and another time.) I was born and raised in Iowa and had seen the ocean from a distance exactly once, during a short family trip to California. My first Navy station was in Northern Scotland, where I saw the ocean every day, but because the job was ashore, I had never seen it firsthand. The North Sea contains some of the roughest waters in the world, but somehow my friends convinced me to go out on a fishing boat for an entire day. I didn’t catch any fish, but I did “feed the fish,” if you know what I mean, for 8 hours. I came ashore a shadow of myself, vowing never to lose sight of land again.
A few years later, after the fishing boat incident had faded into a distant memory, I stood on the pier at Pearl Harbor waiting for my new home, the USS Bradley, a frigate, a small destroyer. The ship was returning from a six-month deployment in the Western Pacific and was en route to her home port of San Diego. I was the newly commissioned ensign assigned as assistant supply officer. (I didn’t realize until a few days later that the job came with a name change. My new name was “Chop,” a shortened version of “Pork Chop,” as supply officers in the Navy have been called since the beginning of time.) The Executive Officer (XO) was standing next to me, also waiting to board the ship, back from leave. He welcomed me to the crew and casually mentioned that we were leaving the next day and that a typhoon was looming between Hawaii and San Diego. The XO assured me that he didn’t expect it to be a problem. It wasn’t for the ship, but it was a problem for me. It was the fishing boat again. I threw up repeatedly for five days until the ship slipped into San Diego Harbor. My father, a senior officer on a destroyer during World War II, once told me that the only cure for seasickness was to sit under an apple tree. I found that to be true, and yet I served on four ships and sailed on many others in my 29-year Navy career.
In a next column I will explain in more detail how exactly I dealt with the “mal de mare” in the service of my country. You know I am right.
Don R. Haven is a retired Navy officer and retired high school teacher who divides his time between Granville and South Carolina. He can be reached at 740-504-8793 and donrichardhaven@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Newark Advocate: Column: The Problem I Didn’t Consider Before Joining the U.S. Navy
