“Crossing the Trades, 
Before The Curtain’s Collapse”

In the Antwerp dockyards, I felt both eager and anxious, as I had been the previous New Zealand spring when booking this passage at the agency in Dunedin. I’d be boarding a small, rust-encrusted Polish freighter, the Czaszki, bound for Venezuela, the land of Simón Bolívar, several future Miss Universes, and the dark tension in Wages of Fear, starring Yves Montand. The small harbor of Guanta would be our first port-of-call after a two-week Atlantic crossing, and my blood was stirring with the thrill and apprehension of exploring the unknown. From Venezuela, I would island-hop up the Caribbean, through Martinique in the Lesser Antilles, and into the States, ending a two-year untethered journey around the world. Jimmy Carter would be elected President as I motorcycled home from Florida to California.
     Yet in August, 1976, I was one of the few in love with Belgium, and reluctant to leave. While neither the Tyrolean Alps nor the Croatian Coast, Belgium provided the settings for spies and gunsmiths from Ludlum’s and Forsyth’s action/adventure fiction. Belgium also bred cycling champions like Eddy Merckx (if anyone could be like that phenom) and embraced the poets of Flanders’ Fields. Moreover, Antwerp gripped my heart.
     Actually, it was Lieve Goossens, lovely-natured daughter of a Flemish burgher, who gripped my heart, who, due to my gold-plated good fortune, had boarded the same Frankfurt-to-Brussels train as I. Returning from an Austrian holiday with her little brother and cousin, she had been harassed by trois soldaten Boche, fuzzy-cheeked and drunk, making clowns of themselves in the railcar passageway.  I masqueraded behind a Clint Eastwood-ish scowl and, laughing behind their hands, they shuffled off, Lieve making grateful remarks on behalf of herself and her charges. I mumbled some Shucks-it-wasn’t-much American patois, and she smiled beatifically. The next thing I knew, Lieve was mine—and I was hers. She offered, and I gratefully accepted, bed and board at the family manse, arrangements approved by her father, no friend of the Germans.
     Now, with the clock ticking dockside, this young Flemish lady and I would soon be parted. The Czaszki, once its cargo was loaded and holds battened, would weigh anchor out of Antwerp for the Bay of Biscay, bound for Lisbon. Once there, we’d put the Trade Winds on our stern and our next stop would be South America. I felt the thrill of that restless urge that drives the natural traveler—until I saw my cabin.
     Chalky white paint covered layer upon layer of the same, applied with old brushes over every surface in the room except the water taps and the bunk’s mattress fitted under the single porthole. To the right of the bunk was a lavatory—toilet, sink, shower stall, and shower curtain hanging from overhead pipes. To the left was a built-in desk table and small bookcase painted… white. Overall, a dingy space, to be sure, but I'd slept in worse—on a Samoan steamer, in a dosshouse in Delhi, in Mena and Bena's Bar and Grill in Nepal's Ghorepani Pass—other stories for other times. 
     Heaving her shoulders, Lieve smirked at the base surroundings. Did such rude appointments downgrade me as a lover? I felt resentment rising. Not, God forbid, toward Lieve, who had treated me like the Crown Prince of Lichtenstein, but toward Polish Ocean Lines, for disappointing her. I’d have traded a good pair of shoes for another night ashore with Mademoiselle Goossens, but if I had, and sailing orders had arrived, the Czaszki would have left on the next tide without me. I'd have missed the boat, missed Venezuela, missed the Caribbean tropics, and missed Florida. Critically, I couldn't miss Florida, for another sweetheart was meeting me there.
     Irrepressibly lovely Lieve knew about this, and I was happy she did. This other heartthrob, you see, was a motorcycle, and anything but new. A 1950 500cc single-cylinder ES2 Norton, she had surfaced in Wales the previous June, found abandoned in a hay barn, like a fairytale cliché. I had restored her in a garage in Wiltshire, rode her across Britain and Europe, and then put her on a Rotterdam freighter for Jacksonville, where I'd pick her up for the long ride home. 
     My Czaszki luggage was spare—backpack, writing materials, a personal bible—but adequate for the voyage to Guanta, in Venezuela’s Northeast. My "bible" was Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the de rigueur, consciousness-bending adventure for all 28-year-olds at the time. I still think it’s packed with truth.
     The freighter’s captain got his sailing orders, Lieve and I said our hefty, grappling goodbyes, the diesels churned, and, in the small hours, the Czaszki’s propellers pushed her off the dock and toward the open sea. At breakfast, I met the man who ran this ship.
     A sketch of the captain is apropos—six feet, dark, bony rather than lean, about fifty-five, with black hair full but trimmed, gray at the temples. His white officer's hat sported a traditional black-patent bill and crusts of gold braid. His long-fingered hands were thin, his eyes coal-gray and closed to intimacy. Though swarthy, he wore a patchy beard, and was never seen without his black tunic-like officer’s jacket and tie. Thinking back now, it was odd he wore no spectacles.

#

Over the years, many have asked how I came to take this sea-born leg of the journey. World travel in 1976 wasn’t planned from the seat of your Herman Miller Aeron; it still had a great deal of "world" to it. Guidebooks were rare for places where visitors were rare. You just went, and found things out when you got there. Before electrified humanity became media-supersaturated, you could have the very tangible experience of departing from "the known" into "the unknown," and no one heard from you until you got out. 
     Yet it wasn't easy to roam the untrammeled Fields of Eden. Many of the remote ones had restrictive entry. An American couldn’t fly from New Zealand (where I’d been living for year) to Australia (my next stop) without an Australian visa. I had to get that from Australia's High Commission in Wellington, NZ, before I could I buy a ticket for Australia. Further, I couldn't apply for that visa without a ticket to leave Australia to my next destination, in my case, Bali, in Indonesia (unknown in those days). Since Indonesia also required a visa, I had to apply to their embassy, and include an exit ticket to the next country. To where? Somewhere that required an exit ticket before they would issue an entry visa.
     You get the picture, an Alice-in-Wonderland daisy-chain in reverse. If one were living in New Zealand, you’d break out a world map, find your farthest travel target for which a visa was needed, work backward from that final destination (in my case, the US) to one’s starting point (New Zealand), and get the visas required, hard-copy, not digital. While all the letter-writing and Xeroxing tickets was a chore, it was part of the art-and-science of travel—of life, really. What aggravated one’s spirit was the non-spontaneous aspect, that so much had to be pre-planned. A backpack and some money in your pocket was sometimes enough, but not always. Often, each step had to be set down and recorded before you left. If you wavered, and found yourself at some fly-blown border bazaar infested with feverish tourists seeking the road to Mandalay, you risked a red-tape Gordian knot to get through to the back of beyond.
     Nonetheless, random was possible. One could fool “them,” could evade the map, the programme, the predictable. To do so often took a civil war, a lucky mistake, or a chance meeting, a few of which I stumbled into. So, the freedom to barge off into the unexpected and unplanned could be arranged, and sometimes even pre-arranged—especially if you came by sea, the “road” less traveled. The Czaszki, then, became my simple escape from the semi-Orwellian bureaucracy. 
     I left Antwerp with no visa for Venezuela.

#

Cargo ships? Twelve passengers maximum, since more, by international maritime law, required a doctor. We were nine—a German mother, father, and three young children from the Mosel, two German matrons visiting relations, the daughter of the chief engineer, and me. All meals were served in the Officers’ Mess, tablemates unchanged for two weeks. In my case, that consisted of the captain, the first mate, and the chief engineer (who resembled the old Hollywood movie spy, Oskar Homulka, and never explained why he didn't dine with his daughter).
     Our square, metal-legged table was edged with a polished metal strip, and the four chairs—wooden, straight-backed, no cushions—were fixed to the mess-room deck with small brass fittings. Lino the color of dried blood covered both the table and the flooring.
Though the captain treated me face-to-face with neutrality tinged with respect, his disapproval of me showed from the start. My ragged beard and unkempt, Swiss Army Knife-haircut, boyishly charming to Lieve and her mother, were not "shipshape," as my own father would've said. Nor were my tie-dyed, Indian-embroidered hippie shirts, Nepalese topi, New Zealand boots, and multi-patched corduroy walking shorts. Still, we coexisted, the captain and I, and would share a drink on my birthday, though I believe he fostered, with the first mate, a tainted view of me, the fallout from which would later sour the atmosphere.
     The first mate spoke English well, the captain and the chief engineer not at all (at least, not to me). Wojtek the radioman, with dark, theatrical features on his long, thin face, could be heard within earshot of the radio room, night or day, broadcasting our position via the ship's call sign, P.A.T.Z., in "navigator's English." 
     "Papa Alpha Tango Zulu!" Wojtek would shout into the mic, "Papa Alpha Tango Zulu!," grinning with delight at the outbursts, as if throwing expletives of freedom into the face of his criminal captors—which, in fact, he was doing. These years were the depths of the Cold War, with Ford in the White House, Brezhnev and Kosygin in the Kremlin, and Poland controlled from Moscow with an iron fist. The Poles enmity toward the Russians burned (and still burns) not like a torch, but like an acetylene flame, with a pointed, blue-hot hatred. Perhaps Wojtek thought his English was the perfect way to insult Poland's political masters in their chess game with America.
     At the time, I was blind to politics, clueless. I'd spent two years teaching, trout-fishing, and playing rugby in New Zealand, and then backpacking around the world. I no more grasped the truth of "suffering behind the Iron Curtain" than I did the 19th-century reign of Mad King Ludwig. Bad news from the world’s dark corners was slow and cryptic. It was easy, and easier, not to know. Perhaps this state of affairs played a role in the captain's veiled disdain for me. He was a sea-captain at the sunset of his career, native to a country that saw itself as an ideological ally of America, the self-styled “World's Policeman.” And I/we could not or would not free his people from The Russian Bear. So, did the captain prod the first mate into asking me "the question?"
     After our first Sunday breakfast, the captain and chief engineer departed the Officers’ Mess, leaving me alone with the mate. About 30, he had a Teutonic look—prominent, rosy lips, a square, dimpled chin, honey-colored hair and eyebrows, and Baltic-blue eyes, which were aimed at me now. His accent could be cut with a chainsaw.
     "Ewe haff manny Pollish pipples een Amyrikah?" You have many Polish people in America?
     "Polish people? In America? Yes, we do."
     "Vwy Amyrikahns say joke-ess abot Pollish pipples?"
     It was a question with the subtlety of an unexploded artillery round. It illustrated the polluted flotsam euphemistically called "ethnic humor," the cheap-laugh accessory to a social system that delivers, at one end, rock-bottom wages for "them" and, at the other, segregated toilets and public lynchings.
     "Jokes?" I replied, looking for the exit. "About Polish people?" Could feigning ignorance make the topic go away? "In America?" 
     One deliberate nod, and the drawn-out reply, "Joke-ess. Yass."
     A nimbler man would have retreated to count casualties. 
     "These rude jokes," I said, "appear everywhere. The English make jokes about the Irish. The Thakalis make fun of the Newaris." I had learned that at Mena and Bena’s in Nepal. "Even in Africa, the Somalis look down on the Sudanese, and the Ethiopians talk rubbish about the Eritreans." I was mimicking a Denmark-dwelling Eritrean exile I'd met in Bali. Or in Jakarta— somewhere.
     The first mate looked at me as if I were speaking Sanskrit. I flailed on. "See, in America, these jokes, they came out of Pennsylvania"—What did I know? I'd been gone for two years—"where a lot of Polish people worked in the steel and coal mines. New immigrants start at the bottom of the ladder, see? First, as the butt of jokes, yes. That's the way it's always been. It shouldn't be that way, but it's a human failing." Did I say that? Maybe. My diplomacy flowed like wet cement, clammy and thick.
     "These jokes started then, when Poles worked low-paid jobs, lived in separate neighborhoods." I was prattling on like an eight-year-old, a dumb one. "But people respect the Poles in America. Guys like Bronko Nagurski and Carl Yastrzemski, especially in Boston."
The first mate, whose name might have been Karl, smiled thinly, looking at me with sympathetic dismissal. "Baht vwy Pollish pipples?"
     He hadn't seemed that thick-headed at first. Maybe if I told him the joke about the bride at a Polish wedding… Instead, I could only shut up and shrug, fulfilling the captain's derisive estimation of me as the persecutor of The Noble Pole, complicit with the Russkis. I went back to my cabin to write.

#

On we sailed, without a single wrinkle in the weather, as if crossing a sea that was jaded by its own tranquility. Boredom threatened, as I searched for the core of myself, for the untrammeled person that two years on the road had struggled to find. I filled those days with broken conversation (sans Polish jokes), my journal, letter-writing, cheese and salami sandwiches with mealy apples, and, for a short time, the crew's “weight room.” That space lay under a tarp on the poop deck, with barbells and dumbbells, and I’d made headway with my bench-press and tricep curls, jollied along by a few able-bodied seamen. Then the captain, via the first mate, informed me that passengers and crew could not fraternize. No more weight-lifting.
     Preposterous, I thought, a wretched slap in the face. The Czaszki was no P&O liner, with bridge parties and shuffleboard. Was I going to lead a mutiny? Were white-slavers going to shanghai an iron-pumping Yankee drifter? 
     We were eleven days at sea, three days from port, when my twenty-ninth birthday arrived (September 8, Feast of the Blessed Virgin; most Poles are mackerel-snappers). The young German father raided the hold and his large cache of Moselwein, from his wife's family’s vineyards. My first experience of a true pedigreed wine, and I treated it like fruit juice, paying the price in the morning. The Poles toasted the occasion with "Na zdrowie!"—To health—but eerily similar to the Russian, Na zdorovye! I fretted about this: Why would the Poles use a Russian-like phrase? Paranoia can be its own entertainment.
     Following the Polish-joke episode, the first mate reduced his warmth, but retained a baseline civility. As we neared Venezuela, Wojtek the radioman picked up the slack, his English improving daily, reflecting his excitement by clattering away in my mother tongue at every opportunity. I remember my excitement, too, though it was tinged with both anxieties and eagerness as I reentered the New World.
     After our fourteenth day at sea, we glided up to the docks of Guanta. Well, not actually the docks. In the world of small freighters from Iron Curtain countries in 1976, you didn't necessarily bang up to the wharves and unship your cargo. Wojtek explained that we would drop anchor in the Guanta channel, joining the other ships queueing for wharf space, and wait there "on the roads" for seven days. How did this happen?
     Because the ‘70s global oil boom had drenched Venezuela with imports, hence clogging her harbours with incoming shipping. It wasn’t a sense of loss I felt by having to wait seven days in a queue. It was a sense of being lost. But was I worried? No, I was too naïve to be worried. I had a flight to catch ex-Caracas to Martinique, but was stone stupid about what I'd be doing during my short stay in Venezuela. I had no plans to tour, had spent no time researching or preparing for the visit, knew no one there, and could just as well have been stepping off a freighter onto Venus as Venezuela. I was free to do as I pleased, and freedom can sometimes allow you to be stupid. In a few years, Jim Jones and Co. would die near here and, ironically, the fridge in the Czaszki’s mess was full of Kool-Aid.
     Anyway, Wojtek kept me up on the essential ship-based news, and some mainly extraneous but enthralling stuff to know. For example, the Czaszki had gone to Nigeria the previous year when West African oil exports were also peaking. The Nigerians needed to enlarge their wharf facilities at Lagos, and the Polish steel and concrete in the Czaszki's cargo hold were part of the expansion plan. Yet the wharves were so small that all of the new shipping had led to massive traffic jams “on the roads.” The materials for the new wharfage were onboard the ship, but the anchor time in the Lagos channel was—wait for it—360 days. That's right, a year.
     I couldn't imagine it, this freighter, and others, languishing for twelve months in the equatorial sun—a colossal waste of time and resources, given the ship’s cargo was there to relieve the queues. Finally, some bright spark rented barges from Alexandria and offloaded the ships’ goods, allowing the freighters and crews to sail on to their next ports-of-call. 

#

As combustible rumors flew, we waited, but the captain had to be anxious, with his responsibility toward cargo, crew, and the Communists in the Kremlin. He had to be worried about getting unloaded and moving on. For my part, my logistical need had been solved. The Venezuelan capitalist spirit that preceded Hugo “The Mad Colonel” Chavez had also availed me of alternative transport. The next day (or the next; this was South America), for the grand sum of $20 U.S. in used, unmarked bills, I would be picked up by speedboat and delivered to the Customs and Immigration desk in Guanta, with the hope of acquiring a tourist visa. If cleared, I would board the bus—un coche de camino velocidad—for Caracas, and there board the next plane to Fort-de-France.
     In the meantime, events moved apace. Guanta's harbormaster was rapidly making the rounds of the vessels-in-waiting, extending the diplomatic hand of welcome to the newly arrived. It was soon extended for other purposes, too. At 1:30 PM, after a midday meal of ground beef, chopped onions, paprika, potatoes, and egg noodles, followed by coffee and the captain's three cigarettes, the harbormaster and his toadies were piped aboard the Czaszki. With his mustache, open white shirt, thinning hair, and half-glasses on a chain, el jefe de puerto reminded one of a recently promoted hotel clerk.
     The visiting party scuttled into the lounge off the Officers’ Mess, followed by the first mate and the captain, regaled in his black, double-breasted officer's jacket, hoops of gold at the sleeves, and brass buttons. A closer look, though, picked out a tatty hem on the jacket, threadbare cuffs, and the fabric at the back slickly polished by compression and age.
     A steward brought coffee and sugared Polish pastries, and a young Latin man translated English into Spanish for the harbormaster. The first mate translated the English into Polish for the captain, while I eavesdropped easily from nearby in the mess, the voices being loud and slow to aid the translations. After bland introductions and commiserations over delays and the stress of busy harbors, the conversation proceeded as follows, the translators receiving no credit in my rendition.
     Harbormaster: "This interruption in your duties is a great inconvenience."
     Captain: "Your port is exceedingly busy for its size."
     HM: "Yes, oil exports build our economy, but we hope to accommodate you."
     C: "We'd like to continue our voyage."
     HM: "We try to be flexible when we can."
     C: "Would this be one of those situations?"
     HM: "Who can tell? Tomorrow we can discuss the matter further?"
     C: "That would be possible. What did you have in mind?"
     HM: "Lunch at my office. I will send my launch."
     C: "Of course. What time should I expect your boat?"
     HM: "Eleven-thirty. Bring your two executive officers, if that is suitable." This meant the First Mate and Chief Engineer
     C: "Quite suitable." 
     HM, after a delicate pause, during which he chewed the template of his glasses: "One thing. We are a small port under many demands. We are unable to provide lunch for all of our visitors."
     C, after another, most uncomfortable pause, during which he blew smoke at the ceiling and sculpted the ash of his cigarette on a coffee saucer: "Yes?"
     HM: "So, forgive me, but” (a very little pause) “I must ask you to pay for your lunch."
     Through tendrils of tobacco smoke, the captain studied his guest as a herpetologist studies a snake. "And how much would that be?"
     HM: "$400 U.S. per person." You might have thought he was shooting fish in a barrel.
     The captain knew a shakedown when it smacked him in the face—This was no joke, Polish or otherwise. The Venezuelan, greasy as an oil slick, nibbled a cookie.
     Having witnessed this train wreck, I left the ship’s mess before any bloodshed resulted. Since zlotys wouldn’t do, and the Russians supplied the captain with no dollars for paying bribes, he'd have had to pass a camel through the eye of a needle to pay $400 for one lunch ashore, much less for three. Here I could quote a disquisition on Communism’s central banks hoarding the U.S. dollar, or on Marxist-Leninist Central Planning Vs. Laissez-faire Capitalism, but no matter. By the time I left the ship via the aforementioned $20 speedboat, no détente was flowing between the HM's office and the bridge of the Czaszki. 
     I got my visa at Guanta’s immigration desk as easy as buying a movie ticket, and about the same price. Passenger traffic by sea was low, and I suppose the port’s red-tape apparatchiks had had enough for the day. Maybe they weren’t part of the harbormaster's blackmail racket, or were, but decided I was too small a fish. One of them inspected my passport, murmured a question or two about my ongoing travel dates, and stamped where stamping was needed—thonk, thonk, thonk. I was on my way.
I passed a bit of time reading, writing letters, and editing passages in my journal, and, in the early evening two days later, my bus arrived at Caracas Central Station. I was straight onto another to the airport, and caught the flight to Fort-de-France. Mike, a State Department friend, met me at the airport, appraising me askance for my road-weary appearance: a vagabond's clothes, black topi, road-worn boots, backpack, and bamboo walking stick.
     I spent a month in Martinique with Mike and Carmella, and then passed through Haiti on the way to Florida to pick up the Norton. An American had had the bad judgment to die in Port-au-Prince, and now, in his coffin on the airport tarmac, waited to be flown home, his unembalmed body absorbing the tropical heat, multiplying decomposition gases, and exuding them into the still air. A low-level official went to investigate the smell and, nearing the coffin, reached for his Bic to light a cigarette. The methane explosion was limited to the immediate area, but it forced a reconsideration of how the scattered remains of the deceased would be repatriated.
     Lieve and I wrote for a while. I didn't forget her, and hope her life blossomed, as it seemed it would. The Norton stayed in my hands for many years, and then, while back living and working in New Zealand a decade later, I sold it to a fellow named Cyril. On a warm afternoon, shortly after the last time I saw it, I crashed another motorcycle into an oncoming car at high speed—a six-o’clock-news, head-on collision—from which I’d walk away. Rising from my resting place on the asphalt, I saw that the car’s driver was goggle-eyed with fright and surprise, but no more than I. 
The lack of extraneous obligations in life allows one, on occasion, the freedom of questionable judgment.

END

<freedom

Lance Mason was raised in rural California and has taught at UCLA, Otago University (Dunedin, New Zealand), and Federal University (Natal, Brazil). His work has appeared in Mystery Tribune, Lowestoft Chronicle, Writing Ireland, The Kalahari Review, and another three dozen journals. Mason has spent half his adult life exploring, living, and working overseas, traveling by foot, bicycle, motorcycle, tramp steamer, plane, train, and dugout canoe; this has both informed and interfered with his writing life. In that vein, he won Gold in the 2024 &'25 Solas Awards, the 2024 Grand Prize Silver, and a share of the 2025 Fish Publishing (Ireland) Annual Memoir Prize. 

Of the work featured here, Lance says:

'Freedom of body, of thought, and imagination are useful tools, useful adjuncts in encountering and absorbing the best possible results of a wandering life. This recollection of two weeks on a Russian-controlled Polish freighter in the thick of the Cold War attempts to illustrate that.'

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