souls on deck, alight

by Susan Hata

ON THE FIRST TUESDAY in November of 2024, I stand at my stove all afternoon simmering soup. This is my practice before all impending threats: blizzards or deaths or births or the months of December and June, which, as every parent of school-aged children knows, are when family order and maternal sanity completely break down. The stove gives me a little island of agency and caregiving to stand on because when the world ends, I will offer anyone near me the comfort of a warm bowl of soup. Later that night, as the first polls begin to close on the East Coast, where I live, one of my neighbors texts the neighborhood WhatsApp group to ask, “How’s everyone holding up???” The group texts back with what they’re doing to busy themselves: some fold laundry or watch the news. I make soup and pray. Waiting rituals as old as time. The text thread goes silent as the night progresses, and one by one, each lighted window in each house in our neighborhood goes dark.

The next morning, I wake without an alarm and refresh the New York Times on my phone for a split second and put it away. So. This is what it will be.

I drop one teen off at the train station where he sprints to a train’s loading door and gets in line with the other passengers under the watchful eye of a conductor who rides the train back and forth every day, shepherding the citizens of Boston from home to work and back again. He knows all the high school kids, where they get on and off. He wakes them if they fall asleep in the dark early morning.

My twelve-year-old daughter rides to school on a yellow school bus, driven by a woman who is almost too punctual, sometimes leaving the bus stop early, just before we get there.

I drive out to the grocery store to pick up prescriptions at the pharmacy. I thank the cashiers—one woman with smile wrinkles and another with dyed hair and gray roots—and I drive home. Every few minutes, texts light up my phone. Little missives of care from friend to friend, group to group.

When I arrive home from my errands, I reopen the neighborhood text thread. “I don’t have a lot of profound words,” I say, “but I’m around a lot today.”

Within the hour, my neighbors and I embrace each other in the street outside our houses—one neighbor going to an appointment, two others walking their dogs, two of us coming out just for the sight of friends. It’s a sober, quiet circle. We will take care of each other, we say, and we mean everyone. That’s what we have done, and that is what we will keep doing: our resignation struggling to become resolve. We disperse, buoyed up a bit by each other.

I go from bedroom to bedroom with a laundry basket and gather sweaty running clothes to wash. We are a house full of runners, and even slow ones like me generate a lot of laundry. The basket of clothes under my right arm gets heavier and smellier as it fills, but I’m used to this. I carry the basket down one flight of stairs and pass through the kitchen and down another flight of stairs to the basement laundry. Our house was built in the 1930s, and in the dark basement, the unfinished rock walls of the foundation have been slowly crumbling. Above my head are exposed floor beams and plumbing and electrical wiring—the inner workings of a beloved house, crusted with cobwebs and dust. Often centipedes scuttle into the shadows as I approach, and my bare feet pick up the gritty dust from the rough concrete floor, so I try to hurry at the machine, tumbling in the salty shorts and socks. I trot back up the stairs and leave the soap and water to wash away the stains.

I feel restless and sad. I’m a doctor and working part-time is wonderful for parenting, but today I wish I was at work. When I’m there, I know how to help and what to do. I can just be in one exam room at a time and focus on one person in front of me. In primary care, it’s a way of life to hold belief in what’s possible. But now, here alone in my home, I don’t have the heart to read any online analysis of the election or the future. The past eight years of politics have saturated my capacity to absorb words on screens.

I live in Boston, five miles from the ocean. Gulls fly overhead when I drive to work, and the closer you get to the waterfront, the more the brine in the air pricks your nostrils. Here, the tide comes in and goes out, twice each day. Not far from my primary care office and exam rooms, the harbor bustles with ferries to Cape Cod and container ships unloading and fishing boats coming and going from places like Georges Bank and the Gulf of Maine.

A few years ago, on a ferry ride through the harbor, I noticed that at one dock, a steel ship painted bright red stood out against the industrial palette of brown and black. She was smaller than a cargo ship but bigger than a tugboat and was tied up broadside. Her name, along the length of her hull in white letters several feet high, was visible all the way across the harbor: “NANTUCKET.” Odd that a ship would have such bold attire when named for an island of subtle wealth and white sails. She sat alone and still in a harbor that is always moving. The sun glimmered off the city skyline across the water, and the passenger jets from Logan airport took off just overhead. I had seen her a few times on ferry rides over the past few years and wondered about her. The other boats and even the birds have places to go, but the old red ship is always tied up at the same place.

The Nantucket is an abandoned lightship that has been rescued by a nonprofit and is being restored and turned into a museum. Before modern navigation techniques, it was too dangerous to build a permanent lighthouse structure along some stretches of coastline, so instead, ships were permanently anchored near underwater hazards with lantern lights burning atop their masts. The lightships were painted red, with the names of their location in big white letters along their sides. For years I have not stopped thinking about this idea: a vessel of light.

The Nantucket Shoals are sand bars that spread 50 miles east and south of Nantucket Island, 100 miles from the Massachusetts mainland along the edge of the North Atlantic shipping lane for boats traveling from Europe to New York Harbor. In some places, the rocks are just three feet below the water’s surface, and there are hundreds of shipwrecks asleep in those waters. The shoals also sit at the convergence of two major ocean currents: the cold Labrador current coming from the North and the warm Gulf Stream coming from the South. The collision of these cold and warm currents creates fog that hangs above the water. Two ships less than a mile apart could be hidden from each other in the mist, close together, but alone on the sea.

To reduce the loss of ships and souls, a lightship was stationed on Nantucket Shoals from the 1850s to the 1980s, when it was replaced by an automated navigation buoy. The Coast Guard stationed men there year-round, in shifts for weeks at a time, anchored in one place, out of sight of land, with the ship blown and tossed by the wind but holding its ground, diffusing its light. For over a hundred years, sailors lit the lamps each night and sounded bells each day the fog rolled in. Theirs was the last light visible when leaving East Coast waters and the first light visible coming home.

I tend to romanticize stories like this, and to counter that weakness, I try to think about the harsh conditions implicit in this beautiful story: the forty-degree seawater, the seasickness and the storms, the monotony and loneliness. Maybe visiting the boat would ground me, give some texture to my imagination and offer a counterweight for the news.

So I send an email to the caretaker, and in no time he writes back. We can meet at the ship at one o’clock today.

I drive into the city, first through the neighborhoods of houses, then past my clinic and along the Charles River lined with universities and biotech companies and through the tunnel under the harbor, where I try not to think of the weight of water over my head. I emerge into the sunlight of East Boston, with its oceanfront condos alongside bodegas and school playgrounds.

To get to the Nantucket, I walk over a rusty floating platform strewn with broken purple and white fragments of clam shells, and at the end of my journey, I meet Bob, the ship’s caretaker, a tall man with a trim white beard and cap. We walk up the gangway and stand on the deck and squint in the sunlight that reflects off the city and the water and the ship's bell. Bob points out the masts, the lanterns atop them, and shows off the foghorn. The light from this ship was visible for twenty-three miles, he says, and the foghorn could be heard for fourteen.

When I was a little girl, we stayed with relatives on Lake Michigan for my grandmother’s funeral, and I remember falling asleep under a wool blanket, listening to the bellow of the foghorn from the Grand Haven lighthouse. A sound of safety.

Bob details the history of lightships and their use around the world, in the Atlantic and the Pacific and even the Great Lakes, where I grew up. He tells stories of the original wooden lightships, with lanterns fueled by whale oil, and how the nor’easter storms battered the ships, sometimes breaking the anchor chains and casting the boats to drift miles away. During a storm in 1867, a lightship in this area broke free of its anchor and sank. The crew’s families believed the men had drowned until they received a telegram months later reporting that the men had been rescued by a boat heading for New Orleans, and they were alive and safe in Louisiana.

The steel ship we are in now was built in the 1930s—the same age as my house—and was built to be unsinkable. To keep it in one place, a seven-ton anchor was lowered by a thick chain to the ocean floor. We look into the hold that stores the chain, and I imagine the huge iron interlocking links unspooling from the ship down into the dark and darker depths of water, down to the anchor resting on the silty bottom among the crawling lobsters and crabs. Since the Nantucket was towed to Boston, volunteers have been slowly restoring the ship, turning her into a museum, piece by piece, power washing away the barnacles and marine creatures encrusting the hull and putting fresh blankets on the crews’ bunks and repainting and making her seaworthy and sharp all over again.

There’s not a lot of money in restoring old worn-out ships, and to raise funds, they keep the boat open for tours while they work. Five dollars a tour. Maritime history buffs come to admire her, and old Coast Guardsmen sometimes stop by to see their former home and share stories of storms or swimming in the sea when it was sunny and calm. Bob says they speak of boredom and loneliness and how the conditions were even worse before radio communication with shore was invented. To pass the time, the men on the ship in those days learned to weave baskets to sell on shore.

We circle down the metal stairs into the hold of the ship where the sailors slept and ate, then through the galley and the engine rooms and back up to the deck. Bob is happy to be sharing his boat and his knowledge of history and geography. We don’t speak a word about politics or the election, and for an hour in the sun and on the waves, the weight of it is lifted.

In the helm, I lean against the ship’s wheel and feel the boat gently rising and falling on the harbor waves. The sun warms the navigation room and Bob points out the nautical maps and the barometric pressure gauge and the engine control, set to “dead slow.”

At some point, Bob asks why I wanted to tour the ship, which is a hard question to answer. How did a mother in her forties come to be standing on the deck of an old boat on a Wednesday afternoon? I tell him how I’d noticed the boat in the harbor years ago, and after I’d learned about lightships, I couldn’t stop thinking about them and about people who would plant themselves in a dangerous place to light a torch that will keep others safe. I am trying to figure out what it takes to keep doing that, when the full force of nature feels against your efforts. I can tell that this is not what Bob expected me to say and not quite the angle most visitors ask about on these tours.
“This ship did save lives,” he says. We can hear a water taxi buzzing past, voices of tourists laughing over the wake. The boat shifts, and without looking, Bob places his hand gently against the hull to steady himself. He looks past me for a moment and says, “I believe ships have souls. The sailors who come back to visit her think so too.”

When it’s time to leave, I crunch my way back over the shells and the rusty dock. The salt brine in the air is thick. The first time I saw the ocean, I was surprised at how different it smelled from the lakes I knew. I’d had no idea that saltwater and freshwater don’t smell the same. Sometimes what we have is better than what we imagine. I look back at the lanterns atop the masts, still standing. I drive home with the radio off, thinking about restoring what’s been abandoned and about the sound of the foghorn echoing across the water.

The kids return from school, one at a time, carried home by the train conductor and the bus driver. I put the soup pot on the stove. The food I made last night in a time of waiting will feed us tonight. I open my front door for the mail and see another neighbor. She is walking down the street to find me with her arms open. We stand on the sidewalk and hug and we don’t have to say anything. We have done this so many times: after the election in 2016, after the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, in our masks during the summer of 2020 with its racial violence and pandemic deaths, after October 7^th. There is never anything right to say. The events in the world feel so big and these things we can do feel so small.

My twelve-year-old daughter comes outside to stand with us. My neighbor puts her hand on my daughter's shoulder and says, with feeling, “The most important thing for all you kids to know is: We’ve got you.”

One neighbor volunteers in the food pantry in the church near the train tracks, another in a nature sanctuary. One family hosts zoom calls about local elections, and another couple takes care of everyone’s homes and pets when they travel. We shovel each other’s sidewalks in the winter and host dinners and our neighbors invent yard jobs for my kids to earn money and learn responsibility. This week we’re in the street talking over the election, but there will be more times we need to reach for each other rather than go inside.

The sun is setting, and we go home to our dinners. I turn on the lamps and go back down into my basement to bring up the clean laundry. I think of that anchor chain, spiraling down in the darkness to what’s solid, weighty enough to resist the force of water and air. Kelp forests in the Pacific do this too. Each long rope of seaweed tethers itself to the ocean floor by wrapping one end of itself around a rock, leaving the rest of it able to move with the current. Flexible, playful, alive, the kelp forests shelter many tiny forms of marine life and nourish them with nutrients they diffuse into the water. The knot of rock and kelp wound together into an anchor is called a holdfast. A fragment of Scripture comes to mind: “We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.” I think about my neighbor’s hand clasping my daughter’s shoulder, about the train conductor showing up to work every day to get my kid to school, about myself as a little girl, standing on the lake shoreline, feet burrowed in the sand.

I walk from room to room with my laundry, distributing piles of clean running clothes, free of their sweat and salt. In a few days I will repeat my steps and do this all over when they are worn again. The soup simmers and the house is warm, and all the while my phone lights up with texts from friends and family—little signals of connection invisibly passing through the air, reminding us we are not alone, we are close together even if we can’t see each other. I dish up the food and gather with my kids and my husband around our table. Outside, each house in the neighborhood glows from its windows.

The lanterns atop the lightship masts shone out into darkness, too, waiting through the night for the sun to rise. When the light of the sky matched the brightness of the lanterns, the lights merged. When the warm and cold sea currents collided, and fog hung low over the water, the bell sounded so others could orient. To light a lamp and sit on a boat was a small thing to do in a vast ocean. But to the crews sailing by it was not a small thing. How many presidents came and went in the century that sailors guarded the shoals? They weren’t the ones who sat anchored out on those boats. It was ordinary people with families needing to be fed. Men who trained their restless hands to weave ways to hold things. We still need to be those people for each other. Humans who go out on the dangerous waters rather than come in. Souled vessels keeping other souls safe, by radiating light.

About the author:

Susan Hata practices medicine, mothering, and writing in Boston. She and her family hike and explore in New England, the Great Lakes, and the Pacific Northwest.