Battleships and Billfish

NONFICTION

By Stephanie Sellars

Pop-Pop took me to the Intrepid. The World War II aircraft carrier turned museum permanently in port in the Hudson River at West 46th Street in Manhattan. I always thought of the Intrepid as a battleship, probably because my brother and I used to play the board game “Battleship” with Pop-Pop and the tiny ships were long and gray just like the Intrepid. According to my mother, I was about eight years old, staying at her parents’ house in Brooklyn when Pop-Pop drove me to the Intrepid. The car was enormous to me, like a ship. I remember the color as gray, but it was a late 60s copper Chevrolet. I sank into the ash and mauve or tan seat and inhaled the cigarette and cigar smell that permeated everything. The smoke failed to mask his particular smell of public toilet and oily skin. I was glad to be in the passenger seat with the windows open. The ride seemed like hours, even though it was only about forty minutes. He had a cigar butt hanging from his mouth. He was wearing gray polyester slacks, a Cuban style shirt and beat-up loafers. I don’t think he wore a seat belt but he made me wear mine. We didn’t talk much. He kept changing the radio from one fuzzy station

to another.

When the car pulled over on the West Side Highway, my body buzzed with anticipation and fear. We were about to embark on an adventure, but I had never been alone with him for more than a few minutes. He was gruff and didn’t hesitate to speak his mind about how I should be in the world. You better watch it, he would say. Or, serves you right.

He held my hand as we walked through the museum. Many of the photos and plaques prompted stories of his time as a Seabee. When we was working on the airstrip in Bora Bora, the Japs attempted to invade… Pop-Pop used the word “Japs” a lot. At the time I didn’t understand this to be derogatory. In middle school and high school two of my closest friends were Japanese immigrant girls. When I performed in my high school’s musical production of South Pacific, I wondered if Pop-Pop ever had a fling with a Tahitian girl. I imagined him smoking and drinking and playing cards with images of pin-ups. I felt proud that my Pop-Pop was a Seabee even though I didn’t understand much about World War II. In my girlish mind, the Seabees were a magical bunch of sailors who built things for an idealized America.

My other grandfather was a cornerstone of that America: mansions, boats, a mantle of duck decoys, and a Norman Rockwell book open on a stand. Fishing trips with Grandpa Sellars were a matter of course during Cape Cod summers. It was a boys club. Grandma never went, nor my mother, nor aunt, nor any female cousins. My father, brother, uncle and older male cousins woke up at six in the morning and they were gone all day long. They returned with a swagger and tales of fighting with a fish. It’s not that I couldn’t go. I didn’t really want to get up so early and spend all day in the middle of the

ocean watching my male relatives do battle with nature. I loved seafood but didn’t want to participate in its killing, especially if it was for sport. Grandpa fished for billfish: marlin and sometimes swordfish or tuna. There was a small marlin mounted on the garage. It was shiny and curved like a perfect frown, as if it died mid-jump.

There was a little café in a shack at Crosby’s Boat Yard called the Crow’s Nest where we got rope bracelets every year. They were in a basket next to the register. Every July or August my brother and I got thick white shiny rope bracelets that were gray and dingy by summer’s end. I loved when it got dingy — that meant my skin had turned from pale to golden, and Cape Cod was a part of me. The salt water made the rope shrink so it had to be cut off with scissors sometime in September, after we returned to New Jersey and were back in school. The ghost band on my wrist was a reminder of both belonging to the sea and the sadness of summer gone.

I went on a fishing trip once. Grandpa often took his biggest boatTheDolphinsixtytoseventymilesoffCapetoTheDump,a ten by ten mile square area south of Martha’s Vineyard, teeming with yellowfin, bluefin, albacore, mahi-mahi, marlin, and some sharks. More likely I joined one of the shorter trips, ten to fifteen miles away where the primary catches were bluefish and striped bass, also called stripers. Grandpa consumed garbage when he went fishing. The freezer on the boat was always well stocked with Snickers bars. He drank Mountain Dew. The healthiest snack was Nabs peanut butter crackers. It was a running joke in the family — Grandpa and his Snickers bars and Mountain Dew! It seemed funny at the time, but now I wonder what compelled such a wealthy, sophisticated man to consume candy and soda on these fishing trips. He could’ve had champagne and

caviar. Was he rebelling against class expectations, or indulging like a kid on vacation? I’m inclined to think it was the latter, as Grandpa fished alone or with family and friends. He was more boastful about his toys than fine food and drink. Perhaps this is a trait common to those who acquire wealth as opposed to those born into it, like his grandchildren.

Grandpa helped me hold the fishing pole with a reel the size of a bowling ball. I remember the sharp jolt when a fish bit, Grandpa standing behind me with his giant hand over mine as he talked me through the process of reeling it in. And then a hump of shimmering gray and silver thrashing in the water. I watched with disgust and fascination as he stepped on the fish to slow its movements and gently pulled a hook out of its mouth. He was sensitive to preventing further damage to the fish’s jaw, like trying to put a band-aid on a drowning man. Although Captain Dick helmed his boats for years, sometimes Grandpa took to the wheel. And he let me steer sometimes. I loved steering the boat wheel. It felt more powerful than a car – the shiny oak wood with spokes like the ones on wagon wheels of pioneer days, the way it spun 360 degrees. It was one of the few times in the company of my Dad’s family when I felt important and in control. When I wasn’t steering, I enjoyed sitting at the back of the boat, looking down and watching the ocean split into two foamy hills. I was fascinated by the momentum of the water, how these shapes maintained consistency even while changing.

In 2000, I moved to Hell’s Kitchen, a few blocks away from the Intrepid at Pier 86. I didn’t know it was so close to my apartment until a few years later. Since the renovation of the pier in the early 2000’s as part of Hudson River Park, I started to take walks there. On Sunday nights during the summers, a

wooden dance floor was laid down and I and other dancers reveled to the syncopated rhythms of a swing band. The Intrepid helped me pretend it was 1943. My husband and I “buried” several pet goldfish in the Hudson with the battleship at our backs. I stood in the same spot alone, tormenting myself with doubts over the same husband. During these moments, the Intrepid seemed to say, “Here you are again. I will restore you.”

I became an occasional runner on a route that starts and ends with the pier. I either go north or south twenty blocks before crossing the highway to return home. During NYC’s 2020 pandemic lockdown, I would often walk to the pier and back as a respite from quarantine. I still go there and hear gulls that remind me the ocean is not far away. The Intrepid casts a beautiful, harsh pointed shadow in the sun. At night, she glows in a halo of light. From my childhood to Covid-19, she has remained solid and steadfast. I feel like she watches over me in her own way, just like my Pop-Pop did.