This is a column caused by a ship, not a beard. A big ship. An old ship. A familiar ship. But the beard’s part of it, too.
Sometime in the next month or so, Canada’s oldest coast guard vessel, the CCGS Hudson, will leave a shipyard in St. John’s after a pair of refits that have spanned pretty much four years and, along the way, two different shipyards.
The Hudson is 57 now, and is expected to do scientific work in the Atlantic for another four years before being permanently retired and replaced with a brand new vessel.
But the Hudson, while it’s been a federally owned and operated ship for its entire lifetime, wasn’t always a coast guard research vessel. It used to be one of several oceanographic research vessels based at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography (BIO). My dad, Peter Wangersky, was an oceanographer at Dalhousie University in Halifax, and much of his at-sea research was done on the BIO vessels.
The Hudson wasn’t the only Bedford ship Dad was on for scientific research; I remember the Baffin as well, and even a fleeting memory that he did at least once go to sea on the Acadia, now over 100 years old and a museum piece.
Dad at sea is a bit of a cipher to me; the saying now may be “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” but what happened at sea, seemed to stay at sea, too. I know that Dad often left for weeks at a time, reappearing when whatever vessel he was on returned.
We’d get some stories, but Dad’s stories suffered a bit on the accuracy side, because, while he loved facts, he loved a good story even more.
Dad happily did research, Mom did all the heavy lifting, and we waited for his return.
One of the largest cruises he was ever on was a legendary scientific expedition called Hudson 70. It was the first, and I believe still the only, scientific circumnavigation of the entirety of the Americas. From Bedford, N.S. to the tip of South America in the Atlantic and north through the Pacific, through the Northwest Passage and back to Nova Scotia. At the time, it was a marvel of scientific co-operation: a range of scientists in different disciplines, doing baseline scientific research on everything from carbon transport to the movement of water masses to sedimentation and benthic life surveys.
None of that mattered to me at all. What mattered was that Dad was gone for a good part of the Hudson’s trip — from November 1969 to October 1970 — when I was eight (and my younger brother was two). Dad happily did research, Mom did all the heavy lifting, and we waited for his return.
This time, when he came back, he was different.
The story was that when the Hudson left Halifax, it almost immediately hit heavy seas. Dad’s cabin had a medicine cabinet with glass shelves in his bathroom, and the waves were apparently significant enough that the shelving collapsed, depressing the top of his shaving cream can in the process, filling every nook and cranny with foam and completely wiping out his shaving cream supply.
Left without shaving options, a beard resulted. A permanent beard, as it turned out.
I have no idea if I’ve gotten the story exactly right. Pulling memories from your early childhood is tough. I also remember being told that the Hudson came back from trip boasting a quiet cargo of fine Argentinian beef.
A fine old ship, with many stories.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire newspapers and websites across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky.
