Please Hold the Phone  ... There's a Ship Headed Out
	Texas City Sun, March 27, 1994
By MAX RIZLEY, Jr.
... Yes, yes, okay ... Mr. Fitweiler, is it? Horace Fit ... F-I-T-W-E ...  is that E-I or I-E -- oh, drat. My pencil broke. Give me a minute to go sharpen  it, won't you?
And it's over to the pencil sharpener, over there on the table with the  stapler and the paper clips and the rubber bands, the table by the big window  overlooking the Galveston Channel, right where it elbows its way past the Fort  Point bell buoy and into the main Bolivar Roads channel.
It's a lovely day outside, the warm spring sun glinting diamond-hard off the  windshields of the cars lined up for the ferry, spangling the broad watery vista  beyond with a million sunny sequins. The gulls are wheeling and diving, a small  sailboat is reaching up the channel toward the yacht basin, and coming down the  channel -- ah, coming down the channel, riding slow and deep, is an outbound  steamship.
The electric sharpener grinds my pencil shorter and shorter as I watch, as I  cannot help BUT watch, the vessel's passage.
Lots of ships pass by here, and they go both ways, in and out -- but it is  the outbounders, headed for sapphire seas and faraway cities, that hold me  spellbound.
I KNOW where the inbounders are headed; their berth is visible from here,  even if I don't know exactly which pier it is.
But the outbound ships steam by in tantalizing, Mona Lisa mystery, their  foaming wakes fertile with promise but barren of answers.
Where is this one headed? Some South Pacific port, some emerald gem of an  islet whose name is mostly vowels? The noisy, pungent chaos of Hong Kong,  Singapore, Shanghai? The brisk hustle-bustle of Le Havre, Rotterdam, Liverpool?  Sunny Egypt, dusty Africa, or the topsy-turvy South American run, where winter  is summer and summer is winter and the toilets all flush clockwise?
The ship certainly isn't telling. She rounds Fort Point, harrumphing a black  belch of smoke from her funnel as the bridge rings up "half ahead" and she picks  up speed, her screws churning the grey-green water into a creamy froth, driving  hard now for the open Gulf . Outbound. All she tells us is that she's  headed Somewhere Else, where people talk differently, eat different foods,  listen to different music. And mainly, she's just headed -- Out. To sea. To  chase the horizon, down the coast, across the Gulf or halfway 'round the world,  a little, self-contained world of her own, the center point of 360 degrees of  watery emptiness, plowing her endless furrow through seas whose blue the  landsman can scarcely imagine, under nighttime skies where the stars outnumber  the dark.
How fast she disappears! Eager, I guess, to chase that horizon -- "she's  snorting and she's snatching for a breath of open sea," Kipling once said.  Smaller, smaller, she recedes, her once-solid mass of steel now quavery and  vaporous in the distance, and at last nothing more than a wisp of smoke on the  horizon to bid us a final farewell ... The pencil sharpener makes a funny  noise, and I see that my once-proud Eagle No. 2 is just a nub. And Fitweiler!  Oh, lordy. I race back to my desk, pick up the receiver. "Hello? Hello? Mr. Fit  ... oh, fiddle!" I say, to the uncaring drone of a dial tone.
Ah, well. I have his  number, he has mine, we'll get back together.
I wonder what's outside his window?
		--30--