SS Penn Leader

In 1974 (or so) I was waiting for a ship in New Orleans. Shipping was always better in Houston, but I had reconnected with friends in New Orleans and didn't mind that it took longer to get a job. While I waited I worked for a jeweler on Royal St named Mr Antin. He told me he had stowed away on a ship from Brooklyn when he was a teenager and came to the Crescent City to seek his fortune.

After a few months of waiting at the union hall my shipping card had enough seniority to get me a job on the Penn Leader, bound for India. I was standing on the levee talking to a friend when the old ship passed by, going to load grain. When I told her that I was going to India on that ship she just laughed as if I was making it all up! I would be gone for close to four months.


The Penn Leader was a converted T-2 tanker; hatches had been added to allow the WWII era steam tanker to haul sugar from Hawaii. This was to be her last trip and, as I learned later, the Captain was not happy with the fate of his ship. He hated India and took sick as soon as we arrived in port, leaving us for a hospital stay in New Delhi.


We sailed the same route that my first trip had taken, around the Cape of Good Hope, stopping in Durban, South Africa for bunkers and arriving, over a month after leaving New Orleans, off the port of Madras. We then spent two weeks at anchor before we entered port and began to unload our cargo. One day we swam off the back of the ship and even though we were far offshore and the water was clear, we all got sick with sore throats and ears. We were innoculated!


Once at the dock I was able to call home on Christmas day! A great difficulty in those days. When I finally got a call through at the public long distance company it was evening, but I woke my parents up before dawn due to the time difference. I also went to the market nearest the ship and made friends with someone my age who found me a bicycle, which I bought for $20 and was able to sell back to him when I left (for slightly less) That helped a lot since everything interesting in town was a little too far from the docks to walk. Taxis aren't very convenient if you're not sure where you're going. One night when I was on my way back to the ship a police officer, also on a bike rode alongside me for a while to tell me "you must not ride without holding the handlebars" I just kept riding and disagreed politely with him until he gave up. Not sure what he would have done if I had stopped.



Soon after we arrived, the ship became infested with cock roaches. We couldn't really work during the day due to the method of unloading which involved about 75 people being on board. The grain had to be scooped into sand slings and lifted to a rail car where it could then be bagged. We were unloading around 1,000 tons a day. We were in port close to a month!



When the Captain left the young Chief Mate was in charge of the ship. I gave away my gangway watches and took a week off, from Christmas to New Year. The Captain had been holding us to the minimum draw allowed by law, $60 a week. He didn't want us to waste money in this country that he disliked so much. So I borrowed $60 more from Chilinski, one of the older ABs and bought a plane ticket to New Delhi! The plane flight took a few hours I realized how big India really was and wondered if I was doing the right thing. By the time I got to New Delhi I had to buy a wool blanket! It had been cold for a few days and I was going north by train to Rishikesh. I knew this was near the mountains and higher in elevation, on the Ganges River. The Beatles had studied meditation there. What I didn't know yet was that the train took all night and I would have to take a "tonga", a two wheeled horse drawn carriage, for another hour after Hardwar, the last stop for the train.

Once I arrived at the end of the trail I took an open ferry boat across the river. This was Rishikesh, a collection of Ashrams along the Ganges River at the place where it comes out of the mountains and onto the plains of northern India. The river is crystal clear at this point. On the ride across I noticed fish below us that looked like trout, only they were 4-6 feet long! When I got excited about it, pointing and talking loudly to anyone who would listen, one of the other boat passengers made sure I understood that "No one fishes here. No one ever hunts or eats meat of any kind. This is the one of the most sacred places of Hinduism." I assured him that I knew that, but that those were really big trout.



I got out of the ferry and headed up the hill. I was told by everyone at the landing that the Ashram I was asking about was twice as expensive as the ones along the river that were about $1.50 a day. I felt recklessly rich even though I had very little money. For my $3.00 I was given a large suite of rooms, my own bathroom (even though the water was cold) and two teas a day. The main meal was lentils and chapati, bread that I watched being made on the open coals of a wood fire in the room where the cook worked. No one was at the ashram as it was winter, except two other Americans. They were in school in Benares, down the river a few hundred miles. They said they were preparing to go farther up river on their spring break when the water level is low and pilgrims seek out the high valleys of the Himalayas where many yogis live in caves. Uttar Kashi, one of those valleys, had been described to me by Maharishi when I first met him at Humbolt University in Arcata, California.



As we meditated and lived quietly, going back to the landing for fruit and yogurt (which came in coconut shells, unrefrigerated) we met one of the other yogis who accompanied Maharishi in the West at that time, Satchitananda. He had been an attorney before he became a yogi and he asked me what life on the ship was like. I was a little confrontational in my answer perhaps: "Its like an Ashram, only there is no God" He stopped talking to me and showed me the heel of his bare foot, a universal insult in the East. Our conversation was over. I guess I was trying to pursue the question I had been asking about "a blind date with God" (after Cosmic Conciousness, God Consciousness is achieved) when I had studied with Maharishi in Spain. My point was, "how can we be expected to pursue a practice that promises this without any discussion of the nature, character or origin of God. Transcendental Meditation was taught and learned as a scientific way to use one's physiology (breathing, awareness) to purify thoughts and emotions (the soul).



I took a day off and hiked up into the foothills. After the initial jungles near the river the path leading up was through relatively open woods. There were wild peacocks and large monkeys. The monkeys gravitated to wherever people were and had really big teeth. I had thrown a rock at one that sat outside my room for a few days staring at me.. he didn't budge, just moved his head to avoid the rock. I was instantly repentant for my transgression against the order of the region. I had hiked for about two hours when I came out of the trees onto a barren ridge and could see the snow covered peaks of the Himalayas! I was in the midst of a Himalayan village of small stone houses.

There was a pile of stones on the ridge with a small, hand forged iron trident laying across it. As I picked it up to look at it and contemplated taking it with me, I looked below to what I thought was an abandoned stone building with no roof. There was a man and a bunch of kids looking up at me from inside! I soon found out this was the (roofless) school for a small village of people who lived on this ridge. The teacher brought the kids up to meet me. He spoke English and explained that the kids didn't speak Hindi, which he was there to teach them. I had put the trident back and he explained that it was the sacred symbol of the God Shiva. The pile of rocks was the shrine for the village. He further explained that when the shrine had been disturbed in the past a tiger had come up out of the river valley and killed one of the villagers. I was really glad I hadn't disturbed it too much. He went on to explain that the village owned a rifle and would go to the river side to hunt deer! So there you go, I was less than 3-4 miles from the landing where I was told that no one ever ate meat! India; it seemed that every mile changes things by a few thousand years. These villagers had to carry water up from the river to water their barley crop and the teacher asked if I could arrange for a pump that would lift water from the river up to their barely patches. I still want to meet that request some day.



On the way back down the path I met someone about my age who had been sent by his Master to the valley to bring back one squash, which he carried like a baby, back up into the mountains.. And so life goes there, with a lot of footwork. I also went with the Americans to see a yogi who lived in a cave very close to Rishikesh. He had been there for forty years or so, he had dreadlocks that reached the floor when he stood up. Even though it was cold, he had nothing to wear but a loin cloth, no furniture in his cave except a picture of Shiva on the wall above a wooden platform that made it easier to do his asanas. He knew Maharishi and of his work in the West as a watered down attempt to interest people in the yogic practices described in the Vedas, which had given rise to Hinduism. He didn't see the point, the interpreter said we were practicing the McDonalds version of those ancient truths. We went away glad that we did not have to approach any other yogis to be able to practice our watered down version of knowledge that would eventually enlighten our consciousness (In those days I was hoping it wouldn't lead to a "blind date" with God).



We three went on one last hike before I had to leave for the city. I had a plane to catch back to Madras to rejoin my ship! We wanted to climb down from where we were staying to the river. The bluff below the Ashram was steep as a cliff, soft clay and sand. I thought we could make it so I went first. I fell about twenty feet and cut the heel of my left foot. The guys waved goodbye and went back. I still had another twenty feet or so to the river which, at that point was a deep pool with a dead water buffalo in it! It took a while to summon the courage to dive into the river, which turned out cold and swift. I made it to the gravel bar upstream and back to my room, but not without getting rejected by Shiva. The river Ganges is considered to be his hair, so before I dove, I asked him for help! It seemed that some huge elemental force or voice answered, but in the form of a question that was not addressed to me: "Is this one of your followers?" followed by: "Because he is not really one of mine" It seemed as well that the answer came back as "Yes, but he doesn't know it". I had my idea of who it might have been that answered, but I kept it to myself and reassured, dove in, hoping it would work out in my favor.



When I got to Delhi with a makeshift bandage on my foot and only a few dollars, I found out that there was an airplane pilots strike. I had to rent (for one dollar a night) a cot in the hall of a hotel in Old Delhi that catered to European junkies. Hippies who came there to live out their days as heroin addicts. They didn't sleep much so neither did I. The following day I found the Meditation Center, near embassy row, and they let me sleep on the floor for another night. After a third night back in the city I was able to board the plane to Madras, but when I arrived at that airport I had to beg money for the train into the city. Begging in India is somewhat acceptable if you are lower class but it was disturbing to most of the crowd at the train station when I did it, even though I was limping by this time on what I thought was an infected foot.



When I finally made it to the port my ship wasn't there! The street urchins that lived in the port felt sorry for me and told me that the American ship had finished unloading and had been moved to another berth awaiting departure. I was very glad to get back aboard the old ship! The Chief Mate had the agent send a Doctor to look at my foot. He heard my story and said that the reason it wasn't infected was that there are many sulphurous hot springs that feed into the Ganges above Rishikesh. He added that it was still a miracle that I made it four days on the streets in India without contracting an infection.



We fed the urchins, who would climb the mooring lines and eat left overs from a bucket on deck. I gave the one that had told me where the ship was a tee shirt which came down to his knees and he wore it every day, the leader of his troop. Those little guys don't live long, a twelve year old is an elder statesman. I asked the Captain if I could pay off and stay in India to hike up the Ganges in the spring and he said "Absolutely not, this is not a fit place to leave any American" and we sailed for Singapore.



The ship was sold in Singapore and I tried to pay off again, but Singapore would not allow any one to stay unless they had their airfare to their home country, which was $800; a lot of money in those days. Impossible to get as there were no cash machines. Pay off was back in New York when we arrived at JFK at midnight, there was a dispute between the crew and the company over living conditions as there had been almost 90 days without cold water so we hadn't been able to take a shower without cooling the water off in a bucket. We settled for half of what we were due; $15 a day x 45 days.. Our flight home had taken two days due to a long plane trip through the Mideast and Europe during the fuel shortage. It was winter and I went to New Haven to stay with Kelvin Chin at Yale where I slept on their couch for 24 hours! I still had the wool blanket I bought in New Delhi and still wore it as a coat (Kelvin made sure to explain where I had just come from when we were out around the campus) until I left for New Orleans on the train. The "Southern Crescent" was full of people going to Mardi Gras and I felt like a King returning to his kingdom from exile.