The relentless Egyptian heat beat down on my neck as we steered the Ben Franklin through the canal. The air hung thick and heavy, and my gaze drifted across the vast expanse of metal ahead of us – the Ever Given, a leviathan of a ship dwarfing our own freighter. It was a monstrosity of progress, and entirely too close for comfort in this narrow waterway. A prickle of unease ran down my spine, a premonition brushed aside in the face of the day's tight schedule. We settled into the slow, single-file crawl that was the canal, a routine as familiar as shifting of the seasons. The days bled into one another, marked only by the rising and setting sun.
The first whispers of trouble began as hushed conversations amongst the crew. The Ever Given, they said, had run aground. Disbelief turned to worry as the news solidified. We were stuck, a string of dominoes frozen mid-fall. The once-orderly flow of the canal ground to a halt, replaced by a tense, watchful stillness. The mess hall became a microcosm of the chaos outside. A cacophony of languages filled the air, each crew member a prisoner in their own cage of worry. The captain, a normally stoic man, spent hours hunched over navigation charts, his brow furrowed in a perpetual crease. I swear I saw him muttering to himself once, his eyes glazed over with a strange kind of resignation. The outside world, once a blur of passing scenery, became a stage for the absurd. A lone windsurfer, a defiant speck against the colossal backdrop of the beached ship. A fleet of tugboats, valiant but hopelessly outmatched, buzzing around the Ever Given like angry bees.
Weeks bled into one another, the only constant the relentless sun and the unyielding Ever Given. The initial worry morphed into a weary acceptance, a dull ache that settled in the pit of my stomach. Time, once a steady march, became an unmoored ship, tossed about by the currents of uncertainty. Then, one day, a tremor of hope. Monstrous dredgers arrived, their mechanical jaws gnashing at the sand with an insatiable hunger. Day and night they toiled, slowly, painstakingly, carving a path for the Ever Given. We watched, a collective breath held in our lungs, as the leviathan shifted ever so slightly.
The day it finally budged was a day etched in my memory. A cheer erupted from the decks of the surrounding ships, a sound as crisp as clean water in a desert. We watched, bleary-eyed, as the Ever Given, stirred back to life. It was a victory not just of engineering, but of human resilience, a testament to our ability to overcome the seemingly insurmountable. The canal unblocked, the world lurched back into motion. We steered the Ben Franklin forward, the once-still water churning beneath our hull. The experience, however, left an indelible mark. We carried with us the weight of those surreal weeks, a shared story etched in the lines on our faces and the weariness in our eyes. The world spun on, ignorant to the drama that had unfolded in this narrow stretch of water. Perhaps they had heard about it, but for us, the crew of the Ben Franklin, the Suez Canal would forever be a place of suspended time, a bizarre wrinkle in the fabric of reality, a reminder of a time the world stood still.
Image of the Ever Given as seen from above.
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
This piece describes what I imagine it may have been like to be stuck behind the Ever Given freighter during the 2021 Suez Canal obstruction incident. I did my best to adapt the prose and some of the themes from Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five into the text. I really focused on displaying two main themes from Slaughterhouse: the collective human experience and the ambiguity of time. I thought about structuring the narrative nonlinearly too, but it seemed impossible to do well in such a short piece.
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