Random Ships 73

An unrelated question to begin:  Have you kissed or do you know Resusci Anne, aka the most-kissed face of all time?  I’ve kissed her more than once.  Answer at the end of the post.

Some of you can conclude a lot from this shot: the type of vessel, the company, the location the ship, and maybe even what part of an evolution this is.

On the other hand, a lot is unknowable:  who are those three people, their nationalities, their lives, their specific livelihoods…   And those containers, what do they contain, their provenance, age, and destination.  And those initials . . .  in this age of weighty four-letter abbreviations . . . what are these four letters?

How many boxes are on this vessel?  How many places are they headed?  Where are those places, and of what import to their lives is the contents of those containers or the arrival of the containers in terms of what they’ll fill it with in the coming months?

If this vessel draws 40′ through the KVK, what would be the experience of a bottom-dwelling fish as it passes above its habitat?  What would this passage look like from 1000′ directly above?  Would there be a mud swirl visible, stirred up by the turning of the huge prop?

And then, there are questions of scale in the harbor and numbers of vessels that come and go and from how many ports and who these crews are . . ..  Here’s a relatively unknown story about a ship’s cook who visited NYC and left the vessel for a while just over a century ago and if he’d stayed, history might be different . . .

Getting back to scale . . .  part of the story here is foreshortening and proximity.

I’ve been doing this mostly-daily blog for well over a decade now, and although I’ve learned a lot, there’s so much that will just be unknowable, and simultaneously, that fact makes me consider discontinuing the effort and persisting to try to understanding it better.

All photos by Will Van Dorp, who thanks you for reading these posts and looking at the photos.   I don’t think I would be continuing if the subject matter were NYC roadways and vehicles that use them . . . .

For some certainties on these three ships, here are the numbers:  CMA CGM Aquila  is 1190′ x 159′   Dubai Charm is 820′ x 144′   and Atlantic T is 590′ x 108′;  all three are about 10 years old.

If you’ve ever taken a CPR course, you too have kissed Resusci Anne.  I stumbled upon the story yesterday, then read some accounts here and here, and found it too good NOT to share.   Learn to save a life;  kiss Resusci Anne.