Pilot is Job One

I really don’t want to work in Information Technology particularly, but that’s where my skill set and my best chance at a good paycheck lives. But if I could do any other job, what would it be? What would I do if I could do anything? I decided to make a list. One job per blog. It might go on for weeks or it might end after this one. We’ll see.

Pilot.

First of all, I like the fact that there are other definitions of words aside from what pops into our heads when we hear it. Older meanings, ancient, worn, and rubbed smooth by a thousand hands and a million tongues. The dictionary I use says the word “pilot” was born around the early 1500’s. It came from Medieval Greek words like “pedotes” which means rudder or “pedon” their word for a steering oar. It wasn’t until the 20^th century that it had anything to do with airplanes, thanks to those brothers testing their motorized kite at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina.

Today a pilot boards a ship that is entering a harbor or maybe the mouth of a river. His job is to guide the ship through the harbor to its mooring or through a channel to safer or more open water.

As a pilot I’d come aboard the most magnificent ocean liners, or the most sophisticated freighters or oil tankers, not to take the command from the captain but instead advise on steerage and navigation. I would know the tides better than the moon herself, both the ebb and the flood. The location of sand bars and sunken wrecks would be familiar to me as the aches in my joints or the scars on my knuckles. I wouldn’t touch a single spoke on the ship’s wheel but reveal my secrets to the helmsman from the back of the bridge; put that church spire two points of your starboard bow and make 6 knots for 30 minutes. I’d remember the mantra for the use of navigational aids; red, right, returning.

To become a harbor pilot you have to have hundreds of hours at sea, plus apprentice under a pilot. I don’t know if anyone would be interested in hiring a 50-year-old as an apprentice on any kind of ship, but look at Benjamin Button was much older when he worked on that tug. Of course he was aging backwards and I’m just aging. A degree from a maritime school or being a former deck officer in the Navy or Coast Guard wouldn’t hurt. I’ll look into the former since I don’t have the latter.