Desdemona Sewall
Chapter 2: Life As a New Bedford College Student
The orientation meeting took place the next morning under a sky as gray and flat as old tin. We gathered in the chapel—though no one called it that anymore—where the air smelled faintly of mildew and old wood. A tall woman in a navy blazer spoke in that rehearsed, chipper tone people use when they’re trying to sell you something.
She told us the place had a long, proud, history.
“New Bedford College,” she said, “was founded in the mid-1840s, back when the ocean still swallowed men by the boatload and whaling captains ruled the docks like kings. Originally, it had been an academy—and an orphanage—for the children of whalers who’d vanished into the deep. You could almost see them in your mind: thin, hollow-eyed kids staring out windows, waiting for fathers who’d never come back.”
Later, the school reinvented itself as a boarding institution for the sons—and eventually the daughters—of the whaling elite. It was a place where you could learn trigonometry and astronomy, sure, but also how to read the stars like omens, and maybe how to lie with a straight face in three different languages. By the 1880s, they were teaching navigation, international business, and all the hard sciences—things you’d need if you were going to chase monsters across oceans or build business empires at the expense of some poor native.
It became a college just before the Great War, and not long after that, women were allowed in—just a few at first, like testing the water. Then came the degrees: Mathematics, Political Science, Astronomy, Romance Languages. All useful, all respectable. But you could feel it even then—something older than textbooks, something learned on the docks and below decks...
The school never forgot where it came from. Sure, it taught earth sciences, the usual stuff of rocks and rivers, but its heart still beat with the pulse of the sea. So they started a college that leaned into those old roots—lessons once drilled into sailors who knew the stars better than their own families. Seamanship, navigation, weather forecasting, oceanography, marine biology, hydrography—the whole toolkit of men who lived or died depending on how well they read the water.
And then came the newer fields. Marine geology, for one—scientists who studied rocks on the ocean floor and swore they could read the sea’s fortune, like diviners squinting at tea leaves. The administrators liked to talk about “resources,” “wealth,” and “opportunity.” But beneath the polished phrases was a hungrier truth: the sea was a vault waiting to be cracked open. Business was circling—like sharks that smelled blood in the water—just waiting for the feeding frenzy to begin.
No one said it out loud, but we all felt it—this place was tied to the sea.
That’s what they said, anyway. But in New Bedford, tradition didn’t come from dusty books or school songs—it came from the sea. The sea was why the college existed in the first place. It built the town, fed it, took from it. Gave back, sometimes, if it felt generous.
Out there, you either learned the ropes or the ocean chewed you up and spat you out. That’s why the School of Marine Sciences had its own ship. Not just for show. Not a floating classroom with padded seats and safety rails. No—this was a working vessel, meant to teach students how to survive out there, and maybe uncover something worth discovery.
They called her the Pequod II.
The Pequod II was a beast—just over a hundred feet of cold steel and forgotten Navy muscle. She’d been gifted to the college like an old war trophy, a relic from the memory of a grateful alum who owed his survival to what he’d learned here.
Back in the day, she’d prowled coastlines with radar eyes and a diesel-fed growl, her belly full of machinery and intent. Now she sat lashed to a quiet dock, trying real hard to pretend she didn’t still dream of deeper waters and darker things.
She could hit twenty-eight knots if you pissed her off, cruise fourteen hundred miles before she needed a drink. Not bad for a ship older than most of her crew, and meaner than all of them put together.
Inside, it was all tight quarters and humming steel—no wasted space, no hand-holding. Below deck, she had a marine biolab that would put most universities to shame—the kind of place where discovery came with salt on your boots and the memory of a hurricane bearing down on you.
This wasn’t some leaky old training boat. She was the real deal.
And she still had something to prove.
For the next year, she’d be home. Sort of.
When I wasn’t in class or holed up in my dorm studying to keep up, I was aboard the Pequod II, elbows-deep in her guts. My job was to help keep the Seaboard marine diesels humming and the systems running—the power, the heat, the water, all of it. She had her own little world below deck, full of growling engines and pipes that hissed like snakes. I couldn’t wait to get started.
There was just one problem: distance.
The ship was docked way the hell on the other side of town, and the walk from campus would take over an hour—longer if the weather turned or if my boots started chewing up my feet. I started looking for something with wheels. A bike. A moped. Hell, even a used motorcycle if I could talk someone down on the price. I also figured I’d check out the local bus routes, though something told me public transit in a town this old might not be built for college kids running engine checks at midnight.
Still, I’d figure it out. You have to, when the thing you’re chasing is waiting just over the horizon—and it smells like diesel and salt.
Back at the dorm, it didn’t take long to figure out I didn’t belong.
I was the only senior on the floor. Everyone else was fresh out of high school—still wide-eyed, still buzzing from the high of freedom. First time away from home, first taste of no rules. You could hear them tearing through the halls like a pack of sugar-crazed hyenas: shouting, thumping bass through the walls, slamming their doors like they were trying to bring the whole damn building down.
It was one big, stupid party, and they never seemed to run out of energy or cheap beer.
I kept my door shut. Most nights, I kept the lights off too.
Maybe it was age. Maybe it was growing up in the Midwest, where folks knew the difference between fun and noise, between courage and just being stupid with your friends watching.
Back home, nobody acted like wild animals just because the leash came off. You got your kicks, sure—but you kept your head down, because people noticed when you didn’t.
I didn’t even want to think about what the weekend would look like—two full days before classes started, and nothing on the calendar but bad decisions.
Friday night was steak night in the dining hall. I showed up early, hoping to beat the stampede. The place was still half-empty when I slid into a seat with my tray.
But already, it had started—the hum. That low cafeteria buzz. Forks clinking against plates. Laughter with no punchline. The occasional chair dragging across the tile, long and slow, fighting its way through the accumulated dirt and wax.
By the time I left, the line was out the door and every table was crammed full.
A few guys I didn’t know had joined me while I ate—probably freshmen. They didn’t ask, just sat down like they owned the place. Typical. I didn’t say much, just listened.
After five minutes, I was glad they weren’t my friends.
The whole conversation was a greatest-hits reel of weed, cheap booze, and who was throwing the wildest party that weekend. They spoke fast, loud—like they were afraid of silence. All that mattered was the chaos still waiting to happen.
None of them talked about classes. Or sleep. Or anything that might look like a future.
It was like they’d never heard of consequences. Or worse—had, and just didn’t give a damn.
Not one of them mentioned classes. Or books. Or why they were even here to begin with. Just a lot of empty laughter and talk about getting wrecked like it was some kind of calling.
Nobody seemed to care that every beer, every shattered lamp, every dent in the drywall was getting billed to a parent two states away. Honestly, I doubted the thought had even crossed their minds.
And as I sat there, chewing the last bite of a steak that tasted like it came out of a prison cafeteria, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was surrounded by strangers—strangers wearing the faces of children.
That evening, I ended up in the dorm’s TV lounge with a warm soda and a playoff game no one else gave a damn about. Just me and the color analyst, calling plays into the void.
Back home, October baseball was damn near sacred. You heard it everywhere—crackling through truck radios, humming from porch windows, playing low in the background at hardware stores while old guys argued about pitching.
But here? Here, it was just noise.
In New England, fall meant soccer and lacrosse. Winter was basketball and hockey. Come spring, they ran in circles and jumped over things and called it sport. Baseball didn’t really factor in. No one talked about it—not seriously, anyway. Not outside of Boston, the lonely bastion of baseball in New England.
Sitting there in that half-lit lounge, surrounded by posters of teams I didn’t care about, I had the strangest feeling—like my reality was quietly shifting, and everything around me felt a little unfamiliar.
From the way things were shaping up, I figured I’d need something outside of class to fill the cracks once spring came—something to keep me tethered. To keep the drift at bay.
Saturday and Sunday passed quiet as dust. I picked up my books at the campus store—half of them overpriced, the other half smelling like mildew and bad storage. Pages yellowed at the edges, like they’d been soaked in a damp basement.
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