THE NEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 131
DEPT.OFNAVIGATION
BRINGINGIN THE COMFORTT
he Navy hospital ship Comfort
went under the Verrazzano-Nar-
rows Bridge at about nine-twenty last
Monday morning. Trucks on the bridge
blew long blasts of welcome on their
horns. The ship appeared suddenly in
the overcast day as if out of nowhere;
the medical-clinic white of her hull and
superstructure blended in with the sea
and the sky. In Von Briesen Park, on
Staten Island, ship-watchers had set up
cameras on tripods six feet or more apart
on a bluff overlooking the Narrows. The
MarineTraffic mobile app told them
what time the ship would arrive. Four
McAllister tugboats awaited the Com-
fort just north of the bridge, their bows
pointing toward her. As she passed, they
swung around and escorted her in. An-
other tug, carrying film crews, veered
among a wider entourage of police and
Coast Guard boats, and private craft
practicing police-enforced nautical dis-
tancing, all under a small, hovering flock
of helicopters.
At the helm, Captain Timothy Fer-
rie, a Sandy Hook pilot, licensed and
skilled in local waters, had control of the
ship—the “conn,” as pilots and ships’
crews call it. Captain Ferrie had piloted
a tanker out of the harbor and into the
open ocean the day before, spent the
night on the pilots’ station boat, twelve
miles out, and received the assignment
to bring the Comfort in in the morn-
ing. He dressed in a coat and tie (cus-
tomary attire for pilots meeting a ship),
put on a respirator mask, and climbed
up the ship’s twenty-foot ladder. On theship’s bridge, he and the captain and
others on hand kept a safe and cordial
distance. The sea was calm, with three-
foot swells, and the tide almost slack.
As the ship made her way slowly by,
the watchers at Von Briesen Park moved
along the fence to follow her, each at a
distance from the next, like football de-
fensemen staying in their lanes. Farther
along the bluff, it was hard to see the
ship through the trees, one of which, a
beech, had the names of Rob, Chris, and
Eileen carved onto it. Soon, wakes from
the boat traffic began splashing onto the
rocks at the base of the bluff with sigh-
ing noises. In Manhattan and along the
shoreline in New Jersey, the people who
came out to see the ship were not so
careful, as news photos showed. The
crowds bunched together in heedless
camaraderie, no doubt encouraged by
the arrival of the floating thousand-bed
hospital with the red crosses on her side;
watching a ship come in can lift the
spirits enormously. (Later, the hope
would seem to be misplaced. The Com-
fort was not intended for COVID-19 cases,
and the small number of other patients
that the ship accepted in the days after
docking has been little help to the city’s
hard-pressed hospital system so far.)
Just north of Chelsea Piers, the dock-
ing pilot, Captain Robert Ellis, from one
of the McAllister tugs, climbed aboard
and took over from Captain Ferrie. He
brought the ship upstream and, mostly
by means of his tugboats’ nudging, turned
her ninety degrees, into the slip at Pier 90,
which had been dredged out in a high-pri-
ority dredging marathon to accommo-
date her. The last watcher in Von Briesen
Park stayed until the ship and the distant
haze of downtown Manhattan could
barely be distinguished from each other.
Later, by way of a network of New York
pilots, he reached both Captain Ferrie
and Captain Ellis on their phones. “My
family have been Sandy Hook pilots since
1882,” Captain Ferrie said, while on his
way home to Point Pleasant, New Jersey.
“And it’s kind of ironical, because my
older brother William Ferrie was the li-
aison between the pilots and the Com-
fort when George Bush sent her to New
York Harbor after September 11th. Wil-
liam is now retired, and his son, Thomas,
also became a pilot, so that’s the fifth gen-
eration of pilots in our family.”
Captain Ellis said, “Docking this shipno one else is taking care of. And yet,
for the first time in my career, I feel truly
appreciated by society. The mood at
work has changed. Before this, it was
not uncommon to be cursed out by—
understandably—angry, stressed people
who are in pain and tired of waiting. I
always joke that you want to be ignored
in an emergency room. If everyone’s ig-
noring you, then you’re probably not
sick enough to warrant immediate at-
tention. If, instead, you see a lot of E.R.
doctors getting really excited and pay-
ing a lot of attention to your case, then
you should probably be a little nervous.
The patients who now need me most
can’t speak. They’re gasping for breath.
Or they’re “altered”—they’re out of it
mentally, either from lack of oxygen or
from direct viral infection of the brain.
There is something psychologically
taxing about working a day shift at the
E.R. No matter how hard you work, the
day just keeps getting more and more
intense—more patients, more illness—
until you reach a crescendo of misery,
and you walk out the door completely
spent. On a night shift, you come into
the E.R. at its busiest and most chaotic.
People are screaming, someone is run-
ning naked through the department, all
hell is breaking loose. But you take this
chaotic landscape and transform it.
Things begin to taper off at midnight.
Patients get admitted. Most have gone
home. And, when the shift’s over, you
walk out into the morning light.
This morning, on my way home, I
went into someplace to get a cup of
coffee. A woman saw me in my scrubs
and she insisted on buying my coffee.
After years of being abused in the E.R.,
it’s amazing the appreciation people have
shown. The E.R. is flooded with food
that people are sending us: Thai, Turk-
ish, regular pizza, fancy pizza. And, this
being Park Slope, a nice kale salad, too.
There’s so much food around now that
one of the residents said we’re all going
to gain “the Covid-15.”
—Jessica van Voorhees