USCGC Diligence departs Wilmington

By John Wolfe   •   Photographs by Andrew Sherman

 

It’s a cool gray Memorial Day morning, and the tide is nearly full beneath the big white ship moored at the heart of Wilmington, this city on a river. The wharf bustles with last-minute preparations for departure. Sailors in blue coveralls load pallets of provisions up the gangplank; a life-jacketed crew prepares the ship’s small boat for launch as a team of line-handlers surveys the bollards and places fenders over the side.

A few crewmembers are still arriving at the ship. Some come alone, with seabags slung over their shoulders, saluting the flag flying at the stern as they cross the ship’s brow. One petty officer tarries with his family in the parking lot, wearing sunglasses and crisp dress blues, his tight-lipped wife beside him as he hugs his children one more time. This is part of the service. Goodbye is a familiar word in every sailor’s vocabulary. But on this day, it feels a little more permanent.

Their ship is the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Diligence, a 210-foot medium endurance cutter with a crew of 74. Commissioned in 1964, it has been stationed in downtown Wilmington since 1992 after undergoing a two-year, $28 million refit in 1990. After it departs it will spend the next two months patrolling the Atlantic, completing its missions of search-and-rescue, marine fisheries enforcement, counter-drug operations and migrant interdiction. To be diligent means to be persistent in application to one’s work, and Diligence lives up to its name: In 2011 it seized 3,000 pounds of cocaine in the western Caribbean, worth $34 million, and three years ago it intercepted three high-speed smuggling boats carrying $60 million worth of cocaine in the eastern Pacific.

This is the sixth cutter to bear the name Diligence, an honor few ships share. The first Diligence was one of the 10 original revenue cutters, built by order of George Washington in 1791 to enforce customs and tariff laws and provide income for the fledgling nation, and sailed from Cape Fear the following year. It famously seized notorious French smugglers, an act which led to the mysterious disappearance of its master, Thomas Cooke, and his son in 1796.

According to Coast Guard historian William H. Thiesen, the next three ships named Diligence were also based out of Wilmington. Diligence II served in the quasi-war with France in 1798 and now has a full-sized replica in the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia. Diligence III was lost in a hurricane off Ocracoke in 1806, and Diligence IV saw action in the war of 1812.

As of this morning, Diligence is the only cutter named for one of the Coast Guard’s original 10 revenue cutters still serving in its namesake’s home port. But when it casts off its lines, that comes to an end. After this patrol, its new home port will be Pensacola, Florida, where Diligence will be moored alongside three other ships in its class to make maintenance easier as they near the end of their service life. When Diligence is eventually retired, its name will live on. The Coast Guard recently announced plans to build 10 new ships: Heritage-class 360-foot offshore patrol cutters, which will become the mainstay of the oceangoing fleet. The first flight will include WMSM-922 (W means Coast Guard and MSM stands for maritime security cutter), the seventh Diligence, which will carry the name forward. But currently, the Coast Guard has no plans to home port another cutter in Wilmington, although the dock will remain available to visiting ships.

Cmdr. Luke Slivinski is the ship’s commanding officer. Lean and tan, with steady blue eyes and close-cropped sandy hair, he stands on the quay by the ship’s bow, talking to the press and the small group of civilians who have gathered. Even though the ship is leaving, he emphasizes that the Coast Guard will remain: Sector Headquarters for North Carolina will stay in Wilmington, and small boat bases at Oak Island and Wrightsville Beach will continue to stand ready to come to the assistance of mariners.

“The Coast Guard has enjoyed a very special relationship with the city of Wilmington,” he says, and “that close relationship . . . will continue.” Calling Wilmington a “hidden gem in the service,” both captain and crew are sad to be saying goodbye.

Though its home port will be different, the mission of the cutter remains unchanged. Life onboard, Slivinski says, is about how you’d guess it would be spending months at a time on a 210-foot ship with “70 of your best friends.” It’s nothing like a Carnival Cruise, he explains: The work is 24/7, and 16- or 18-hour workdays are typical. The types of missions and activities the cutter gets involved in are rarely scheduled. The Atlantic Ocean can be a harsh place, something they get exposed to quite regularly, and it’s tough to be away from family and friends (and for the younger sailors, cell service) for months at a time.

“But there’s a certain allure and mystique about going to sea,” Slivinski says. “Every day is different — the environment is constantly changing. It never stops moving. And it certainly humbles you, in a way, because you’re at the whim of the ocean and Mother Nature. It’s certainly special for me, which is why I’ve made a career of it.” Working together in tight situations, while stressful, has the benefit of creating a floating family. “That’s what keeps people coming back,” Slivinski says. “It’s not the food, or the long work hours, or the constant motion or seasickness. It’s being part of a group and getting to accomplish some amazing things that no one person could do on their own. The camaraderie that you have on a seagoing ship can’t be replicated anywhere.”

It’s time to say goodbye. The captain goes back onboard, and the only people left on the pier are the families of the men and women on the cutter, waving American flags and homemade signs. A banner saying “THANK U” billows from a window on a nearby building. On the golden river, an armada of local boats floats outside the perimeter made by a Coast Guard small response boat, waiting to wish the Diligence off one last time. The ship’s crew appears on deck, on the bridge, on the fo’c’sle and the fantail, bedecked in blue coveralls and orange life jackets. Gray smoke billows from the stack as the engines warm up. The clouds are parting, the sun is coming out.

One prolonged and three short blasts on the ship’s whistle, a deep baritone bellow that announces it’s getting underway, and 228 years of maritime tradition come to an end as it clears its lines for the final time. The small boats in the river sound a chorus of horns in response; a cheer goes up. American flags wave everywhere. Diligence backs out, pivots to starboard, and slowly gathers way downriver with the falling tide. The Wilmington fireboat throws a sparkling cascade of water skyward as Diligence leads the parade south.

The crowd onshore waves goodbye. No longer will their ship play soaring bugle calls when they raise the flag in the morning or lower it at sunset. No longer will their ship ring eight bells at noon, a naval tradition that dates back to the age of sail, when time was kept with sand-filled hourglasses and eight bells signified the end of a watch, that “all was well.” Part of the heartbeat of Wilmington leaves with this ship.

Diligence, among other things, is the living counterpart to the old gray battleship North Carolina across the river — an active part of our nation’s tradition of service, a tradition as proud and colorful as the rainbow of signal flags she flew from bow to stern, dressed overall on the Fourth of July. The great white ship passes beneath the yawning span of the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge for the final time, leaving the city in its wake, and heads out to sea.  OH

John Wolfe enjoys life as a writer and mariner on the North Carolina coast. More of his work can be found online at www.thewriterjohnwolfe.com.

Almanac

September breaks you open with her golden hours, her wildflowers, her long, sweet kiss of transience. She is absolute radiance. Summer in her loveliest form. And one day, out of nowhere, she cradles your face in her tender hands, gazes into your dewy eyes, and tells you that everything will change.

September is the earliest fall leaves — yellow and burnt orange — dotting the trees like a Tibetan prayer flag strung across a verdant landscape. She’s the electric hum of cicadas, the pink glow of muhly grass in sunlight, blueberries on creeping crimson vines.

September is bewildering. Summer and autumn at once. She slows you down, asks you to savor what is right here, right now — treasures untold.

Look and see.

Pear trees heavy with yellow fruit.

Swamp sunflowers.

Monarch butterflies.

Eddies of tree swallows.

Here today, gone tomorrow. But such is the nature of September. Your face is in her hands now, and she asks you to watch closely.

You look up to the trees, notice the green and yellow leaves wave hello and goodbye as the first breeze of autumn passes through them. Just like that, summer is drifting beyond the veil, a transition that renders you both dizzy and tender.

September invites you inward. You aren’t looking for a sign per se, but you are open to one. A simple affirmation that all is as it should be; that you are where you should be, right here, right now.

It will take you by surprise.

Perhaps you will be on a walk. The path will be familiar, but today, on the stretch of trail that leads to the picnic bench in the woods, you will notice an arrangement of goldenrod and late summer flowers in a vase on the center of the table, the sun filtering through in such a way that the flowers glow. 

There is no one else around. You take a seat at the bench, and in this moment, all is well.

Everything will change, you think, but life is as it should be. Such is the nature of life
and September.

Signs of Autumn

According to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, Native Americans had several names for this month’s full moon — the “Corn Moon” and “Barley Moon” among them. Other names include “Moon When the Plums Are Scarlet” (Lakota Sioux), “Moon When the Deer Paw the Earth” (Omaha), and “Moon When the Calves Grow Hair” (Sioux). Poetic, don’t you think? Whatever you’d like to call it — imagine the names you might contrive — this month’s full moon will rise in the wee hours of Sept. 2, when the swallows swirl as one, when the leaves begin to turn, when the apples are ripe for the picking.

Speaking of apples, Johnny Appleseed Day is celebrated this month — on Saturday, Sept. 26. Born John Chapman (1774–1845), this American nurseryman and missionary was the living legend known for introducing apple trees to the Midwest and northern parts of present-day West Virginia. Among the colorful stories collected about this gospel-preaching plantsman, Chapman was said to have had a pet wolf who began following him after he healed its injured leg. And while that wasn’t a mush pot on his head, he did wear a tin cap used for cooking during his travels. Another fun fact: Chapman’s trees grew tart apples believed to have been used for alcoholic cider, as the fruit itself was practically unpalatable. In Michael Pollan’s book The Botany of Desire, the author dubs Chapman a “modern-day Dionysus.” Bet they didn’t tell you that in grade school.

 

I meant to do my work today —
    But a brown bird sang in the apple tree,

And a butterfly flitted across the field,

    And all the leaves were calling me.

— Richard Le Gallienne

 

What You Sow

As winter squash and late summer crops spill from the September garden, plant mustard, radish, turnip, onion and pansies galore.

 

Autumn is a second spring when
every leaf is a flower. — Albert Camus

 

Raman Bhardwaj sends big messages with oversize art

By Maria Johnson   •   Photographs by Lynn Donovan

 

Artist Raman Bhardwaj stands so close to movie star Lupita Nyong’o, he can feel the heat coming off of her, and she is flat sizzling.

Neither wears a mask — worrisome behavior in these Covid-19 times — but it’s OK because Bhardwaj is painting the actress’s face on an outdoor mural that’s catching the late afternoon sun.

 

“I can’t stand the heat,” Bhardwaj says casually. His last name is pronounced BARD-wadj. First name: RUM-an, “Like in rum and Coke,” he says.

As a native of India, he cannot claim this is his first experience with furnace-like temperatures, but he is undeterred. Shade from a curtain of trees crawls his way.

He pours a stream of glossy black latex into a tray and soaks a paint roller to do Nyong’o’s hair.

“Usually you would start a picture from the top down,” Bhardwaj explains as he steps up to his sweltering work. “If something goes wrong, I’ll fix it. I’ll take the risk.”

He crowns Nyong’o in broad strokes. The paint does not cover completely, and the effect is softening.

“I wasn’t expecting this,” Bhardwaj says, stepping back. “It’s good.”

Just then, the roller attachment drops off its handle, landing in the recently bulldozed dirt of the Kotis Street Art Outdoor Gallery.

“Uh-oh,” says Bhardwaj.

He snatches up the sticky roller, picks off the biggest pieces of crud and continues painting, standing on the toes of his paint-splattered Crocs until he cannot reach any higher.

He tries a longer handle, but it doesn’t work, so he reverts to the short handle, drags a ladder to the wall and continues working on Nyong’o, who won an Oscar for her supporting role in the 2013 film 12 Years a Slave.

Gently, Bhardwaj wipes a drip of black paint from her left ear, picks up a can of nutmeg-colored spray paint and replaces a curved ridge of cartilage. Pssst. A thin line of black under her left eyelid. Pssst. A white gleam in the center of her iris. Pssst. A touch of sienna in the white of her eye.

“Our brain thinks it’s white, but it’s actually not,” says Bhardwaj.

A breeze sweeps away puffs of paint that do not make it to Nyong’o’s striking face, a visage Bhardwaj chose to venerate the beauty of brown-skinned women.

Marty’s brush. That’s what some people call Bhardwaj, meaning he’s the go-to painter of Greensboro developer Marty Kotis, father of the local street-art scene.

It’s a remarkable nickname for the 44-year-old artist, considering that he had never painted a mural, much less tagged a wall with graffiti, before last year.

“In my hometown, we had no culture of murals,” says Bhardwaj, who was weaned on paper and canvas. He grew up in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh and landed in Greensboro on an artist’s visa in 2018.

Now, a year after Kotis handed him a spray can, Bhardwaj has finished 29 projects, a healthy slice of the 220 works created under the umbrella of Kotis Street Art in its four-year history. (See September 2018’s ohenrymag.com/painting-the-town/)

Bhardwaj has a strong presence at the developer’s latest project, an outdoor gallery of pole-mounted panels near the corner of Church Street and Lees Chapel Road.

Not only is Bhardwaj’s mural of Nyong’o’s face prominent there — you can’t miss her; she’s the one with a third eye of consciousness on her forehead — his work covers almost every vertical surface in the adjacent Church Crossing shopping center, which Kotis owned for seven years before making it a venue for aerosol art.

The caramel whorls painted on stucco over Millie Nails? They’re Bhardwaj’s. The stout round columns covered with brown faces and Hindi letters? His. The Marvel Comics and DC Comics characters duking it out on a retaining wall? Those are Bhardwaj’s, too. At Kotis’s direction, he darkened the complexions of some characters. Witness a Captain America that looks more like America — and Greensboro.

“We wanted a welcoming wall that inspired kids of different colors and nationalities,” says Kotis.

Bhardwaj’s art is not limited to the walls of Kotis holdings.

In the wake of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25, Bhardwaj took to the streets of downtown Greensboro with other supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The activism resonated with him. As a dark-skinned child, he felt the sting of prejudice. Though he was born a Brahmin, the highest social caste, he watched as his teachers lined up the lightest-skinned students in the front rows for class pictures.

“I thought, ‘OK, the fair-skinned kids have a better chance than me,” he says. “It acts on your confidence level. I can connect with the Black community.”

In late May, he joined other Greensboro artists who got approval from business owners to express themselves on plywood that protected plate glass from looters.

Bhardwaj painted two murals at Little Brother Brewing. One shows two boys — one Black, one White — with their arms around each other. The other shows a dark hand and a light hand curled to form a heart shape. The panels have been moved to Guilford Preparatory Academy, a charter school on East Cone Boulevard.

“They’re going to appeal to kids,” he says. “Even if you’re not paying attention, images are stored in your head, and they have an effect.”

Last year, his piece Flights of Fancy, a dreamy green vision of floating people and animals, was posted on billboards across the Piedmont. The surreal piece was one of five local winners of ArtPop, a national contest sponsored in this area by the Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County.

Bhardwaj’s submission was grounded in his own feelings about immigration.

“I was thinking of a free land, with no borders, where people can fly anywhere,” he says. “I like to dream happy. No matter how big you are, everybody likes magic.”

As a child growing up in Chandigarh, a city laid out by French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier (picture lots of traffic circles), Bhardwaj was fascinated by religion and mysticism.

He built an altar to Hindu gods in his room at age 4.

By the time he was 6, he was known as the kid who recited long chants and prayers.

“I could memorize anything and retain anything,” he says. “I was good in studies for the same reason.”

One day, after looking at a classmate’s drawing of the popular comic strip character Daddy-Ji, Bhardwaj went home and drew Daddy-Ji for himself.

“I drew it for many days,” he says. “I was trying to perfect it. The day I could draw it without looking at the picture, I was like, ‘Yes!’”

Soon, he was known as the kid who spouted prayers and drawings. Gradually, art replaced religion as his obsession. He shunned sports, which he found to be populated by bullies.

“I was intimidated,” he says.

He made peace powerful in pencil and paper, which he used to detail the musculature of athletes, superheroes and mythical figures. Bhardwaj imagined that he, too, possessed the powers to overcome his weaknesses and help others.

His favorite hero was Batman, righter of wrongs.

Bhardwaj’s father, a city college official and editor of a literary magazine, divined a career for his younger son: illustrator.

He introduced him to a children’s book publisher, and Bhardwaj, age 12, had his first professional gig, drawing pictures for moralistic books by the writer Munshi Premchand.

Bhardwaj earned 10 rupees — about 60 U.S. cents in those days — per illustration. A book contained 10 to 15 images. “For one book, I would get more than my monthly allowance, so I was happy,” he says.

At age 19, while studying art at a local art college, Bhardwaj won a national award for his illustrations.

Emboldened, he asked the college gallery for a one-man show of his figure drawings. He was denied, but he landed a show at a city museum. He also got an encouraging review after badgering a tough critic, S.S. Bhatti, to see his work.

Today, Bhardwaj reflects on the chutzpah he mustered as a young man.

“I wanted to prove something to everyone, always,” he says. “Even in school, I dreaded failure, so I over-prepared. It was out of fear of failure.”

Fear propelled him to the top of his profession. He won recognition as a newspaper illustrator and designer at The Indian Express and The Times of India, both daily behemoths.

He also expanded the sideline he’d started at age 12, illustrating children’s books and, thanks to the growing reach of the Internet, generating logos and animations for business websites.

Bhardwaj preferred Western clients to Indian clients. They were more polite, he thought, and they paid better.

“I felt like they were more honest and appreciated me,” he says.

He became a pure freelancer in 2010, and he thought about moving to the West, but family ties kept him in India until his mother’s sudden death in 2017.

“After that, I thought, ‘I have to go now. Life is short,’” he says.

He applied for an artist’s visa that would allow him to stay in the United States for three years.

In March 2018, he landed in Greensboro, where his brother lives. Bhardwaj liked the city immediately. It reminded him of home.

“It’s clean and green and sleepy,” he says. “I like sleepy.”

He hadn’t been here long when he added an item to his bucket list: “I cannot die without doing a wall.” Murals, with their oversize scale and impact, mesmerized him. “Content-wise, they can be grand,” he says. “I like to do grand things.”

By the summer of 2019, Bhardwaj had painted his first two murals, one inside the Greensboro Cultural Center and one facing a covered patio at The Brewer’s Kettle, a beer hall in Kernersville.

He was itching to tackle more visible pieces, but he was nervous.

“I’m not ready,” Bhardwaj told his friend Bill West, a musician from Chapel Hill.

“You’ll never be ready,” said West, as he handed Bhardwaj the web address for Kotis Street Art.

Bhardwaj and Marty Kotis had coffee. Kotis offered him a trial run inside his Red Cinemas, a movie multiplex blanketed, inside and out, with wall art. Wielding spray cans for the first time, Bhardwaj painted caricatures of two Bollywood stars, Shah Rukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan.

Kotis offered another space, on the backside of Saffron Indian Cuisine in the Westover Gallery of Shops. Bhardwaj brushed on a giant ballerina.

He spray-painted his next piece, Heath Ledger’s Joker from The Dark Knight, which haunts the backside of Red Cinemas.

Kotis was floored, not only by the composition, but by how quickly Bhardwaj learned to use spray cans and the “doodle grid” system that most street artists use to accurately transfer digital images to large walls.

He was even more impressed when Bhardwaj squeezed another version of the criminal clown — based on Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal in Joker — into a doorway in the back of the theater.

“That’s extremely difficult, to aerosol that small a character,” says Kotis. “There’s not a lot of room for error.”

Next, Bhardwaj busted out a shirtless Bruce Lee on the back of World of Beer the Westover Gallery. After that, Kotis, who’d been providing the artist with supplies and food, started paying him for commissions.

Last year, on the 25th anniversary of the Community Theatre Group’s performance of The Wizard of Oz, Bhardwaj and Kotis cooked up a tribute. Bhardwaj would paint 13 Wizard scenes on Kotis properties all over town, creating a scavenger hunt for fans of the film.

But first, Bhardwaj had to watch the movie.

“Now I see what everyone is so excited about,” he says. “I love that movie. It’s great, great storytelling.”

Increasingly, Bhardwaj paints murals in private homes. For one client, a basketball fan, he plastered Michael Jordan across a carport wall. For Jeanie Duncan and her partner Lyn Koonce, who live on the edge of Fisher Park, Bhardwaj blanketed one dining room wall with a condensed panorama of the park. Using a brush to achieve the look of a pen-and-ink drawing spiced with splashes of color, he folded in the couple’s favorite features of the neighborhood: antique street lights; stone bridges; the masonry King’s Chair; rocks in the creek; and wildlife such as rabbits, squirrels, birds and dragonflies.

He finished the piece in July.

“We can’t wait to share it with others,” says Duncan, who’s eager for coronavirus to subside. “It’s a conversation piece between the two of us. I can only imagine what it will be among friends and family.”

In the post-Covid world, Bhardwaj wants to pick up where he left off, doing local shows of his paintings on canvas. His studio pieces whisper the influences of Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Henri Matisse.

These days, he paints mostly women, including nudes, a practice scorned in many places in India.

“I still find in Greensboro some people are not comfortable with it, but it’s not dangerous. It’s not like people can come to your gallery and mess up your show and take down your paintings,” he says.

Bhardwaj hopes to get a three-year extension of his visa, which runs out at the end of this year. He’s gathering contracts to justify staying. He’d like to get a Green Card, indicating permanent residency, and become a U.S. citizen.

For all of this country’s problems, he says, it’s a fertile place to be an artist. The average person here knows much more about art than his compatriots back home.

“Here, even if I’m alone among foreigners, we still have the connection with art, which is my life.”  OH

See Bhardwaj’s work on Instagram @artistraman or
www.artistraman.com.