Torn In Two: A Narrative Monologue

Inspired by Max’s blog, ‘Old Steam Ships’ –
this is my story based on facts about the sinking
of the SS Daniel J. Morrell on Nov. 29, 1966 in
Lake Huron from reports made by 26-year-old
watchman and lone survivor, Dennis Hale.

I was asleep when the ship told me she was dying.

That’s the only way I know how to say it. Ships talk to the men who live on them …. you learn the sounds she makes, the groan of her ribs settling, the hum of her engine two decks down. So when a sound came through the Morrell that I’d never heard before, I was awake before I understood why. A crack. Not thunder …. thunder rolls. This was a single, flat, enormous crack, like the whole world had been snapped over somebody’s knee.

I didn’t have time to dress. I grabbed my pea coat, my life jacket, and I ran out onto the deck in my underwear, and that alone should have killed me before the night was through.

The wind that night was doing seventy. The waves on Huron were twenty-five feet, climbing over each other like some kind of war dance. And when I got out on deck and looked toward the bow, I understood the sound I’d heard.

She was broken. My ship …. six hundred feet of American steel that I’d sailed for years …. was broken clean in half, and the two pieces of her were still moving, independently, like something out of a nightmare a shipbuilder might have. The stern, where I stood, was still under power. The engines were still turning. And somewhere out there in the dark and the spray, the bow section …. with men aboard her, my friends aboard her …. was drifting off on its own, already a stranger to the rest of the ship.

I don’t remember deciding to get in the raft; I just remember deciding not to die standing still. Four of us went over the side together …. me, and three other men …. whose faces I will carry to my grave, whose faces I remember more clearly than my own children’s faces some days, because what happened to them and not to me is something I have never been able to understand or explain.

The cold in that water isn’t like cold you’ve felt before. It doesn’t hurt at first. It empties you. It goes in through the skin and finds whatever is warm inside and puts it out …. the way you’d walk through a house at night, one room at a time, turning off lights. I remember thinking, quite calmly, that I was going to watch myself die, and that it wouldn’t take very long, and that there was nothing to be done about it except to keep breathing until I couldn’t.

The others slipped away quietly. I want to say that gently, because it deserves gentleness. One by one, over those hours, they stopped answering when I called to them. Stopped shivering, which I would learn later is the worse sign, not the better one. The body only fights the cold as long as it believes it can win. When it stops shivering, it has already surrendered, and it takes the man with it, quiet as anything. I held onto that raft in the freezing dark with three men who had been alive an hour before, and I was, by the end of it, entirely alone.

And that is when I saw the lights.

I want you to understand what that felt like, because I have spent decades trying to make people understand it and I don’t know that I ever will. You have to picture a man who believes, truly believes, that he is going to die within the hour …. cold enough that his mind has already started letting go of things, sounds turning strange, thoughts arriving from nowhere and leaving just as fast …. and then, out of that black water, a shape rises up. Lights. A superstructure. A vessel, unmistakably, coming toward him through the storm.

For one moment …. one single, perfect moment that I would give almost anything to have back, just to feel it again the way I felt it then …. I believed I was saved. I believed some laker had spotted me, had turned into that sea to come get me, and that I would live to be an old man after all.

Then the shape came close enough, and close enough again, and I understood what I was looking at.

It was her. It was the bow.

It was the Morrell, or what remained of the Morrell …. the forward section, still afloat, still lit, still carrying way through the water on whatever momentum a broken ship carries when nobody is left alive to steer it …. and it was coming toward me not as a rescuer but as a ruin, my own ship’s corpse drifting past me in the dark like it had come back to check on what it had left behind. I have heard men call it a ghost ship since, and I never corrected them, because that is exactly what it was to me in that moment. Not steel. Not wreckage. A ghost …. my ghost, my ship’s ghost, gliding by in the storm to have one last look at the man she couldn’t keep aboard her.

I don’t know how long I watched her go. Long enough for the hope to curdle into something worse than the despair I’d had before I saw her, because now I knew, with a certainty that no rescue could undo, that whatever was going to save me was not going to be the Morrell. She was done. She had already given up everything she had to give, and she was only continuing to move because the lake hadn’t finished with her yet.

After that, there is very little I can tell you with confidence, because the mind does strange things to a man in his last stretches of cold. I know I saw things on that raft that weren’t there …. a man in yellow sitting with me, though I couldn’t tell you if he was mercy or delirium, and at this point in my life, I’ve stopped needing to choose between the two. I know the storm did not let up. I know the sun came up eventually, gray and reluctant, over water that had killed twenty-eight men and had not yet decided what to do with me …. the twenty-ninth.

I was found the next day. Thirty-eight hours, they told me, though I couldn’t have counted them myself. I was the only one. Twenty-eight men who had wives, mothers, children waiting on shore for a ship that was never going to tie up again, and I was the one who got to go home and grow old and be asked, for the rest of my life, what it was like to watch your own ship come for you as a ghost.

I never found a way to explain it that satisfied me. I’m not sure I’m telling it right this time either. But I was there, and I saw her, and I have never in all these years stopped hearing that crack in the night that told me, before anything else did, that the world I trusted to hold me up was already gone.

NAR©2026

Nancy’s Notes: After almost 38 hours laying in one position on a life raft, Dennis Hale was saved when Coast Guard helicopters swooped in to rescue him. He reported on the excellent care he received from the staff at the Harbor Beach Hospital and the people of Harbor Beach in general. His injuries were less that what was expected, with his feet requiring the most care. He underwent numerous operations on his feet but managed to get around pretty well on his own. Hale claimed to be unprepared for all the media interest and was terribly upset by some of the blatantly false newspaper statements about him. He commented that the crew of the Morrell was the closest thing to a family he had ever known and he mourned their loss deeply. Because of this tragedy, life became very precious to him; through good times and bad, he looked forward to each new day, thankful to have been given a second chance. Dennis Hale died September 2, 2015 at the age of 75.

This is “Goin’ Down” by Dan Hall and the Merrill’s lone survivor, Dennis Hale

SS Daniel J. Morrell: A Ship Chasing Its Survivor

^{Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.}