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April 2010 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: The Canadian Navy Feature: Haida Gwaii Feature: Wallaceburg, Ontario The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations À la carte Reviews Mosaic

Seaman Ashley Saunders.

Photo: David Barbour

Most Navy ships have someone aboard who can cut hair but the Toronto actually has a former Halifax salon stylist. Leading Seaman Korey Tynes, a third-generation sailor and father of two with a double-pierced left ear, was both a hairdresser and a restaurateur before joining the Navy, at age 33, as a sonar operator. When he is not in the Operations Room, he descends one deck farther, to the workshop, places a bar stool between the grinder and the vice and offers the basics for $5.

“Make me look cute,” says Able Seaman and fellow Sonar Operator Gabriel Dion-Levesque.

“This is a comb, not a wand,” deadpans Tynes.

McMahon squeezes past the stool, still searching for tools and singing Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” which plays on Tynes’ mobile phone on the greasy workbench. Ordinary Seaman Maxime “Astro Boy” Blouin comes in for his usual fauxhawk. When five-foot-one Blouin sits down, his feet dangle above the floor. The coxswain often reminds the men when they need a trim, which is great for business. Tynes grins. “Sometimes I tell the cox’n, ‘I haven’t seen you in here in a while. You’re looking a little shaggy,’” he says. A sense of humour is essential in this “steel-clad shoebox,” where every day can feel the same.

From “wakey-wakey” to drowsy-drowsy, blue and black uniformed backs disappear through hatches with file folders, metal parts, distracted faces. They are off to hoist flags, consult navigation charts, listen to sonar echoes, repair engines, clean toilets, decode messages and pour ship-side grey into paint trays for touch-ups. Or maybe they’re going to bed. At sea, however, about four dozen sailors work overnight on the bridge, in the Operations Room and in the Machinery Control Room, where thousands of on-board sensors, monitoring everything from moisture to heat, are linked to a wall of tiny coloured lights. Every minute of the day, someone is taking care of business.

“It’s like having a bunch of brothers,” says Lieutenant Melanie Blanchard, a maritime surface and subsurface officer with a degree in psychology, a tenacious resolve and a hometown of Hearst, Ont. Blanchard is a five-foot-one anti-submarine warfare specialist and one of 12 female sailors on board. At 31, she is the Toronto’s operations officer, acting combat officer and public affairs representative. She has a no-crying rule and persuades tall men to sit before disciplining them.

It’s late, and I’m bound for my bunk, but not before Blanchard offers a tour of the bridge. It is pitch-black inside except for random-coloured dots on indistinguishable machines. The goal of a combat ship is to be silent and invisible, hence the lack of lights. Murmurs spill from ghosts around me. “Here, hold my arm,” whispers Blanchard, leading me toward the forward windows. Crew members are tracking a Lear jet as it passes overhead. Sea and sky mingle into a seamless void. We could be Kirk and Spock on the USS Enterprise. She tells me about trips to Hawaii, Nunavut, the Caribbean. Blanchard has seen northern lights, polar bears and the blue-green sea foam in the middle of the ocean. It makes the stressful, and sometimes bawdy, atmosphere tolerable, she says.

It is true what the University of Calgary’s Rob Huebert says, that the Canadian Navy is a sophisticated force designed for “killing people and breaking things.” Not everyone can stomach that — or the rolling ocean. Life aboard HMCS Toronto is draining. Sailors escape with books, Hollywood and cigarettes in the port breezeway. When escape is not an option, they learn quickly how to resolve conflict. Like any isolated community, there are cliques and gossip, but neither seems to penetrate the underlying trust crew members freely impart and the support they require in return. The fact is, they need one another. Navy is a team sport, and the Toronto is full of people who fled the constraints of Smalltown, Everywhere, to be part of something smaller and bigger at the same time. Something powerful and global, where the food is fantastic and the view even better.

Ottawa-based Lisa Gregoire wrote about Lake Placid in the Winter 2009-2010 issue of Canadian Geographic Travel. Photographer David Barbour lives in Ottawa.