Featured image of Sam;
photo credit unknown
From The MÉLANGE
Occasional Journal of Personal Histories
I am blessed. And so was Samuel Satori Silverstein in his short life.
Sam was born January 3rd, 1990. If memory serves, he was born in Port Angeles on the Olympic Peninsula. He grew up on Kitsap Peninsula. Bremerton was his home. His father worked in the forest industry. He told me a story about his parents once: His mother was dating a guy who was involved in pool game with his biological father. For a bet, his father had nothing but his chainsaw to use as collateral. His mother’s boyfriend had nothing, so his father asked for the win to be Sam’s mother. Sam’s father won the game and kept his chainsaw. And as result got the girl to birth Sam. Sam’s father died shortly thereafter, so Sam grew up with his mom’s original boyfriend as a father.
I met Sam in Pascagoula Mississippi during my time working on the BP spill. So much happened during that job. It was an impossible situation that could never be recreated. As a result, it gave me a few close relationships that I am still nurturing. Sam was one of those that carried after. We were fifty men living in tight quarters, getting paid beaucoup money. Lots of isolated time in the swamps and bayous of Louisiana on barges, small boats and deserted offshore islands.
When Sam showed up in my life, I was smitten by him. He was ten years younger than me and the soul I needed. We worked hard together, we drank hard together, we wrestled together (I always lost), we spun and shared life’s amazing gifts together. When our relationship continued past the BP spill, we spent time together in Seattle or Bremerton chasing that light young souls do into the endless night. He had this phrase he would always say to me, “For the Boys!” He would use it to convince me to do something that I felt unsure about. Like: “Have one more beer, c’mon — for the boys!” Or, “Let’s piss right here on the patio of the bar, c’mon — for the boys!” Or, “Jump in that water naked, c’mon — it’s for the boys!” That phrase became biblical scripture to me when we would hang out. So much so that I gave it back to him. On a drunken excursion to Port Townsend and back to Seattle (a long drive and ferry ride), I gave it back to him by daring that we would get FTB (for the boys) tattooed on our wrists in Pioneer Square. And so, after a long day of drinking and driving and ferry riding, we did.
After high school, Sam went to the Diver’s Institute of Technology in Seattle — a school that was down the road from the school I went to and taught at, the school that made me a sailor. Global Diving & Salvage was a company in Seattle that I worked for off and on doing both oil spill preventative work and spill response work. Global Diving was the company that employed both me and Sam for the BP spill. They hired me for the work because I was experienced with the spill response end of their endeavors. They hired Sam because he, like most of the kids that came down to the Gulf of Mexico, were students from that school that were looking to get hired full time as commercial divers with Global Diving.
Global Diving is a small company that only hires the best of the best when it comes to their commercial divers. The New York Times did a Sunday special on that company once; divers that I know were sent to New York to fix old plumbing problems buried deep in the old city works. Global Diving has sent divers all over the world for special jobs that you can read about in the news.
Sam could have been one of those divers for that company. But shortly after the BP spill, he got a DUI. And it pretty much ruined his prospects of getting a job with any commercial diving company. So he instead went the cowboy route and became a geoduck diver. A risky business of working with small outfits, unregulated, diving down for geoducks.
In the spring of 2014, he died doing his job. His death is shrouded in mystery. Whether it was a mistake of his boat captain being negligent, or a mistake of Sam being the kind of person he was, who would try to correct a situation when he should have bailed out…
I don’t know.
I was based out of Austin when it happened. Physically, I was just around the corner from where he lost his air supply and went into a coma. He was near Port Angeles, and I was in port in Anacortes. It wasn’t until I was about to be airborne, on a plane leaving Seattle the next day to fly back to Austin, that I heard about his accident on Facebook. He spent a week in a coma before finally giving his life up to the unknown.
At that time, I was dealing with a horrible wife and a one-year-old daughter. And I was a traveler for work. But never a traveler for personal reasons.
I went to Washington to celebrate Sam’s life for a few days. Met a handful of young kids that had gotten FTB tattoos in remembrance of him. Sam was also the lead singer of a punk rock band called HIV, and they had toured the West Coast a number of times. While in Seattle, I went to one of two tribute shows that happened downtown in his honor. Bands from California that had toured with him showed up. They put on one of the best shows I had ever seen.
I’ve been drinking and getting emotional as I try to describe all of this.
I’m done.
