Row Charon Row: Fic Notes
To paraphrase one otherwise crappy book, plot is a small piece of land where dead writers are buried. It's very true.
There is something like a short timestamp to this, if you care about original characters: Owl of the Waste Places.
History:
The research on this thing was a monster. I’ve written term papers on less research, and most of it never made it into the fic. But I’m a huge WWII nerd and had lots of fun with it. I’m sure I still screwed it up hideously, and for that I apologize. There was this absolutely brilliant website about the life on Fletcher class destroyers in the 50s, with many notes on how things were different during the war. I owe a lot to that website but I won’t link it, out of paranoid fear that the LJ bot will run over there and congratulate them on being mentioned in this post, and then someone will come here and be scandalized. Or something.
USS Morrigan is a fictional Fletcher class destroyer, which was the most popular type with the US Navy in WWII. But because I know fuck all about destroyers, my research models were Aylwin and Monaghan. Both were veterans of Pearl Harbor and Midway but neither was sunk by a torpedo strike. Aylwin was decommissioned after the war, and Monaghan sank in a hurricane. Fun trivia fact: when Pearl Harbor was attacked, Aylwin went out to defend the harbor under the command of a junior officer who had less than a year of service, with another three even less experienced officers and only half of her crew on board.
From my research, it looked like destroyers were often named after distinguished naval officers, so I picked one that could’ve been someone’s last name. Morrigan is actually named after the Irish war goddess. Had I been a better writer, I would’ve picked a random name that didn’t mean anything.
The captain and crew are completely fictional and have no real life research models.
Wiki has an article on ship cats, and apparently quite a few warships in WWII had them. There is a photo of Churchill trying to pet one.
Fic connections:
In 2012, I wrote Little Monsters in the Tide, a ghost story fic set on the coast of Washington, and there I cut it short of final resolution, before the ghost was put to rest. I felt that the ghost was not essential to the story and wasn’t a character but rather scraps of what was once a person. Here, I went back to the coast of Washington and its drowned ghosts, but this time wanted to write a story where it was important who the ghosts once were. The events of that first fic are referenced in “Row Charon Row”, but mostly for my own entertainment, because I like to bury things in the plot. You don’t need to have read it.
An obscure connection to The Witch Is Dead sort of just happened accidentally one day when I was messing around with original characters. Sarah B. that Leigh wanted to say goodbye to is Sarah Barnard, the witch that put a love spell on Dean, but the events of that fic aren’t even mentioned here. Leigh wasn't kidding about her not changing one bit since WWII.
Western Washington really does get fog-happy in winter at night, all night and every night.
Medical:
Survival time in near freezing water is under fifteen minutes, and the common cause of death is cardiac arrest. Severe hypothermia produces electrolyte imbalance by mechanisms I won't go into, and high potassium in particular tends to trigger ventricular arrhythmias, which make the heart unable to pump blood effectively and kill the person on the spot. The mechanism is different from the heart attack people usually think of, in which clogged arteries cannot provide the heart muscle with blood and oxygen. Arrhythmia is not the only cause of hypothermic cardiac arrest but it's the one that got Dean.
The psychiatric illness mentioned by the corpsman is Cotard delusion, in which a person believes he is dead.
Music:
...And because I've seen other do this in BB and enjoyed checking it out, here is my playlist for the fic. Links lead to YouTube.
1. Alice by Tom Waits
2. Hearse Song performed by Harley Poe
3. Henry Lee performed by Nick Cave and PJ Harvey
4. Suzanne by Leonard Cohen, performed by Nick Cave
5. Row Row Row Your Boat
6. Butcher's Tale (Western Front 1914) performed by The Zombies
(And if you speak Russian:)
7. Two Ships by Agatha Christie
8. Hurricane by Agatha Christie
(And for silly and surprisingly hot fun:)
9. US Navy Academy Gangam Style