A floating metal cavern stretching three blocks long and five stories high trudges up the Chesapeake Bay, nearing the end of its monthlong journey from Singapore.
Thousands of colorful steel boxes, known as containers, stand five and six high on the Marchen Maersk's deck, strategically positioned like a giant three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Among the treasures this 18-wheeler of the sea holds are 22 tons of Chinese caviar, 250,000 pounds of McDonald's Happy Meal toys and 40,000 pounds of Harley-Davidson motorcycle wheels.
But deep inside the ship's bow, there is one box -- carrying 33,000 pounds of black peppercorns -- that alone will link hundreds of workers in the coming weeks, supporting jobs from the docks at Dundalk Marine Terminal to McCormick & Co. Inc.'s packaging plant in Hunt Valley. The ripple created by Container #GSTU2224833 -- and hundreds of thousands like it -- reveals why the port of Baltimore, while diminished in stature, remains pivotal to the state's economy.
"If the port vanished today, Maryland would be a vastly different state, a kind of poor Indiana," said Richard A. Lidinsky Jr., a former official for the Maryland Port Administration, which oversees the port's state-owned terminals.
Yet, today, the port of Baltimore is virtually invisible. "People say 'I know it's there. I guess it's there,' " he said. "But for most people it's become a distant memory."
Although physically vast, the port no longer permeates the life of downtown. It exists instead as an outsider, a shrunken industry symbolized by towering blue cranes seen only from a distance along the interstate.
To be sure, ships don't come as often. They don't stay as long either. Only a fourth of the 5,000 longshoremen who toiled at the docks during the port's heyday still find work there.
Its wooden finger piers and warehouses at the Inner Harbor have long since been shoved aside by the glitzy tourist attractions, restaurants, hotels and condos. And gone are the days when Mr. Lidinsky and other Baltimore children bought watermelon right off the tugboats along Pratt Street.
"You stand at the Inner Harbor and you can't see the port any more," said Mr. Lidinsky, who today is vice president for Sea Containers America in Washington. "The port has moved away from its birthplace. Decade by decade. Generation by generation."
These days, the port's vitality is most often reflected through isolated measurements.
More than 28 million tons of cargo, including coal, automobiles and chemicals, come and go each year, generating $1.3 billion in revenues, according to the state. The port also provides more than $580 million in paychecks and accounts for $141 million in taxes. In some way, the work of 87,000 people is connected to the coming and going of ships and cargo. Without the port, more than 18,000 of those jobs would disappear.
In fact, the port is considered so vital to the state's economy that Maryland has spent $850 million on it during the past 10 years alone.
But the essence of the port is much more than a series of data. It is revealed in the lives of bay pilots, tugboat operators, dockworkers, custom brokers, warehousemen, shippers, truckers and stevedores, all working to pay mortgages, put food on the table and send kids through college.
It is spring, months before the holiday season when demand for pepper and other spices soars. In the fields outside Bandar Lampung, Indonesia, workers pick berries off the vines and sun-dry them until shriveled and brownish black.
At McCormick's ingredients plant 9,500 miles away, spice buyer Ed Coach trolls the Indonesian market -- via phone, telex and fax -- searching for the best peppercorns, at the best price. From an Indonesia exporter, he buys 33,122 pounds.
Down the hall, other McCormick spice buyers are plying for millions of tons of cinnamon bark, chile peppers, oregano and saffron from South America and the Far East. This year alone, McCormick, the world's largest spice and flavorings company with sales of $1.6 billion, will bring 2,000 containers of spices through the port of Baltimore. Black pepper will account for one-third of the company's spice production.
Once the peppercorns deal is completed, McCormick's global support distribution manager, Timothy Brotzman -- one of McCormick's 8,000 employees worldwide -- takes over the logistics of getting them here. His first step: booking a ticket on Maersk Inc., one of the world's largest steamship lines.
Despite the fact that millions of tons of Christmas decorations and toys are being shipped from the Far East, competition is still intense for McCormick's single container.
"We have salesmen in those areas that practically book the peppercorns off the trees," says David L. Bindler, regional director for Maersk, a privately held Danish transportation company.
At the port, all work hinges on the coming and going of shipping lines. And Maersk is one of the biggest. The company and its subsidiaries employ 110 people in Baltimore and pump at least $29 million a year into the state's economy, according to Mr. Bindler. It brings 250 ships and 50,000 loaded containers a year into the port.
At 965 feet, the Marchen is the world's longest steamship. It is so big that Maersk must secure special permission to pass through the Panama Canal en route to Baltimore. With enough power to light a city of 30,000 people, the Marchen can transport 3,000 loaded containers, weighing 55,000 tons. In total value, its cargo often tops $30 million.
In the scheme of things, a container load of peppercorns is
mundane work for Maersk. It has, for instance, moved a three-story housing unit for an oil drilling rig and fur-lined automobiles to sheiks in the Mideast.
The peppercorns travel by a small feeder ship from Bandar Lampung to Singapore. There, the container -- 20 feet long, 8 feet high, and 8 feet deep -- is shifted to the Marchen Maersk for its journey to Baltimore.
It is June 22 and four hours after the Marchen leaves Singapore, McCormick's peppercorns show up on the computer at Mr. Bindler's office overlooking the Inner Harbor.
?3 Container #GSTU2224833 is offically on its way.
In the early 1970s, Baltimore, like most of the nation's largest ports, became a container port. No longer was it necessary to pick up each bag of grain, each crate of Scotch, each carton of grapes, hoisting it off the ship and onto the docks.
Now, nearly 4 million tons of the port's cargo move in the giant metal boxes that are shifted by towering, high speed cranes from boats to trucks or trains, almost seamlessly linking the sea and the nation's highways and rails.
Not all cargo comes in 20- and 40-foot metal boxes, however. The port -- including the privately owned terminals scattered along the Patapsco River -- handles an additional 24 million tons of automobiles, iron and steel products, pulp and paper, coal, grain, chemicals, petroleum products and dry bulk cargo, like sugar, salt and fertilizers.
But it's the cost-efficient containers that have revolutionized international trade.
Because steamship companies spend $35,000 a day to keep a ship like the Marchen in the water, they need to cut the time it remains in port. In a matter of 30 seconds, cranes can swoop a 20-ton container off a ship and swing it to a waiting truck.
The rise of containers has saved money in another way, virtually eliminating the legendary pilfering that occurred when cargo arrived one box at a time.
"In the old days, 80 percent of the peppercorns would have made it to Hunt Valley," quipped John Kolacz, one of the 50 men who will help unload the Marchen.
And the other 20 percent?
Mr. Kolacz, who has lived on Grundy Street in Highlandtown for 22 years, smiled. "Well, there used to be three smells in Highlandtown --fresh cut grass, tar and black peppercorns," he said.
But containerization -- along with other changes in the world economy, like the shift in trade patterns away from Europe and to the Pacific Rim -- has taken its toll on longshoremen.
Three decades ago, it would have taken 150 men between a week and 10 days to unload the Marchen. Now 50 men, using three high-speed cranes, do it in eight hours.
The cost in jobs has been great. Over the past 20 years, membership in the International Longshoremen's Association has dwindled from 5,000 to 1,600 workers in Baltimore. And most days, a third of the workers who remain can't find work.
The future is even more bleak, with automation likely to replace all but a few, as it has done in some of the world's great ports, like Rotterdam.
With two taps on a keyboard, #GSTU2224833 pops onto a computer screen inside a small, one-story office park in Linthicum.
It is early July, three weeks before the peppercorns are due to arrive and customs broker Wendy B. Webster is among dozens of people anticipating the Marchen's arrival.
Longshoremen scan the local newspaper's maritime listing to see what day the giant ship will dock. Chandlers order enough food and drinks to stock it for a month. Tugboat operators schedule their rendezvous with the Marchen under the Francis Scott Key Memorial Bridge.
First, though, Ms. Webster must bird-dog the peppercorns as they make their way across the Pacific, along the West Coast, through the Panama Canal, up the Atlantic shoreline and into the Chesapeake Bay.
"Our job is to make sure the cargo gets where it's supposed to go," said Ms. Webster, who works for BDP International Inc., which coordinates cargo logistics worldwide.
BDP workers will call Maersk almost daily to make sure McCormick's container has not mistakenly been hoisted off somewhere between Singapore and Baltimore. Or something worse.
Containers sometimes fall off ships. And sometimes they're just delayed. A load of coffee beans, being followed by Ms. Webster, was once held up for days after three South American stowaways were discovered dead on board.
With Marchen still three weeks away -- somewhere between the ports of Yokohama, Japan, and Oakland, Calif. -- Ms. Webster electronically tells the U.S. Customs Service and the Food and Drug Administration that 15 tons of peppercorns are on the way.
Barring especially rough seas, Ms. Webster knows, almost to the minute, when the Marchen Maersk, traveling at 27 knots an hour, will arrive.
So will Doug Hawlett, a Maryland Bay pilot.
Hours before it reaches the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay at Cape Henry, Mr. Hawlett will catch a ride on a launch boat to the Marchen where he scales the 60-foot side of the ship on an automated Jacob's ladder. On deck, he will take over from the captain of the foreign-flagged ship, navigating it through the tricky channels of the bay that windy afternoon.
Once underneath the Key Bridge, Gregory Lukowski, a docking pilot for McAllister Towing Co., will board the Marchen and toss lines to the crew of the two tugboats to guide the ship into the Dundalk Marine Terminal. There, a dozen line handlers will take the Dacron rope and secure the 55,000-ton ship to the cleats along the dock.
As the ship enters the port, the peppercorns spark no unusual interest. In fact, the customs service will physically inspect only 5 percent of the 300,000 containers that pass through the port. In this case, the federal agency receives the required documents and, by computer, clears the container for passage through the port.
By messenger, Ms. Webster sends the delivery order to OST Trucking in Canton. The document will be trucker Marty Shavers' admission ticket to the 574-acre Dundalk Marine Terminal -- and another day's work.
It is July 22, 6:45 p.m., exactly 30 days after the Marchen has left Singapore. A light drizzle falls in Dundalk. The hulking ship chugs into the marine terminal, backs up as nimbly as a power boat and double parks alongside the pier.
Three gangs -- teams of 16 dockworkers each -- post themselves at 200-foot intervals alongside its blue hull. For eight hours' work, they have come from Canton and Highlandtown, Bel Air, the Eastern Shore and even Virginia.
Carl White's gang will unload the bow of the ship where, under Bay 15, the box of peppercorns is sandwiched between containers of rice from Bangkok and cocoa butter from Johore Bahru, Malaysia.
With 436 containers to load and unload, tonight will be profitable for these men. Because they're starting after 5 p.m., they earn $32 an hour, instead of their usual $17. For Maersk, the labor alone will cost nearly $20,000.
Climbers and lashers board the ship and scramble up the stacks of containers to free the steel rods that hold the metal boxes to the deck and to unlock the metal "shoes" on the corners that connect the boxes to each other. A gust of wind or unexpected movement of the crane can cause the containers to shift suddenly, making their's the most dangerous job on the dock.
The drizzle turns into a light rain. For years, Baltimore's cargo handlers, by contract, were not required to work on the rain-slick docks. The often-abused safety regulation became one of several practices that earned Baltimore the reputation as a bad labor port.
But three years ago, the ILA scrapped the rain clause, helping to create a management-labor harmony that nearly erased the negative image and has started to bring cargo back to Baltimore.
"The work is starting to pick up. I can work every day and nearly every night," said 54-year-old truck driver Fred France, lighting a Viceroy cigarette.
By grabbing work whenever and wherever they can, dockworkers can earn a decent living.
"You work a couple hours here and there. Sometimes not at all," said Victor Chewning, a 59-year-old spotter who aligns trucks precisely under the steel-jawed "spreader" that will hoist the containers off and on the ship.
"This is a good job," said Mr. Chewning. "You can make a good living on the waterfront, but you got to hustle." Last year, he earned $70,000, double what he once earned to support his wife and five children.
Mr. France pulls his truck under one of three cranes that grinds slowly along the tracks embedded in the pier. High above the grounds, Jerry Radtke sits in a crane's cab, crouched over a glass floor that enables him to see the containers below.
With Maersk coordinators in New York having already elaborately plotted the location of containers on the ship, the Marchen's foremen, using two-way radios, tell Mr. Radtke which container to unload.
Mr. Radtke lowers his spreader over the container and, with a loud clang, clamps it onto slots on the four corners.
"It is impossible for them to drop," says Jeff Kavanaugh, marine supervisor for Universal Maritime Service, a Maersk subsidiary responsible for hiring longshoremen and arranging services for the ship.
But they can split open, says Mr. Chewning, who has worked 27 years on the docks. He recalls the bottom of a steel container once ripping out, sending cases of Coca-Cola cascading through the air.
The Marchen, like all containerships, is loaded and unloaded at the same time, with the crane whisking the boxes off and onto 18-wheel trucks, known on the dock as yard hustlers.
As one box clears the deck, another is loaded from the dock bound for Northern Europe.
By 10 o'clock, the ship's hull has sunk several feet into the water. This night, Baltimore will do its share to tip the balance of trade back to the United States, as it loads more containers than it takes off. A 45-foot refrigerated container of frozen chickens from the Eastern Shore moves in line, awaiting its spot on the Marchen.
By 11 o'clock, the hatch covering Bay 15 is removed. The spreader hovers over the orange container from Bandar Lampung, lifts it gently and lowers it onto the awaiting truck.
Three days later, with the Marchen well on its way to New York and then to Le Havre, France, Marty Shavers drives his truck to the Dundalk terminal off Broening Highway. Without knowing it, and perhaps without caring, it is his job to complete Container #GSTU2224833's final five miles in its journey from Indonesia.
For the veteran driver of 27 years, it is one of three trips he will make from OST Trucking in Canton to the port that Tuesday.
"The port of Baltimore is crucial to our business," said Larry English, vice president of operations for OST, which employs Mr. Shavers and 75 other truckers. "Everything we do is at the port." In fact, 3,000 trucking and rail jobs extend the port's impact from the coal mines of Western Maryland to the poultry farms on the Eastern Shore.
Mr. Shavers backs his rig into a loading dock at the Baltimore Quality Assurance Inc. warehouse in Canton.
The warehouse stores more than 42 different spices, all bound for McCormick, everything from the black peppercorns to fenugreek.
This morning, brothers Tom and John Gill and co-worker Charles Kinser are waiting to unload the 150-pound burlap bags of peppercorns from Mr. Shavers' truck. Inside the metal box, the temperature has reached 110 degrees.
John Gill and Mr. Kinser spend the next hour hoisting the bags one by one onto a pallet. Twelve bags at a time, Tom Gill drives the forklift to the warehouse's industrial scales.
For the Gill brothers, cargo weighing is a way of life. Their grandfather, Daniel, worked as a weigher in the port of New York.
Fifteen years ago, their father, Jim, founded Mid Atlantic Cargo Services Inc., which weighs and samples materials that come through the port and are stored at Baltimore Quality Assurance.
"Ninety-nine percent of our work is because of the port," said the elder Mr. Gill, who operates an office at his Catonsville home.
With a long metal cone, John Gill pokes through the burlap bags, randomly extracting samples for McCormick and for the American Spice Trade Association's control laboratory in New Jersey.
Months later, OST will return to reload the bags for their trip up Interstate 83.
The red-capped bottles move swiftly along the conveyor belt at McCormick's spice mill. The peppercorns' journey -- as well as the port's economic ripple -- ends here in the rolling hills of Hunt Valley.
The ultra-modern plant has long since replaced the company's former home on Light Street, where the strong scent of nutmeg (( and peppercorns once wafted through the urban streets. But for veteran assembly line workers like Ellen Newman, the port of Baltimore still has a special meaning.
"The port was almost like a part of us," Ms. Newman recalls. "It was right across the street."
Now, only computers and highways link the 105-year-old company to today's state-of-the-art piers. And, for most of the plant's 500 production workers, the port's connection has been lost.
"I guess I never thought about the port's importance here," said 32-year-old John Deasel, as he slices open the burlap bags of peppercorns at McCormick's grinding plant.
Mr. Deasel's job and 62,000 others seem far removed from the gritty realities of the port. Yet, at the end of the ripple, they are still considered vital to the state's economy.
And cargo, like peppercorns in Container #GSTU2224833, makes all the difference on the docks of Dundalk, in the warehouses of Canton, in the rail yards of Locust Point, in the trucking bays in Highlandtown.
"The last 14 years of my life have depended on the port," said Mr. English, OST Trucking's vice president who lives in Fullerton with wife and newborn. "I can't even think about the port not being there."