I stood on the bridge listening and watching. Listening to the conning officer issue commands to the helm as he executed a plan to free a Great Lakes freighter that found itself beset in the ice; the pressure of a wind-driven miles-wide ice sheet held fast against its hull. And watching as we made several passes back and forth, seemingly over some of the same "ground", until its Captain was finally able to make way through the broken plate ice. In Robert Frost's poem "A Serva