Tiny isn't small. Neither are his engines.

Chris "Tiny" Olson is 36, but could pass for 25. He stands perhaps 5'9, but none of the standard-issue shipboard firefighting suits fit his girth … custom coveralls are on the way.

Tiny's World begins just below the car deck of the M.V. Kennicott, the newest gem in the Alaska State Ferry fleet. He is a welder, painter, mechanic and craftsman. He builds bookshelves and special work tables. He cleans fuel filters and maintains the onboard sewage treatment plant.

A year ago, a local newspaper sent a reporter and photographer to tour the Kennicott. Although the journalists saw the entire ship, Tiny says they left the vast engine room completely out of their story. "Everyone thinks the wheelhouse is exciting," Tiny complains, "but this is where the real action is."

Tiny's tour takes us from the pistons to the propellers - or at least to the back end of the boat, where a giant shaft slides back and forth in response to each slight turn of the ship's wheel. We learn about bowthrusters and centrifuges and rotations and rudders, each separated by firewalls and watertight doors. "Every room has six sides: left, right, forward, back, top and bottom. The Titanic was watertight on only five sides … the top was exposed. The Kennicott would never have the same problem," Tiny tells us.

Some of the men (we saw no women) who work beneath the waterline spend two weeks on duty and two weeks off. Others go a month before getting a month break. Many work 4 hours, then break for 8, then work for 4, then break for 8 … they lose track of daylight, they don't know what day of the week it is. "The only day we remember," says one engineer, "is the day before the end of the run."

Tiny is from Texas. His momma got sick when he was just 15; he worked in a restaurant to pay the bills. A regular customer was known to everyone only as "Stacks," named for the giant stack of pancakes he ate at each sitting ("He must have weighed 500 pounds"), and for the stacks of money he'd flash around in front of restaurant workers like Tiny. One day, as Stacks was eating his flapjacks ("a nudie girl on each arm"), he was attacked by a man who was apparently after his money. Tiny intervened. Stacks - eternally grateful - told young Tiny that he could make real money working on ships. Twenty years, and one failed marriage later, Tiny is still at sea.

If you don't really understand the way engines work - and even if you do - Tiny seems to be some sort of mechanical genius. His ship has two engines, two huge backup engines, and a third backup that all but assures the ferry will never be left drifting at sea. Tiny's World, despite all the fuel and grease and fire in the miles of steel around him, is meticulously clean. He wouldn't have it any other way.