Travel Reference
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crew members disappearing by the day, the rank and file were wondering if we, too, should
step off the boat.
Something held us back, though. Something that counterbalanced all the bad omens. A
single factor that kept the entire crew from walking.
It was the Pirate King. His name was Stephen, and his position was first mate, but I
thought of him as the Pirate King of the
Kaisei,
a single person so compulsively know-
ledgeable about seafaring that he made up for the frightening deficits in the rest of us. A
compact man, even short, he was trim and strong, with a close beard and two golden hoops
in his left ear, and just in case we weren't paying attention, he wore a black baseball cap
decorated with a skull and crossbones.
The
Kaisei
had a captain, but we mostly ignored him in deference to the Pirate King,
who exemplified that very specific kind of manhood that is built on overwhelming know-
ledge. He knew how to navigate, how to tie knots, how to rig a sailboat, how to walk along
the yards with barely a hand to hold himself in place, and how to slide down the stays,
Douglas Fairbanks-like, landing himself back on deck in mere seconds. He never wore a
safety harness. He knew how to furrow his brow and raise his voice and tell us that, as first
mate, he was responsible for us. He had personally circumnavigated the globe in his own
small sailboat at near-racing pace, sailing through every kind of sea imaginable, even sur-
viving a rogue wave. He was equal parts Jack Sparrow and Han Solo, and we would have
followed him anywhere—across the Pacific in a rowboat, up Everest in our shorts, suitless
through an airlock into deep space—as long as he was there to tell us what to do. You can
actually survive in deep space without a space suit, he would have explained. You just need
to control your exhalations.
He promised us he would walk off the boat if it wasn't safe, and that was good
enough for us. He became our knot-tying, aggressively all-knowing weathervane. And sure
enough, a new engineer was found, and a cook, and everything came together at the last
minute, and finally, eventually, suddenly—we sailed.
The crew of a ship about to go out of range becomes diligent with its telephones. I texted
my friends and family and posted a picture from the far side of the Golden Gate Bridge. I
received one, too: my friend Victoria had gone up on the Marin Headlands to take a picture
as we left. On the boat, we looked at it, the picture of ourselves. It showed the mouth of
the bay, opening out from the land of the Golden Gate. Our ship was in the center of the
picture, our huge steel ship, barely a dozen pixels wide, the merest smudge against the sky-
colored sea.
And I talked to the Doctor one last time. She made me promise her something. She made
me promise that if I found myself being washed off the ship, I would hang on.
