Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The impossibility of steering in a straight line is just one expression of the truth that at
sea there
are
no straight lines. Nothing is level, nothing constant. Least of all gravity. You
were once so naive as to assume that gravity was a force of uniform strength and direction.
Welcome, then, to the
Kaisei,
where gravity is contingent, erratic, ever-changing. Just try
putting down a mug of tea. All the flat surfaces of the world, formerly so useful, are now
mere runways for your beverage, which will leap unbidden into the air and onto the floor,
scuttling away in search of lower ground. For a mug—a book, a computer—to be left on a
table or a shelf, it must first be restrained, like a lunatic strapped to a bed.
All the structures of daily life now find themselves built on quicksand. I go to the bath-
room: I pee. The urine describes a sideways arc away from me (strictly speaking, I arc away
from it), first left, then right, then left. Compound upon this the natural downward curve of
the stream, and a newfound inability to stand upright, and now several integrals of calculus
are necessary to ensure that a majority of one's piss doesn't end up on the floor.
The bathroom anointed, you make for the lower lounge. The world rotates. You plow
against the left wall of the corridor, the right, the left…Soon you will realize that in fact you
are walking a straight line, and it is the corridor itself that is driving the lane here, some-
times quite violently. It's up to you to shoulder off its aggressions.
Finally, you make it to the lower lounge for a quiet sit on the padded benches built
against the hull. The lower lounge, like most places belowdecks, throbs with the vibration
of the engines and the motion of the ship, with the parting of the ocean water as the
Kaisei
toils ever forward. Here, merely sitting, watching a movie on someone's laptop—
There
Will Be Blood
stirring memories of Spindletop—you feel, more purely than anywhere else,
precisely because you are trying to sit still, how the Earth's lines of force, once so parallel,
so uniform, now swing and warp, bending the room into a haphazard, freaky place. One
moment you are pressed against the cushions of the sofa. Then the pendulum of the world
swings and you float half an inch into the air. An hour later, your face has melted and your
stomach, having received so much from you over the years, now wants to give something
back.
Will it never end? For three weeks, the very welds in the hull yearning upward and side-
ways?
You need your bunk. You stagger to the end of the glowering, thuggish corridor and
back into your cabin, mumble something to the sleeping forms of your cabinmates, and
then you are home, hidden away in the wooden womb of your bed, surrounded by clothes
and blankets and bags of almonds.
I curled up, oriented so I wouldn't roll and crash against the walls as I napped, free for
a moment from the need always to be bracing and balancing and holding on.
