Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
But even in my bunk I could feel the tireless ocean gravity, changeable as the wind.
Under its sway, my organs and skin, my face, my mouth, they pulled against my skeleton:
left, then right, then left…The thought surfaced that this was not, in fact, a special marine
case. The boat and the ocean had not cast some churning and unnatural spell. They had
merely revealed how the world really was. Gravity and orientation
weren't
reliable, except
in the narrow instance of life on land. The worlds that sprang from the laws of nature were
wavering and irregular. And so were our bodies—provisional, inconstant, flesh on a frame.
And our lives and plans, too, oscillations in a medium, ripples passing up the swell.
18 AUGUST—35°46′ N, 135°28′ W
That afternoon, while I was at the helm, Mary came and stood on the bridge for a while.
We hadn't spoken much since the beginning of the voyage. It was another odd effect of life
on the
Kaisei:
thanks to the rigorous rotating schedule, you could see surprisingly little of
someone who wasn't on your watch. Aside from meals—and even those were sometimes
worth skipping for sleep—I might see the members of Alpha Watch only if I happened to
be on deck taking pictures during their shift, or if there was a call for all hands to make
sail. But Mary wasn't assigned to a watch and tended to be in her cabin when she wasn't
visiting the on-duty watch or observing some debris being brought on board. So a certain
distance built up.
Maybe I just felt awkward around her.
I shifted the wheel a few spokes to port, keeping course. Mary took a deep breath of
ocean air.
“Been doing so much reading,” she said. “Trying to synthesize everything and come up
with the right approach.” She told me she had a tall stack of books about ocean debris in
her cabin.
How late, I thought. How late to be looking for the right approach.
She sat down on the edge of the bridge, leaning against the railing.
“So what do you think, Andrew?”
“Of what?” I said.
“Of life out here.”
I considered the question. The sailing life is supposed to be the apotheosis of freedom
and adventure, but it seemed notable to me mainly for its indignities, and for the endless
tasks, both awkward and arcane, on which our safety depended. It was like owning a house,
but more likely to get you killed. The idea that sailing was an expression of freedom, I sus-
