Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
that day that the Garbage Patch was anything but uniform. It varied from spot to spot, het-
erogeneous and changing.
But that didn't matter. What mattered was getting farther west while we still could, and
finding more trash.
21 AUGUST—34°44′ N. 142°44′ W
One week at sea. I spent half my waking hours dreaming of land. Land, which wouldn't
move. A nice sidewalk, with the Doctor walking down it. The other half I spent in witness
to the plain wonders of the open ocean and the numberless, fractal layers of its moving sur-
face. Or I spent it out on a yard, wrestling a sail in the shining void.
We now lived for what we had all feared: going aloft. We waited for the call, edging
toward the ratlines, ready to scramble upward, to the lower topsail, to the upper topsail, to
the topgallant, perhaps a hundred feet above the deck. We edged out along the spars like
arthritic monkeys, clinging to the yard with our bellies, as the Pirate King had shown us. I
now depended on what I had dreaded would be the worst part of going aloft: the roll and
pitch of the ship. I waited for the moments when it seemed to lift me upward in my climb,
for the seconds when it glued me to the yard, when I could with confidence use both hands
to tie a knot, unconcerned that I might be flung backward into blue nothingness, with only
a short stretch of line to connect my waist to the rest of the world.
And I liked my shipmates. We were in that long moment of becoming friends, when
the foreign and the familiar become, for a time, the same thing. Robin was revealed as a
serial trickster, helpless before the opportunity to tell an off-color joke or to make joyous
mockery of himself, of us, of everything. He told us old stories from his job, of being called
into the principal's office—as a
teacher
—for some mischief inflicted on his students. Art,
Robin's good friend, was a weather-beaten man in his seventies, with the thick brogue of
a New England fisherman—yet he was a surfer and science teacher living in Hawaii. He
climbed the ratlines and slid down the shrouds like someone much younger, hopping onto
the deck, an ancient mariner flashing the
hang loose
sign. Then there was Adam, the sham-
bling, culinary animal who inhabited the pitching metal box of the galley, fending off slid-
ing pans and trays, deploying his ninja kit of cooking knives with focused abandon.
On Saturday evening we had a party. The concepts of “Saturday” and “evening” had
long since lost their meaning in the constant cycling of the watches, but “party” was an idea
that still held. It marked our entrance into the heart of the Gyre. At last, the air was warm,
subtropical, the ocean glassier, almost smooth, the ship's deck glowing in the late sun. Joe,
the engineer, cut the engine, and the
Kaisei
bobbed on the lazy swell.
