At Sea

            by Zoe Richards

 

The summer before my junior year I set off to sail the Atlantic.  I was to embark from the remarkably chipper town of Woods Hole, Massachusetts with thirty-three other students as part of Sea Education Association’s Summer at SEA program.  I was escorted to the SEA campus by the only two people I was even loosely connected to in the area: Ellen and Len Gilbert.  They were these really silly grandparents of a friend of mine.  They took photographs, and constantly made me toast, and gifted me with a pleasant introduction to coastal Massachusetts.  I was feeling solid about myself after my short stay with them, even with my extremely limited knowledge of the events to come.  They dropped me off early in the day, and I felt incredibly comfortable walking up the immaculate brick walkway to the white Dutch colonial “lesson center”.  The summer breeze tickled my ankles and my pale cotton dress shifted innocently against my almost skipping form.  I caught these random whiffs of intoxicating optimism.  Life was so sunny.  I slid through the opening of impressive French doors, and announced myself to a piggy pink middle aged woman.  “Zoë Richards,” I said jovially. 

            “Okay Zoë, go right on along through those big blue doors. Most of the others adventurers are already there.”  Oh Jesus.  That was short. Her eager speech.

            “Oh, um…oka----”  Thwump…a fat load of books, binders, nautical charts and handouts landed on my arms and made my knees sink.  I staggered into the carpeted room, and found my assigned seat, creating what was apparently an extensive disruption.  I plopped down, crestfallen.  A laminated itinerary with my full name glared up at me.  Every hour was blocked out, in military time.

The next three weeks passed slowly.  I forgot that there was another totally different, non-preparatory, component of the camp to come.  Every day I woke up too early, ate too little, and then had to force my way through intensely detailed lectures on sediment coring, compass conversion, whaling, meteorology, knot tying, or whatever else was deemed relevant.  It wasn’t that the material was boring per se, but the total immersion into the life, culture and science of the sea while I was away from everything I knew and surrounded by thirty-three shiny, cheerful, simple kids really wore on me.     

 

They said things like “peachy-keen” and “great!”, and organized communal games of Red Rover. Viewed from far enough away they looked like a video you’d see played on a loop in a J-Crew store.  After classes I carefully slipped away from the spanking clean lot of ‘em and listen to Tom Waits, read bulky novels, or wrote.  Most of the writing I did there was juvenile and whiney, but I did fill a whole composition book in those three weeks. 

            At nights, especially the stormy ones, my thoughts were limited to vivid memories of my friends.    I forced myself to go into painful detail about what they might be doing at that exact moment, replaying anything that brought me close to tears.  In bed with the lights out I’d mimic smoking a blunt, leisurely, even delicately forming that thick white smoke, savoring the flavor of artificial peach and buttery grapes.  My life in Berkeley seemed so civilized in memory, so mature in comparison to the assembly line dinners and scheduled bonding time I’d been having. 

Two weeks of the exact same routine.  Regret set in. I was confused and exhausted.  I was living a life where you had to be five minutes early to be on time, and were encircled by glares if you were late.  Everything was counter intuitive. I tried to make Woods Hole my enemy, leaving room for Berkeley as my champion, but now even the most sentimental memories of my life back in the Bay left me cold. 

 

            On the boat, everything was new, and I was a total mess.  I walked around like I was drunk all the time; woke up still dreaming of home and the smell of clean sheets.  It seemed like the rest of the students were making substantial efforts to enjoy the first moments of sea, but for the most part, they too had no idea where they were or what they were doing.  I saw a few trying to be witty, or at least helpful, but the surly crew just grunted back rejection after rejection. It would’ve been funny to look from above at all these stumbling, elephantine kids on a pirate ship, bumping up against everything in sight, like some kind of slapstick comedy routine.  But for most of us it was painful to be clumsy.

            And then people started to get sick.  A few at first, and then this massive wave of fifteen or twenty people collapsed against the rail.  In its first stage, seasickness takes on the form of depression, coming on strong and quick. Then there’s the exhausting nausea and pain; the cruel bliss with the rise of the ship, and the bone-deep agony with the fall.    I remember wanting desperately to jump up and stay there, pinned in the sky peacefully; anything to break free from the unending circle of torture the motion of the boat implied.   Lastly, there’s the constant vomiting.

We were fed bad minestrone soup the first night, and then for lunch the next day.  The crew must’ve known better than to bother making a whole new dish; it was all going over the side anyway.  I wasn’t vomiting as of lunch time, so after my meal I was ordered to go on deck and bring more soup to all the totally incapacitated.  I climbed the narrow ladder, and the instant I planted my feet on the deck a very distinct and hideous wave of smell smacked into me, almost knocking me down.  It was a mix of the sour and crusty smell of throw up and the corn nutty smell teenagers achieve without showers and toothbrushes and proper rest.  After the initial shock wore off I steadied myself, and continued to walk back aft, keeping my eyes locked on my blue and black imitation Teva’s. I turned a corner, revealing twenty five or so very pale, very crumpled humans, all lined up and harnessed to the rail.  Their skins were beginning to bake red from the sun, and on their hands and knees they looked very close to death.  Collectively they produced an incidental symphony of hushed moans.  Their movement reminded me a bit of the game you play where you whack the beavers down with a soft mallet.  One would come up to hurl, then another parallel to the first, then maybe two at the same time, and a fifth encouraged by all the others.  Walking back down to the cabin, I had to resist a laugh. 

That night I woke up sticky, and suddenly in the dark.  Some one was rustling the crunchy curtain of privacy that separated my bed from the door to the galley.  A woman’s voice spoke gently, “Zoë, it’s 2:15 in the morning and you have watch in twenty minutes.  Try to eat something before you head up.”  It had been made very clear that since the ship’s needs did not rest at night, we weren’t going to either. 

I shook myself awake and felt around the end of my bunk for some kind of pants.  I could very clearly smell the vanilla and bergamot of my body wash.  After grabbing a water bottle as a second thought, I fell down to the ground loudly, forgetting about the five foot drop.  I was motionless for a moment, listening acutely to the regularity of snoring coming from the bottom bunk.  After confirming that Jim was still fully asleep, I made myself some poor quality tea.  I sat with a blank mind as the water cooled, noticing very little and forming even fewer opinions. Robotically, I made my way up to the science lab to meet with the rest of my watch group.  The watches were designed very specifically to divide up the “operations of the vessel”, and although I had no idea what they could entail, I was in no hurry to find out.  Stepping slowly out of the dark night I could hear some kind of introduction already going on.

“Okay guys, my name’s Jason.  I’m the first mate of this fine vessel, and the leader of watch Arrrrrrrrr.”  I looked on the list of names, and found mine under WR.  I studied the cold, sterile room, and the self-proclaimed Jason.  He seemed totally normal, dressed in khaki pants and a fleece, with crew cut chocolate hair and no obvious abnormalities, except that behind his metal framed lenses, his right eye was shut.  He continued to speak enthusiastically, of rules and then anecdotes of past sea voyages.   I liked him, but was in no mood for friendliness.

  “..heh, that was probably the worst bunch of sailors we’ve ever had…” he concluded, smiling nostalgically. “Okay, enough about me and my memories, let’s get on with the good stuff.  But first, does anyone have any questions for me?”  There was a sleepy silence in the small lab that filled the room for what seemed like an awkwardly long time.  I surprised myself by breaking it. “Uh, yea, why is one of your eyes closed?”

“Oh…hehheh, that one’s so I can see when I step outside.  See, this eye’s adjusted to the dark (indicating the right) and this one to the light, so I never get blinded.”  He spoke simply, but with pride.  You could tell there was pleasure in his life. 

During the watch I felt like we accomplished a lot: we squeggeed all the floors below deck, oh, excuse me soles, and made a breakfast of soggy cornbread and instant eggs for the forty-two people aboard.  Towards the end of our shift my opinion was corrected.  Captain Chris, a lanky red headed man, even went so far as to tell us that we were the laziest bunch of scallywags that he had ever met, which I was sure was a lie.

When we were relieved at 7:55, I was more lost than when I was woken.  We were all told to sleep because we were on duty again at 11:00 that night till 2:30 the next morning.  I wandered to my cabin, and made an effort to become unconscious.  I imagined myself as a tiny kitten curled in the palm of an enormous marble statue that was whispering softly in Italian, trying to sooth me and rocking side to side.  After waiting for sleep to come for a very long time, I gave up.  I pouted for a bit, and then started Catch-22.

I was woken again by a rustling, but instead of feeling tired and disoriented I was enraged.  What the fuck right did they have? Coming up to my bunk, pulling me out of my bed, so I can “gain a true understanding of commitment, hard work and discipline” by scraping all the dirt from every impossibly tiny crevice their boat had?  I felt my cold teeth starting to grind, and pushed air violently through my nostrils.  After I intentionally not responding to their attempts at rousing me, the messenger started the wake-up speech from the beginning again.  “Zoë, it’s- ” Very abruptly, I almost yelled back “I’m up, alright!” and then gave an exasperated “god damn” that was much softer, emphasizing how ridiculous I thought they were.   I must’ve startled them, because they left right away, and stepped unsurely down the passageway. 

That morning I considered throwing myself overboard.  I would give a shocking scream, and someone would take notice.  I would certainly be rescued and returned to shore.  Or maybe I could just fake going blind or being pregnant; both of those would probably get me out of this pit.    I continued late into the afternoon, proposing new, more intricate schemes of escape to myself.  Lying in the sun, plotting, I managed to relieve some of my anxieties and frustrations.  The more ridiculously detailed paths my mind wandered, the more relief I was rewarded.  I spent a very long time perfecting one in which I’d get the diabetic in on it with me, and we’d steal the rescue boat and paddle our way to freedom, justifying the action later as desperate need for insulin.  We would go during the day, at lunch time when no one could hear the short wooden boat bumping against the captain’s quarters as we lowered it. 

After I exhausted my self by planning, I began to categorize the personalities of people on the boat.  I’d always start with an extremely lengthy and harsh description of their physical appearance, progressing on to truly brutal reductions of character.  After attentively tallying up the points (always careful to subtract strictly for enthusiasm), I was ready to brand, and moved slowly through the process, enjoying the images of labels being melted into the unlined foreheads.  I think I laughed out loud after determining that the blondest, most cheerful girl there was actually a closet serial killer. 

The sun started to set, and I was left very much alone. The warm roof had turned cold, and my mind had abandoned all its viciousness.  By the time the first stars came out I was daring myself not to cry, wildly swiping my eyelids down and up to maintain clarity of sight.  My stomach was sick from worry, and my head had begun to hurt from fear.  I pushed hard against the feeling of insubstantiality I felt, but inevitably my protections cracked and I was sucked into a very dark world.  With my eyes closed I could feel my ankles locked to a smooth, spirally descending track. I was taken down to a depth with so much pressure that I wanted to scream. My body wanted to weep.  My persona wouldn’t allow either of those two releases, but such force came from my being that some kind of strange cough finally escaped.  That first sound triggered a steam of tears, and after accepting their presence, I tried only to keep my sobs quiet.

To my own surprise I got up after the emotion died down.  Walking to my bunk I kept trying not to reflect on that day, and how childishly I had acted, but specific moments kept flashing in the back of my head.  I stopped for a moment in the empty lab and allowed shame to crumple me.  Tired of fighting my emotions, I slid my eyelids shut with my cold little hand and anticipated the inevitable montage of that day. I sat there, prepared with a hand supporting my temples, waiting for the self-inflicted blow.  Ironically, it never fell.  My body must’ve been tired of misery.  I let out a little laugh. Just a chuckle.  The pain it released from my joints was cause for a little euphoria, and so I giggled again, a little more boldly this time.  I caught my reflection in the stainless steel cabinet; a very squinty pink girl was staring back, I let go of everything.  Shattering the calm of the room I convulsed, belly and face shaking with glee.  I rolled from one side to the other, roaring with laughter.  I let emotion take hold of my stomach, eventually releasing itself in liquid form throughout my veins. 

After the laughter had subsided, I pulled myself up with extreme ease.  I stepped down the sticky black ladder. As my feet became visible to those eating, I sensed a change in tone at the table.   

“Zoë, aughhhh!  Where were you?  We thought you were sick in your bunk!  How’d you get down here?!”  The speaker rushed towards me, enveloping my body with her limbs. I was pretty sure her name was Erin, and remembered previously labeling her as an impoverished Irish streetwalker.  “Where were you?”   There was genuine concern in her voice.

“Ughhh, hhehe,” I said with a hand supporting the weight of my head, unable to begin a description of that day. I pulled back to look straight at her thin face.  I shook my head as I spoke “Ya…um I was just kind of sick, but it doesn’t even matter dude.”

“Oh, we found a guitar for you,” she remembered happily.

“Sweet.”