Essay--Sail Away

In case you hadn’t heard, I’m currently writing a few things, one of which is your fiendmas present. The novella, tentatively titled The Black: Oceania, takes place in the islands off Papua/New Guinea. Having never been to PNG, this obviously required research to find the right location, familiarize myself with the projected rise in sea level, how many of the populated islands have already been evacuated, things like that.

It’s not too difficult to forecast a decade or two down the road and do a mental worse case scenario. In the case of this novella, a little ecological upset and vacancy of some of the islands works to my benefit, so I’ll take it!

Alas, I’m not here to bore you with technical information and statistics about Papua/New Guinea or The Duke of York Islands, I’m instead here to bore the shit out of you with a memory or two. When I start talking islands, I start thinking of boats and ships. That leads me to two experiences I had as a boy and later as a teen.

Hard to believe, I know, but I actually am an Eagle Scout. I was in BSA in one form or another throughout my life up until I turned 17. When I was old enough to move from cub scouts to Boy Scouts, my new troop was headed to Florida sea base. My parents decided that was something I needed to do.

Seabase was a quaint name for the facility in Florida where the BSA had a few rented out sailing boats/ships (depending on your nomenclature), taught you how to snorkel, and then kicked your ass out into the ocean aboard the ship for five to seven days (my memory fails me here) puttering around the Dry Tortugas island chain.

That experience brought me face to face with barracudas in clouded water, scrapes and cuts from fire coral, a near encounter with a tiger shark (while bleeding from said fire coral), and lobstering for spiny tailed lobsters using a tickle stick and a net all while on the lookout for barracudas and eels.

The ship was a power sailer, had enough berths and whatnot to hold more than a dozen boys and dads, as well two or three crew. It was 1983, CD players were brand new, and the only cd the boat had was YES’ 90125. And we played the shit out of it.

We spent time on the deck at night watching the stars, miles away from shore. We saw the blink of dozens of oil rigs far off in the distance. We watched streaks of color flit across the darkness. We saw a world we didn’t know.

Gliding beneath the depths in clear water, hovering over a bed of live coral and watching the fish nibble on the organisms while avoiding predators, fascinated me. Each bed of brain coral was its own micro biome, affected by and dependent upon animals to visit it, much like a flower to bees. Watching the spines of hiding lobsters push outward from the holes in the coral, finding which the best spot for you and your partner to cover. Oh, wait. Maybe that’s not a lobster, but an eel? Moving on.

It was one of the best experiences of my childhood and it all happened before I came down with ITP., which ended up destroying all my plans for the next year. In a way, it was the last of my boyhood and I’ll always think of it as such.

Fast forward years later. I’m on my last BSA summer experience before I hit Eagle and where are we? Florida Seabase. One last jaunt on the ocean. Only this time instead of being a boy led by older boys, I’m the older boy leading the younger boys.

It was a different experience. We didn’t lobster. The weather was poor for quite a bit of the trip, and it just didn’t have the same magic. Still, there were quiet moments for me when the boys had fallen asleep or they were sitting hushed beneath the stars, where I found an inner peace I hadn’t experienced in my lifetime up to that point. It seemed as though, for a night or two, the arguing voices and inner dialogues that constantly chatter through my skull fell silent.

Maybe it was because that trip signaled the true end of a journey. It was the last hurrah, but I hadn’t truly accepted that fact until the last night beneath the clouds and the looming threat of a coming storm.

That next morning, instead of relaxing on the deck, the weather came in as we headed back to port. The boys were ushered inside and I helped the first mate take down the sails and lock down the upper decks. I had a rope around me and everything while the waves smacked against the hull, the rain fell on us, and the ship canted to one side before going even further in the opposite direction.

I was terrified. I was elated. It was that mixture of fear and adrenaline that that leaves you giddy, manic, and anticipating the next horrible thing to happen.

I don’t know that I was out on the deck for than 20 minutes or so, that part of memory is lost to me, and we weren’t more than an hour or so from port. But it felt so much longer. Some of the kids got sick, as expected, but apart from that, it was a bumpy, safe ride.

While the first trip to Seabase is seen through the eyes of a child, the second trip is told through the memories of an older, more serious me. The me that considered the realities of being at the mercy of a callously indifferent ocean and weather that defied human will. The possible mortality of sitting in a tiny piece of wood and steel floating atop trillions of gallons of water hit me, nearly caused a panic attack, yet those moments passed as well.

The realities stopped being something to worry about and more something to celebrate. Apocrypha from the time of Akkad claims an Akkadian King made the first journey across the sea to India. Regardless of who made the first journey, imagine the will and sheer arrogance it must have taken to crawl into a small wooden boat and head into the unknown, somehow certain you’d find land?

Considerations, revelations, philosophic kernels that have grown into values and ideas over time, whether I’ve thought about them or not.

If we are the sum of our experience, then those moments on the ocean certainly added much to that total.

So as I research the history of RIBs (Rigid Inflatable Boats), Motor sailors (popular between the years 1967-1973), Papua/New Guinnea, the smell of salt spray, diesel, rippling sails, and the crash and roar of angry water fills my brain. I just thought I’d share a few memories while I plow through them.

Cheers.

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