blasting from the stereo.
“Stolen from Africa -- brought to America,” ebbs and flows in the background. I feel sleepy and sick but try to focus on the music. I know the song, “Buffalo Soldier." It's the one about former slaves who helped fight against American Indian tribes after the Civil War. I wondered how many of their ancestors died from being sick on the ocean as the slave ships hauled them across the ocean.
Or maybe it isn’t a Bob Marley song at all. I can’t really tell now because I suddenly feel as though I want to jump overboard and be done with it.
“Are you gonna be okay?” my husband asks as he wedges in beside me, his warm hand gently resting on my back. His closeness makes me feel claustrophobic, and bile rises in the back of my throat. I shirk off his palm and press against the fiberglass. It feels cool, and I look up. The other two crew members, Alla and Sergei, are manning the main and jib sails, waiting obediently for Shaun to shout the next tacking command. Like us, they are beginner sailors.
The brightness takes over again,. All color bleeds into white, as if the sun has exploded. All I can hear now are the saiIs fluttering. They sound like angel wings.
Of course I’m not okay. As long as we’re not on solid ground, I’m not gonna be okay, I feel like telling JD.
I press my lips together and blink back the brighness instead. Red, now I see red. “I’ll be fine,” I say with a half smile. “I think the bleeding has almost stopped.”
I look down at my mangled finger. It's the finger on my left hand, my writing hand. Sonuvabitch! Red pumps into the blood-soaked rag, and I feel like kicking Shaun in the crotch. This whole thing is his damned fault. What a freakin' idiot! I throw a devilish glare in his direction, but he keeps his eyes toward the sea.
I had planned on keeping a detailed journal of our island sailing trip, of writing about the intriguing people we met and meals we ate, of penning vivid descriptions of the tropical beaches and colorful islanders, of writing about the pros and cons, do’s and don’ts as a beginner on the high seas. What now? My plan for using my journal notes to write an article is ruined. I can't even participate in helping around the boat.
“Maybe some water?” I ask as another wave of brightness floods my eyes. I try and remember what Thor Heyerdahl wrote while drifting like flotsam across the Pacific on his raft, Kon Tiki. Something about finding yourself in an odd situation and asking how it all came about. The memory calms my stomach, my disappointment.
My journey had begun three years earlier, with an idyllic vision of woman and sea. My husband and I had never sailed on the ocean before, never felt the great sea lurching beneath the keel of the small twenty-three foot Santana that we rented five weekends a year to sail on a small lake outside of Boulder, Colorado. Having lived in a landlocked city the majority of our lives, we were accustomed to fast food restaurants and shopping malls, groomed walking paths and traffic, taking cover when the wind howled too strong, and lighting a fire in our fireplace when it snowed.
Ready for a change, we envisioned ourselves enjoying smog free sunsets and warm ocean breezes on a sailboat, sipping colorful boat drinks and relaxing to a little Jimmy Buffet, with only shorts, tee shirts and flip flops filling our wardrobe. We signed up for a basic keelboat and coastal cruising course on a lake nestled between the base of the Rocky Mountains and the rolling shortgrass prairie.
A cermudgeoney old sailor with a real-life limp taught us rudimentary sailing skills such as how to raise and lower the sails, start the engine, and steer the rudder. We both passed with flying colors and felt ready for the next step transitioning us from dusty plains dwellers to a couple of salty seadogs. After three summers sailing on the small mountain reservoir, my husband signed us up for a Bareboat certification course in the West Indies, which, if we passed, would enable us to captain our own chartered vessel on the open sea. Excited, we readied ourselves for days seasoned with silvery catches-of-the-day and smooth, sherbet colored sunsets.It would be our first time sailing on anyting other than a lake,
Bareboat certification entails working aboard a sailboat under the tutelage of a qualified instructor. In exchange for payment, students crew an ocean worthy sailboat island to island while being tested on their practical skills. A written exam is given at the end and snap -- clients have a piece of paper legitimizing their Skippering skills on the vast and mighty pcean. Odysseus would be proud. Being somewhat of a realist, however, I worried about our lack of experience. Did three summers sailing on a mountain lake and seven days on the ocean qualify us to sail in waters where veteran sailors have perished? More likely, we would graduate with a Gilligan certificate.
To ease my concerns, my husband told me that ocean wind currents are steady and consistent, nothing like the volatile shears that rush across the little reservoir on which we learned to sail. “No need to worry about unpredictable wind – unless a squall or storm hits,” he had said as we packed our bags, adding that storms in the Caribbean are rare in the spring.
The first day of Bareboat certification began as our captain gave us a hurried tour of the forty-nine foot sailboat named Postscript on which we would sail from the Caribbean island of St. Vincent toward Bequia, the next substantial landmass in an archipelago of West Indian islands north of Venezuela called the Grenadines. Our itinerary took us southward, where we would anchor in turquoise bays off islands such as Mayreau, Union, and Petit Martinique.
As our captain Shaun shuffled us from the galley to each cabin, from engine room to bathroom, from the anchor hold to a quick circuit of the entire upper deck, I quietly hid my apprehension toward sailing such a large vessel on the ocean.
“Now, this is where you put the oil,” Shaun pointed out after he uncovered the engine compartment. “And make sure this is clean and connected if the engine won’t start,” he quipped to the four wide-eyed, open-mouthed faces standing before him, “and only use such-and-such a station on the two way radio for emergencies, otherwise no one will ever hear you.”
I thought back to when I drove my first car, how I almost burned out the clutch trying to change gears, how I careened too fast around a corner and slammed head on into a granite rock. I walked away from those accidents, but a boat can sink, leaving its passengers treading water until they either drown, are saved, or eaten alive by predators.
Anxiety sprouted again as I listened to our young captain’s instructions, “. . . and when you organize the halyards make sure they don’t cross each other, otherwise they’ll become tangled and you won’t be able to raise the mainsail,” he said as he pointed to a mass of lines dangling from the mast. Damn, what were halyards again? “And only use a bowline knot when tying off the dinghy, otherwise you might lose it,” he added to a litany of instructions. Bowline knot? I better practice that one some more.
Shaun’s golden young skin and knowledge of both boat and sea made him seem like a demigod to me. His blonde hair shone magically in the sun, and I shielded my eyes momentarily from its blinding perfection. I mentally ran through the Gilligan Island's cast. assiging JD as the Professor, me as Maryanne, Alla as Mrs. Howell and Sergei as Gilligan. Although Shawn looked nothing like the Skipper, he seemed as though he could be just as grumpy.
I’m not gonna to remember any of this, I thought to myself as we huddled together in sad clumps of inexperience listening to our demigod teach. Everything he said was over my head. I did not even know what questions to ask until at last he demonstrated how to flush the head. I listened particularly close to his flushing instructions, remembering the toilet problems we’d had several years ago when renting an RV. We had not been flushing properly, and the smell had overwhelmed our vehicle. We ended up dragging all of the bedding outside and sleeping under the stars every night. Thank god it didn’t rain.
After being hastily shown around the boat, I joined the rest of the crew in casting off. Even before the boat began drifting away from the dock, I felt the pressure to perform. With every line I untied from each dock cleat, my hands shook and my stomach flopped. But I refused to let my anxiety prevail and kept working the lines.
Suddenly, we were free from solid ground and the indigo waters of Calliaqua Bay rolled quiet and smooth underneath our boat, sparkling in the afternoon sun like millions of cut sapphires. I stood midstern, gripping the sidestay and studying St. Vincent as it grew smaller from behind, its palm trees waving and watching us under a cloudless blue sky. My stomach calmed as I took in the surroundings.
“Looks good for sailing,” I said as my eyes involuntarily fell again to the mass of lines running vertical along the mast. My stomach constricted slightly while everyone remained quiet, looking at the horizon just beyond the bay as if in a trance. I peeled my eyes from the mast and looked toward the horizon.
Submersed in the silence, I listened as the dark water lapped softly against the boat’s hull. The vast ocean spread out before me like a great rolling prairie – blue instead of brown, liquid instead of dusty and dry. I thought about the great abundance of life teeming just underneath the surface: schools of tuna and silver jack, red snapper and bonefish, mackerel, anchovy, and dolphin fish; living reefs where spiny lobster, octopus, and moray eels hide in dark crevices for safety. It was an underwater Disneyland filled with sea turtles and pink conch, eagle rays and sharks, brain coral and banded shrimp. Together, captain and crew heaved a collective sigh, each of us replacing the pollution in our lungs with a deep breath of fresh, salty air.
JD kept watch off the bow, hanging idly onto the mast’s forestay as he looked toward the horizon, where the sea touched the sky. Suddenly he was a child daydreaming out of a schoolroom window instead of a man working day after day at a job he dislikes. With a subtle breeze soothing the sun's harsh rays, my skin felt warm and young.
I leaned sideways, dangling on the sidestay to look at JD more closely. His eyes glistened like the water. I had not seen that twinkle since before his dad died six years ago and he had taken over the family accounting business. I wanted desperately to make this dream work - if not for me then for him.
I closed my eyes, but the anxiety bloomed into slight nausea. Even in the bay, I could feel the great mass of ocean rolling beneath the boat, its unfathomable depths calling to me like both savior and nemesis. My mind partnered with my stomach in rebellion. I felt vaguely unstable, my skin prickling as I imagined Odysseus and his crew rowing their battered trireme between Skylla, the six headed cave monster, and the swirling waters of Charybdis. Their ship sank, and Odysseus had been the only survivor.
Looking back toward St. Vincent, my eyes fell upon the palm trees that had once looked kind and well-wishing. Now they appeared angry and mocking, like a frenzied tribe of Caribs shaking their spears, cursing us and praying to their sea gods for retribution against the murderous Spaniards who had invaded their small paradise centuries before.
I remembered reading that Christopher Columbus first spotted St. Vincent on his third voyage in 1498, but the Spaniards greatly feared the island’s fierce inhabitants and left it unsettled for many years. During slave times, the Caribs generously welcomed Africans escaping the brutal hand of slavery, and the island soon became populated with large numbers of Black Caribs – a combination of an indigenous mother and an African father. Eventually, however, the Spaniards came back.
I looked at Shaun, who despite his small stature exuded a quiet air of authority and wisdom. His tanned arms were sinewy and tense, his blue eyes intelligent and somewhat fierce as he stood at the helm. His sun bleached hair and golden tan stood in stark contrast against the dark skin of the locals who had helped ready our charter, but his demeanor blended in naturally, as if he had lived in these islands all his life. He had told us that although he was South African, he could not enter his own country because he held no passport. “This presents a problem,” he said “because you need some form of ID to get through customs, to own a car, a house, to open up a bank account.” Shaun was a man with no identification papers in a world that requires a paper trail for recognition. He was a man without a country. I wondered what his story was, what he had done to live in such exile, what it was like to be so homeless.
I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with his seafaring confidence, allowing the salty air to massage the pebble of angst wedged deep in the pit of my belly. The distraction worked, easing my mental and physical discontent. I focused my attention next on the older Russian couple from Rhode Island sitting busily on the deck practicing sailor’s knots with a strand of rope they had brought from home.
The woman, Alla, had a weathered, cabbage-shaped face surrounded by a frizzy mass of auburn hair, and her large teeth were almost black around the edges. I remembered the stories of eternally long market lines in Soviet Russia, how even toilet paper cost one week’s pay, and wondered what she had lived through to cause her teeth to decay as they had. She was old enough to have lived under the Communist regime, and I imagined her defection, imagined her packing a small bag and hurrying off into the night. I wondered if Alla and Sergei had met in the Soviet before they defected.
I watched as Alla looked vacantly at her task of looping, weaving, and pulling the two foot piece of rope into knots, lifting her eyes every now and then wistfully toward the sea like a tethered mermaid while her husband, Sergei, proudly displayed the figure eight knot he had just completed perfectly in less than thirty seconds. He held up his accomplishment for all to see, fondly appreciating his closely trimmed, peppery grey beard with his free hand. Alla looked bored and exasperated, her gazes toward the sea lengthening with each incorrect knot her nervous hands tied. Sergei busied himself again with the rope, and I wondered if they were as anxious as I about sailing in open waters.
“Batten down the hatches everyone,” Shaun suddenly yelled, his calloused hands deftly turning the oversized steering wheel as he negotiated through the bay. The dark bay waters teemed with boats of every shape and size; sixty-foot yachts and rowboats with weathered, dark-skinned fishermen wearing cut off pants and faded baseball caps; motorized dinghies buzzing through the network of activity like worker bees.
I wondered how I would ever steer through such a mess without crashing into something, how I would remember all the navigational rules of the road. Does the sailboat with the wind on the port side have the right of way, or is it the other way around? When both vessels have the wind on the same side, which one stands on? Does a boat on a tack give way to a boat coming about, or vice versa? All of this was still new to me – the jargon, the equipment, the terrain.
In my nervous state, my mind went blank. I could not remember how to start the engine or raise the mainsail, tie a simple clove hitch knot or drop anchor. Our quick tour with the captain had confused me, and now all I could remember was where the galley, head, and cabins were located. As we slowly motored through the bay and away from solid ground, I longed for the innocuous wavelettes of Carter Lake.
“We’ll be out of the bay soon, and the wind’s gonna pick up as soon as we round the south end of the island,” the skipper called out again. “We’ve got to raise that mainsail before we get there. Otherwise, we’ll never get her up!” We had not even battened down the hatches, and his voice told me we needed to hurry.
Instantly the Postscript burst into a flurry of activity. Alla and Sergei rushed back and forth across the deck, frantically tugging and tying off various lines while my husband zoomed down the stairs and into the hull. I scuttled across the deck and hurried down the stairs close on his heels.
“Close any open hatches you see,” he called out as he emerged from Alla and Sergei’s cabin at the bow of the boat. I ran into our cabin, stepped onto the bed, and began tugging on the Plexiglas window with all my might; but it would not budge.
“There any secret to closing this hatch?” I yelled above the sound of the engine, my body bobbing through the hatch like a buoy in choppy waters. I could barely see the captain and ducked back into our cabin to inspect the troublesome hatch, my hands resting lightly on the horizontal window frame.
“Pull as hard as you can,” I barely heard him say as a wave pushed against the hull. Its force momentarily threw me off balance, and I gripped the window frame for leverage. Even on Carter Lake, negotiating around a moving sailboat was sometimes like balancing on a wobble board.
“Hurry,” I heard someone say, “we’re coming out of the bay.” “Shut that hatch,” I heard someone else say, then steps and shuffling topside.
The voices sounded muffled, as if I were listening from behind a closed door. And then suddenly the hatch slammed tight and I was pulling my bloody finger out from between the window and frame and the cabin was spinning and the voices sounded distorted and even more muffled and I was telling whoever could hear me that I needed a towel and some gauze and I felt like throwing up and going to sleep at the exact same time.
Everything went white, and the next thing I remember was cleaning my finger in the galley sink. After dressing the wound, I somehow found my way to the deck, where I now sit and stare vacantly at the bright horizon as our boat pushes ahead towards the island of Bequia. I gaze at the island’s profile, blinded by the brightness but remembering how beautiful its turquoise bay was in the photos I had all but worshipped over the last six months. I look across the deck at Alla’s bright form and remember how she, Shaun, and Sergei had kept their distance as I stood under the hatch bleeding. Before we set sail, Alla had asked Shaun about the AIDS billboards around St. Vincent, if the virus was a problem in these islands. He had said yes, and I knew they had been thinking about AIDS as my blood had pooled on the cabin’s pristine teak floor. Shaun had slid the first aid kit across the dark, shiny wood so my husband could dress my wound. I realized then the profound distance between us all.
My body rocks back and forth as each wave crashes against our sailboat, swaying and rocking, rocking and swaying, the brightness throbbing with my finger. I think about Alla’s bad teeth and Sergei’s busy Russian hands, about Shaun continually sailing from port to port in search of a country, about my husband who watched his father die slowly from cancer, how our beautiful differences are woven together into one big blanket of similarities.
Another Bob Marley song beats soft and rhythmic over the speakers. I let my mind wander, and an epiphany suddenly washes over me like warm water. Forget about getting certified, memorizing facts and taking exams. Just enjoy and heal.
With each wave of resolve, my stomach calms and the blinding light fades into a rainbow of colors.
