itchy feet

AHOY!

2010-07-23T05:49:00.000-07:00

Sunday, July 4 2010
Gondi and I are sitting on a café boat moored to the bank of the Rhine, huddled under the shade of an umbrella to escape the sun. The cold glasses on the table sweat profusely. Gondi mops beer foam from his beard and proceeds to list all the possible lasts we could be having now.
“This could be our last beer together.” He says. “This could be our last day together on the Rhine.”
“Give me a kiss,” I say.
“This could be our last kiss.” He takes another gulp of beer. “This could be the last time we see us.”

He’s being melodramatic, given I’m only leaving for three months, but it cuts me all the same. I watch the freighter boats slip past, bound for the North Sea as I hold back beer-salty tears. Tomorrow I will follow the freight passage from Ijmuiden out into the open ocean. The gentle rocking of the café boat is making me slightly seasick. It’s an ominous beginning.

Monday, July 5, 2010
Everything in the shipping yard is enormous, and loud. I have to clamber over a railroad to board the Iryda; the ganway is too steep, the water is too far below me. The stench of smelted metal and crude oil makes me dizzy. A burly seaman in red coveralls takes my violin, leads me up the stairs. The violin case looks like a toy in his brawny hand. There is nothing here that doesn’t make me small and out of place. I’m at least somewhat comforted by the fact that this overwhelming feeling of terror is becoming familiar.

Freighter lodgings have a certain odor. Maybe it’s a mix of sea salt and industrial strength bleach. Maybe they all just stock the same brand of bathroom soap. I don’t know, I can’t put my finger on it. Whatever it is, my cabin smells like I’ve been here before.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010
The facts: the Iryda is 200 meters long by 23 meters wide, which gives her a mere 30 centimeters width clearance on either side going through the locks along the Great Lakes. We’re carrying steel coils from the Corus steel works in Ijmuiden, the Netherlands to Cleveland and Milwaukee. The shipment going to Milwaukee will be used to make tin cans for “kids food” (so the Captain says, I assume that means baby food). The destination of the Cleveland shipment is unknown. The approximate cost of one steel coil is $10,000 USD. They’re bringing them up alongside the boat by the trainload. We’ll carry 22,000 tons in total. At an average speed of 13 knots, it takes approximately 24 tons of fuel per day to haul the load across the Atlantic. The Captain warms me that the weight will cause the boat to rock more than usual.

We were scheduled to leave this morning (which is why I boarded yesterday), then rescheduled to leave this evening, and by lunchtime we’re rescheduled again to leave tomorrow. It should take about 10 days reach Montreal, and another two and a half to get through the locks to Cleveland (unless we get rescheduled along the way, of course).
The Iryda is a true artifact of globalization—constructed in Japan in 1999, she sails under the Cyprus flag, for no particular reason that I can fathom, and is owned and operated by the Polish Steam Company. The crew is, surprisingly, all Polish, “For now,” the Captain says. “Maybe the Chinese are cheaper. It’s a sensitive issue.” He also tells me the median age of the crew is 47. There are 23 crewmembers on board, three of which are students—cadets from the marine academy in Szczecin. One other passenger boards today, a 70-year-old Dutch man. There’s no karaoke.

Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Waiting. I spend the wee hours of the morning in half-sleep hoping for the great rumble of the ship coming to life. But by breakfast time it’s still silent, and when I peer out my little porthole I’m greeted once again with the wretched Corus shipping yard with it’s mounds of iron ore littering the shore, the factory belching out black plumes of smoke beyond. I’m itching to get out to sea, feeling somewhat robbed of the pleasures of the ship here at port. Outside the air smells foul and the decks are filthy with soot from the factory. The only benefit of leaving so late is that there’s a TV in the crew’s common room and we should still be in range of England tonight, which means I just might catch Germany play Spain in the semi-final World Cup game.

Around 10:30 the engine begins its low growl and the Captain summons me to the bridge to watch the ship pull out. The Captain, a pilot and several other officers rush about the bridge calling into walky-talkies in a mixture of English and Polish commands. Down below a line of crew in their red coveralls heads out to the bow of the ship like a string of marching ants. A sliver of water appears between the berth and the boat. “All clear,” the Captain shouts. The gap widens. “Slow ahead.”

And finally, finally, we’re off, the long nose of the ship nudging out into the narrow channel that will take us out to sea.

It’s cold out, the wind snapping at the crowds of grey of clouds hurrying across the sky. We’re crossing the North Sea towards the southern tip of England, soon land disappears out of sight, the smooth spread of the ocean draped over the horizon like a tablecloth. One of the crew stops me on deck to introduce himself. He’s the first one I’ve met who looks anywhere near my age. He has startlingly blue eyes, and I’m pretty sure he said his name is Magic.

At 16:00 we are given the safety brief from the Third Officer, commencing with the usual demonstration. There’s nothing more hilarious than watching a fully grown man stuff himself into a fluorescent orange neoprene suit, replete with booties, mittens, and a hood that sips up to the nose. (Admittedly, it’s possible that when the daily entertainment is watching the ocean go by, standards for comedy are somewhat lowered.) After the suit up we are shown the location of the fire equipment and the life raft. Lastly, we move to the lifeboat, secured at the bridge and suspended at a 45-degree pitch toward the sea. The Third Officer opens the hatch, lowers himself in and beckons us to follow. We are made to seat ourselves in the backward facing seats and buckle in, while the Third Officer bounces up and down the narrow aisle showing us the provisions storage, engine location and steering controls. “This is my seat,” he says, pointing to the single forward-facing seat overhead. “Very dangerous. And here, this is how we turn it on.” He flicks a switch and the engine chortles, causing the lifeboat to skip and shudder. It’s quite like preparing for a roller coaster ride and at this point I’m absolutely positive that the Third Officer is inadvertently going to launch the thing, which will surely kill him, and likely break a few of my ribs to boot. I clutch at my harness till my knuckles are white, while the Third Officer continues his carefree prancing. But eventually he switches the engine off and we are let out without incident.

By nightfall we’re passing through the English Channel, flanked by Dover to the north and Calais to the south. We’re close enough to land to catch a fuzzy signal on the television, but watching Germany lose does nothing to life my spirits. I miss Gondi.

Thursday, July 8, 2010
For breakfast I’m served three lonely, boiled hotdogs, which loll to and fro on the plate with the rocking of the ship, as if unembarrassed by their nakedness and wanting to show off. I manage to stomach one, with a bit of bread and butter. The Steward—whose English seems to be limited to “Rice or potatoes?”—makes his disapproval clear with a long series of exasperated tsks accompanied by vigorous shaking of his head.

There’s a fire drill after lunch, which we had been warned about during the safety brief. The alarm is infernally loud, the stairwell suddenly flooded with flashing red emergency lights. The Third Officer has cautioned us to keep our hands away from the doorframes during the drill unless we’re keen to lose a few fingers—I can hear the heavy steel doors along the narrow corridor slamming themselves shut now, sealing off each deck to stop the spread of our imaginary fire. Even knowing it’s not real, I feel for a moment, the tight fist of panic closing on my gut.

Soon we’re rolling over long waves, the boat gently pitching over the swells, as the grey smudge of Plymouth fades on the horizon. I’m beginning to feel decidedly seasick, and spend the better part of the afternoon and evening sprawled on my bed with my eyes closed.

At 20:30 the Capitan calls to invite me down to his office for a beer with the other passenger. I should reasonably say no, given the intensity of my nausea, but I suppose when you’re two weeks on a boat with the same 24 people, half of whom don’t appear to speak English, you do well to take what socializing is extended to you. So I sway down the stairs to the Capitan’s deck.

A little more here about my fellow passenger: His name is Vill—which is more likely spelled Wil, or Woojl, for all I know of the obscurities of Dutch orthography, but Vill is what I heard on introduction, and so he will be called. He is an avid sailor, in ownership of a 40-foot yacht. He spends much of his time on the bridge, pestering whoever is there, I imagine, with an endless string of questions regarding the apparatus, the route, and the weather. (I can only imagine, for I do not spend great amount of time on the bridge, there being mot much there of interest to me, save the view, which can just as easily be seen from the wings outside.) Vill was born and raised in a southern Dutch town, which I will not attempt to spell, and there he sired and raised two daughters, now in their forties, with children of their own. Which is to say, Vill and I have very little in common. He has traveled widely—to every continent except Australia/New Zealand, in fact—and I’m sure harbours a wealth of adventure tales, but unfortunately seems insistent on directing the conversation back to his life’s work, which, though he is twelve years retired, clearly still holds and esteemed place in his heart: pacemaker manufacturing.

Vill’s wife has gifted him this journey as a 70th birthday present. It’s been a dream of his, he tells me, for about 20 years now, to cross the Atlantic by boat, and see himself sounded by days of water. He imagines it will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Being on my second round at the tender of age of 25, I’m (smugly) wondering what took him 20 years to get his act together. But I suppose he had children to support and dead parents, in place of unborn children and the wonderful parents to whom I am currently indebted (financially and otherwise). But really, I think, what’s a thousand euros and a couple of weeks to a man twelve years retired who has the means to own a 40-foot yacht? Still, I’m happy for Vill that he’s getting around to fulfilling his dream while he’s still got a sturdy pair of legs and a pacemakerless heart to keep him going.

So my stomach and I struggle through a beer with these two men, twenty-five and forty-five years my elders. When the second round comes out and the conversation turns to a discussion of the best suppliers for nautical radios, I find it prudent to excuse myself, and sway back up the stairs and directly into bed.

Seasickness comes from fighting the waves. To stand, balance, and focus your eyes while the whole world heaves beneath you, serves no purpose save to drive you completely crazy. The only thing to do is surrender to the ocean. Lie down, close your eyes, let the water cradle you home.

Friday, July 9, 2010
Sea: 1, Liz: 0.

The crew of the MV Barmbek, my last transatlantic ride, had two pieces of advice to impart regarding seasickness. The first was that, to forever cure oneself of seasickness, one should eat a little fish found inside a big fish. During a rendevouz in Barcelona with my parents, my mom did come across a fish at the market that had a half-swallowed sardine poking out of its mouth. We fried it up and I ate it for breakfast. Clearly I’m not quite cured of seasickness, but I’ll give this ancient bit of Filipino wisdom the benefit of the doubt on the grounds that my big fish was actually on the smallish side; the sardine was not fully inside, the better part of its tail still flopping in the air; I ate both the little and the bigger fish, which wasn’t clearly specified in the cure; and perhaps the ceremonial eating should be undertaken at a more appropriate time than breakfast.

The other thing they told me was that if the rocking of the boat made it difficult to sleep in the bed, I should move to the couch, which lies perpendicular, rather than parallel to the roll of the waves. The bed was starting to make me feel like one of my breakfast hot dogs, and I had found the relocation to the couch to be much more bearable. (Which only leaves one to wonder why they don’t put the bed in the right direction in the first place, it being a rather more comfortable place to nestle into than the granite-like slab of the couch.)

I was sleeping off the dregs of my seasickness on the aforementioned couch, when I was awoken in the wee hours of the morning by a great crashing. The pitch of the waves had picked up in the night and was now wreaking havoc on my cabin. Books were slamming themselves about on the shelves, drawers were opening and closing at random, and I could hear the rest of my worldly goods rattling about in the closet. I took a brief stagger about the room attempting to set things in order, but quickly saw it was a futile exercise. And so, wedging my violin and laptop between the legs of the coffee table, where they had little chance to move about, I let the rest fly. Back on the couch, the ocean dipped me like a tango partner, and, despite the ruckus in my room, quickly danced me back to sleep.

…

I learn at breakfast to accept no more than a slice of bread with butter, and, being able to finish what’s on my plate, thus escape the open disdain of the steward. Afterwards, feeling healthy, and decidedly chipper, I head outside. I’ve claimed a perch on a small triangular platform, halfway up some rigging on the starboard wing. It’s accessible by a short ladder, and hemmed in on two sides by an iron railing. I can swing my legs over the edge, rest my arms on the lower rung, and pass the hours losing myself in the ever-changing swell of the sea. It never ceases to be fascinating. The sun tickles my cheeks, the wind rakes its strong fingers through my hair, and the ocean splays itself before me—blue towards the horizon, white where the light tracks across its surface, turquoise where it ruffles against the prow of the boat, and yet impenetrable and colourless as the night sky when you try to peer straight into it.

After awhile the Third Officer, who has caught sight of me from the bridge, comes rushing out waving a square of cardboard. “Very dangerous!” he exclaims, and, just as I’m about to guiltily make a hasty descent, he adds “Too cold!” and passes the cardboard up, indicating that I should sit on it. Then he offers me coffee, which he serves black and piping hot, and even comes to collect the empty mug when I’m finished. I could want nothing more from life, save a little relief from the backache I’ve acquired from spending 24 hours on the calcite couch being kicked about like a bean in a hacky sack.

Saturday, July 10, 2010
My lack of appetite is causing a stir. The cook wants to know why I won’t eat. The Capitan wants to know why I won’t eat. Even Vill keeps a curious eye on my plate. The Steward responds to the remains of each barely-picked-at meal with a dissatisfied “Mamma Mia!” (his limited command of foreign languages offering him no other venue to express his dismay). I begin to feel as though I’m on board with 23 frenzied Polish mothers, rather than the swarthy seamen I though they were.

But how could I possibly be hungry, when we’re being knocked about 24/7 by the relentless sea? How to be hungry, when the sight of the endless ocean leaves me feeling completely unmoored, both thrilled and terrified to have allowed myself to be wrenched away from solid ground and every semblance of normalcy? How to be hungry, when I can’t decide if I’m heading home or leaving it—with the buds of romance and career on one side of the ocean, and the soil in which I laid my first roots on the other, with all its old charms and old wounds; one home newly built on the wonder of finding myself strong enough to hold my own in the world, one home held lovingly in my memory for two long years, and yet, changed now perhaps beyond recognition—how to be hungry amongst all this?

Sunday, July 11, 2010
As seems to be the case on cargo vessels, the dinning room comes with assigned seating. I have been awarded the prestigious seat on the right hand of the captain; Vill sits beside me (for no other reason that he got on the ship second). The First Officer owns the place across the table, to the Captain’s left, though he rarely shows up at mealtimes, as they coincide with his turn to keep watch on the bridge. The Chief Engineer sits next to the absent First Officer, and, though he shows up, he rarely offers more to the conversation than a curt nod. The next eight higher-ups sit at two four tops to my right. The Officer’s Mess is only partially partitioned from the Crew’s Mess, where the rest of the motley crowd eat at one long table. My seat has the disadvantage of facing the wall, so I am unable to amuse myself at mealtimes by spying on the crew.

Vill has been on a tour of the engine room, and the Captain politely inquires over breakfast how he found it. “Oh it was just wonderful!” exclaims Vill, “Really top notch. You see, I’m a technician by trade—mechanical engineering, before I got into the management side, you see—and the instruments you’ve got there are just fascinating. I mean, the control room!”
The Captian shrugs, “Ja. It’s normal.”
“And I saw,” Vill continues, “that the keel on this ship was laid in July, 1999, and finished in December, 1999. Now, can that be right?”
Tha Captain shrugs, “Ja. It’s normal.”
“Just a few months! When you think of all the work, it just seems so fast!” Vill can barely contain his excitement. “I mean, the welding and the installation of every hook and bolt, and the painting…”
The Captian cuts him off with a wave of his pudgy hand. “Painting is fast,” he says, “it’s normal.” He takes this opportunity to expound on a theme he finds abnormal—the sub-par quality of Chinese workmanship, which, along with the sub-par quality of Filipino seamanship, is proving to be a pet subject of his. Naturally the frequency with which he brings them up is in direct proportion to my growing distaste for him. Meanwhile, Vill continues to gush over the “technical instruments” onboard, while squeezing in as many passionate references as possible to his work in the pacemaker industry. I busy myself staring at the wall and wonder how I landed in the company of such dolts for two weeks straight.

…

The sky seems determined to remain grey and drizzly, and the sea seems determined to continue to make a tossed salad of me and my belongings, so I retire to my couch after breakfast and spend the morning there clutching my stomach and wallowing in self-pity. Just before lunch I gather enough energy to wander out to the bridge, where I find Vill and the Captain engaged in what I presume to be one of their boring discussions of technical instruments.
“Did you see the dolphins?” the Captain asks.
I shake my head.
“They were here just ten minutes ago. About fifteen pieces.”
Put that way, it sounds more like a sushi train passed by than a fleet of live animals, but, either way, I’m disappointed to have missed out on the action, and resolve to stop feeling sorry for myself and start getting outside more.

To that end, I spend the afternoon on my regular perch, sending the Polish mothers into a second frenzy when I am caught, once again, without protective seating. Clearly there’s some great fear that I will catch hemorrhoids from sitting directly on the cold metal, or meet some equally unpleasant demise. This time a thick green and white striped cushion is procured for me. I take to storing it just inside the starboard door, and am careful not to leave the bridge without it. I have to admit it is quite comfortable, though gazing down at the rest of the company from a lofty, matressed seat feels somewhat reminiscent of the princess and the pea.

…

Supper begins at 17:30. The seamen arrive punctually, and proceed to inhale their food. Sunday dinner, to my surprise, is accompanied by a glass of wine, and the seamen promptly inhale that too. By 17:45 the mess is fairly well cleared out, leaving Vill and I to graze over our plates at a more leisurely pace. Vill, considering himself aged and experienced in the ways of the world, and perhaps spurred by the wine, sees fit to impart a small portion of his infinite wisdom while we pick over our plates of smoked salmon and cold sausages. I, considering myself of progressive breeding and a less backward generation, disagree with most everything Vill says, though I grit my teeth and smile politely through the larger part of his diatribe. And that I suppose, is the history of civilization in two sentences, since generational gaps first came to be.

Monday, July 12, 2010
We’re now a mere two days off the Canadian coast, and I, assuming Canadians’ reputation for timidity extends to our coastal waters, keep expecting to wake up to find the skies cleared and the sea laid meek before us. But the weather remains much the same. The prow of the boat sprays up great white tufts of water as it cuts through the rough waves, a blanket of cloud stretches across the sky in unbroken, melancholy grey. Still, though the sun cannot be seen, the light seeps through and lays a thin silver path along the eastern horizon, and though the cold wind whips into your skin and threatens to tear out your soul, the ocean, for all its fierce wildness, is unbearably beautiful, 360 degrees around.

…

I go down to supper convinced that I cannot possibly put even a morsel of food into my stomach, such is the state of my appetite. But there, to my shock, I am served a vegetable! It’s a red pepper—cooked to death and stuffed with meat, of course—but a whole pepper, nonetheless, and (potatoes, cabbage and a few withered lettuce leaves notwithstanding) the first vegetable I’ve laid eyes on in over a week. I’m so overjoyed by its miraculous presence on my plate that my appetite floods back and I tuck into its fleshy backside with great relish. I eat the whole pepper, and even manage some of the stuffing and a bit of potato on the side before my stomach shuts down for business. I’m feeling quite chuffed about the progress I’ve made, but the Steward still lays me with a wrathful “Mamma Mia!” when he collects my plate, which I think is entirely unfair, given that most everybody else has eaten the stuffing and left a perfectly good pile of pepper uneaten on their plates.

…

The Captain warns us that we’ll hit heavy fog as we near Newfoundland, where the cold air streaming down from Labrador hits the warm currents rolling up along the western United States from the Gulf Stream. And indeed, all evening I watch the mist bring the horizon in closer and closer, until the universe is shrunk down to the small island of our boat.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010
The day breaks ghostly and silent, the thick fog creeping in ever nearer until the long nose of the ship is lost in a nebulous shroud and the loading cranes rise up through the haze like specters before us.

I spend the day cozily holed up in my cabin alternately puzzling over sudoku, watching the drizzle spatter against the window, and wading though Robinson Crusoe (which may ordinarily not be a book that requires a literate adult to get the gaiters out, but the copy I have happens to be in German, and a passage of even remote complexity can leave me swamped in my dictionary for quite some time). It’s hard to say whether it’s actually raining or if the cloud we’re moving through is simply condensing on every solid surface.

For supper we have dumplings. I like dumplings, and I also like that dumplings are not meat. When the time comes for the Steward to collect my plate, he says “Okay,” and gives me a conciliatory nod. So I guess, for once, I passed. After he’s gone, Vill, who did not eat his dumplings, and was not reprimanded for it, leans over and whispers “What was that?” And for once I have the savoury pleasure of lording my worldly wisdom over him while I explain, at length, the inner workings of a dumpling.

…

Vill has been exploring all over the boat (and no doubt harassing whoever he finds along the way) while I’ve been hermittng in my cabin, and he offers now to show me the way to the gym, just to see what’s there. It turns out to consist of nothing but a ping pong table, over which two seamen are furiously smacking a ball at each other, and a piece of equipment I can only presume to be a thigh master tucked away in one corner.

We’re watching the game through the doorway when Magic appears. “I haven’t seen you down here all week,” he remarks, fixing me with his crazy blue eyes. “I was beginning to think you were some kind of princess locked up there in your tower.” He waves a hand up towards my cabin,
“Now careful,” Vill interjects, “she is!”
I think he means this as some kind of compliment. On second thought, he has often witnessed me holding court from atop my matressed perch, so maybe he doesn’t.

We engage in a bit of idle chatter by the ping-pong table, while keeping an eye out as to not get beheaded by a wayward paddle, until Vill excuses himself, and I see fit to escape back to my aerie. I note, on the way up, that the crew list contains one Maciej Brzezenski, Ordinary Seaman. I will claim dyslexia and continue to refer to him as Magic.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010
The wind on the starboard side is so vicious it threatens to wrench me out of my seat. I retreat to the port side, where there is a similar platform to use as a perch, except that, where my starboard roost is set back slightly from the outer rail of the wing, this one lies flush with the edge of the ship, giving me a clear view of the sheer five-storey drop down to the water.

To observe the ocean from this vantage is to acknowledge the fragility of your own existence. Should you chance to slip and fall over that thin white rail that separates you from the open maw of the sea, and someone is standing nearby, they will likely fish you out and get you somewhere warm before permanent damage is done. What is more likely, should you chance to slip and fall, is that no one will see you go over, the roar of the wind and the drone of the engine will drown out your screams, the frigid temperature of the water will cause you to lose feeling in your extremities almost immediately, and within fifteen minutes it will stop your heart.

The ocean renders you helpless. Yet I think it a worthwhile endeavor, once in a while, to hold your small self in contrast to such vastness, and bow to its greater power, lest you get it into your head that you are in any way in control of your life.

…

There has been an accident in the St. Catherine lock, and the seaway to the Great Lakes is temporarily closed. We’re told a ship had a power failure last night and ran aground, punching a hole in her fuel tank wide enough to let out a few thousand litres of oil. The cleanup is expected to take at least 48 hours. It’s unclear whether we’ll be able to get passage straight through on our arrival, or if we’ll have to put up anchor in Montreal. As is ever the case with freight travel, the schedule remains very much up in the air.

…

I think we were served tongue for supper. It looked like tongue. And the one tentative nibble I took certainly gave me the feeling of chewing on a piece of my own mouth. It came with a side of macaroni, which I ate doused in ketchup—something I haven’t done since I was about six years old. Macaroni with ketchup reminds so much of my glorious childhood dinning room table, where five other kids were also squirting ketchup around, spilling juice, pinching each other under the table, and generally turning the world upside down, that if it hadn’t been for the two hunks of meat flapping about my plate like they wanted to have conversation with me, I would have felt right at home.

Tonight our clocks will go back an hour for the fifth time, bringing us out of those murky hours kept only by seamen and whales, and into the Newfoundland time zone.

Thursday, July 15, 2010
Sunshine and clear skies! And Port Aux Basque through the binoculars—nothing but a bit of green fuzz rising out of the water, dotted with the white squares of buildings. But still, I thought, that’s my country, and I’m pretty sure I heard a good twang on one of the old heartstrings.

…

Magic has a way of appearing out of nowhere. I never see him coming. He has suddenly materialized on the bridge, and is trying now to convince me that I’m bored, hiding away with my books all day. I think it’s more likely that he’s bored, stuck with the same 22 dudes all day. In any case, I agree to make an appearance at the ping-pong pit of death after supper.

There seems to be a regular crew in attendance—four or five seamen who are obviously well practiced in the sport. My experience with ping-pong is limited to childhood days in my grandmother’s basement. My brother and I would play there whenever we went for a visit, and I’m pretty sure he was more interested in seeing how often he could smash the ball square into my forehead than he was in engaging in an honest game. My grandma died when I was about twelve and that was the end of my training. So I was fairly intent on being a casual observer down in the crew’s gym. But of course it only took about five minutes before I got suckered into taking up a paddle. They were good humored at least, and played easy on me—it was almost not painful. It’s really too bad there’s no karaoke around though.

We get a proper sunset, the kind that makes you salivate, it looks good enough to eat. Like a great pink layer cake sinking into the water, trailing feathery bits of icing and all aflame with candles setting scoops of ice cream clouds aglow and flickering across the waves. Best of all, the boat has finally ceased to swing like a pendulum, and it’s actually possible to sleep in my bed.

Friday, July 16, 2010
The crew does another set of drills this morning, and Vill and I are asked to stay on the bridge until the exercise is over. The Third Officer has shown me how to read the longitude and latitude off the GPS and plot our position on the charts. While the plethora of radars, radios, buttons, knobs, whistles and gadgetry that so fascinate Vill continue to have little seductive power for me, a good map is positively titillating. The dot of an island, the thin vein of a river, concentric lines of elevation flattening mountains and dales onto the smooth plane of a sheet of paper, the endless possibility of adventure condensed into two dimensions, is enough to set my spine tingling, and I happily pass the time pouring over the great swaths of maps that chart our course up the river and through the Great Lakes.

We’re traveling now past the peninsula of Gaspésie, though too far away to see it. But there are birds again, flitting about the loading cranes, and moths and other insects are reappearing too, creeping in through open doors and frantically hurling themselves against windows.

The drill complete, I throw on my windbreaker and step out onto the wing. There’s a light drizzle, and the air is fresh with the scent of pine, moss and damp stone. Suddenly I find myself gasping uncontrollably, desperate to fill my lungs with this sweetness, the full orchestra of nostalgia reverberating in my chest.

Though I grew up in the city, looking back I feel as if that was only some sort of hibernation, a long dreary slumber between summers spent in the great outdoors. Here, among the Maritime provinces, Gaspésie, the Laurentians, and further west—Muskoka, Algonquin, the summer I spent biking across Canada—that was where my real life was lived, with the fecund smell of the soil and the whole uncharted forest waiting to be explored. It’s a funny thing about smells—you can’t recall them in their absence, and so never know that you miss them until they are there again. Then, confronted with that particular aroma of wet earth, it is as if you have been thirsty two long years, and such is the relief, the utter joy, of taking great gulping, quenching breaths.

…

It’s an exciting evening. Supper comes with a bottle of beer, courtesy of Vill. He’s arranged for everyone to have one, down to the last lowly cadet, which I think is noble of him. The cook thinks so too. He doesn’t say much—not in English anyway—but he wraps Vill up in a great sweaty bear hug. Polish mothering at its best. Afterwards, on the bridge, we catch a glimpse of a whale. It comes up right beside us, 10 degrees off the port side, greets us with tip of its great hulking black head, sends up a misty snort of water, and disappears. I guess it wasn’t as enthused about us as we were about it.

At 20:00 we arrive at Les Escoumis, where we pick up our first pilots. They sidle up to the ship in a speedboat marked PILOTE, the Canadian flag snapping smartly off the stern. I watch two seamen lower down a ladder. The pilots climb up. The seamen haul up their knapsacks on a rope. There’s a great bustle on the bridge. It seems, suddenly, that everyone is there, shaking hands, checking the charts, setting up laptops, hollering into phones in Quebecoise and English and Polish.

Things settle down, just as the mist begins to creep back in, pulling the dark in with it. They set the foghorn on automatic, it sends out a long, low blast every 45 seconds. I fall asleep to its forlorn cry, thinking of that Hafiz poem—someone untied your camel last night/For I hear its gentle voice/Calling for God in the desert. /At least come to know/That Hafiz will always hold a lantern/With galaxies blooming inside.

Saturday, July 17, 2010
It gets unnerving, Magic’s uncanny way of slinking up on me. We’re passing by places familiar to me now—Quebec City, the buttressed face of the Château Frontenac surveying the river with its many-windowed eyes; Trois-Rivières, where the weekend sea-dooers cling to our wake like parasites. Magic wants to talk. He asks me what kind of music I like. I say I like every kind. What I mean is: I like a beat that raps on my bones, I like a melody that gets all tangled up in my hair, I like discord that resolves into harmony that dissolves into silence. But I think Magic wouldn’t understand. He likes house. Come on, he says, you must have a favourite song at least. I say that all depends on my mood. That’s the thing with women, Magic says. They make it all so complicated, going through the world basing everything on feeling. I shrug and say it doesn’t seem that complicated to me. What I mean is: I wish there was someone, anyone, on this boat who has something to say that I can agree with.

Magic wants to know about yoga. He thinks maybe I could show him a few things. I make a lot of excuses, valid ones—it’s hard to balance with the rocking of the boat, the floors are too hard, and too slippery, the ceilings aren’t high enough to raise your arms over your head, it’s just not really the right atmosphere. Magic wants to go down fighting. I say maybe I’ll come down to the gym later, in a non-committal way. As I’m escaping up the stairs, he hollers after me, I hope you won’t forget your promise. Did I promise? I don’t forget, but I don’t show up either.

…

There’s a backlog on the seaway, due to the accident earlier in the week. There are so many ships going through the locks now that they’ve run out of pilots. We have to anchor in Sorel overnight, at least. When they turn the engine off the silence is oppressive, impatient.

Sunday, July 18, 2010
I’m slowly adjusting to the food, but there are still a few things I can’t abide by. One of them is hotdogs for breakfast. I ask the Steward to just give me a plate; I will eat bread and butter, which is already on the table. The Steward brings me a plate with a hotdog on it. I tell him I really just want the plate. The cook appears. He is distraught.
“Cheese!” he says.
I shake my head.
“Egg!?”
No.
“Jam??”
Okay, I will have jam.
I’m halfway through a slice of dark bread with jam when the Steward appears with two extra pieces of toast.
“Please,” he says.
I eat one and pawn the other off on Vill.
Since we got off the choppy waters of the Atlantic my appetite has more or less returned to normal, which means I eat about three quarters of what they serve me—plenty, considering I get exactly zero exercise in a day. I continue to be treated like a starving waif.
“Is there anything else you want?” the Captain asks me, for the fourteen millionth time.
“Well, maybe I would take an extra piece of fruit later,” I say, thinking a bedtime snack wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
The Steward is summoned. He returns shortly, carrying a plate spilling over with three pears, two giant apples, a grapefruit and an orange.
The Captain shrugs, turns his hands up to the ceiling. “The cook is very worried about you.”

I’m glad to have the stock of fruit later. We are served something that looks like raw chicken for dinner. I don’t test it to see what it is.

…

We receive news that we’ll get a pilot at 18:00. Three minutes later we receive news that, actually, we wont. We’re rescheduled (for now) to leave at 3:30 tomorrow morning, arriving in Cleveland July 21st, in the evening.

The trip from Ijmuiden to Cleveland was supposed to take twelve to fourteen days total. I have now been on board fourteen days. I have eaten more meat in two weeks than I would otherwise eat in a year. I am very nearly out of reading material. If Vill gives me one more of his industry management talks, I might hit him.

The First and Second Officer, and the Chief Engineer, have been on the boat 119 days. The standard contract with the Polish Steam Company is 120 days, plus or minus one month. The men are still waiting to hear when, and where, their replacements will show up.

The Captain is also displeased with the turn of events; he paces madly back and fourth on the bridge, running his hands frantically through the silver stubble of his crew cut and muttering under his breath.

I’m not the only one anxious to see this ship get moving.

Monday, July 19, 2010
I’m awoken at 4:00 by the purr of the engine and the sound of rain lashing against my cabin window. I turn on the electric heater and pile back into bed with my laptop. I’ve discovered I have 72 CBC podcasts that I forgot I downloaded. There’s nothing like a good cozy snuggle up with Shelagh Rogers and Stewart McLean to whittle away a rainy morning.

…

We reach St. Lambert—the first of fifteen locks between the mouth of the river and Lake Erie—at 7:30. I watch from the bridge as we sneak up to it. The pace seems excruciatingly slow, but I suppose it’s not a simple matter to maneuver 200 meters of boat into a dinky little box. Makes parallel parking look like child’s play.

The nose of the boat weasels into the narrow channel, the Pilot comes in off the bridge, calling back, “Come on in outta th’rain, Cap’n. Hard part’s over.” And they step inside, shaking the water off their coats like a pair of wet dogs.

We watch as the vessel inches forward, with hardly a foot’s width leeway on either side. The Pilot shakes his head. “Keep makin‘em bigger ‘n bigger,” he says. “This ship’s no good in the winter, with all the ice on the walls,” he gestures down to the cement banks of the lock. “Take you three hours to get in an’ three hours to get out.” His speech is all contractions, he drops his G’s, runs his S’s into the next word, speaks like he’s got a mouthful of R’s, hardly a T in sight. God I love Canadians.

Once we’re safely wedged into the small square of the lock, a plank is run up the side of the ship. New provisions are loaded, our pilot, his shift over, gets off and a new one gets on. I’d love to hop off on one of these planks—at Iroquois Lock, for example, a mere step and a jump home to Kingston. But as we have not yet been cleared by customs since leaving Europe, I am absolutely, unequivocally, not allowed disembark before Cleveland. Whatever, I’ve got three days worth of solid publicly funded broadcasting to keep me company. What more do I need?

The lock fills up so fast that we’re towering over the low bungalows lining the canal before I even know what’s happened. And then, aided by our new pilot, we wiggle slowly out into the shipping lane. It will take at least twelve hours to get through this first set of seven locks, which will raise us 69 meters, to Lake Ontario.

…

The rain clears, but the grey-haired clouds loiter all afternoon, hunching over the dark swaths of trees that line the seaway. Wind dimples the black surface of the water, wafting the scent of pine. The boat is quiet now, furtive; it slinks upriver like a fugitive.

Vill and I are pretty often the last to straggle out of the dinning room. He likes to talk at me while I sip my tea and try not to roll my eyes at him. Strangely, while it seems obvious to me that I should find him immensely boring, it never occurred to me that he may think likewise of me. (I happen to find my life fascinating. Why else blog?)

Vill says he’s a bit disappointed with the level of English among the crew. I remind him that the working language onboard is Polish. I guess that doesn’t give them much incentive. My eyes are like marbles in their sockets, it’s all I can do to keep them from lolling skyward.

It’s also a shame, Vill thinks, that there weren’t more passengers—he’d like to have met people from different countries, had more of a conversation going around the table. Well, Vill, that’s what passenger ships are for. I’m practically holding onto my eyeballs.

If it weren’t for his blatant love of nautical technology, I would find it incongruous that Vill landed himself on a freighter boat, Eden for the recluse. Vill’s a social cat. He once told me that though he adores sailing, he wouldn’t want to travel transatlantic by sailboat because it takes several months, and “when you remove yourself from the community for that time, it’s isolating. You can’t expect your friends to be there waiting when you get back.” Which made me think, really? Shit! I hope someone shows up to my welcome home party.

I finish my tea and we get up to go, the sound of our chairs scraping against the linoleum echoes in the empty room. I say “Well, too bad. I guess you’re stuck with me.”
“Or you’re stuck with me,” Vill replies, and we both have a good hearty chuckle.
The funniest jokes are the ones that are true.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010
In the morning we pass Wolf Island. I could swim home from here. The pilot comes out on the wing, sees me leaning longingly over the railing. “Don’t jump,” he says, “That would cost me a lot of paperwork.” He brings me a copy of the New York Times; the Third Officer brings me a coffee. The news is the usual, police brutality, violence, oil. The same as the news two weeks ago, two years ago, two centuries ago, even. It’s a wonder they get away with calling it new. I guess there’s no need to rush home then, everything will still be the same when I get there.

It clouds over, it rains. We pass Howe Island, Wellington. It clears, the sun refracts off the infinite facets of the lake like a strobe light on a disco ball. The Officers get word that there will be a crew change in Burns Harbor, Illinois—in a week they will be home. The atmosphere on the bridge is festive, the Third Officer shakes everyone’s hand, pumps his fists in the air, his wide white smile cracks his sunburned face.

Ontario fades out of sight as we begin cutting south towards Buffalo. It clouds over, it rains, it clears. The great mouth of the lake yawns, the breeze sighs contentedly, and we all settle in for a lazy afternoon.

…

We reach the mouth of the Welland Canal, just as the sun is cooling her heels in the shadow of the trees. The crew springs back to life, the Pilot hollering, starboard 20, 10 to port, stop engine, dead slow ahead; his instructions echoed by the Captain, who calls the commands down to the crew at the bow of the ship. They will work through the night, navigating this set of eight locks which bypass Niagara Falls, 100 meters up to lake Eerie. I watch the crew pass thick mooring ropes up to the lock attendants. The boat secure, the doors creak shut behind us. The lock fills, the boat ascends like a sleepy giant lumbering up the stairs to bed.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Day 17. Lake Eerie slides by, the Third Officer brings coffee, the sun skips over the water. The trip seems paradoxically to have been both very long and very short. Memory warps the time, so that I feel somehow that I suffered over the ocean for weeks and that the trip passed by in the space of a shutter click. Haven’t I always drunk coffee here, black and piping hot? And yet, wasn’t it just yesterday that Gondi and I sat by the Rhine, watching the freight go by?

At breakfast I want to kill Vill (no pun intended) and the Captain too, at lunch I’m starting to make a Gondi-esque list of lasts, by the time Cleveland whispers on the horizon mid-afternoon, I feel overwhelmingly benevolent to everyone and everything onboard. The Captain, though somewhat misguided in his worldly views, is, after all, kind at heart, and treats neither me nor his crew with any of the aloofness that was so obvious in the master of the M.V. Barmbek. And I admire Vill’s ability to take such boyish delight in all that the ship has to offer, I admire that at the ripe age of 70 he is clearly less jaded and grumpy than I am now. I even feel something like compassion for Magic, who really wanted to be a DJ, not a seaman. Like all of us, he’s just making the best he can of the path he is startled to find himself on.

I will admit I could have imagined a more pleasant voyage. The weather could have been more agreeable, the company more stimulating. There could have been karaoke. But it sorrows me too, that—due to the immense cost of freight travel, and the complete unpredictability of both departure and arrival—come September, I will surely be making the journey back to Germany at 39,000 feet. Because there is nothing like slow travel to make you appreciate the distance, the world, yourself.

On the surface of the ocean, there is not actually much to see. The play of light on water merely acts as a mirror—it gathers up all your sorrow and all your fear and reflects it, augmented, back. The ocean drags you through your lowest memories, your deepest hurts; it carries you into the core of your aloneness, and forces you to ask yourself again and again if you can love the imperfect creature you find there. What I’ve come to find, is that the answer, surprisingly, resoundingly, is yes.

German 101

2010-06-01T02:53:00.001-07:00

Igel = hedgehog. Meerigel = sea hedgehog. which is to say, sea urchin. Meerschweinchen = little sea pig. which is to say, guineapig. Meerrettich = sea radish. also known as horseradish. Also Flusspferd (river horse) = hippopotamus, which I thought was ridiculous until I discovered that hippopotamus is just greek for...river horse.

Reporting from the Nursery (an excerpt from the family Christmas letter)

2010-05-14T14:35:00.000-07:00

The move to Denmark was prefaced with constant reports from Theresa:
“I moved my boxes out of your room, and consolidated my shoe collection to make extra drawers for you”; “I bought you a desk, and some shelves,”
When I finally arrived there was a stuffed pig named Liza waiting on my bed.
The biological clock is clearly ticking, and Theresa’s in to full family-planning mode. So I’m ending of the year starting a new life as the stand-in baby—one that tries not to get too much in the way of T’s work schedule. Liza is pretty good company.

Theresa keeps me busy with Christmas craft projects, dry-cleaning runs, and constant introductions to her endless multitude of acquaintances. Perhaps after another month or two of task-mastering and Saturday night fashion shows I’ll be full up on quality family time, but for now it’s a welcome change.

I’m trying to front like the last year has been all about lying on the beach, cerveza in hand, and seeing where the sea breeze blows me, just so everyone feels profoundly jealous about all the fun I’m having. But in truth the last year has been about intense learning.

School subjects include:
1. How to finish a Bachelor degree without ever actually showing up for class;
2. How to collect languages, memories, and digital photographs instead of household appliances and souvenirs;
3. How to travel lightly—in terms of both weight, and environmental impact;
4. How to be flexible—physically and mentally;
5. How to cultivate slowness (even in the face of Ts rapid optimizing);
6. How to not cry when there’s a train strike in Belgium on the very day I’m trying to get to Brussels.

Sometimes the learning is fun (especially when it involves beaches, sun and cold beer). Sometimes the fun gets left out of the equation. But when things don’t go as planned, Gondi, in his infinite wisdom, is there to remind me: “Ja, Liz, life is not a wish concert.”

I’m learning to that you can’t always get what you want. Or you can, you might just have to change what you want.

Looking forward to a new year of adventures, starting with 3 months as (once again) the baby of the household, a brief introduction to corporate (mis)communications, and a string of cold, dark nights in T’s cozy candle-lit dining room with a warm mug of glühwein and more than a few laughs.

EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED IN SPAIN (more or less).

2010-05-14T14:28:00.001-07:00

1.
The man sitting beside me on the train had a white plastic bucket full of olives wedged between his feet. The olives were lolling back and forth in the bucket like big green eyes, swaying with the train. The man saw me staring at his olives and said something in Spanish, fast.
“No hablo español.” I said.
“¡Ah! ¿De donde eres?” He asked, casually. like I hadn’t just said I don’t speak Spanish.
“Canada.”
“¿Que?”
“Canada.”
“¿¿Que??”
“¿El país al norte de los Estados Unidos?” I tried.
“¡Ah!,” he said, nodding enthusiastically.
He leaned across the aisle to the woman sitting the next seat over and, pointing a stubby thumb in my direction whispered “Ella es de los Estados Unidos. No habla español.”
And she leaned toward me, smiling and nodding like we understood each other perfectly, saying “I speak a little English” with an accent thick and meaty as chorizo that made it hard for me to understand her at all.

The train was going to Barcelona, and it was running late. Which is a rule about Spanish trains. I know this because I took a lot of them and they absolutely never run on time. It was an overnight train, scheduled to arrive at 9:00 a.m. At 11:30 a.m. we still weren’t there, and a man in the middle of the car began complaining to a train attendant. I guess he didn’t know the rule about Spanish trains.

So this man and the train attendant started a loud discussion, which sounded to me like a fight, but that’s just the way Spanish people talk to each other (incidentally the Spanish word discusión translates as ‘argument’). More people in the car got involved in the conversation, and then more joined until everybody was in on it. Everyone but me, because I didn’t really understand what anyone was saying.

We still weren’t in Barcelona when the train attendant came through the car with a huge sac of bocadillos, which is the Spanish version of a sandwich, and everyone got one for free except they ran out before they got to end of the car, which was where I was sitting. By this time the people sitting in front of me knew I was an “American” who didn’t speak Spanish, and they also knew I didn’t get a bocadillo, so one of turned, squashed his face in the space between the seats and told me what I was supposed to do while the lady across the aisle translated. Then I knew I was supposed to go to another car where they had more bocadillos. I got one and ate it even though we were pretty much in Barcelona by then.

The man beside me caught me staring at the olives again. He pointed to my feed and said “etothapatosonporlaplaya”.
And I said “¿¿Que??”
He put his face really close to mine and said “ETO THAPATO SON POR LA PLAYA”. Which is the Andalusian way of saying ‘those shoes are for the beach.’
So I said “OK.” And then I watched his olives some more while I thought about how flip-flops make comfy travel shoes, even if they really are for the beach.
The train pulled into the station and the man got off with his bucket sloshing back and forth and the olives ogling around all over the place and I flip-flopped my way into Barcelona.

2.
I was only visiting Barcelona for the weekend. What I was really doing was living in Málaga and trying to learn Spanish. Every day, Monday to Friday, I went to the University of Málaga from 8a.m. till noon. There were 14 other people in my class—six Europeans, eight Chinese. The European kids already spoke two or three languages apiece and didn’t seem to find Spanish all that foreign. The Chinese kids spoke really loudly to each other in Chinese and then really quietly when they spoke Spanish, so you could hardly hear them. I mostly tried to avoid talking at all on account of being petrified, but sometimes we had to get in pairs and invent a conversation, which I loathed.

By the end of October it was dark in the mornings, though it still warmed up to 30 degrees or so during the day. The university was on Avenida de Andalucia, which had pineapple-shaped palm trees sprouting along the median and bird-of-paradise flowers sticking up all over. Down the side streets there were truckloads of hibiscus pouring over people’s gates. Málaga was like a cocktail party where everybody spilled their drinks, it was all splashed with Blue Curacao and Malibu Passion Fruit.

One of those days we were in class with Rosa, who taught us reading comprehension. We were doing an awful fake conversation exercise based on something we’d just read, while Rosa was hollering and flailing her arms at us, not because she was angry, just because that was how she taught. I had to work with Victor, who possibly despised role-playing more than I do, so he just read the conversation from the book instead of making up his own.
“¡NO!” Rosa screamed. “¡Tenéis que imaginar algo!”
Victor buried his head deep into his dictionary, so you could only see the red tips of his ears. Rosa yelled some more. Victor’s head went deeper into the dictionary, like the proverbial ostrich into the sand.
Rosa looked at me. Then she looked at my feet.
“¡Chica!” she shouted, ‘¿don’t you know it’s winter?’
I was still wearing my flip-flops.

3.
The streets were full of ripening oranges, caught in the trees like lost balloons. I was sitting in class daydreaming about the fresh tomatoes I was going to drown in olive oil for lunch when a note arrived from the office. I didn’t know exactly what it said, my Spanish still wasn’t that good, but it was something along the lines of ‘Urgent notice regarding your matriculation. Please see secretary.’ After class I went to the secretary and he explained in Spanish, and then again in English, that someone wanted to give me a job.
“What’s the job” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “You have to call this woman, Mari Carmen."
When I got home I called Mari Carmen right away because I really needed a job, even if I didn’t know what it was. Mari Carmen didn’t speak English, but she took my email address and said she would send me information about the job.

I didn’t hear anything for a week, so I figured I didn’t get the job. I wouldn’t have hired me either.

I was in grammar class when I got another urgent notice regarding my matriculation. The secretary said in Spanish, and then again in English, that the people who wanted to give me a job needed my email address so they could send me information. I couldn’t see how they didn’t already have my email address, but I gave it to the secretary anyway. I really did want the job.

After a few days I got an email from someone named Margarita. It was written in caps. Translation:

HELLO,
I AM MARGARITA FROM EDUCATION. MARI CARMEN HAS SENT ME YOUR INFORMATION TO CONTACT YOU FOR THE JOB OF AUXILIARY IN CENTRES.

YOU CAN PASS BY MY OFFICE.

C/ AVENIDA DE LA AURORA
BLACK CRYSTAL BUILDING, NEXT TO COMMERCIAL CENTRE LARIOS
FLOOR 10 DOOR 15

I WAIT FOR YOU AND I TELL YOU WHAT THIS JOB CONSISTS OF.

MARGARITA

I was wondering when exactly I was supposed to go see her, when I got another email.
Translation:

i forgot, at 1:30 i go for coffee, but i come back soon.
margarita

So then I knew I could go see her whenever as long as it wasn’t just after 1:30.

Margarita didn’t speak English either, but I understood that the job was in a school where they taught English, in Vélez-Malagá, a town an hour away by bus. I would go four days a week, for a total of 12 hours work. They would pay me 700€ a month. Margarita said I should go on Monday, but not before four o’clock because nobody would be there yet.

The language school was in an old building called Casa Cervantes—apparently Miguel de Cervantes stayed there once. I was a beautiful stone structure pierced through with an open atrium which, when I arrived, was flooded by the setting sun. Like most buildings on the coast however, it lacked indoor heating, which meant that about five minutes after the sun went down the whole place was freezing.

The director of the school also didn’t speak English. But she laughed a lot, an easy rippling laugh that made her swath of black curls bob furiously up and down. She gave me set of keys and took me around the building, carefully demonstrating how to open each and every door. Afterwards, I met the head of the English department, who asked if I had any teaching experience. I said no, to which she said “hmpf.” And then she said, “Well we didn’t even know you were coming until this morning, so frankly I’m not quite sure what to do with you.” She told me to come back the next day to work out my schedule.

It was cold and dark, and I had no idea how to get back to the bus stop. Vélez-Malagá, like every other old, Spanish town, has spiny cobblestone streets that twist about like a tangled mess of grapevine so that you’re never sure which direction you’re going in. Just as I was leaving the school I was introduced a young German who was also working as anauxiliary (whatever that meant. I still wasn’t sure exactly what we did.) He kindly offered to walk me to the bus stop, and then waited with me half an hour, just to make sure I got on the right bus, which was awfully nice of him (and possibly a good part of the reason that, when school ended in May and he had to go back to Germany, I went with him, and we live there together now).

You never know when you might fall in love at a bus stop with a man you met at a job you didn’t apply for.

4.
My rule was that I wasn’t allowed to fly. I took a freighter across the Atlantic. I went by train/bus/car to Nice, and Cáceres, and Cabo de Gata, and all over Andalusia. Over Christmas, I traveled by train to Serbia, three days each way. I had to wait in Venice for six hours, which I spent in a cozy restaurant eating a pizza that positively dissolved in my mouth while the bartender refilled my wineglass without bothering to ask me if I wanted more. Obviously I wanted more. By the time I stumbled back to the train station it was dark and all the Christmas lights were dancing in the canals. I thought you could probably be drowning in all those lights and not even care that you were dying.

Nothing that good ever happened to me on an airport stopover, which proves it’s best not to fly. People were allowed to fly to visit me though. That was different. My sister Theresa, who lives in Copenhagen, thought she would fly to see me for a weekend. But Theresa has a busy schedule and couldn’t find any direct flights from Copenhagen to Málaga. She said she would pay for me to come see her though. But the no-flying rule made me have to say no. The thing was I had a week off and it was the same week my mom was flying to Copenhagen from Toronto to visit Theresa. So in the end I had to say yes. We didn’t tell my mom I was coming.

When I got to Theresa’s house my mom was already there, but she still didn’t know I was coming and when I walked in the room you could see she still couldn’t figure it out, not right away. Then she didn’t say anything, only her mouth got big and round, and there was just a bit of perfect silence and the grapefruit hole of her gaping mouth.

At the end of the week I flew back to Madrid. While I waited for my connection to Málaga I practiced yoga a bit, next to the designated smoking area. I didn’t mean to be next to the designated smoking area. But there I was doing Utkatasana —which is like sitting in a chair, except there’s no chair—and suddenly it smelled really smoky. That kind of thing gets your attention in an airport terminal. Then I noticed the smokers, crowded into their little glass box, gawking at my Utkatasana. It was sort of like the zoo, except backwards, because they were all inside looking out.

While I was in Utkatasana I was also wondering how I was going to get home. I didn’t live in Málaga anymore; I had moved to Torre del Mar, which was about 30 kilometers down the road. The last bus left at 11:00p.m.—the same time my flight was arriving in the Málaga airport. There was no way I was getting on that bus.

I was thinking about how long it takes to walk 30 kilometers with a heavy backpack, or possibly where it was safest to sleep on the beach, while I waited to board my plane. Then I noticed a young guy further up the line looking at me like he knew me. I thought maybe I knew him too, but I wasn’t sure until he came over to me and said “¡Liz!” and then I knew I did know him, although I wasn’t sure how. He asked me where I’d been and I told him about Copenhagen, and I asked him where he’d been and he told me about an English program in Santander, so then I knew he was one of my students. (It turned out my job as an auxiliary meant speaking with 12 different classes of about 20 students each, and even when the term ended I still didn’t know the half of them).

This particular student happened to live in Torrox, which is just 17 kilometers past Torre del Mar. His dad was picking him up at the airport and por supuesto he could give me a ride. So it was there in the Madrid airport that I realized the most important thing I learned while living in Spain is that you never really need to worry about anything, because life always works itself out (although never the way you expected it to).

SHIPPING LOG

2008-10-08T07:30:00.001-07:00

Aug 21 Port of Montreal

“MAKE NO LITTLE PLANS. They have no magic to stir men’s blood.” (Daniel Burnham)

The Port of Montreal is endless. We drive and drive and drive, past stacks of brightly coloured shipping containers, scattered like confetti as far as the eye can see. The cab weaves through the heavy traffic, hemmed in by trucks coming and going from the docks. At last we come to section 77, where the MV Barmbek waits patiently in her berth. Burly men in construction boots and hard hats holler at me in coarse French – go here, no there, no what are you doing??? You can’t walk there, HERE! And then it hits me full force, double stroke engine ramming straight into my chest. I don’t have a fucking clue what I just got myself into. And then I’m being shepherded into a van, driven through the melee, deposited beside the hulking ship. A tiny Filipino man in orange coveralls struggles up the stairs with my heavy bag, the Chief Mate shakes my hand – welcome aboard – he takes my passport, the Steward shows me to my cabin. Dinner will be at 18:00.

And then I am alone, and it slowly becomes possible to open my eyes, process my surroundings, breathe.

I collect myself by six and clamor down the metal stairs to the dining hall. I’m the only passenger. I eat alone on this first night – most of the crew and officers out cavorting about onshore, since we don’t set out till 8 o’clock tomorrow morning. The few stragglers left hanging around (the Cook and Steward, the Chief Mate and a couple of Able Seamen) seem friendly enough. I suppose this is where I should start learning to be outging, or some character building shit. Or whatever, I’m too busy feeling lost and sorry for myself.

I pick at my dinner, a greasy piece of pork and a small mound of oily white rice, and poke around the officers’ dining room and adjoining lounge. There’s all these random hooks on the floor that I can’t figure out, until I notice that all the chairs have bungee cords dangling from their undersides. Everything else is bolted down. The ‘library’ consists of about five dog-eared German romance novels, but there is a fairly extensive DVD collection, so I guess I’ve got back up if this turns out to be the most boring adventure of life.

I’m too wired to sleep, and pass most of the night staring out my cabin window. I’ve got a clear view over the container hold – empty when I first board. I watch titan cranes effortlessly pluck containers from the backs of waiting trucks, swing them out over the ship and drop them into their slot. An empty truck moves off and another loaded one slides into place. The whole ship shudders ever time a container hits the deck. There’s a few guys down among the stacks securing the crates – from my lookout up on Deck 10 they’re just small flecks of orange, fireflies dotting the blue night.

The ship continues it’s low hum, the falling containers play the drums, honking trucks trumpet their arrival and departure, this discordant orchestra playing ceaselessly through the night and into the morning. (The irony does not escape my that in order to make an effort to travel more sustainably I’m bedding down in the belly of the industrial beast. Note to self: buy local)

August 22 Port of Montreal

“ROUND THE WORLD! There’s so much in that sound to inspire proud feelings, but where to does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure were all this time before us.” (Herman Melville)

By 6:00 the ship is loaded and the engines roars to life. I’m pleased to see that the stacks don’t rise higher than Deck 6, which means that my cabin has an unobstructed view of the cargo hold, and the great open sea beyond. (Or, for now, the smoggy Montreal Port and the scum of the St. Lawrence River.)

At breakfast – another plate of barely identifiable food suspended in grease – I am educated on the cure for seasickness. Nathan, the Steward, tells me “You have to find the big fish, that’s eaten the little fish. You know this one? The little fish is still whole inside. You find this one, and you eat the little fish, you never get seasick. My grandfather did this for me.” This is ancient Filipino knowledge apparently. I’ve equipped myself with ‘anti-nausea wristbands’, which my doctor claims are the real cure for seasickness, although their effectiveness seems equally implausible to me. The ship, now moving, rumbles and sways, back and forth and back and forth over the gentle swells of the Saint Lawrence.

I venture timidly outside. The stairs, the decks, the bridge balanced high over my head are all painted startling white, the light bouncing off their blanched planes so brightly I can hardly see.

There is one other passenger after all. I pass him on the stairs on my way back from breakfast. He’s an older guy with an accent that I decide is German – which proves that I’m a complete ignoramus because I discover later that he’s from Montreal. He turns out to be as quiet and reclusive as I am. Mealtimes are more or less silent, with the occasional line of small talk, which suits me just fine. The officers sit at a second table in the dining room (two German Engineers and the Filipino Chief Mate), and generally acknowledge us passengers with a perfunctory “Mahlzeit!” (‘Bon appetite’) and a cursory nod, after which, polite formalities taken care of, they ignore our existence. The captain’s wife has also joined us for the journey, so I am not the only unlucky woman onboard. I have yet to see the captain. My favourite so far is the steward, who has an optimistic buoyancy about him befitting a ship.

I still have my cell phone, but the signal quite suddenly disappears, leaving me officially severed from my old life ashore. The first day sympathetically loses its signal too, the light fading over the low hills on the distant banks of the river. The ship continues its incessant rumbling – it reminds me of the bread maker we used to have at home, which trembled and shook so hard it sometimes wobbled itself right off the counter.

Tomorrow we have been instructed to meet with the Second Mate at 10:30 a.m. to go over safety procedures. It’s quite exciting to have an event to schedule into the day. The only other itinerary for the next two weeks is: Breakfast: 7:30-8:30; Lunch: 12:00-13:00; Dinner: 17:30-18:30. Repeat daily.

The thick blue lips of night close over the white teeth of horizon. The day takes its last bite, chews thoughtfully, and then the light disappears down the black gullet of the universe.

August 23 the St. Lawrence River

“NOT TILL WE ARE LOST, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are…” (Henry Thoreau)

My fellow passenger, Stephan – more intrepid than I – becomes my source of information. It will take up 50 hours to reach the mouth of the St. Lawrence, he tells me, and we will have two pilot changes, once at Trois-Rivières, and again at Quebec City. I did see a small boat pull up abreast of us yesterday, and though ‘Pilot” was clearly written on it’s hull in bold black lettering, I had no idea what was going on. It docked against our side for several minutes, then sped off, curving away in a smooth arc back towards the shore. I guess that means we’ve passed Trois-Rivières.

Meals continue to verge on unpalatable. Breakfasts are generally the most successful, the ratio of oil : food becoming less favourable as the day progresses. Stephan has heard that on German ships the cabins are bigger but the food is more “straight” – his word – whereas on French ships the quarters are smaller but the meals are good and there’s wine included. (Note to self: next time go French.) I’m prone to losing my appetite when I travel anyway, and with only a couple ascents and descents of a few flights of stairs as my daily dose of exercise, I’m not exactly working up much of an inclination to feast. I’ve been told there’s an exercise room onboard, but have also been warned not to expect much out of it.

My cabin suits me well. There’s a bed and a couchette, joined in an L shape (I am later informed that if the rocking of the ship is really bad, it’s more comfortable to sleep on the couch, which will be perpendicular to the motion of the waves.) There’s also a desk, a small coffee table and a large closet, and a bathroom just big enough to turn around in. It’s functionally appealing, if not aesthetically beautiful. From my little round window I can see the neatly stacked containers, their bright primary colours float above the backdrop of the water like balloons against a clear sky. And beyond there is only the ever-changing river – grey then blue then green. A swath of white foam peels away from the left edge of the ship, to the right the sun rolls out a glistening carpet; silver, gold and bronze threads weaving across the undulating surface. There is still a hazy grey smudge of land to the south, but all around to the north and the east the water meets the sky in a sharp line, two blue hands pressed together in prayer.

I meet the Captain after breakfast. He’s a whale of a man, and appears to have spent the last several decades living in the sea, rather than above it. He has a waterlogged look about him, his pale skin tinged blue, his frigid irises spill out into the whites of his eyes, the flesh on his jowls quivers and rolls as if spurred by the tide. When he shakes my hand his palms are damp and cold. A large mole clings like a barnacle to his upper lip.

Stephan and I meet in the crew’s rec room for our 10:30 appointment with the Second Mate. The purpose of the meeting is to brief us on what we are to do in the event of an emergency alarm. There are two different alarms, we are told - the Second Mate demonstrates with two shrieking trills which sound identical to me. In any case, depending which alarm sounds we are either to go to the lifeboat on the 8th deck and put on a lifejacket there, or we are to get the life jacket and emergency suit from under our beds and proceed to the bridge. The Second Mate’s English is borderline passable, but he repeats everything 4 or 5 times and includes lots of hand motions, so we more or less get the gist. Then he pulls out a fluorescent orange emergency coverall and proceeds to give us a demonstration of how to put it on, while Stephan and I struggle to hold back our laughter. The suit is apparently designed as a one-size-fits-all, but it turns the diminutive Second Mate into an amorphous orange blob, with small black eyes, the faint beginnings of a nose, and bulbous neoprene hands. The life jacket must then fit overtop of this waterproof snowsuit, which amazingly it does. It comes equipped with a light that automatically turns on when in contact with water, and a whistle. The mate makes another high-pitched trilling, in case we don’t understand what one might do with the whistle.

Stephan requests a tour of the laundry and exercise facilities. The “gym” is as I was warned it would be – about 6 feet by 6 feet, with a very basic stationary bike – clearly stationary for some time – and a stand up shower with large cracks in the siding. There is inexplicably a plastic lawn chair folded up inside the shower. The mate tells us, or rather, demonstrates, that we should remove the chair if we wish to take a shower. There is also a small sauna, which he seems to disapprove of – no telling why, it gets lost in translation, but I get the impression it’s just not really a Filipino thing. I tend to agree that a sauna is kind of a waste of time, unless you are 16 years old and have just been rolling in the snow (and likely have also just consumed an illicit amount of alcohol). Stephan says he enjoys a good sauna though, and intends to give it a shot.

The laundry room is quite a bit more usable. And I am pleased for once that the mate gives us a thorough hands-on demonstration since all the knobs are labeled in German.

The Captain reappears at lunch, and turns out to be marginally more verbose than the rest. I can’t help noticing his heavily German-accented English makes his consonant swish around in his mouth, his thick L’s, R’s and S’s come crashing out like waves. “On Saturdays, we have only soup for lunch,” he tells us. “Seaman’s traditions.” And indeed, lunch is not quite the usual three-course affair, but a thick white soup with fatty chunks of pork and a side of plain boiled sausage. I am quickly developing a keen, if perhaps ill informed, dislike for German food.

My roaming grounds are actually much larger than I thought. Stephan, my trusty tour guide, discovers we are allowed to go out to the front of the boat, and I happily follow him there after lunch. The side passage is quite narrow – the wall of shipping containers towering on the left, a steep drop to the water on the right broken by a slim white rail. From my lofty cabin’s view everything is shrunk back to a comprehensible size, but down here things resume their epic proportions. The coiled bowlines are thick as my legs, the anchor chain completely dwarfs me. But, far away from the entombed engine, silence reigns, broken only by the quiet lap of the waves licking the hull of the boat. Stephan lends me his binoculars, and for a while I watch the distant outcrop of Gaspésie slip slowly by.

August 24 the Atlantic

“THERE IS NO FREE LUNCH.” (Milton Friedman)

A fork of wind picks up the water and tosses it into leafy waves with frilled white edges, but our small island stays more or less steady, plowing out into the open ocean under the yellow smile of the sun. Behind us our white wake cleaves the water all the way to the horizon like a long straight road. The captain says we can expect good weather across the Atlantic. Stephan is mildly disappointed, hoping to encounter at least a small storm. I suppose he entertains some romantic vision of himself planted bravely on the foredeck while the wild rain lashes against his skin and the wind billows in his clothes. But I imagine for me a storm means keeling over with my face on the toilet bowl while my stomach heaves in time with the waves – anti-nausea bracelets and small-fish-inside-a-fish be damned – so I’m hoping to pass on the experience.

The clocks will go forward one hour tonight – the first of six time changes. It didn’t really occur to me until now, but these seamen exist between two time zones, their days constantly in flux as they move with, or against, the motion of the sun. On the way back they will have to reverse six times; lives equally divided between 23 and 25-hour days. I don’t anticipate the time changes will affect me too much, my existence only loosely hung on the frame of three meals. I seem to be getting up quite early, I nap after breakfast, doze on the deck for half the afternoon, bed dowb by 12:00, and then wake sometime in the wee hours of the morning and read until the sun reaches long golden fingers into my cabin. Time hardly seems to matter. And whenever I find myself on the brink of boredom, it miraculously, it seems, is time for another meal.

Which brings us to Sunday’s midday extravaganza, intended I think, to make up for the supposed meagerness of Saturday’s ration of ‘just soup’. I am served salad, more soup, a colossal t-bone steak with fries – floating in a requisite puddle of grease – followed by a bowl of Chapman’s finest ice cream drowning in chocolate sauce and whipped cream. I take no more than a tentative sampling of the caloric mound on my plate. The officers devour their meals in silence, having no appetite for conversation. Stephan and I also eat – or at least push the food around on our plates – in relative quiet. In our occasional conversation we discuss our ‘big plans’ for the afternoon, our more important plans for the post-Atlantic future, our chosen selection of literature (although since he only reads in French and I only in English, we can’t exactly share stimulating intellectual critique). I learn that he works for Commission de la santé et de la sécurité du travail du Québec (CSST), managing a group of employees who have the pleasant job of assessing the validity of claimants seeking compensation for mental health disabilities. (Unsurprisingly, he seems a bit depressed himself.) I learn also that he is onboard for the full 28-day round trip; that he is an avid swimmer and boater; that he has also cycled through a fair chunk of Canada, and dreams of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. I learn that he does a good job of seeming to speak English, but in fact, he says, it’s quite difficult for him to understand, and he often peppers our sparse conversation with French. I learn that the French word for ‘still-life’ is ‘nature morte’ (dead nature?), which strikes me as bizarrely paradoxical.

After lunch a bit of fog creeps in, surrounding the ship, and holds us hostage for the night. The rumbling engine trundles me off through sleep, and delivers me into another foggy grey dawn.

August 25 the Atlantic
“AND AIN’T I A WOMAN!” (Sojourner Truth)

The fog besieges us all morning, coating the deck with slick moisture and constricting the view to a small patch of water, puckered and grey as the scarred back of a manatee. I reluctantly confine myself to my cabin, with only the tragic F. Scott Fitzgerald for company.

It seems an endless struggle, but the sun finally wins the war after lunch, blazing the decks in a triumphant white gaze. Some blessed member of the crew has taken to setting out two plastic lawn chairs each morning for Stephan and I to lounge upon. Not having ever been on a proper cruise, I can’t make a just comparison, but I will say that I spend a fair bit of time lying in the sun, and am generally waited on hand and foot. As far as I can tell as that’s missing is a cocktail with a little paper umbrella.

It’s actually a bit weird to be lying about all day when everyone around me - save my one fellow passenger – is busily working away (although my mother might contend that I have done so all my life). Still, it’s blatantly unjust that I should be lazing in the sun and thinking it a grand old time, while the crew are trapped here for 9, or sometimes 12 months, on what I would surely think a pittance of a paycheque.

I climb up to the bridge at sunset, because there’s no better place to watch the light drown itself in the sea. The Chief Mate – whose name is Nathaniel, but everyone just calls him Chief – has the 4:00-8:00 watch (both a.m. and p.m.), and is happy (this p.m.) to answer all my burning questions.

So: the boat has a container capacity of 16,000 tons, which is certainly not huge by industry standards. Fully loaded we burn 55 tons of fuel per day (!), at the cost of $700 US a ton (!!). On this trip we’re only carrying about 9000 tons of cargo (including some empty crates, which I don’t really understand. Chief, by way of explanation, just says they need them back in Valencia), so we’re moving a bit faster than the usual 18 knots (33km/hr) and also burning slightly less fuel. Of course it’s not much of a relief that my ride is only burning 45 tons of fuel per day. Note to self: next time swim.

Chief helps to somewhat assuage my guilt about being the veritable sloth in the neighbourhood – it’s preciously rare, I gather, for a young woman to be making this trip, alone no less, and apparently the crew is quite pleased by my mere presence. According to him, “they’re happy and they work harder, and we get more done, so I’m happy too.” So tomorrow I will go about my sunbathing with the clear conscience of a woman with a purpose in life.

The bridge is home to an astounding collection of radar screens and maps, two steering wheels, binoculars, radio equipment, and all kinds of mystery knobs and switches. The sunset splays itself out perfectly across the wall of plate glass windows. Chief shows me how the radars are picking up large clouds, but says again that, judging by the atmospheric pressure, the good weather will hold. He does add though, that “weather is like women – you can never really know for sure what it will do.”

August 26 the Atlantic

“THE WINE URGES ME ON, the bewitching wine, which sets even a wise man to singing...” (Homer)

The menu is posted on the door of the dinning room each day – I have decided this is to help one determine what the oily hillock that appears on each plate actually is. However, breakfast this morning is eloquently described as “minute meat” so I am none the wiser to it’s origins. Needless to say I take only a few timid bites. Which turns out to be more than enough, for quickly (within minutes!) it goes to work burning a hole in the lining of my stomach. I will be more than ready for the fresh vegetarian diet I have been promised upon my arrival at the farm in Spain.

Gastrointestinal discomforts aside, I am gloriously happy. The sun is out, bouncing gleefully off the white surfaces of the boat and skipping amidst the joyful waves. I’ve claimed a corner of the back deck as my permanent spot, as it gets the first rays, and ease into my lawn chair to begin my slow roast. Occasionally the wind lifts spray from the sea and litters small shocks of water across my hot skin. (We’ll pretend, for the sake of my mother, that I was dutifully applying sunscreen at regular intervals.)

Loneliness does unexpectedly creep up on me occasionally – generally towards the end of mealtimes when the officer’s mess is enshrined in deafening silence, despite there being seven people present. These sailors are a solitary bunch, well suited to this hermitage out here in the wide ocean. They occasionally engage in gruff conversation, related to pressing matters of the ship, but otherwise speak little to each other. Even the captain and his wife seem to avoid mindless chatter in favour of an amicable peace. In one of my visits to the bridge, Chief tells me his favourite moments are during the morning watch, when he’s alone with the sunrise. I too enjoy the solitude of watching the sunrise through the round hole of my cabin window, the sun opening a lazy yellow eye and rousing itself from the horizon, wispy clouds shaking off the heavy darkness and turning fresh pink faces up to the light. There are things better left untainted by common conversation.

However, there are also times where a little merrymaking is in order, and if it can’t be done in the presence of the stiff German officers, than it must retreat below sea level, into the crew’s rec room in the bowels of the ship. Here there are a few rickety tables and chairs, the heavy scent of lingering smoke, and a spiffy silver karaoke machine. I am invited to join the party that evening, and predictably am coerced into attempting to sing. I’m embarrassed by the ordeal, and unsurprisingly lacking in talent, but these guys are so thrilled to have a real live female in their midst that it’s entirely irrelevant. I could screech into the microphone to my heart’s content and they would continue to eat out of my hand.

Nathan proves to be quite a decent crooner, further endearing himself to me. Moreover, some of the others have, of late, become a bit too forward in their admiration, but Nathan maintains a respectful distance, and I appreciate him for that too. (I entertain no illusions that I am in any way worthy of such overwhelming attention from any of these men – they are clearly starved for companionship, and are additionally fascinated by what they perceive as foreign in me.)

We grease the night with a few more beers, someone turns out the lights, cranks the volume on the karaoke machine and starts dancing, and soon enough everyone’s on their feet, swaying against the rocking of the boat in the cramped dark room while one of the Able Seamen belts out Stevie Wonder in a heavily accented growl.

I excuse myself before I lose track of how many beers I'm sloshing down into my empty stomach – agreeing to return at 10:00 tomorrow for a round of darts while the boys are on their break – and stumble up to my lofty aerie, stopping on the way to admire the stars spattered across the boundless sky.

August 27 passing the Azores

“DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE FUTURE. Or worry, but know that worrying is about as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum.” (Paul Fagan)

I fail at darts as much as with karaoke. But I can do no wrong here, and in any case I somewhat improve by the end of a second round at the 15:00 break. Along with Nathan, two Able Seamen – John and Noel – become constant presences in my life at sea, the other eleven crew drifting in and out as their work schedule allows (of the officers, I only ever befriend the Filipino Chief). I begin to feel a little less like an awkward white giant in their midst.

Just before dinner Chief calls my room from the bridge. “Look out the window,” he instructs, “we’re going through a rainbow.” I assume there is something lost in translation here – how can we be going through a rainbow? But I look, and lo, it seems that is exactly what we are doing. An huge rainbow fans its multicoloured tail across the sky, diving into the water at either end, and our little ship points its cargo-laden bow straight through the middle of its wide arch. It holds for a minute or two, then wavers, and disappears, as though we’ve pierced through some magical portal into a brave new world.

I have little appetite at dinner, despite having hardly eaten breakfast or lunch, and leave earlier than usual to avoid the oppressing silence. I stand out on the deck under a grey sky, the pale sun shimmering faintly through the clouds in spotty patches like coins at the bottom of a well. The bulk of the Azores slumps out of the water off in the distance, but it’s too far to inspire any particular excitement. There are birds now though, for the first time since we left the St. Lawrence, swooping down to skim the water and than soaring back up to the sky in erratic circles, buffeted by the wind. I watch them absently, distracted by their motion and the choppy roll of the waves, feeling lonely and small in the presence of this vast sad beauty.

I intend to pass on the karaoke tonight, but Nathan calls my room at 21:00 to invite me down and I feel obliged to accept. Stephan joins the party tonight too – likely also summoned from the comfort of his room. I’m less shy now, and thus somewhat more skilled at yelling into the microphone at an appropriate volume, and am happy to report it’s an enjoyable endeavor. But, having dutifully made an appearance I skip out fairly early and retreat to my cabin to continue wallowing in my loneliness. The lights of the Azores are strung out across an endless black night, a thousand distant hearths lit to illuminate the happy gathering of loved ones.

My phone rings again sometime after 2:00 a.m. It’s Chief, begging me to come back down, the party apparently still going strong. He’s clearly had quite a bit to drink, and a very awkward conversation ensues, in which he is inappropriately explicit in his affection for me. I let him down as best I can, and hope that the whole thing will be forgotten by breakfast. And then I crawl back into bed and continue to lie awake for the better part of the night, it having dawned on me that I am now closer to Europe than I am to Canada, and all too soon will be dumped on the shores of some foreign country and left to fend for myself.

August 28 the Atlantic

“TRYING TO KEEP IT SOMEWHAT LIGHT, BUT COMFORTING ENOUGH WE COOKED THIS LOVELY PORK KNUCKLE THE OTHER DAY. Can a pork knuckle even be lovely? Maybe not the best description for a piece of meat so delicious, yet so many times forgotten that a little TLC can’t hurt.

“There was no recipe. There was no script. We kind of made dinner up as we went along, the main ingredient being, you guessed it! the pork knuckle. A big casserole filled with water, some bay leaves, black pepper corns, the all essential stock cube and your diced vegetables of choice: onions, carrots, etc. All in and the pork knuckle was left in peace, simmering away for the next hour.” (On (Glorious) Food and Wine, www.onfoodandwine.wordpress.com)

I’m disoriented by the light in my room when I wake, thinking it’s still the middle of the night. Have I fallen asleep with the lights on? But no, it’s the sun streaming in through the window. It’s already 7 a.m. So there is such a thing as boat-lag, the slow progression of time changes finally catches up with me.

We have another scheduled activity today! Stephan and I are to be shown around the engine room. The tour begins in the control room, which is cold and dry, and rather dull. It consists of a couple computers and a wall of switches that monitor various pumps and valves around the ship, and sound the alarm should any liquid / gas / temperature misbehave. The First Engineer gives us a rundown of the systems, which I mostly don’t understand – partly because of his accent, and partly because I don’t know, or care, that much about engines. I do the best I can to pretend to be fascinated.

The Second Engineer leads us down through a maze of stairwells to the engine room, handing us each a package of bright yellow earplugs on the way. As soon as he opens the door, the low rumble of the engine becomes hoarse shouting. The combination of the noise, the earplugs, and yet another heavy accent means that I can’t hear / understand a single thing that he says. But everything is impressively enormous and vibrates ferociously while giving off wicked blasts of heat.

Lunch today – according to the menu – is ‘roast pork knuckle’. It’s inedible as it sounds – a hunk of bone in a shirt of slimy brown meat and thick overcoat of fried fat. Perhaps, if given the benefit of the doubt, the problem has something to do with an inexperienced Filipino cook confronted with bizarre German cuisine, but I hope never to be subjected to it again. And once again I hardly eat. I’ve begun to worry that by the time I make it to land I will have become so malnourished that I will simply collapse under the weight of my oversized bag.

I have learned that we dock in Valencia for a day. I’m a bit peeved because I had asked my travel agent for the shortest trip possible, and was told the only available passage was to Livorno. Which is about 2 days farther along than Valencia. (Since the price is factored by the day, a ticket to Valencia should have cost me significantly less.) Additionally, Livorno happens to be at least three days west of Granada, where I am trying to end up. I’m not really anxious to get off the boat, it being comfortable, and quite familiar now, and I’m also keen to get my money’s worth, since I poured close to $2400 into my ticket (which was more or less the extent of my life’s savings). But the more I play with the idea, the more it seems to make sense to jump ship at Valencia.

August 29 the Atlantic

“EITHER YOU DECIDE TO STAY IN THE SHALLOW END OF THE POOL OR YOU GO OUT IN THE OCEAN.” (Christopher Reeve)

The clocks go farward again, and I wake feeling as though I haven’t slept at all. I stumble through breakfast and then fall right back into bed, sleeping until lunch.

The afternoon presents itself perfectly. The sun takes a glowing curtsey, the clouds respectfully bow out, a thin breeze rustles across the surface of the ocean like the whisper of applause. Sprawled out on my lawn chair, any lethargic loneliness I previously felt sizzles away, although I suppose technically I still spend most of the afternoon sleeping.

I join the karaoke party again, and consume far more beer than is really necessary – as does everyone else. By the end of the night, which is actually early morning no one is singing, so much as hollering tunelessly into the microphone. Even Nathan is giving me a little more undue attention that I can deal with by then: and so I decide tomorrow, after I’ve slept off my hangover, that I will talk to the captain about departing in Valencia. It’s time to start a new adventure.

August 30 Straight of Gibraltar

“IT IS OF INTEREST TO NOTE THAT WHILE SOME DOLPHINS ARE REPORTED TO HAVE LEARNED ENGLISH – up to fifty words used in correct context – no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.” (Carl Sagan)

I climb to the bridge to view the passage of the straight. There are ships everywhere – freighters, cruisers, sail and pleasure boats drifting hither and thither across the narrow channel. Spain looms large and red to the north, Africa presents it’s rugged russet bulk to the south. At the most perfect moment I chance to look down and catch sight of a troop of dolphins frolicking in our wake, flashing emerald and silver against the pearly foam. They are amazingly playful, showing off with their aquatic acrobatics as if daring the day to be more joyful. I want to hold them there forever, but they slip away quickly, their circus not to be contained by my gaze.

Tonight will be our final time change. Tomorrow I plan to visit the laundry room, and then, freshly scented, pack my bags, as it sounds like I will be allowed to depart at Valencia. Chief calls to invite me for coffee and a sunset on the bridge. He knows now to lay off a little, and we watch companionably as the sun dips a sultry toe into the ocean, the sky blushes to have been caught watching, the curtain drops over the amorous sea. And then I pass another night away with the crew, accompanied by the sonorous squeal of the microphone. And I feel, despite our very different upbringings, an affinity with these men, who have taken me, without judgment, as a friend.

August 31 the Mediterranean

“TIME FLIES LIKE AN ARROW. Fruit flies like a banana.” (Groucho Marx)

I sleep in right through breakfast (no sacrifice really). Only I discover when I descend to find myself a coffee that Nathan is not speaking to me. Apparently I have slighted him in some horribly irreparable way. Which is sad, because he’s still my most preferred of the characters onboard, and I hope not to leave him on unpleasant terms.

I’ve been mildly curious as to the contents of the containers on board – but have been told that only the whereabouts of dangerous chemicals or otherwise volatile content are charted by the officers. The rest is simply deemed ‘general cargo’ and is beneath further scrutiny. However, it becomes apparent that several if the boxes we’re carrying contain raw animal hides, which are quickly decomposing in the unforgiving heat of the sun, and leaking their odorous contents onto the front deck. Chief has to send a team out every other day to clean up the mess. But by now, resistance is more or less futile, and the putrid carcasses are spawning a colony of flies, which have found their way, in droves, into every nook and cranny of the boat. I’d hate to be the receiver of those bovine remnants, whence they must be removed from their coffins and transported to some cow heaven to be transformed into divine Valencian purses. I’ve been so lucky in my life, having only, in my menial labours, had to deal with rotten customers, and not rotten meat.

We’ve arrived in Valencia early, but there’s no room at the inn, and we have to anchor outside the port until a berth is freed up for us. It’s a sweltering 31ºC in the shade, and now resting as we are on the flat sea in a strangely silent ship, there’s no hint of a breeze to whisk the smoldering heat off my skin. I’m disoriented by the stillness, wishing for the gentle sway of the ground beneath my feet, as calming as the coaxing rock of the cradle. And I find too that I miss the constant soundtrack of the growling engine. Stephan comments at lunch that now would be a far better time for a tour of the engine room.

It’s Sunday again, which means the boys have the afternoon off. I find them fishing off the side of the deck, equipped with long pieces of string festooned with bits of bread. The Bosun has already caught a fish by the time I appear, and he grabs it out of a bucket by the tail, holding it up for me to admire, as it wrestles violently with the sun glinting off it’s back. Nothing more is caught for a while, and I venture off to engage in more exciting pursuits, such as doing my laundry and gazing off at the distant port. But later a squid is baited in, and I’m similarly subjected to a session of approval.

Nathan continues to shun me until dinner, at which point I guess he realizes it’s kind of a waste of time. Stephan has come with two bottles of wine to share around, and chooses to break them open at dinner tonight. The five officers split one between them, Stephan and I make do with the other, and have a very nice heart to heart as a result. I visit Chief up on the bridge for a final sunset chat, and then we all head down to pass the night merrily to the tunelessness of the karaoke machine.

September 1 Valencia

“NOBODY IS EVER MET AT THE AIRPORT WHEN BEGINNING A NEW ADVENTURE. It's just not done.” (Elizabeth Warnock Fernea)

September! Where does the time go? I’ve been up late, and think that I’ll sleep in, but I’m rudely awoken at 5:00 by the grumble of the engines starting to life. We’ve been summoned to berth. I watch our journey to land through my little peephole, as we quiver and quake, jitterbugging all the way to port. I spend one last 10:00 break taking coffee with the crew, attempt to give them a few euros to compensate for the beer I've guzzled, which they staunchly refuse. The pleasure was all theirs. And then I say my bittersweet goodbyes, and I’m off, swinging one browned leg, then the other over the railing of the ship, John navigating the stairs in front of me, his orange coveralls disappearing under bulk of my knapsack. Once again I’m whisked away by security, the van lurching around heavy cranes and careening trucks, and dumping me, and my bag, at the front gate. A cab is waiting for me, accompanied by a driver who does not speak a word of English and doesn’t appear to have a clue how to get to my chosen hostel. I give him my Lonely Planet guidebook with a vague map of the city, the hostel marked with a miniature house, and he gets on his cell phone and lurches off into the traffic-clogged depths of Valencia, hollering in rapid Spanish all the way.

After some time, many u-turns and back tracks, and a fair amount of what sounds suspiciously like cursing, he deposits me, and my bag, in front of the Hôme Youth Hostel. “¿Cuánto cuesta?” I ask, in my unsure Spanish. He hollers a string of indecipherable sentences – I only catch the word ‘nada’ – and then he hops spryly back in his cab and speeds away down the narrow cobblestone street. So taxis in Spain are free? With a considerable effort, I hoist my knapsack onto my back and march on towards the dark wooden door of the hostel. I have arrived.