The East Coast

The sea is at its best at London, at midnight, when you are within the arms of a capacious chair, before a fire, selecting phases of the voyages you will never make. It is wiser not to try to realize your dreams. There are no real dreams. For as to the sea itself, love it you cannot. Why should you? I will never believe again the sea was ever loved by anyone whose life was married to it. It is the creation of Omnipotence, which is not of human kind and understandable, and so the springs of its behavior are hidden. The sea does not assume its royal blue to please you. Its brute and dark desolation is not raised to overwhelm you; you disappear then because you happen to be there. It carries the lucky foolish to fortune and drags the calculating wise to the strewn bones. What else may we expect from it, the nameless thing, new-born with each dawn, but as old as the night? Now for me it had degenerated into its mood of old night, behaving as it did in the lightless days, before poetry came to change it with flattery. It was again as inhuman as when the poet was merely a wonderfully potential blob on a warm mud bank. – H.M. Tomlinson

This is how she came to me. Black and white and slightly sagging in brown waters and from here we embarked on an adventure of untold beauty and despair.

Home. Waves as big as trucks pound the hull only inches from my sleeping head.

Hey mang!! My name is Paulo!! I was born a street dog in Puerto Rico, but then the Humane Society took me and now I live on a boat mang!!

The pay is a full belly and the rare stolen moments of bliss and awe when the world appears under a new light, found in a new place where mother nature is always furious.

Being at sea is a constant reminder of the impermanence of our lives for you can never know if it is you that is moving or if it is the water. Without terra firma, how can you really know where you are, where you are going and from where you have come when all horizons appear as one, the ocean confused and the sky refusing to offer reference. The sea does not care for longevity or endurance, a rudder can only work if there is water passing by it, waves are mountains that rise up, peak, and then wash away. Such is life. Newport, Rhode Island

There once was a little wave rolling along over the ocean. Under crystal skies, though windy storms and beneath starry skies that defy description the little wave rolled on and on. The little wave loved his life and loved his world, he loved his home where the ocean meets sky. One day the little wave saw land on the horizon. He saw a beach and saw that there was nothing he could do and would soon wash up onto the sand and it would be the end of him. He cried to a bigger wave next to him “what am I going to do?!? Please help me, I don’t want this to be the end.” The big wave smiled down at the little wave and said “worry not little one, for you are not just a little wave rolling along over the ocean, you are the ocean.”

Brittany has gone home and New York is far too big to ever know completely. This footbridge encouraged me to follow my soul as if my soul wrote this and was waiting at the other end, impatiently smoking a cigarette wondering if I would actually come. But I took it for a deeper meaning and dug my shoulders into my work a little harder. Thanksgiving.

I find it a paradox that someone so afraid of the world as me finds it so irresistible to run out and get lost in it.

It is better to surrender thought and reason and find yourself not asking your self why you are here and why you have come, but asking yourself where do you want to go next?

Ground Zero. Not sure how I feel about that one.

If we were to make contact with another race of beings from another planet and they were to come visit earth, would we as a human race bring them to New York, the greatest city in the world, and say “This is it! This is the best that we have thought of so far!” Would we show them all the perverse and excessive desires of man and our obsessions and greeds and their manifestation as temples that flash and rise ever higher into the sky? Would we take them to the federal reserve bank and show them the mountains of gold that we hoard and worship above every other god we have loved? Would we show them the two holes in the ground where mankind slaughtered mankind? Would we show them our power over mother nature to decimate her and wound her and cage her, to void her? Would we show them the greatest city in the world and say we are proud of our capitalism, we are boastful of our riches, we are progress, we are methodic, we are unstoppable? No, I should hope not.

Thursday December 9, 2010

This morning we landed on the moon. I rolled out of my hammock in time to see a dead fish wash across the deck. The empty, lifeless, grey landscape tapped at the galley window with drops of water streaking down the glass. We have made a heading back to Virginia. Oh what bad news for morning, this was the last thing I wanted to hear. To revisit, to return to where I have come. To silence the engines for a few days while the weather passes. Karen cut up the fish and put it in a bowl for the dogs. No one else came to the funeral.

Living at sea is a constant physical challenge. Simple things like eating, getting in and out of bed and using the bathroom become strenuous exercises in balance and patience. I’ve never felt so completely exhausted. I attempted to clean and organize my bunk today but could do no more than move my extra sleeping bags (crew quarters have become too warm from the deafening engines for really any blankets at all) and remove a couple pieces of trash. I set up my hammock last night after my watch was over. I find it much easier to relax as I sway with the movement of the boat instead of sliding and bouncing on the air mattress. I looked out over the sea today and imagined looking out over a grassy plain. I could see rain showers in the distance and sunbeams shooting down through the clouds. It made me miss land but made me feel blessed to have known both rolling plain and wide open sea.

I watched dolphins swim along side the boat under the crescent moon with the stars in chorus and the distant ships on the horizon. Its been 5 days. Only 5 days at sea.