Solitude is hard to come by on a ship, even one that’s three hundred and seventy-eight feet long, forty-two feet wide, and several decks high. You sleep in company, eat in company, work in company, relax in company, despair in company, fight in company, revel in company.
The luck of landing a private stateroom is fleeting, for your chances of quiet escape are even rarer: you have a private phone number, and everyone knows where to find you.
And there’s certainly no escaping the commotion of everyday ship’s operations: pipes, alarms, radio traffic, engine roar, needle-gunning, clanking, whirring, banging around, shouting, loud rock music from the space next to yours. The soft hum of mission accomplishment.
The brain accustoms itself to this noise, tunes it down and focuses it out, though at times it’s overwhelming, like trying to drive the ship with a half-dozen different radio circuits blaring and ten or twelve crewmembers shouting across bridge wings, other desperately clamping sound-powered phone headsets to their ears in a futile attempt to pick out your commands, hollered over the commotion.
Sometimes you’re lucky, in port calls, when you can escape the buses and vans with piped-in music, the TVs blaring ubiquitously, the raucousness of the drunk and rowdy, the rock music at the gym, even (to my surprise) piped in underwater, in the pool, in one of my few remaining sanctuaries.
Numbed by the noise, the mind takes its time to unwind, to release its carefully hoarded thoughts. Clarity of focus emerges surprisingly, after sleeping in (for once), with noise-canceling headphones tuning out the ceaseless clatter of worklists and general announcements. Profundity is hard to grasp, larger concepts harder to conceive, even rote memorization hard to digest comfortably. Cognition is coiled expectantly, nervously.
Somewhere I find a quiet corner, secretly, briefly. Carefully classified and covertly occupied, lest the others run to possess it in reverse hide-and-seek. Here the thoughts start to bubble up, slowly at first, then in a torrent, pressed down and overflowing. Perspective emerges. Realization. Understanding.
Then I am piped. “…your presence is requested in the XO's stateroom...”
It shatters. The moment is lost.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Under the weather
They call it the common cold for a reason. We all get sick. It’s supposed to be normal, and then we all recover. Except when your immune system’s been compromised, you’re never quite so sure. You scrutinize every sneeze, sweat the fevers, choke back the sore throats, stress over the aches and coughs.
And standing up to 15 hours of watch a day, you don’t have a chance to slow down and sleep it off. You dope yourself up with cold medicine, swallow gallons of water and hot chocolate and cough syrup, and hope the watch will be busy, to distract you.
Eventually the cold medicine wears off, or maybe you’re just building up resistance, or maybe the cold is getting worse (you worry). The pseudoephedra starts clouding up your vision like the steroids did; you’re blind when you first wake up, and no amount of blinking and squinting focuses the picture. The fever’s broken, but you can’t stop coughing. You lose your voice at first, then it abruptly returns, but only in lower, raspy registers; and when you try to sing, out come these strange chirps.
You’ve tried not to think about it, but you’re counting the days, and when, after 7 days you’re still sick, you can’t escape the lurking despair anymore: I had an immune system disease, after all.
Your fingers start reaching, feeling, searching for swollen lymph nodes: neck, collarbone, armpits, thighs. It doesn’t matter nothing’s there. You still worry. You still look.
The recirculated cold air blowing down your throat, the short nights of just a few hours’ sleep before waking for another watch, the close-quarters contact with other ill folks, the stress and noise and uncertainty that keep you up even when you’re in the rack; maybe this is why you’re not getting well, but that’s not the thought foremost in your mind, undercutting all your conscious powers.
One day you wake up after a decent amount of sleep and your head is clear, your chest clear, your sinuses clear. Your voice is back and the cough has stopped, but you open your mouth to sing and still it’s the chirps coming out. And your hand instinctively starts feeling again, searching, dreading.
You still wonder. You still worry. You still feel.
And standing up to 15 hours of watch a day, you don’t have a chance to slow down and sleep it off. You dope yourself up with cold medicine, swallow gallons of water and hot chocolate and cough syrup, and hope the watch will be busy, to distract you.
Eventually the cold medicine wears off, or maybe you’re just building up resistance, or maybe the cold is getting worse (you worry). The pseudoephedra starts clouding up your vision like the steroids did; you’re blind when you first wake up, and no amount of blinking and squinting focuses the picture. The fever’s broken, but you can’t stop coughing. You lose your voice at first, then it abruptly returns, but only in lower, raspy registers; and when you try to sing, out come these strange chirps.
You’ve tried not to think about it, but you’re counting the days, and when, after 7 days you’re still sick, you can’t escape the lurking despair anymore: I had an immune system disease, after all.
Your fingers start reaching, feeling, searching for swollen lymph nodes: neck, collarbone, armpits, thighs. It doesn’t matter nothing’s there. You still worry. You still look.
The recirculated cold air blowing down your throat, the short nights of just a few hours’ sleep before waking for another watch, the close-quarters contact with other ill folks, the stress and noise and uncertainty that keep you up even when you’re in the rack; maybe this is why you’re not getting well, but that’s not the thought foremost in your mind, undercutting all your conscious powers.
One day you wake up after a decent amount of sleep and your head is clear, your chest clear, your sinuses clear. Your voice is back and the cough has stopped, but you open your mouth to sing and still it’s the chirps coming out. And your hand instinctively starts feeling again, searching, dreading.
You still wonder. You still worry. You still feel.
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