The sound of silence

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.