May 19
Swells. The ship pitches and gravity does, too. A few g’s more, a few g’s less. We’re steaming through a watery world with its own rules of physics. Nothing’s rock solid out here. Everything is slippery. The ship groans and creaks, straining at all its welds and bolts. The liquid parts of me slosh around inside the solid parts of me. I feel sick.
I head down to the poop deck for breakfast. The poop deck is where you find the officer’s mess. Poop. Mess. Unfortunate names for the place I’ll be eating my meals for the next ten days.
Sue and Mark from Charleston, South Carolina, are already at the table. They’re the only other passengers on board, and they each have a small pink seasickness patch stuck behind their ear. The chief engineer is sitting at the table, too. He’s a burly East German guy with a big tummy and a bushy white beard.
“You are zee cyclist!?” he bellows at me. I nod.
“Vee had a Swiss cyclist on zee last voyage. He told us he was going to cross the U.S.A. on his bike. Zis is crazy, I told him, and you will regret it.”
The chief engineer doesn’t like the U.S. He says you can’t walk anywhere, and when you try to walk, you get questioned by the cops.
“It’s worse than North Korea!” he says, pounding his fist on the table for emphasis.
Then the first mate joins us. Christoph. A friendly young guy from Hamburg. Christoph is a New School sailor. He has a neatly trimmed beard and an engineering degree. Unlike the chief engineer, he isn’t the type to get sloppy drunk and start a barroom brawl. Christoph has a habit of blinking his eyes quickly at the end of his sentences— blink, blink, blink— like he’s translating everything he’s saying into Morse code, just to be absolutely sure his message has been conveyed.
Everyone has finished breakfast by the time the captain shows up. A guy right out of central casting. Ruddy cheeks, a white beard, and eyes tinted watery blue from years of gazing at the sea. He could be the captain of a U-boat in an old war movie. While he expertly dissects his half slice of grapefruit, the captain tells us about the time he was docked in Richmond, Virginia. The James River was running high and debris of all sorts was flowing past the ship: tree limbs, car tires, you name it. Then the chief engineer radioed up to the bridge. Trouble on the poop deck, he said. The captain hurried down and discovered a little chihuahua tangled in the mooring lines.
“I organized a rescue mission,” the captain says with the hint of a smile.
A crew guy was lowered off the side of the ship and managed to grab the little dog. Somehow, the local news found out about the rescue and sent a reporter to interview the captain. For a few days, the Independent Venture was famous and the captain was a local celebrity.
After breakfast, the third officer asks the passengers— Mark, Sue, and me— to attend the mandatory safety drill. He shows us how to launch a life raft (it’s complicated) and he tells us what to do if someone falls overboard (yell “man overboard!” really loud). He also shows us the free-fall lifeboat, which slides down a steep diagonal ramp at the back of the ship and plunges 30 feet into the ocean. It’s like a theme park ride at one of those minor theme parks where the thrills are unsubtle and sketchy. I ask the third officer if he’s ever tried it. He shakes his head.
“I was sick the day they did the drill,” he says. I get the feeling he’s not being 100% honest. I find out later a free-fall lifeboat isn’t a pleasant thing to experience. The impact when the boat hits the water is intense, and it’s not unheard of for a sailor to break an arm or leg.
The sea is swelling. Swollen. Not angry, exactly, but a little hot under the collar. I spend the day feeling seasick which is like being carsick, except a ship never pulls over onto the shoulder so you can barf in the ditch. I head up to the bridge to take my mind off how I’m feeling. Christoph is on duty, hovering over the radar scope. He tells me we’d been shadowing another freight ship earlier in the day. A little luminescent blip on the scope. But now the blip has vanished and our radar beams sweep over an empty sea. The North Atlantic may be a shipping highway, but it’s like one of those highways out west in Nevada or Arizona. A lonesome desert highway. If you break down, you’ll be waiting a long time till help arrives.