Torren
At one point, a huge cockroach crawled out of our food stores and wandered across my leg. I felt a strange kinship with him, bunkmate and crew, and remained in a weird comatose haze as he crawled across my sheets. Nine months ago, I would probably have leapt from my bed screaming. I would have felt frantic to get off the boat. Over time I have become, I guess, much more accepting of whatever gets thrown at us because out here there is no other option. The weather is what it is, and the only solution to a miserable night is to change your outlook on it. To lay in a fragrant daydream, to befriend your cockroach buddies, to imagine the rolling of the boat as sort of fun or tender (the ocean as a womb or a rollercoaster). Learning this acceptance, allowing time to pass without resenting it, has been, for me, the hardest part about living on a small sailboat but also so rewarding. Of course, the logistics of it have been difficult. Learning how to sail, to read the weather, to react to things going wrong, to tie knots, whatever…none of that has compared to the mental side of living completely at the mercy of the weather. My ability to be accepting remained fractional and odd; there were moments when I felt desperate to control my surroundings, to get off the boat. There were lots of moments when I wanted anything but to have to sit alone with my thoughts and the endless horizon, when I craved the distractions of life on land. But there were also times when all the challenges - the storms and heat and oil leaks and tangled lines and lack of food - felt not just okay, but like a wonderfully complete reality. That night, uncomfortable and wet and rough, I felt okay about it all, couldn’t imagine being anywhere else in fact.
|