It is my watch. I am wedged in the cockpit between the end of the bench seat and the dash board of the boat. I can see the wind direction and our speed without getting up. I raise myself up every ten minutes to quickly sweep the ocean for lights, and then just to ease my conscience, every forty minutes I get up and stand on the stern, stretch out and sweep the silent darkness from horizon to horizon. The night sky and the dark expanse of water intermingle into a mass of complete unknown. The only thing separating the two tonight are the stars.
I hold onto the mizzen mast and reach out with one hand into the wind. I have spent many days gazing out at the sea. There is no where else to look. The endless waves are an onslaught of blue hacking into my subconscious. They move as one mass until I try to focus, and they transform into a myriad of individual waves. I try to keep a steady eye on just one, and yet they march on incessantly, and I am left defenceless. Memories of my childhood swim up the surface like fish to a light, and I swing around to face the wind full in my chest. I hear the rhythm of the soft, small slapping waves sending me to sleep as lie in my grandparent’s home. The children in the green room, my parents in the blue, our sheets always damp with salt. The wind blows the feathered fingers of the pink tamarisk as I chase my sister, our childish brown feet pounding the dry path flat. The tiny strawberries stubbornly cling on the thin summer grass. The ferny foreshore streams with snakes, but we are faster and we race past the tall pampas grass, to the dark sand, sand piled high with stinking seaweed, over the smooth black mounds of stones, to the reef. And then I hear my sister telling me, as though she knew I would leave her, ‘This is how I will remember you, with your black hair streaming as you go up and into another wave.’
Tonight the waves are with us. The wind blows from the northwest. The sails are set. I feel the crests rising beneath us, the boat rising smoothly up and over them, and the spume gently, somehow quietly bubbles at their back, a silent, inky wave disappearing. There are no reflections of the stars. Yet I look out, out, out trying to see in the silky dark and suddenly remember myself at fifteen, one night in Melbourne when I woke and quietly walked through the house, to the damp grass and all that was outside. The night around was black with clarity, the stars bright. I felt my feet flat on the cold, metal table, the cool air wrapping around my legs. All alone in the secret, beautiful night, I wanted it to begin.
I didn’t realize that once it began it would be impossible to return. Life has to change, even if you are not there to see it happen. And people too, even family, even if you cannot understand why they must. The life that had seemed so constant, now came to me in gusts as the wind blew us further out of reach.
We have only been out three days this cross, sailing west across the top of South America to Panama. The waves are full of themselves as they push us towards the canal. During the day the sea is a bright, painful blue, and the tops of the waves fly in white streaks, as we surf our way to making our longest days. But we could be anywhere, on any ocean, sailing to any port. The sea is always the sea.
