Guam. Deux.

There is nothing out here but the ghosts in your head.  For thousands of miles you cross endless shades of indigo, water water everywhere, four miles deep and bending around the curve of the earth in all directions to the point of incomprehensibility, and at the end of the day the only things in your mind are the well-organized projects that reality will most likely never see...  Conversations you’ll never have...  And all those dreams watched from behind the windows of a thousand yard stare, any intrusion by job-related distraction an unwelcome annoyance cast off as soon as practicable.

The things of note on the midwatch:  

I saw a moon-bow, also known as a lunar rainbow, or- as Ronny James Dio would call it- a “rainbow in the dark.”  I kept referring to it as “The rainbow of the dead,” or the “the unicorn’s grave.”  Whatever you want to call it, the damned thing was eerie- at first looming in the darkness like a dome over a fog bank, it grew at an imperceptible rate into the unmistakable arc of a partial halo, the colors indistinct- as if they were nothing but the corpses of colors past.  It only lasted long enough for me to cross it off my bucket list of phenomena to see- and now that I know what they look like I will probably be quicker to spot one in the future when it drifts toward me in the dark.  

I have created a song playlist on the bridge's music system that all watches have adopted (for the moment, anyway).  The previous playlists had grown so stale that I suspect anyone could have put any music into a new one and it would have been popular, but I was the first to blink.

I call the cadet, third, and second mates “the kids-” one is 21, the next 23, the last is 25.  Since they are my mental age we get along fine.  Through much finagling and back-slapping, I built up the required enthusiasm so that we have established a gym on the bridge wing.  I use it to stay awake at night, they use it because they are young enough to be in thrall to their own testosterone.  Yay Youth!

And now, Guam.  Again.  This time I forwent the rental car and took a ship’s bike to the end of the road, to a beach far removed from civilization, and swam out a quarter mile or so to where the reef drops off into the depths and gawked like a yokel at the neon fish, the tropical warmth, the ship wreck covered in life and lost to history, the anchor and chain that let its ship go in the storm, and I indulged in the strange isolation that comes from the loss to your ears of all sound but that of your own gasping breath.  A bubble of magic within the sea of the mundane.  A mile up, a mile down, and then back to shore- to the heat and humidity waiting especially for me on the beach.

I rode the bike back to the ship past wild jungle fowl (read: chickens), lizards, and feral cats- one tom was too disdainful to even stand from the luxury of the asphalt where he sprawled, his contemptuous mug covered in battle scars and some fresh wounds, pointedly ignoring me as I rode on by while talking on the phone with Laura. Other cats with spots lurked in the bush. I don't know if it was the heat of the day or the inclination of the sun, but I didn't hear much bird song or insect droning, but perhaps it was because I had the disembodied voice of Laura in my bluetoothed earhole and all else was lost to my attention.

And then back here, to the smell of heated bunker oil steaming from the tank vents and the feel of that thin patina of grease covering every square inch of this ship, back to the pronounced juxtaposition of my ideal and my reality.  Ship sails at 0700, with or without me. How very surreal it all seems, at times! Next port of call is two clock retards and 30 degrees of longitude away- Xiamen, China. Between here and there is a point in time that will mark the half life of my indenturetude, the midpoint of my middlemost voyage, and at that point all other milestones are downhill ones, all those mathematical tricks I play in my head to lessen the tedium of being away from home are now working for me, like compound interest.