We steamed northeast from Darwin, Australia, crossing the point where the equator meets the international date line, a transit so dull I no longer remember anything but the rage I felt toward management; a rage that still burns hotly deep in the ashes of my psyche, but out of sight and out of mind these last few years.
In May, 2020, I went down the gangway in Oakland, California at last, and the entire world was shut down from the Covid-19 pandemic. The company gave me a cloth mask and an "Essential Worker" letter as I signed off Articles and sent me on my way, no love lost between us.
My reintegration process felt like I’d landed in a different timeline. I rented a car and listened to audiobooks as I drove the Pacific Coast Highway north to Seattle on utterly deserted highways.
Gas stations were empty. Lights were off in all the stores. There were no pedestrians on the sidewalks; when I did see lone solitary figures walking their dogs or hurrying along with shopping bags swinging in time to their strides, their faces were bizarrely obscured by masks.
I have said it a dozen times here on this blog or to any random person on the streets with ears pointed in my general direction – to be on a ship for seven months is to be in a coma dream that never ends, each day a slightly varied repeat of the one before, and when you finally wake, you find the world moved on without you; the displacement is jarring, the feeling of isolation is absolute, and for weeks you're a fish who finds himself outside the aquarium, looking in.
With the fog of that timeless sleep still thick in my head I transited the coast northward. While crossing the Pacific on its longest axis, I had crossed into a different, stranger, and shittier timeline – I had wandered onto the set of a post-apocalyptic zombie movie that made waking from the coma more visceral and surreal.
I went through the motions of renewing my sea papers and taking a basic safety refresher course, but my disillusions with my maritime career had grown so pronounced that it was with relief that I got my general contractor's license again. I began working on a major new house project and doing projects for a series of clients, ranging from the not-so-satisfactory to the best of the best. Seems I was too busy to go back to sea anytime soon.
And into this years-overdue update comes a project that has me firing up the Way For A Sailor blog again… a combination of a lifelong dream and a plan hatched in 2015 while staring at the Pacific Ocean on the 12x4 watch: building an outrigger sailing canoe and taking it down the coast of Georgia.
Stay tuned; details to come.
