Across the Globe without a Plane
Crossing the Atlantic Ocean by Container Ship
…”we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.”
A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson (Broadway Books, 2003)
You live in a house. Next to another vaguely similar house. In a homogeneous row of houses that make up a neighborhood in a town or city where everything points you toward getting through the day. There’s no time to think about anything but getting up for work so you have money to go shopping so you can eat at least two to three times a day to continue working to pay the bills on the house you have. The one that’s next to the other vaguely similar house, wherein resides the kindred folk who much like you, don’t really know their themselves, let alone their neighbors. There’s no time.
Wherever people live, in whatever country, rich or poor, nomadic or sedentary, the overriding theme of modern living is get born, get a job, get dead. No thinking allowed. There’s no time. What with taking care of all of the little problems nipping at your heels like hyenas waiting for their chance to rip you to shreds since the day you realized you were a living thing, what else is there to do but tough it out, keep your head down and weather the storm. When those fat cumulonimbus thunderheads pass the vultures will circle back waiting for whatever is will be that does you in to do you in so that they can get theirs. There is no variation on life in which this scenario does not play out. But who’s got time to think about all that depressing muck when the bills are due? Again!
More than mere bills, we are plagued by questions: What do you do? How much is it? Who am I? What’s for dinner? What’s this thing on my neck? More than coming up with creative machinations to the incessant questions, if we were to have the time, what would we think about? What we would like to be? How can you just be? There is work to do. Bills to pay. Joneses up with whom to keep.
Day One
This is common—not knowing what time it is. I haven’t known what time, let alone what day, or sometimes even what month, it is for longer than I can say. Of course I can tell you roughly what time it is if I have to. I can also tell you how to figure out what direction you are heading (Point the hour hand of your watch—if you have one—toward the sun and find the midpoint between that and the twelve o’clock: that is south in the northern hemisphere). You could too if you had the time to figure it out. The point is not how to figure these things out, though that is useful, the point is how quickly you can recall knowing where you are and what things are like there, for example, the sun doesn’t set in Europe until ten or eleven pm in the summer, even later the further north you venture. In fact, so long does the sun linger in the French summertime, eight pm feels like two in the afternoon. And, though I didn’t know it, eight pm was when I finally arrived at the harbor where the ship I had booked passage on was being loaded with cargo containers by three massive machine arms, sliding in mechanic fluidity along a guided track back and forth, a beautiful repetition which mesmerized me from my D Deck cabin porthole for longer than I can remember.
The clock on the wall read just after nine before I realized that I was no longer in France or Europe (though technically I was, my mind was toiling about in Nomandsland), but was actually on board the ship that was to take me across the Atlantic ocean to Boston and my port of call in New York. Whereas now I saw a sea of cargo containers fading all the way to the eastern horizon, and to the north and south just more mechanical arms waiting to lade the bellies of the steel whales lining the port’s mouth, it would be from this window that I would see nothing but western ocean and sky, waves and clouds for the next seven to ten days. No more the days a succession of buses, trains and ferries toward some faraway target. No more stopping at the corner markets and produce stands, picking up cheese, sardines and bread, fruit and vegetables for the day’s meal. No more beers washing down soggy sandwiches made hours or even days before while sitting on cement stairs and sidewalk stoops leading to apartment buildings filled with people I will never meet in cities across Europe and Asia I may never go to again. I popped the cork on a bottle of Jenlain, an especially fizzy amber French beer, and pouring myself a glassful, shouted a toast of, “A votre sante!” to the sky, the sea, and nothing in particular, still and always alone, and as usual, I drank it down.
Bière de Garde 7.5%
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