The sea, the sea, the sea!
Yesterday afternoon, Cody came running down the dock saying, “Uncle Dock’s says it’s zero hour. Get your stuff. We’re going.”
“You mean now?” I said. “Like right this minute?”
“Yep!” He was grinning his wide, wide grin. “This is it, Sophie!”
I ran around getting my stuff and didn’t have a whole lot of time to think about what was happening or how I felt about it, but here we are, we are on our way! Whoosh, we are off!
The first couple hours were frenzied, with everyone double-checking his own stuff and arguing over space, and Uncle Stew and Brian handing out assignments and schedules and trying their best to make me feel like a slug, but I was having none of it, and I kept my cool and didn’t even get too snotty with them.
As we were leaving the Bay of Fundy, we heard a plop and another plop and plop plop plop! Surrounding us were dozens of seals, sticking their sweet faces out of the water to have a look around.
“Hey, there, darlin’—” Cody said, as they twitched their whiskers at us. Even Brian seemed taken with them; for once he didn’t have a bossy comment to make. He sat on deck with his hands cupped under his chin, watching the seals.
Uncle Mo sat on the aft deck, sketching. I like his drawings. He showed me how the seals that are farther away should appear smaller in the drawing than the ones closer up. I tried to draw them, too, but my drawing wasn’t as good as Uncle Mo’s.
“Are you an artist?” I asked him.
“Me?” he said. “No.”
“But you look like an artist to me,” I said. “You draw really good stuff.”
“Naw,” he said. “This isn’t so hot. I’m pretty rusty.”
I asked him what his job was, what he did for a living. He frowned. “I’m a number-cruncher. I sit at a computer all day and mess around with numbers.”
“But did you want to be an artist?” I asked. “Before you were a number-cruncher?”
“Sure,” he said.
“So why didn’t you?”
“Why didn’t I what?” Mo said. He was putting whiskers on the seals in his drawing.
“Be an artist. Why didn’t you become an artist instead of a number-cruncher?”
He used his finger to smudge the water line in his drawing, making it look soft and fuzzy and more like water. I thought maybe he hadn’t heard me, but finally he said, “I dunno. Why does anybody become anything?”
“Isn’t it because they want to?” I asked. “Don’t you become what you want to become?”
He looked at me. His mouth was partly open and it seemed like there were words in there but they couldn’t come out. He closed his mouth and tried again. “Not usually, Sophie. That’s not the way it works usually.”
“But why not? Why wouldn’t a person do what he was good at and what he wanted to do?”
Now Uncle Mo was drawing ripples around the seals. “Because sometimes, Sophie, a person just needs a job. And sometimes the job he can get is not the one he most wants.”
“Well, I hope I don’t do that,” I said. “I hope I don’t get a job I don’t want. It seems like such a waste.”
“Ah,” Uncle Mo said, putting away his drawing. “Youth.”
There was no moon that first night, and it was eerie, so dark, the sky and the sea folding a huge black blanket around us. I saw a sparkle and a flash in the water, and then more sparkles and flashes, little streams of light trailing beside the boat, as if the lights were little beacons from someone lost down below.
“Phosphorescent plankton!” Uncle Dock said. “Beauteous!”
All along the sides of the boat, little spots flashed all night, like underwater fireflies. It seemed magical and mysterious, as if they were sending me a message in code. I wanted so badly to decode their message, but I couldn’t, and I got yelled at because I was so busy watching the flashing fish-lights that I wasn’t paying attention to the sails.
Later that night, as we were pushing out into the open ocean, we heard a loud rushing of water, a spewing and bellowing. Whales! It was too dark to see them, but one blew so close to us that I nearly shinnied up the mast. It sounded huge, gargantuan!
Sometimes when I think about what is happening, I get the cold shivers. We’re crossing the ocean! And now we won’t be able to get off the boat and walk around. There will be no new people to meet, no new foods to try, no time alone, no land, no fresh water, no trees, no exercise except boat exercise. And how will we all get along, cooped up like this, with no chance to get away from each other?
I’m worried about being cooped up with Uncle Mo because he is often so loud, and he and Cody seem always on the verge of knocking each other’s block off. And then there’s Uncle Stew and Brian, always bossing everyone about and fussing over things and making me feel very, very small. Uncle Dock is the calmest, and the one I feel most comfortable around, but sometimes he seems disorganized and so worried about what might happen that I wonder if he’s really going to let us carry on, or if he will make us turn back when he finds the first leak or broken bit.
But all of those worries are countered by this huge, surging, pushing feeling, as if the sea is calling and the wind is pushing and whoosh off we are going, whoosh! And you feel as if this is where you should be and you wonder where you are going and you can’t even think because whoosh, you are off, whoosh!
Boom! Thunder now! The weather report calls for hail and strong winds—whoa! That’ll liven things up, for sure.