A week at sea, and no one has been strangled or thrown overboard yet.
We haven’t had much wind for the past few days, and fog and clouds have kept us from seeing the sun, moon, and stars for much of our trip. I never realized how much I’d miss those things. I thought I’d be standing on deck out here in the middle of the ocean, gazing out into the depths of the sky, but most of what I see is gray mist.
Without sun it’s hard to dry out anything, and most of our clothes are damp. We each have a secret hoard of dry T-shirts wedged into our backpacks; we guard them carefully, and pull one out only when we can’t bear another minute of dampness. Ah, that dry shirt, how good it feels!
We’ve had animal visitors the last few days, and it surprises me how eager I am to see them. Company! Yesterday, a little black bird landed in the cockpit, looking pitiful and bedraggled. I called Cody up from the cabin to see it. “Hey, there, birdie,” he said, gently tapping its webbed feet and stroking its bill. “Where’d you get this lump on your beak? Where’d you come from? How’d you get so wet?”
Cody warmed it in his hands and dried it against his shirt. “It’s a cute little peep, isn’t it?” Cody said. And so we started calling it Little Peep.
By the time I woke up for my next watch, Little Peep had made her way down below deck and into the cupboard next to the navigation table. Uncle Mo was sitting there drawing her portrait, and he showed me how to draw scraggly feathers. Little Peep stayed in the cupboard for a few hours, as if she liked posing.
Another bird just like Little Peep followed the boat all night and into the next day. We figured it might be Little Peep’s mate, but the other bird didn’t land, and Little Peep didn’t seem to notice.
Cody tried putting her inside his shirt to warm her up, but I think that scared her, because she started flapping her wings. She flew shakily to the lifeline and then took off again and slowly circled the boat, not very gracefully, before taking off over the waves.
“Bye-bye, Little Peep,” Cody called.
I didn’t want her to go; I could hardly bear it, seeing her all alone out there.
“You sound stupid,” Brian said, imitating Cody: “‘Oh, Little Peep! Oh, Little Peep!’” Brian raised his arms in the air, as if he were sending a message up to heaven. “We are just a floating refuge for lost souls.”
Cody looked Brian up and down. “Ain’t that the truth?” he said.
Yesterday we also saw whales, little pilot whales that look like dolphins, except that their heads are round instead of tapering into a long nose.
“Whales ahoy!” Cody shouted.
We lay flat on our stomachs on the deck watching them. The whales came close to the boat, but not as close as the dolphins, and they stayed at the stern. After a while, we could identify some of them—a mother and her baby swimming side by side, and one really huge one off to starboard.
I was hypnotized by this threesome. I decided the huge whale off to the side was the father, and he was circling around, protecting the mother and the baby. Mostly the baby whale stayed right up next to the mother, bumping into her, but occasionally the baby would veer away and wobble and look very silly, and then it would swim back to its mother and bump into her again. It seemed very important to me that they stay all together, and I felt nervous and touchy when I couldn’t see all three of them.
Uncle Dock joined us. “Most beauteous!” he said. And as we watched the whales, Uncle Dock told us the story of a woman he’d known. Her name was Rosalie and she loved whales with all her heart. She read everything there was to read about whales and she saw every movie that ever had a whale in it and she had pictures of whales on her walls and little stuffed toy whales and tiny whale figurines.
“But she’d never seen a real live whale,” Uncle Dock said, “not up front, you know? And one day I rented a boat and took her out on the ocean, and all day long we searched for whales and all day long she prayed for whales. It was a beautiful day.”
“And did you see a whale?” I asked.
“Not that day.”
“You went again?”
“Yep. I traded my best fishing rod to the boat’s owner because I was about as poor as a flea, and off we went again. All day long we searched for whales—”
“And all day long she prayed for whales—”
“That’s right,” Uncle Dock said. “And then—there—just as we were turning back to shore—there—oh it was magnificent! A pearly gray whale rose slowly up out of the water, and Rosalie—oh, Rosalie! She opened her mouth in a big wide ‘O’ and her eyes were so big and bright and we watched that beautiful whale as he glided along, and then he disappeared back into the sea.”
Uncle Dock sighed a long, long sigh.
“And Rosalie?” I said. “What happened to Rosalie?”
Dock stood and brushed off his trousers, as if he were brushing away the memory. “Oh, she married somebody else.”
Cody stood and opened his arms wide and shouted out across the water, “Rosalie! Oh, Rosalie!”
Dock smiled and joined in. “Rosalie! Oh, Rosalie!”
Then Dock shook his head and ambled away, disappearing below deck.
Brian was watching me watch the whales. “Sophie the Whale Girl,” he said.
“Don’t you ever get interested in what’s out there?” I asked him. “Don’t you think they’re amazing?”
“Enh,” he said.
“Don’t you think they’re more interesting than books and charts?” I asked him.
“Enh,” he repeated, but he came and stood beside me and he even laughed once, when the baby whale banged into her mother, but then he seemed embarrassed to be caught enjoying himself and he retreated to his charts.
Today, more dolphins came and played in the bow waves. One of them jumped clear out of the water, right in front of the bow, as if to say, “Watch me! Wow!”
I was fixed on a mother-and-baby pair who swam in perfect synchronization, as if they were the same being.
“The baby’s like a replica of its mother,” Brian said, “just smaller, but with all its mother’s grace and speed—”
“Brian,” I said, “are you actually getting interested in these things?”
“Look,” he said. “It’s like she’s teaching it how to play,” and then he said, “Why do you think they trust us so much?”
And that’s exactly the feeling I had, that they instinctively trusted us, and really, it made me want to cry. It should have made me want to laugh, because it was as if they were inviting us to join them, be a part of their play. They seemed so overwhelmingly happy: playing, investigating, gliding and leaping and rolling. I don’t know why it made me want to cry. I just kept thinking that there they were and here I was. They didn’t have any burdens and they wanted to be with us, but I was way up on deck and I felt as if I weighed a ton.
Uncle Mo brought out his sketchpad and quickly, deftly, drew the dolphins leaping in the air. He said, “They remind you of being a child, with all that curiosity and energy. They remind you that this is what you could be, not what you should grow out of.” He looked around at me and Cody and Brian, as if he’d just realized we were there, and then turned back to his drawing, mumbling, “Or something like that.”