Maybe we have entered some weird place where the seas always rage and the wind always howls, and maybe we are going in circles and will never escape and eventually we will die of hunger.
Earlier today when Sophie and I were collapsed on bunks, trying to make ourselves sleep, she told me another Bompie story. It went like this:
When Bompie was a young man he set out for the ocean because he had never seen the ocean before. He hitchhiked from Kentucky to the Virginia shore and when he got to the ocean he sat down in the sand and fell in love with the ocean. He loved everything about it: the smell, the sounds, the feel of the air on his face.
He waded out into the water, where the waves kept knocking him down, but still he kept going, until he was standing neck-deep, and he floated on his back staring up at the sky, and he was reminded of another ocean, far away, one in England. And he realized he had seen the ocean before, long ago, when he was small. And then he realized that this was the same ocean, that all that water stretched thousands of miles from Virginia to England, and maybe this water that was holding him up had once licked the shores of England and maybe it was the same water he had splashed in as a toddler.
And finally he let his feet drift downward, but he couldn’t touch bottom, and he looked toward the shore and realized he’d been pulled far, far away from it, and he started swimming, giddy-up, giddy-up, he told himself, but it was so far, and he was so tired, and a wave swept over him and pushed him under, and he was so very weary, bone-weary, and he didn’t know if he had enough strength to keep going, and he tried floating again, and resting and then swimming some more, and eventually he made it back to shore.
He lay down on the sand and slept, and when he woke, he hitchhiked back to Kentucky.
You know the rest: a whipping and some pie (apples again).