I wasn’t going to write in this journal once we reached land, but Cody’s still writing in his dog-log. He says the journey isn’t over yet.
Yesterday afternoon, once we’d docked The Wanderer, we stumbled out onto land, and it was so weird. We looked so silly, wobbling around, as if the land were moving underneath us and we couldn’t stay upright. That’s the first time I felt seasick—on land!
We went into a pub and ordered up all kinds of food—big plates of it, with things swimming in gravy, and fat loaves of fresh bread, and fresh vegetables and fruits. How odd not to have to hold on to our plates as we ate, and how strange to be able to eat and drink at the same time.
We were all chattering away like crazy, talking to anyone who would listen. At one point I looked around, and we were each talking to a different stranger, each of us pouring out our tale.
“You should have seen that storm—”
“Our booms came apart—”
“The waves—like mountains—”
“Knocked out the radar, everything—”
“Thought we were done for—”
“Cracked open my face—”
“The wind—like nothing you can imagine—the sound—”
“Slammed—”
“Blown—”
“Pushed—”
We were bursting. The strangers were nodding at us, tossing out their own stories.
“The sea’s a devil—”
“A tricky creature she is—”
“And my uncle, he drowned out there—”
“Seventeen boats lost back in ’92—”
“See this leg? Not a real one. The sea, she claimed the real one—”
For hours we went on like that, pouring out the words, and at one point I wondered how much these strangers cared about what we were saying, or if they cared at all, and why we felt such an urgent need to tell them our story, and why they told us theirs.
In the middle of all this, I could sense Cody watching me and listening to what I was saying, as if what I was saying was odd. I tried to listen to what I was saying, but I was so caught up in the telling and in listening to everybody else, that I couldn’t concentrate.
As the light faded outside the windows, it felt like we knew these people and they knew us. They told us where to get rooms for the night and followed us down to The Wanderer, where they shook their heads over the sorry-looking state of Dock’s “baby,” and they helped us lug our wet clothes up the long hill, and bid us all a calm and peaceful night on their own Irish soil.
I dreamed strange dreams, with so many people coming and going in them. There was Dock’s friend Joey from Block Island, and Frank and his family from Grand Manan, the lady and her dog, and Dock’s Rosalie, and the Irish strangers, and in and out of all these people wandered Cody and Uncle Dock and Stew and Mo and Brian. And me. There were other people, too—people who looked familiar, and who seemed to know me, but they faded into the crowd before I could figure out who they were.