Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
That Sinking Feeling
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
The 3500-mile transatlantic crossing from New York City to South Hampton, England takes seven days. I’m aboard the Queen Mary at my regular luncheon spot, the ship’s Golden Lion Pub. British-styled pub food—a curled, meaty, reddish-brown sausage with creamy mash and a pint of dark ale on tap--teases my ultimate destination, London.
We departed rudely from New York’s Brooklyn docks. Blaring loudspeakers bossed me into one waiting area, then another. Heaps of luggage shuttled every which way. Clanky, metallic gangways jutted out over the murky water like medieval flying buttresses. Weathered piers and pilings. Battered, stacked shipping containers. Husky tugboats belching diesel fumes. Every maneuver, every disorderly sound, every stinking smell stirred me.
The gentle sway of the ship is a homecoming of sorts. Growing up, from early daylight to after dusk, every weekend, my dad and I navigated a 35-foot wood-hulled, white and mahogany cabin cruiser into the marinas, harbors, estuaries and shipyards of San Francisco Bay. I took a teenager’s pride in skippering a small craft in choppy weather, reading a nautical chart and piloting in and out of tight berths.
By age forty, I have treaded water in the warm Amazon River, surfed in the chilly Pacific Ocean, island hopped on a tramp steamer in the Aegean Sea, watched the Indian and Atlantic Oceans kiss with stormy passion at the tip of Africa and lazed in a hammock overlooking Costa Rica’s Pavon Bay.
Most people have ancestral roots. I have ancestral seaweed.
As I like to think of it, humanity is a series of tide pools—connected in their elemental wetness but each unique, each with a special fascination, each refreshed by ocean waters that are connected to all the waters of the world. Complicated, yet simple. Or maybe simple, yet complicated.
Water is life. Three to four days without water, I will die, evaporating like a drop of water on a hot skillet. Death by dehydration is the death I most fear. The final ebbtide.
Aboard ship, elemental parts of me—long dormant, long ignored—come to life. In the afternoons, I drydock myself in the ship’s 10,000-volume, paneled library. I sink into a leather chair to scan the oncoming waves. I doze off, an over-sized book on naval history collapsed against my chest. Reading at sea is a pacifying, oceanic restorative.
In the mornings, I circumnavigate the ship’s wood-planked deck. I quick-walk under lifeboats and around cushioned lounge chairs. My exercise progresses along the ship’s sheltered leeside, cluttered with other passengers, then weaves into the windward sea air, gusty and fierce, where only the hardy choose to recline.
Standing astern, watching the waves, the salted air brushes my lips. Like a fevered lover, my body arches toward the windswept breezes.
Just a wafer-thin horizon separates two infinities—a light, translucent sky and the slightly darker ocean. In the middle of the Atlantic, all points on the compass look the same. No latitude, no longitude. No sense of place or position, and still, no worry about being adrift.
The big and little uncertainties of my life are drowning. I can see them sinking into the ship’s foamy wake.
