The Ship

It is a ridiculous notion, and therefore, a great one: meet the Sam G., a cargo ship with a Caribbean crew, at Chalmette slip downriver from New Orleans, and sail to Brazil. You’re young, too young to know any better, and lost, why not get lost even further? You say goodbye to your Boston girlfriend and hop a flight to New Orleans, that sunken Valhalla at the bottom of the country where you’ve never been; a crazy, far-flung town, first stop in the Caribbean.

New Orleans, February 14.

I can smell it already. I have yet to go aboard, but it’s in the air: pungent, nectarous, rotting bread fruit, ripening papaya. I don’t know it yet, but it is a scent that will linger, in various degrees of intensity, for months; an olfactory tissue, the city sinewed with the islands. I walk up the gangplank and look out across the inlet. There, spewing sweet smoke, through ancient brick stacks, is the Domino Sugar refinery. I am young and green, and the ship old and weatherbeaten, but we get along quite well, especially after I figure out things like bow, stern, port, starboard, mess. The Sam G. is no QE2: the decks are decrepit, the hallways malodorous dungeons, the johns putrid cubicles. It’s all grime, rust, peeling paint, cold steel. But this is no time for first impressions. I’ve come to get lost. I climb aboard.

Mouth of the Mississippi River, February 15.

The Captain assures me, as the ship plunges into the Gulf, and the Gulf splashes against the porthole window, that the “Sam G. is a sound vessel.” He has appeared as if by some trick of shipboard physics: the cabin door flying open, slamming against the sink, revealing his hard-legged figure, lighting a pipe, defying the sway of the floorboards beneath his feet. He speaks in measured Caymanian syllables, refined by an education in the nautical arts. “You should have every confidence in the crew,” he says. I stir uncomfortably in my bunk. “I’m not worried about the ship or the crew, Captain. My stomach is another story.” The Captain, who has logged more miles on water than on land, manages a smirk disguised as a smile, and steps back into his cabin, the one next to mine. Plates crash in the mess hall across the cargo hold. I pop a couple Dramamines and nod off. I awake to Milton, the mess boy, entering my room with a tray of eggs and toast. It is morning in the Gulf of Mexico. By the time we reach the Caribbean, three days later, I have my sea legs, but don’t need them anymore. The sea is a liquid blue veldt, turquoise and flat, a blueberry pancake.

Yucatan Channel, February 17.

I am far away from anything, from everything. The sensation is beautiful and bleak, oddly comforting. I walk the bundles of cargo at night, my legs dancing drunkenly to the swaying symphony of the sea, star of a maritime musical that Gene Kelly never got to make. The upending of balance: I imagine being pitched into the black waves, my cries going unheeded beneath the whirr of the engines, my lifeless body rendered into white-capped gelatin, kissing the hulls of passing ships. I am the only person alive. I scribble in my journals, read Homer and Don Quixote and Far Tortuga, write epic letters to my girlfriend in Boston. She has told me she’ll wait for me, playing Penelope to my Odysseus. But I am more a Sancho Panza, suffering from dropsy, my thirst forever unslaked. I toss bottles with time-capsule messages into each body of water—the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, the Atlantic—for some future beachcomber to read. When I relate Peter Matthiessen’s Tortuga tales to the Captain, he tells me he knows its characters personally. “That is no fiction,” he says. I discover that, out at sea, legend and reality live in adjoining cabins. I offer to work the ship: painting, scraping, hauling cargo. To sing for my supper. But the crew demurs, telling me to just “fancy the voyage.” An American oddity, I soon find a freighter-full of Caribbean cohorts. I stay up all night with the men on the bridge, marveling at the moon flashing on the sea, the clouds, celestial fan blades, passing beneath. They tell me “true” tales of zombies, their eyes dead and colorless, working the cane fields of Haiti at night; I tell them ghost stories I learned in boys’ camp: axwielding serial killers murdering the campers as they lay sleeping in their cabins. We scare the shit out of each other. They try to explain cricket to me, and I baseball to them: we fail. They point at things I can’t see but they can. I nod yes, yes, I see, I see. Sometimes they let me steer. I imagine Magellan and Da Gama, centuries earlier, without radar and refrigeration, and wonder how they even got up in the morning, much less clung to those twin lunacies, divine guidance and intuition.

Off Isla de la Juventud, February 18.

I can hear the clack of dominoes echoing from the stern. The sailors, through the gauze of moonlight and the glimmer of their pipes, become mythical figures before my very eyes. The crewmen hail from all across the Caribbean—Jamaica, Honduras, Barbados, Grand Cayman. Bez, the electrician, is St. Lucian, solitary, a shipboard revolutionary. He reads Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey, speaks of his job as a way station to a gleaming life of activism, soaking up the lessons of the oppressed sailors. Handsome, wiry, self-assured, his conversation is elliptical, letting me in, keeping me out, language as barrier and bridge. But I am fortunate: as a temporary passenger, at once insider and outsider, I am safe. I become the crewmen’s confidante, a stowaway of secrets.

Georgetown, February 19.

Days are spent watching the cranes lift the cargo out of the holds. With each succeeding stop the ship lightens, gives more of itself to the sea. At night I relish the rocking; it lulls me to sleep in my cabin cradle. A lone pelican finds us in every port, taking a sentry’s position on the far piling. I wonder, dreamily, if this is the same pelican. One night, I confess this idiocy to Bobbsey, scraping birdshit from the stern. “Oh sure,” he says, nonchalantly. His left earlobe dangles halfway to his shoulder, oscillating to the wobble of the waves, a shipboard metronome. “That’s Old Joe. Loves the Sam G. Daht bird follow us everywhere.” I don’t know if he is pulling my leg or not, but I take him at his word.

Cayman Trench, February 20.

The nights are as diverse as the days. The clouds don’t dissolve, the sky plays its tricks. Rain appears suddenly, lashing the deck, then vanishes, as though it has never rained, only a gust upending the sea. A vainglorious moon swoons on the sea at its own reflection; myriad stars dangle above the horizon, like grapes just out of the reach of Tantalus. They hang so low they are sometimes mistaken for the lights of passing ships, even by the oldest sailors. One night, the sky lousy again with stars, a meteor streaks across the horizon. A shooting star! My first ever; I make a wish. A few seconds later, another spirals off. I make another wish. And then, another and another and another. It’s a celestial cornucopia, an astronomical orgy. I’m running out of wishes, I can’t keep up: they devolve from peace for all mankind to a steamy affair with Sonia Braga to calm seas ahead to hoping my aunt has a nice birthday. I step back inside the bridge, dazed, delighted, exhorting to the sailors. Paul and Leighton nod, “Yes it is very nice.” This is a common occurrence: as I race up and down the ship, effusing over the spectacular sunsets, prismatic skies, absurdist seas, oh my god oh my god look at that look at that, the sailors, who witness sensational phenomena every single day, nod their heads and puff their pipes in quiet appreciation of Nature’s majesty. But they remain amused at the funny American bwoy. On the nocturnal approach to Kingston harbor, Bobbsey tells me Jamaica is 144 miles long and 44 miles wide—the first thing every Jamaican school child learns. When I sheepishly point out the compass showing it to be only 128 miles long, I say, “Perhaps the compass is wrong, then,” Bobbsey, the old sailor, quickly retorts, “No mon it is de school. Schools lie, compasses don’t.”

Kingston Harbor, February 21.

A man comes aboard ship, while we are anchored outside Kingston harbor, waiting to be cleared for docking. He introduces himself, produces a small plastic bag from his windbreaker. “Your journey will be long. Perhaps this will make it shorter.” I look at the badge on his jacket. “Um, no thank you,” I say. “Perhaps you are afraid of what I am. But I assure you it is no problem.” “It’s not that. It’s just that…I don’t smoke. But thank you.” He returns the bag to his pocket, nods, and departs. He is the Customs Man. The sailors warn me to stay on the ship. “If you want to go into Kingston, you come with us. Do not go alone, we will take you.” The message is stern, but they speak it with the amiable lilt of their dialect, and I remember the quote by the scholar that the difference between a dialect and a language is that a language has an army and a navy behind it. Now they have offered to be my army and my navy, and I thank them in my American dialect. But I decide to remain aboard.

Venezuelan Basin, February 22-27.

The first time I see them is on the five-day journey from Kingston to Bridgetown. I hear a whoosh, look down, and two of them are leaping together off the starboard side. A few seconds later, they leap again. I run into my cabin to snatch my camera, but when I get back outside, they have vanished. This scenario plays out, again and again: the whoosh, the leap, the dash, the vanishing. Dolphins seem to favor the starboard side, though when I ask the sailors why, they tell me it is not due to ocean currents or cetacean biology, it is simply because “you are on that side, and they know it.” They are said to travel away from bad weather, and toward good, but the Captain pierces the myth: “They swim wherever they damn well please.” On the short voyage from Martinique to Guadeloupe, as we pass close in to shore, there are, suddenly, dozens of them; schools, hordes, cavorting, dancing, frolicking, all around the ship. The sea is a dolphin, the sky is a dolphin, everywhere’s a dolphin. It’s Dolphinfest. I am out of film. The blow-holed bastards. Bridgetown, February 27. The men in the mess hall rub their hands as Milton carries in a plastic bowl of gristled fat. The steward is a skinflint, and except for the fortnightly serving of fried chicken and the infrequent kingfish caught off the stern, the meals consist of pig’s knuckles and chewy renditions of beef. I lose fifteen pounds in four weeks, and subsist on rice and beans spiced with Tabasco, along with white bread and butter. “Hay pan, Milton, hay mantequilla?” is my mealtime mantra. But somehow, I am not hungry. I feed off the 360-degree views offered on the Caribbean’s sumptuous platter.

Basse-Terre, March 12.

In Guadeloupe, the Captain informs me we will not reach Brazil for months; the cargo in Belém has not yet arrived in port. Thus will come more sea-bound days and nights: more island ports, more sailor stories, more daunting skies, more taunting dolphins, more mermaid sightings, more lost pounds, more wishes made to meteors. I stay up all night, and am rewarded with the most glorious sunrise I have ever and will ever see. It takes hours, stretches across the sky, infuses itself into the horizon; the sea rendered sky, the sky a sea.

Port of Spain, March 30.

I stay on the ship until we reach Trinidad. As we pass through the bocas, gleaming silver islets announcing the dawn. I stand on the bridge, furiously snapping photos, when—whoosh!—three dolphins, big and beautiful and blue, leap so close they almost knock the camera out of my hands. Here I am, at last, camera in hand, film in the camera, and I wait. The dolphins, ready for their close-up, are giving me a last waltz, a Caribbean curtain call, so I ready myself for that second leap, the one that always comes, and the third, the one that always comes. And I wait, and wait, and…wait. And it doesn’t come. Doesn’t come. Doesn’t come. The sailors are right, dolphins always know. The damned little teases, they know. Months later, back up in Boston, Penelope and Odysseus have a passionate reunion, but it doesn’t hold. Too much time has passed, and unlike Odysseus, I don’t have it in me to slay all the suitors. So I pack the car and drive back to the Caribbean. New Orleans, that is, its northernmost city. I fit right in and haven’t left since.

Once in awhile, walking along the levee, you spot a bottle bobbing hard against the batture, pushed by the wake of a freighter, and wonder if it wasn’t tossed, eons before, from the night deck of the Sam G.