The water looks like it is covered with a film of cellophane and I could pop a swell bubble with a large needle. The ship creaks and metal jiggers clank lazily against the masts. Thick, coarse sailcloths slap and whisper in the faint breeze, which does little to alleviate the oppressively humid air. The soft grainy wood of the quarterdeck sticks to my flushed skin, and when I lift my calves, the dark grey imprint of my sweat remains on the planks. Sunscreen trickles down my back in white squiggles and my attempts to shield my bare shoulders from the sun are in vain. The sticky lotion oozes between my fingers as I smear sunscreen onto my freckled nose and over the prickly stubble of hair on my legs. Salt from my seawater hose showers and evaporated sweat sticks to the sunscreen in sharp, gritty crystals.
My favorite sound is the ocean but the sound disappears when there is no wind to make waves. The ship rocks slowly from side to side, port to starboard. I relish my ability to walk the 134-foot distance steadily, and this momentary hiatus allows my mottled bruises time to heal. I bang my shins vaulting into my bunk; my elbow is pink and puffed from hitting the belowdecks support column every time I pass the two gimbled tables swaying and laden with platters of burrito toppings or fresh bagels or glistening tomato soup; I stub my toe whenever I lose my balance in the laboratory; my cheek bone is still purple from the unexpected swell that knocked me forward while I was counting zooplankton under a microscope to estimate their population frequency; the bandaged scrape on my calf from when I fell through the bowsprit net while furling the JT threatens infection; and my hip has a large blue-grey tinge from when I fell into the oven handle while trying not to burn scones, which were thrown overboard anyway because I had distractedly added too much baking soda.
I am drifting somewhere in the North Atlantic Ocean, sailing on a two masted brigantine with nine cream colored sails I have set and struck, with two dozen lines I have hauled and heaved. A confetti of zooplankton and eroded plastic pieces skim the waves. Dolphins play in the frothy bow waves and sometimes their slippery, leathery skin becomes coated with the confetti. Belowdecks, the glossy wood-lined box with dusty, moldy maroon curtains where I sleep traps the hot air, making it difficult to breathe and resist the urge to tear my clothes off. No amount of fatigue makes a nap bearable in these conditions, and though typing on a steady computer screen in the library without swirling water darkening the porthole seems like a viable option while hovering in the entrance to the corner alcove and listening to the drone of the engine room next door, I decide to wait until sunset.
When I feel my days losing direction, I bring The Aeneid with me to the quarterdeck. The pages are folded and yellowing, the highlighted and annotated marks in orange, green and purple are blotched from spurts of seawater. The blue cover has detached from the text from too many affectionate readings. I am up to Book Four, having already read descriptions of Aeneas being tossed in Neptune’s waves as the Sargasso Sea has tossed me. Book Four details the frustrations with rigid plans. Aeneas just wants to continue having sex in caves with Dido. Rome can get founded another time. The sea has become a chore for Aeneas. The sparkling waves never change.
“I’ll be up all day,” I moan, letting my head rest on the edge of the quarterdeck hull. I close my eyes and sigh. A brown booby flies diagonally from broad on the starboard beam, diving to snatch helpless zooplankton from the flat surface of the sea. No waves propel the zooplankton or hide them from the enemy. Perhaps the booby is a disguised Mercury, sent by Jupiter to cajole us back to vitality. The minute hand jerks to twelve, a shrill ring reverberates through the quiet still air, and order is restored. A shipmate on watch leans over the rail of the opposite hull and peers at the taffrail log. “Great. 632.8 nautical miles,” she exclaims, crouching into the narrow doghouse entrance to record the result on the sprawling, faded map of the pastel blue Caribbean Sea, smudged pencil calculations of where we think we are, based on measurements of the sun’s position. In the last hour, we have sailed less than half a mile.
I could use a shower but fresh water is a rare commodity and today is not a Shower Day. Today is the day I write the discussion section of my oceanography research paper on the accumulation of plastics on Jamaican and Dominican beaches. Today is the day I finish my ethnomusicology paper on Dominican bachata music. Today is the day I don’t vomit over the side as saltwater stings my eyes because the wind died just when we all predicted it would be strongest. I had elected to sail for two months in the North Atlantic Ocean to appreciate the sea and stars, and to understand the historical hardships from Odysseus’ and Aeneas’ divergent journeys, to Columbus’ accidental discovery of America, to the calamitous 2010 earthquake in Haiti, but I am relieved every time conditions keep us from sailing, instead forcing us to drift aimlessly. As a native New Yorker, I rarely experience idleness.
Science textbooks on polished, wooden shelves line the white painted walls in the cramped furnace of the belowdecks library, secured with lines of frayed blue bungee cords. A large, white plastic fan with ELVIS KING scribbled deliriously in sharpie blows hot air at the textbooks like a hairdryer, fading the green and blue hues, and completely disregards the college students dressed in Patagonia tank tops and Billabong bathing suit bottoms with wispy hair coated in salt and oil, puzzling over Excel graph data. The books are never removed and opened. Instead, I address questions to scientists with PhDs or peer into buckets of net tow samples and petri dishes of sieved marine organisms. This is what science should be. Science is not fifty pages of small print or one hundred multiple choice questions. It is not a factor of my GPA, it is the adventure of gybing on a port tack to prepare for a Hydrocast deployment, and the surprising discovery of eighteen degree mode water in the Yucatán channel.
Science surrounds me, inescapable as Aeneas’ destiny. I watch my fatigued shipmates clamor to action at the sound of the hourly clock chime, measuring Beaufort force, wind and current direction, wave height, temperature, salinity, fluorescence, depth, and direction. Direction is the most difficult concept for me, much more than spectrophotometry or the principles of buoyancy. I steer off course more than on course and on slow days with no wind, it is just as hard to control the helm on calm days as on days when screaming wind tears at the sails and water splashes up one hull, slapping the opposite one. Juno should not feel threatened by me and I cannot comprehend why she would change the currents to lead me astray. “Forty degrees off course,” I call out in exasperated warning as per protocol.
While Aeneas can accuse Juno and the Fates for his misery, I alone am to blame for my wandering. Plans and directions are comforting but the strong pull of currents leads me astray to two hundred degrees off course. I am distracted by shiny possibilities like the phosphorescent esca in the central filament of an Anglerfish. I took a year between high school and college in order to explore and experiment, but unlike those in high school and college laboratories, these experiments are new and tactile. The samples I count are zooplankton that I snatched myself from the ocean at various precisely measured depths, killed with specific chemicals, and recorded according to standard procedure. The chlorophyll-a and the dissolved oxygen analyses I perform disturb beakers of the very seawater that envelops my floating home, the same seawater that abruptly soaks my clothes, soothes the urge to cut my hair when I stand under the fire hose, and cleans my laundry.
Neuston net tows glow at night, parading bioluminescence. After watching the net for half an hour, adjusting the boom to make sure the prized net is comfortable, I hoist it back on the lab deck. My hand reaches for the white plastic jar at the end—the codin jar. Unscrewing the jar fills me with the same excited anticipation as when I first translated the final lines of Book Twelve from Latin to English. The zooplankton is a slippery mass of pink goo, flashing neon green in flickers. A Sargassumfish wiggles through a chunk of beige, scratchy sargassum weed and a small seahorse lies motionless on an unidentifiable piece of red plastic. Though there is no indication of human life beyond the ship except for the occasional traffic threat two points off the starboard bow, signs of human destruction hover in the pelagic zone, waiting for innocent students to collect and count plastic shards and oil pellets.
I appreciate the discomfort that study abroad brings because as humans we rely so much on convenience. It is easier for a tourist to flick a cigarette a few inches from her beach towel than to walk to a trashcan. Jamaican locals would rather toss condoms and crackling food wrappers to be swept away into the ocean by wind. Dominicans dump cracked fishing crates and broken computers directly onto the sandy shoreline so they do not have to roam the streets searching for an evasive dumpster. The hopelessness of the situation, and the thousands of debris fragments I systematically collected from six tourist, local and unfrequented beaches, and fished from the surrounding turquoise Caribbean waters, is discouraging. Of course, because I am an indignant teenager, visions of torn, swollen diapers and black plastic bags studded with slate colored barnacles fill me with inspiration to save the world by majoring in environmental science—Two years of chemistry? No problem!—and restore the solid waste management of the negligent. Aeneas always put the care of his country before the convenience of remaining with Creüsa in Troy or lingering in Carthage with Dido.
The crewmembers on watch duty and the crewmembers woken from their naps join me for the daily two-hour lecture on the quarterdeck, the abrasive tar caulking between the heated planks inflicting burn blisters on the weary students. In the 105 degree Fahrenheit haze of misery, my hands and feet have broken into an itchy, puffy red rash from lack of sunscreen care. Someone tosses me a bottle of SPF 90 and I gratefully squeeze another coat onto the layers of grime that cover my sticky skin. Being allergic to the sun requires me to be constantly alert even when I am not responsible for ensuring the ship’s safety during watch duty. The sweltering air tempts my mind to wander and I have forgotten to hydrate again. My orange Nalgene bottle, scraped white in the places I’ve dropped it to cling fearfully to the rail, holds filtered water hot enough for tea. Considering the thoughts and brainstorms that send me on long-winded, forked roads of tangential mental distraction, I conclude these are not conditions appropriate for beginning a focused two-hour lecture.
Focus. Focus on the dripping sweat tickling sunburned skin. Focus on Captain Steve announcing mandatory Shower Day tonight. Focus on a to-do list of assignments that were put off until the wind returned, even though the threat of seasickness looms. Focus on the glassy translucent water, a vibrant dusky blue. Focus on the mangroves lecture. Focus on the knotty, mangled roots thick with skittering mangrove crabs. Focus on ship report updates. Focus on what happens after we dock in the United States again.
I lack direction, preferring instead to float like zooplankton and let the currents push me places. My friends never know where I am and a coworker once joked that I would soon rule my own island in the South Pacific. But zooplankton, the underdogs, are a crucial life form and one of the most complex and diverse of eukaryotic protists. They rely on the gravitational pull of the moon like Aeneas relied on the Fates, trusting that in the end purpose will be soothingly revealed and their suffering not in vain. The Fates have put me on this stationary ship stuck without anchoring somewhere in the middle of the vast expanse of cobalt blue water. I just hope King Aeolus sends one of his winds soon.
