4.23

[Sorry for the short posts and long absences.]

The skipper was straining for the open sea; you could feel it through the steel of the boat, his frantic energy. There was a trawler ahead of us, rolling uncertainly even with its long arms out, stabilizers attached and dragging in the waves. And the boat had begun to develop an awful tip, forward and back. The waves looked to be ten to fifteen feet tall, and the wind was ripping the foam from the crests. His voice came over the speakers, warning us all to hold on. He was going to let us taste the sea.
The Discovery was a lightly-loaded vessel, for all her bulk. Save for her cargo of sixty human lives, there was no reason the captain couldn't plow through a wave or two, ship a few thousand gallons, and still bob like a pleasant cork. But the weight of those lives weighed on him. None of these people signed up for sea-sickness. Not a single person was as excited as he was by the waves. He took three, four, singly approached, engines running slowly against a rising tide. Each wave was interminable. The boat went where the water took it in three degrees of freedom. People sitting down in the cabin, fixed to a single frame of reference, rolled and pitched in their seats. The breakers against the long breakwater kept a monotonous, pounding thunder, matching the long heartbeat of the boat. The engine trembled with the tension of his hand on the throttle. The instruments pinged and sang in the din. The ocean lay ahead, vast and measureless, calling the old salt in his blood to come home.
And, in the space of one long period between waves, he had the boat around again, tail to the ocean, nose to shore. It seemed as though the boat hadn't moved at all, so slowly did it turn on the face of the approaching swell, and somehow without looking up, it was suddenly apparent that the boat was retreating. The spell that had once had its death-grip wrapped around all our hearts had now never existed. The captain put power to the engine and soared on the backs of the waves, barely dropping the nose until the breakwater was secured as a fond memory, the surf was put away in its place, the wind was a friend whose fingers forgot their fierceness, and, finally, the ocean was a sight--and not a home.