The Island of Misfit Boys

I love being underway, moving through the ocean out of the sight of land. There’s something peaceful about cutting through the water and being able to see no reminders of the outside world. A dear friend said to me the other night that “it is easy to pretend that the ‘real world’ doesn’t exist out here,” a sentiment that I share. Other places, other problems, don’t seem real once you reach beyond the steel skin of our little world here.

I even sleep better while underway, with the ship rocking beneath me. It reminds me of how much I miss sailing, being able to go out alone until the distant outlines of land disappear. It’s thrilling and soothing at the same time. Anyone who lives around the sea knows that it can be peaceful and dangerous at the same time. I stumbled across a Melville quote the other night:

. . . these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.

Out here in the Pacific, with the dark, blue-gray water all around us, I feel far from home and the issues there. Things there aren’t good, and haven’t been since I left. There are a lot of unresolved issues waiting for me when I get back, and I don’t know what it will be like. Will we still be together? How long will I be there before I’m off to someplace else? What will that mean? These questions swirl around me, and make me wish in a way that I could stay here and wander; leave the problems behind and just go off.

It stirs a restlessness inside me that has always been there. I’ve never been the one to settle down, to want to commit. It is easier in the abstract, in the “someday that would be nice” way. It’s harder since I got here, the restless spirit has been rekindled and multiplied. In reading the other night (I’ve been reading a lot in my downtime) I found a passage by Conrad that captured my feeling:

For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

And so it is for me. In my brief return, I need to figure out where my life stands. Whether the new path I’m being pulled down will work with the life that is still waiting behind, no matter how distant it feels from here.