Approaching the Gib in the nighttime in a bus it at first looked like a deformed eyeless elephant to me. Or like a head and feetless sphinx as paul theroux has remarked. Now moving away from it, it looks like an overdimensional mole with its head stuck between its front paws, sulking under the massive rain cloud that has condensed around its top. We are heading just left of the sunset, making our way between the waves and the private rainbows attached to each crest's halo of spray. It eerily feels like we are sailing away from the English weather and into the eternal sunshine of tropical realms that are waiting just beyond the horizon I am sure.
The army of aeolians on the crests of the Spanish hills are waving their massive three fingered hands goodbye. We head off, away from the two fog-shrouded continents out our flanks, and into the watery mists in the distance where the ships with the Arabic writing on them are coming from...
First day -boredom prevails.
Second day -you get used to the slow smooth creaking of the wood and the screaming baby of the autopilot turning the rudder. Watch that eternally breaking splintering viscous thick black metal mirror mosaic of a thousand irregular slivers reassembling constantly trying to recreate the sunlight itself.
The nights are passed not exactly sleeping more than rubbing indecently closely up to sleep. Our three hours off, three hours on -apart from pretty much corresponding to my sleeping pattern anyway, perfectly make the elasticity of time feelable, how three hours can alternatively and alternatingly be ever so short (when you are trying to catch some sleep) and ever so long (when you are on watch).
The positive side to this is that it helps my sleeping disorder in such a way that I have to learn to drop out of consciousness in any given position in any random place on the boat for the three hours I am off duty. The negative sides are that for a time span of something like the following year I probably won't be able to sleep any longer than three hours in a go.
Still the joys of being on watch from three to five in the morning include some joys: nightly dolphins look like immanently lit underwater neon torpedoes with the phosphorescence of the plankton, and Oligando the first island of the canaries approaching is lit like a faint halo of some underwater goddess waiting to rise above the surface, trident and all, causing a storm -a little version of the dawn not quite yet about to break softly huddling like a vault over the horizon in one corner whose linearity on closer inspection is broken by the minute outlines of land rising in the midst of the loom (and after a few hours of what seems to be a never ending excruciatingly slow approach has fledged to a clear cut island inside its cosy little spotlight while the night around it keeps it enormous fat black ass glued to the ocean. And in all this slow rhythm that you are caught, when you spot a light on the horizon, it is not exactly the same as two cars speeding towards each other at 200 miles an hour on a motorway their headlights blinding the drivers, but sometimes things can go faster than one thinks.
Most of the time, of course there is just nothing to do except, by pure willpower, mentally make time move on, make the seconds plop like lollipop raindrops each time you count one off, moving closer together, the closer they move to the edge, to push each other off it over that brink of nothing, each time in the very last moment, playing their endless game of tag, eternally turning around to tap the next second on its shoulder before hopping off.
There is nothing else to do than go for a walk along that line -the now, the lining of time, frontline of our perceptions, emotions, actions - that spherical prison of our consciousness epitomized by the concentric black prison of the night out there closing around me, pushing closer to my being -...counting seconds...
On the brink of nothing -that imperceptibly subtle lining of our consciousness which itself is imperceptibly spherical, a crystal prison the seemingly so immense but in reality so measurable 6,7 sea miles that I can see from the boat to the horizon -the sky siphoned onto the blue surface of the planet the day pushes forward, forward, cutting even the masses of water into two, on part lit and blue, on part still left in darkness.
The concatenation of loom of the hotel lined coastal towns - little version of the dawn echoing, emulating before its time that greater loom of day that every morning rises from beyond that invisible dark continent we are flanking -Africa. Its great landmass is no obstruction to the grey labour of the day pushing forward day by day, laborously, on and on, until the whole sky is filled with rosy lined flat pretty clouds, and the stars are all closing in for sleep. Two fingers above the horizon, Venus is the last one, hanging round obstinately till the wobbly red egg yolk of the sun abruptly switches it off, too.
You hang on to that loom, that rag of rounded light, like to a rag of hope that you will soon be able to get more than the standard three hours of sleep. I hold the thread of hope emanating from that sunken town woven round my fingers as we motor towards it -but that fine, imaginary thread soon unravels, gets distracted on the surface of the sea and sends a whole new loom mushrooming up.
The boat has enough fresh water to drink and even shower for the whole Atlantic crossing, on smaller yachts the crew showers by jumping into the water holding on to a rope. On the canaries the Italian ambassador of Washington DC and the ex US ambassador of Saudi Arabia will mount this yacht which is less a sailing boat than a five room apartment as James remarks and I will be left to my own devices, advanced a mere four days from Gibraltar, but now in a place with considerably more yachts going out.
We pass the lighthouse tweaking at us, and with every flash my molar beams red hot in the night. Every time I start to speak, through the gap of the rows of my teeth my molar beams a neon red flash like an SOS morse signal from a lighthouse of pulsating pain. And then I close my mouth and feel the flash reverberate silently against vaulted velar and the hot, soft inside of the cheek. This tooth needs pulling.
Sailing is a sort of shock therapy for my natural occurring fear of death.
''Touch this the wrong way and you die -or, well, you may lose an arm at best'' James warns me.
Indeed this sailing experience proves the perfect playground for my innate ineptness at all things practical and indeed provided invaluable opportunity to display my limitless
clumsiness, thereby risking my own as well as my crew members lives and limbs.
But hey, we're all still here after all.
The fourth day, we get into a storm. The luminosity of the setting sun lends these savage scenery a falsely glacial air and an eerie slowness to nature's spectacle happening around us, the broken white water that is gushing over us seems to do so in slow motion, like snow falling and it seems like we are sailing down not a fluid valley of breaking waves but a white gash of snow paralysed in between each bat of the
eyelash. It is my first ever storm on sea, and since I am not seasick I actually really enjoy this rollercoaster like ride, blissfully ignorant of all the things that could go wrong. Better not let my grin grow too big though in the presence of our understandably less amused and actually worried captain. After a few hours the main sail starts tearing, and the wind, far from taming its furious tongues, resumes even wilder, lashing out at the sea till its entire surface has turned into foaming white whipped cream.
Back in Gibraltar Czech boy and I had dinner on the tiny 30 footer of a lovely elderly (I hope I can get away with calling him that, I don't know his age, but he had his head full of blinding white hair ) a Swedish man called Jonas. I must say I especially enjoyed his company since he spoke several languages including Russian and Arabic and answered my nerdy questions about favourite etymologies and grammatical constructions. I think I actually embarrassed him a little bit when I took my drink and sat down next to him the next evening in the bar to get him to expound on his theory about pronunciability and biodegradability of the 19th generative declention of ancient Urdu he had hinted on the day before, but not rendered completely.
Now, in the storm, I think of him, lying face down in my cabin with the storm and the boat like its own big and warm organism heaving and breathing, feeling like his name sake in the belly of the whale.
The black movement of my closed eyes floating on the bass tones of the engine vibrating concentrically under the waves of insomnia. I wake up, I lie in the dark, like a whale stranded on the raw, alien shores of an unwanted island and like her I just want back into my night. But here I am, prisoner of the nutshell of my consciousness, condemned to suffer the wound it cuts into my rest.
In the storm I feel like imprisoned in the negative of an aquarium -I hear the water around me, around the narrow wooden cage around me, blustering, rioting outside, whipping over the hatch over my cabin -or like inside a whale's stomach this strange feeling underlined by my own stomach acids heralding their own ascension by a few samples sent beforehand.
Waves stay as opaque under their sunlight dappled surface, the horizon does not fuzz out and blur, but stays tightly strung all around the spherical slab of sea and sky this creaking boat is wedged between and onto gravity -all this achieved by pure willpower. We head just left of the golden corridor of the sun.
As James drives me to the shores on the dinghy, I wave Czech boy goodbye who knows how to sail and will be well paid for the crossing. "If you are lucky you might find a boat quicker than ours" James said. Laughingly I answered "Speed is not how I measure my luck". And having found a place to stow my bag for a few hours I am off to the dentist.
When I first take out the little patch of wool that the dentist gave me a sweet rush of blood flushes over, envelopes my tongue which, still too timid to investigate, only passively perceives on its edge what felt like a softly rounded void where the molesting molar has been. The negative of a tooth, the negative of a pain. Oh glorious gap ?oh alabastrine absence of pain. My tongue slides along the softly curved edges - the boundaries of the bloody soft bread, two softly folded bumps of gum nestling around the absence -oh royal taste of purple where an ache used to be, where the sharp shards of my tooth were. Two hunches of flesh nestled in a cove where a rugged rock used to spread out its zaggy flutes.
I have found a place where I am and under shelter from the wind, actually such that it is virtually windless and warmly cuddled as I am into my sleeping bag this could be the perfect place to pass the night in flawlessly benumbed unanimateness. But as I am waiting for sleep to levitate me off the ground, I realize that the sheer noise of the wind's discordant polyphony singing and screeching beyond the shaded spot I'm in will make the coveted disappearance into unconsciousness impossible. Raving, furious, black madness of the wind tearing at the fragile prison walls of my precious pearl of sound slumber. I swallow one potent little pill, one of those my friend bought off the junkies in Belgium for me, back in the day when they served to alleviate my comedown of a three day mushroom bender with which I had tried to cure the mental torment of an abortion, and for a short precious moment, downy and delicate, I rock off into the arms of Morpheus.
But before long my fragile levitating prison of sleep splinters and I am left wide eyed and bare boned in this furious polyphonic song of the night. And as I close my eyes, I am right at the heart of the rocking ocean.
"Ca tangue" one evening later remarks Harold rolled up in his sleeping bag next to me aptly on this well known phenomenon of benign ''land sickness''. He is another boat hitcher I have met this afternoon, straight off a two day sail trip straight into force 8 winds, ending in a broken mast and a full blown disaster, knee deep in water shuffling out water, firing flares and all, being "saved" by the water guard and posited in a so called "safe harbour" on the other side of the islands behind a dam who should shower the boat with destructive flying comets with the boat a total loss in the morning, the planned Atlantic crossing off schedule for this year, and the poor owner almost suffering a nervous breakdown as tourists callously lined up to photograph his ruined dream. And so at the end of the day Harold was free to take a bus back to Las Palmas where he could tell of his adventures and join the crowd of hitchhikers again.
Sailing again.
The milky way the spine, the vertebrae of the night, it feels like we are sailing this milky way itself, emerging like a curdling solid materializing from behind the pitch black veil. A boat gives off a last star-like signal before the black sea swallows all in one all engulfing gulp of gravity.
The sea blends black with the sky ... till finally, a modest flock of clouds has gathered sheepishly to celebrate the rutilant sunrise as the last faint star flickers to death.
Under the revolving sky we move, ...the flaming up of the sail in the wind, ...the sun's path across the sky... its momentum gathering, then fading...and the ball of heat gets engulfed by the commencing night on the other side of the dark medal...
Freighters near our trajectory, mighty metal monsters with girls' names, and like ships we pass.
The white of the broken water peeling off the painted white walls of our yacht.
The everyday toil of the sun to heave its fat glistening body from out of the water and groan its way from port to starboard -all in the boiling heat with the ocean throwing its light back into the sky .
The daily toil of the boat heaving its creaking rump forward.
The street of glistening blinding white the only disruption of two expanses of blue neatly glued together at the edges -the whole sphere hermetically closed by the horizon, like a zip all around (with only the finest crests of waves discernible in the distance to make for tiny pricks, disturbances on the horizon). The water -one breathing mass, heavy with itself, the shake and shuffle becomes part of my own rhythm, my blood is shaken in my veins, heavy with moon and sea. The sea which breathes us onward. Waves seem like continuous long breaths passing through us, throwing us forward.
And every evening, when the sun sets and the ocean rises, well, the darkness from the ocean rises, and with it its roaring silence. The waves turn against the boat, move up monstrously to it, billowing up like underwater monsters tightening their skin but never protruding their heads -their necks forever stumps without protrusion and only shoving the boat forward, and forward -threatening to protrude the boat and swallow our bobbing nutshell boat like the whale Jonas-but instead fight their silly games with each other, and we are pushed on and on by the wind.
Then for days -the sky as flat as the ocean.
Learn patience, reinvent time.
The sun rises like a zinc penny dipped in viscous, yellow glue which gives off viscid threads stretching almost all the way across the sky and also over the surface of the ocean, where it dissolves incompletely, and ends up bobbing like flotsam on the waves, sprinkling the sea with light, as a counterpoint to the islets of impenetrable metally black that are slanting of the same tiny crests of waves now rocking the sunshine, openings, it seems, onto the cold immensity beneath it.
The Atlantic I am riding and the Pacific: I imagine the two oceans pressed to each other like two sides of one gigantic coin, carrying an unfathomable depth at its heart, two negatives of the same brilliant sky.
Then, at setting, the sun dips into the sea as fastidiously as one strives to seperate an eggyolk from its white and then dip it into a pan, without spilling, clean and smooth it plops into its temporary demise, leaving the sky to the night that is creeping up from the ocean depths like monsters with vaporous bodies, bodies out of mists that intoxicate us, befuddle us as they stream up our noses and down into our lungs, and we close our eyes, roll up and become all night ourselves...
Till I wake up early again, and am waiting under a growing cellophane skies, the scanning of the horizon under the crowd of clouds for the first beaming neon pink tip of the star to appear, to stare into it, drinking its rays with the duty of full attention and almost as trite as like my daily calesthenics to describe them. And as I still its and muse that now the sun is up for good, and the beating down with knifes only hours away I turn around, decided to go to bed.
Day after day, the golden penny of the sun climbs the sky, summoning the heat to rise in relation to the height of its own soar, then at the altitude smiles down genially at the day spread out at its feet. And only when all the heat of the day has congregated and concentrated on your forehead and sprinkled it with sparkling beads of sweat, then the heavenly body gains momentum and from the impetus and so glides on effortlessly through the fluid, tranquil, suave surface of the untroubled afternoon sky and begins its curved descend glossing the limpid immensity with twinkle and sheen it leaves in its trail, permitting the heat finally to disperse again, and finally, at the drop of the penny send us all hurrying down to our cabins and slipping into overcoats to brave the nightshift's wind.
In the monotony of the days it has become my habit, my ritual, religion, my little benign addiction, to attend the ascent of the sun each morning. The waiting under expanding silver skies, the fuzzy edge between darkness and light eating its low way across the firmament above my head till only a thin reminder of the past night is left cowering in one corner of the sky in my back turned to the West.
The scanning of the horizon under the crowd of clouds for the first ray of our star appears, the nearest of all those who already faded along with the dying of the cool of the night. That red hot light spender that sits with indifference at the centre of the ever entrenched elliptical groove our blue and patient planet describes with all its centripetal fervour. Following its steady grow out of the horizon, like the swelling head of a slow-motion mushroom at first, then rising its entire perfectly rounded shape from out of the cool depths spattering sanguine streaks back onto its surface in the process. All the while my eyes riveted onto it, drinking its rays with the duty of full attention before they will become bright and blindingly malign. The very top already painfully glaring to the eye, the rest of the body grading from this raw white to glowing golden to thick syrupy candy apple red, gradually shedding its layers, and so for a moment neatly striping the glorious body from top to bottom to the effect that very briefly a phantom face appears in the most luminous top quarter and the whole tottering apparition reminds me of a heavenly Humpty Dumpty without wall. For a moment I still hear the floating echo of his voice traverse the atmosphere ("now there's glory for you...") and for a moment I picture it plop back to where it came from, then this imagery is already replaced by the next optical illusion. This time an awaited one.
The magical moment: for a couple of seconds just when the entire spherical splendour has emerged, its lower rim folds out like a cup bound to the ocean by suction. The underworld winning the fight of trying to force the sun back down with gravity and glue for the illusion of point zero zero two minutes, and the sun deforming into pear-shape. And for the moment following I am even disappointed that there is no basket dangling of the under the fire-spiting engine of a hot-air balloon with Phileas Fogg and Passepartout puzzedly looking through their telescope and shaking their heads at the sight of that girl squinting in their direction at the aft of that tiny boat with the duck printed on the foresail.
Any way the sun is now up for good, and as I still sit and muse that the beating down with knifes is only hours away I turn around, decided to go to bed. In that very moment, something ENORMOUS jumps right in front of my eyes. It is that kind of whole body out of water, hip wiggling tail beating jump that ends with the animal splashing back into the element spine bent over backwards and a fountain of triumph circumscribing the shape of its silhouette whose white negative is still imprinted on your eye for that split second that you shake yourself in disbelief. I had never yet to this point seen dolphins jump like this, only heard of it. Nor had I ever seen a whale, but had heard that some species occasionally perform stunts like these, so, for a moment I was anxious under the belief that my childhood's dream might just have got fulfilled in the most extravagant of fashions. Having emitted a scream like a kid I ran to the railing, literally almost fell over myself and hence according to the length of the boat almost overboard together with my cartoon like pop-out eyes. I soon realized that by their size and number and the characteristic way by which they move, weaving their way between the waves, describing the same movement as them, they had to be dolphins. Because and their faces are not defigured by those risible paralysed grimaces that other mammals of their kind are cursed with, I am taken over by an immediate sympathy for them. There was a large number of them, less than a hundred though I would saw. I saw them approaching from all sides and sat down at the stern offering my feet for the occasional caress and observing their play. Old dolphins with serrated, eaten fins and bodies blotched with age spots, which i find especially beautiful, and all the way, many yards under them small, young ones with skin as shiny and bright as the morning dew are well protected by the many layers of adults between them and the surface.
When the guys are up they usually start to sing now, being on my own with everyone being asleep under deck I have no choice but have to sing on my self now and so I start humming the only song that I can muster up, floating around in my mind in that moment, Ani DiFranco's "angel food". And indeed, whether this really a corollary of my incantatory efforts or in spite of them, the dolphins stay with us.
By now we have seen 100s of dolphins, but my childhood's dream of seeing a whale has not been granted to come true for me so far. Seeing that we have less than a day left, some 17 seamiles at the unsteady winds that seem to average on 6 knots an hour, and that the loom has already been visible the last few hours, we're bound to reach the safe harbour this afternoon without the sighting of any larger mammals.
But then a few hours later, on this last day of the trip, all expectant over the railing everyone's eyes clinging hungrily to the island rising from the blue -way out there where we've come from, at the horizon exactly we see a massive thing jumping. We see water splashing and a tiny speck of dirt, it seems, having risen from the surface. It's the gigantic body of a massive mammal reduced by distance to a tiny blotch of dirt, only faintly more noticeable than one of those dancing speck of light at the surface of your eyes. The fact that we can see something is jumping at this distance at all, means the thing must be ernomous. As we sail on, they catch up with us -we see there are two whales. We see them breathing their characteristic fountains and see them playing around, the closest we get to pass them are about 10 yards. On the whole the beautiful two animals stay in sight for about half an hour, but will be engraved in my memory for much, much longer.