Sailing Through the Desert

Coming to you live from Robert C. Seamans.

We are sixteen days into this voyage, currently underway to Mangareva. This is my first blog post, but rest assured, when I can get away from watch and evade my sleep, I’ve been doing plenty of writing and thinking on my own. It’s interesting, this trip. Because when I get back home and people ask me, “Where did you go?” and I tell them Tahiti, Rangiroa, and Nuku Hiva, and the other beautiful islands still to come, I will not be telling them even a fraction of the truth. We have been here, on the high seas in the South Pacific, sailing under blistering sun by day and glittering stars by night. We see no land. Until it’s there and gone again in a single day’s time. But I give that answer, a list of a few places they might recall, because if I gave them the truth, there isn’t a chance that they would understand.

Where did we go?
We sailed through the desert.

An expanse of blue desolate beyond imagination. From the surface it appears as wine–dark, poisonous, with an unvarying ability to intoxicate us. It’s beautiful and its blood is much stronger than ours. My research on this vessel focuses on the structure of pectoral fins in tuna and related species, and thus relies on fishing these waters. I take from it and the best I can give back is my complete reverence for any and all that call it home. The ocean is unforgiving, the desert is deceptive.  But so are we.

SPEAR FISH 
Is it any different, the killing? 
The rape and murder
Never mind the plunder
On the sea for anything
That floats
For the sake of biology

 Any different to land
Is the death I see?
Maybe it lies in the victims
Down deep unseen
On land I see where they all be
Here, a lasting mystery

Until broken is the surface
And hauled aboard is she
Eggs and all too, unhatched
Catched from the deep blue
She gives her last kiss
To the saddened deep sea

The brain sliced
And diced is the pectoral
The eggs thrown over
The flesh now covered
In dots and light, as we lower
Over the body, smothered

In blood and grime
And haven’t any time to think
It’s over, the fish is an object
Its guts in the sink
Fins now bagged, fish still gagged
By the regret of its own tongue

I think it over
These things
States of being that
Cannot be undone
Death and Life
Until either deed is done
(May 16, Journal entry on the recent Short-billed spearfish caught while underway to Nuku Hiva)

Step away from the death of fish on the deck and look to the ocean and realize that this is all around us. There is a flow of life everywhere here, and on this voyage, we have become part of it. Inserted ourselves into it, more so, but nevertheless together with the ocean on this prolonged study. I am immensely happy to be here, we all are. Sometimes it takes a sunrise or a sunset over the blue horizon to remind us of that, but we all feel it. That feeling of happiness, as we cross this desert, bobs like the waves below us. It’s tough and and joy can be fleeting. But I know, in retrospect, what we gain from this, is unwavering completeness.