Through The Looking-Glass Darkly

Ah, security patrol.

Where all the minutes are long, all the beds are good-looking...yes, Mr. Keillor, thank you, and good night.

We sit in Reception now for night watch, in this newly condensed version of Caribbean Mercy life. The ship is eerily quiet. I have this sudden urge to go slam a few doors down on B-Deck, just for old times' sake. The only thing i can hear, besides the ventilation blowers, is Keeper the dog jingling her tags in the breezeway. (Take that, Anastasis.) Besides her, nobody's around but me and twenty-eight varieties of disturbingly sizeable winged insect. Not even Honduras had this many bugs.

Yesterday was a long, wet, relentless day. The eleven-odd of us still left stood and watched as the vehicles holding our brothers and sisters and friends-of-a-lifetime straggled, one by one, slowly out of our sight. We gathered in a little circle on the hard concrete dock for a final unhappy farewell to the director's family, the last to leave, and it was then that someone realized: For the first time in thirteen continuous years--and very possibly in the ship's entire fifty-three-year lifetime--there was not one single person physically on board.

A little earlier, they'd started the main engine up briefly to check on something. The old familiar rumble carried me back to aft mooring deck, and i stood where i used to stand and watch the sky go up and down. I was young. Not many months ago, it was, but at least a decade or two, in the well-known parallel universe of ship time. I stood there yesterday on the scarred, vibrating teak remembering the roll of a dozen different sails, a new port every month, new crew every week. How many before me had their hand on that wheel? I can remember good friends enough for a hundred lifetimes. I'd take a hundred more.

One in the morning and i'm generally on the road to writing sap with relish. This is good. A bit more, and i'll have almost enough for a newsletter.