by Rolf Potts
“Maine,” she said. She was ninety-eight, visiting—for one last time—each of her five adult children in their respective homes across the country. Her itinerary freighted her down the West Coast and to southern Texas, to Minnesota and Lynchburg, Virginia. It spanned well over a month, and at its culmination: a nursing home.
But when I expressed condolences, she said there was no need.
“This is just the way it goes,” she said, “if you are lucky.”
If you are lucky. If you get to live before the living stops.
It seems to me a matter of perspective: the way we choose to think about a life, about a landscape or loved one or circumstance. After all, even from the farthest edge of our viewing blind, Hal and I see only darkness: there are no birds or beaks or wings. We know and trust that they are there—we have a rising sense of their frenetic noise—but without the glint of sun cannot see their multitude, those birds, all several hundred thousand, converging and veering across the Platte.
As we approach our third hour within the warming viewing blind, Bill tells us to, at last, “hush up.” Prepare our cameras, he ushers softly. Their prehistoric noise, he notes, has built.
Hal pushes his elbow into my stomach, ecstatic.
“Get ready,” he says—as if I am his child, as if I stand on tiptoes at his feet. As if the very years that have brought him here with regularity have altogether faded away, have rendered him open, once again, to an altogether new experience. Hal is not old or without love; he is, above all, held captive by its renewal, by these birds preparing to rise from murky darkness, however traveled, however weary.
I raise my binoculars to my face and unexpectedly lower my camera. It is not, I know, what matters. I have come to see the birds, and when at last they finally rise, they do so in unison, their wings extended at an enormous length, their density above the river like a churning turbine, roiling quickly, rising up.
A single blade of gray, interrupting this empty landscape.
“Amazing,” Hal says to me, and amazing, I repeat. There’s no way for me to know it now, but three months from this quiet morning, I’ll find myself in a parking lot in Fairbanks, Alaska—a place I’ve chosen to see because of Hal. Nothing about it will seem out of the ordinary: it is simple yellow grass that gives way to birch. But it’s here, in Creamer Field, I’ll read that the sandhill cranes land, having at last reached Alaska.
And have I heard of them, a stranger will ask? Have I ever heard of sandhill cranes?
“Yes,” I’ll say, and will think of Hal: there in Denali, many miles south, beside his daughters, beside his sons. Beside the comfort that he seeks—that he knowingly extracts—from the art of movement. I remember the origin of ecstatic: that it means, quite literally, “to be or stand outside”—of oneself, one’s environment, one’s consciousness, I suppose, or in a viewing blind along the Platte, many hundred miles from one’s origin.
That day in Nebraska, Hal said to me, The world requires no audience. And while I could admit that that seemed true, that it would indeed go on without our presence, it seems nothing if not miraculous when our lives align so that we might bear witness.
When we begin to notice, for the first time, that we are not altogether different, or alone.
Amy Butcher is an essayist and author of Visiting Hours, a 2015 memoir that earned starred reviews and praise from The New York Times Sunday Review of Books, NPR, The Star Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and others. Most recently, her work was awarded grand prize in the 2016 Solas Awards’ “Best of Travel Writing” series, earned a notable distinction in Best American Essays 2015, and was awarded grand prize in the 2014 Iowa Review Award in nonfiction as judged by David Shields. Her 2016 op-ed, “Emoji Feminism,” published in The New York Times Sunday Review, inspired Google to create thirteen new female-empowered emojis, due out later this year. Additional work has appeared in The New York Times, The Iowa Review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Fourth Genre, The Rumpus, The Paris Review online, Tin House online, and Brevity, among others, and has been anthologized in Tell It True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction and The Best Of Vela. She is a recent recipient of Colgate University’s Olive B. O’Connor Creative Writing fellowship as well as grants and awards from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, Word Riot Inc., and the Stanley Foundation for International Research. She currently teaches a range of courses on the essay and literary journalism at Ohio Wesleyan University and annually at the Sitka Fine Arts Camp in Sitka, Alaska.
GLENDA REED
The Good Captain
When the sea is calm, every ship has a good captain.
—Sailing proverb
I watched the sleeping ocean from a corner of the cockpit. In the deep darkness, blind waves broke and collapsed in rhythmic, drawn-out hisses, luring me to sleep as they misted me with spray. Even in sleep, the ocean swell rolled forward, constant, like a shark that never stops swimming. I had felt that I could go on forever too, sailing west without stopping across the great expanse of the Pacific.
Then a few hours before sunset, a faint smudge had floated into view amidst the clouds on the horizon. A Marquesan island, hazy through the atmosphere, marked our entry into Polynesian waters. Sighting land awakened in me dormant memories: limitless freshwater, a bed that didn’t move, the quiet pleasure of a walk. Having sailed day and night for three weeks, I’d already spent the time I’d wanted with the open ocean. Seeing land made me starved for landfall. But the distant island was not a port of entry, and we could not lawfully stop there. We had to carry on; we still had one more night till our destination. We were headed for Nuku Hiva, a dead volcano thousands of miles from any continent.
I had three hours and twenty-seven minutes before Chet would relieve me from my watch. After dawn, we’d trade places and I’d flop into one of the bunks he and I and Cyrille—the other hitchhiking crew member—all shared, the cushions still warm from his body. In the meantime I stared down the sky.
On night watch, the very real (albeit unlikely) possibility of annihilation is balanced against total boredom. I watched for signs of changing weather or a ship’s light on the horizon. A 900-foot container ship cruises at around thirty nautical miles an hour with minimal crew to keep costs down. On autopilot, the captain literally asleep at the wheel, a container ship could run us down without ever knowing it had hit us.
In the groping dark, inky cumulus clouds were assembling behind us along the eastern horizon. The clouds could have been nothing, an annoying obstacle between me and the sunrise, or they could have been a squall, a localized storm. Without a moon, I couldn’t tell. I could barely see the clouds—gobs of black in an even blacker sky.
A squall could bring strong winds that might tear sails, break rigging. We couldn’t afford breakages so far from help. I turned away from the horizon and closed my eyes to relieve the painful pressure behind them, exhaustion from straining into the night. I just wanted an easy final watch. I didn’t want the hassle of deciding whether the clouds were going to coalesce into a squall. If, in fact, a localized storm was forming behind us on the eastern horizon, the trade winds would blow the squall onto us. Then, I’d need to determine if we could ride it out, or if I would need to wake the captain. And waking the captain was the last thing I wanted to do.
Chet didn’t like to be called “captain.” He’d told Cyrille and me, “I don’t want to create a weird dynamic. We’re all just part of the crew.” Once, after he made some unusually pointed request, I said as a joke, “Alright, Cap.” Cyrille winked at me, but Chet cringed and went below without saying anything.
Still, on night watch by myself, when I needed to decide whether or not to wake the one person who charted our course, who rebuilt and rewired every inch of this boat, his boat, the one person ultimately in charge, I thought of him as captain.
For the most part, Chet was right: we were all just part of the crew, though as the newest member, I felt I had to prove myself. I kne
w Chet trusted me, but he trusted Cyrille more. Cyrille had joined the boat three months and 300 miles before me. His time on the boat showed; while I milled about gearing up the gumption to ask Chet what needed doing, there was Cyrille coming down the dock with a chipper smile and a cart full of potable water jugs anticipating our need to top up the fresh water tanks before Chet had asked. Cyrille was Johnny-on-the-goddamn-spot, a valuable member of the three-person team we had fast become. Still, I wanted to be first among equals.
I had connected with Chet—and by extension Cyrille—through Latitude 38’s online crew list. Other boats had dismissed me, saying they wanted young, strapping (they didn’t explicitly say male) crew to help with heavy lifting. Those boats that did welcome me aboard wanted a cook and a maid, often asking if I would be open to a relationship. One captain old enough to be my grandfather declared himself a balding sex machine. Chet, thankfully, just wanted me to sail the boat. He was impressed that a twenty-six-year-old had a decade of sailing experience. I had a lot more if you counted the years I captained my childhood home, a fifty-foot sailboat, from the safety of my father’s lap. I liked that Chet and Cyrille were only ten years older than I and European; I was hoping to sidestep American “bro culture.” Chet was a certified skipper, and Sudden Stops Necessary (Stops, for short) was a seaworthy boat—big enough for three people, with a galley, a navigation station, two cabins that were already taken, and a salon for me to sleep in when we weren’t underway. Chet and I emailed, Skyped, and checked references, until there was nothing left for me to do but fly down to Mexico for a get-to-know-you sail. Since that first night passage along the coast of Jalisco, the guys had trusted me to stand watch while they rested below.
First light glowed indigo on a distant edge of the horizon, while the clouds bled into a continuous line. Every fifteen minutes it was time to look again. If I saw a ship on the horizon ten miles away, closing half a sea mile a minute, I would have twenty minutes to determine if we were on a convergent course, devise a plan of action, and alter our heading to avoid a possible collision.
I stood to scan the horizon, and the cloud line behind us, now a fully fortified rampart, startled me with its height and solidity. I leaned closer and looked without blinking, trying to let in as much light as possible. Beneath the cloud line loomed the darkest corner of the sky. Pushed by a following wind and fast approaching, the clouds would soon be on top of us.
I circled my ankles, flexed my calves and checked the self-steering wind vane keeping us on course. Stops was steering itself. All was in order. I took one last look and went below. At the nav station, I turned on the radar as the deck lurched out from under my feet, and I stumbled backward, disoriented. A large swell rolled under Stops’s hull. I grabbed at the edge of the chart table to keep from falling across the cabin, then leaned back hard in the opposite direction, as the counter-roll tried to throw me into the radar. That was a big one. Pay attention. If I let myself forget where I was, I could break a rib being flung across the cabin.
Embarrassed, despite the lack of observers, I shook off the large swell, assuming it to be the tallest wave in the set, and pulled myself toward the radar. I didn’t consider, perhaps chose to ignore, a fact I knew: big waves are often pushed by big winds.
On the radar screen, large green blotches marred with red announced squall clouds with a lot of rain. Since a few degrees north of the equator, we had been skirting around and through the doldrums. The doldrums, or the intertropical convergence zone, are not a place marked on any chart. Between the reliable trade winds, they are a shifting region of low pressure known for days or weeks of windless calm punctuated by squalls. At first we had motor-sailed around the squalls, altering course a few degrees to dodge each pregnant, low-slung cloud. Then one afternoon we had come across a squall too big to avoid. Chet had taken the helm and driven straight through the gusty downpour. Since leaving the doldrums we’d been pounding through one squall after another.
North of the equator, I had known to expect a predictable burst of wind and rain. Squalls in the South Pacific, however, had taken on different personalities. Would this squall be calm, almost windless, absentmindedly dripping a wet, persistent drizzle? Or would it have no rain but a lot of wind, or both? A squall could push strong winds and a torrential deluge, a wall of enormous drops that rip into the water like gunfire, obscuring the horizon and shrinking the visible world around the boat. My favorite squalls started thick and close, then eased out, pulling back the curtain of rain to reveal undulating silver hills embossed with braille.
In the last few weeks, I’d sailed through more squalls than years I’d been alive, and still I didn’t know what to make of this one. Sizable lakes of green and red pooled twenty miles wide on the radar screen, but size, as they say, doesn’t tell you everything. We had double-reefed at dusk, significantly reducing our sail area to safely ride out the inevitable squalls. The only reason I would need to wake the captain was if the winds were going to be so strong that we needed to shorten sail even further. The radar, whose radio waves echoed off rain, but not wind, couldn’t tell me either.
The captain lay a few feet from me in the salon and I let my eyes wander over his sleeping body. Chet was curled on his side in gray, checkered boxers, limp on top of his white sheet, unable to tell me what he wanted. The thought occurred to me, Maybe he isn’t really sleeping. If he wasn’t sleeping, I reasoned, I wouldn’t technically be waking him. The steady rise and fall of his white t-shirt, however, confirmed he was asleep.
I sat there at the nav station in the captain’s chair, watching him. A week before, we had sailed across the equator. Crossing the equator, a maritime rite of passage, transformed me forever from a pollywog, a rookie, into a shellback, an experienced sailor. I believed in tests of skill and willpower, and the possibility of arriving on the other side stronger, wiser, truer. Somebody different, somebody new. A person could cross a line that meant she had gained enough experience to know the answers in difficult situations. I believed that I’d already arrived at that other side, and I loathed myself for not knowing what to do now. The squall felt like a test whose sole purpose was to humiliate me. If I were a better sailor, I thought, I would be able to reef single-handed, to handle this on my own.
The waves were gathering force, and to keep from falling, I crawled on all fours back up the companionway ladder. The deck pitched at steep angles. All around me in the dim morning, more night than day, the gray surface of the ocean throbbed rhythmically, the pulse of waves visible only as movement. I couldn’t see their height, but I could feel them growing. Big winds, I allowed myself to remember. If only the squall could wait till Chet’s watch.
As the only girl on board Stops, I didn’t want to sound the alarm unless I had a good reason. I had to divine the true nature of the squall as well as the moment when the captain wanted me to wake him, if it got bad. Too early and I was afraid he’d be angry, lose respect for me; too late and we’d be in trouble.
I could feel the squall’s power even before it reached us. The steady wind speed hit thirty knots and gusts struck with surprising force. The sea around Stops heaped up as the wind tore the foaming tops off waves in white streaks. On land, this wind would throw whole trees into motion.
Adrenaline flaming through my veins screamed bigger winds were coming. I had to wake Chet. How could I have waited this long?
In the muffled quiet below deck, I crept toward Chet, trying not to disturb Cyrille, even as the stiff crinkle of my foul weather gear rustled to a roar. My shipmates’ sleeping bodies appeared dead to the impending squall.
I shook Chet’s shoulder. He pushed up his sleeping mask, “Have we reached Nuku Hiva?” Chet’s instant lucidity made me wonder if he’d been sleeping at all. Maybe Stops’s increasingly agitated motion had woken him, or maybe he’d been awake anticipating landfall.
“I need your help.” Chet leapt from his bunk
Back on deck the instrument panel showed wind speeds exceeding forty knots. The win
d clawed down the backs of waves with a force that would tear limbs from trees. Though thick clouds blotted out the dawn, the squall was now clearly visible. Massive gray clouds stretched in a formidable front as far as I could see in either direction. Beneath this advancing army, winds beat the sea into a fury a few hundred yards behind us.
Chet’s large eyes widened as he took in the mega-squall. The acid taste of imagined insults were on my tongue. What’s wrong with you? Why didn’t you wake me sooner? Chet’s eyebrows pursed together, then fell back. He wasted no time squabbling. “Let’s reef. You’ve got the wind vane?” For the captain, only our safety mattered.
With a hand on the wind vane’s thin control lines, I steered Stops into the wind to take the burden off the sails. I braced my feet as the boat slammed headlong into oncoming waves. The mainsail swung close above my head, whipping itself in the wind, each crack of canvas cutting through me like a gunshot. No longer caught in the hand of the wind, the boat’s machinery was a loose-flung thing, predictable only up to a point.
Chet threw himself about the winch, grinding down the mainsail even further, then folded and secured the sail. On his mark, I turned us back downwind. The mainsail, now smaller, filled and steadied us in the following seas. We rolled in more of the headsail and Stops’ jerking motion lost its frantic edge. Practice had made us good at this.
Without saying a word Chet took the helm from me, unhitching the wind vane to steer by hand. Then a long, high-pitched cry let loose from the sky, and the squall hit. Strong winds blew seawater skyward and forced rain sideways, slantways, anyways but down. A gust tried to push the boat over, but 6,000 pounds of ballast in Stops’s keel kept us upright. If we hadn’t shortened sail, the gust could have knocked us down, slamming the boat on its side, the cockpit pitched vertical, the sails pushed all the way down against the waves.