I was exhausted by the time I was ready to set off. I hadn’t slept much or well. My body ached, and I’d broken out in sweat stinking of old whiskey that quickly mixed with the sea-salt on my body in a sticky brine. With each new action, I caught an instant replay of the previous night, each came with a nauseous wave of embarrassment, of guilty regret. I felt like my head was underwater. I didn’t want to row.
But there is no time off from rowing. Yes, I gave myself a week’s margin against the weather, the closing of the ocean. But I’ve only been out here one week out of six. I’ve already begun to lose time. I cannot give up anymore, waste anymore, bet any of it away on a foolish hangover. I deserve my pain.
For a while, I simply felt a general malaise. The paddle’s rhythm eluded me. Then I began to sober with labor. My headache developed into a tense vivid thing. My stomach kept contracting. A breeze kicked up and I began to raise the sail before realizing I didn’t have the pontoons out (of course they weren’t out. I was rowing and they slow me. And I didn’t build them as well as Abba built the hull of the kayak). I turned in to shore, landing on a patch of dirt sheltered in the undercut of a tundra bluff barely taller than myself, forcing me to crouch while attaching everything. Crouching gave me cramps, which gave me—well I had to let go of the boat a minute and squat, and I thought the boat would be ok. It began drifting and I had to go in after it, one hand desperately trying to pull up my pants, which wasn’t such a good idea because I hadn’t had a chance to wipe. I caught the boat easily, but my pants were wet and cold and my butt itched. I pulled it back to shore and tried to tie it up. There wasn’t anything reasonable to anchor it against, and eventually I found myself with one leg on the land, one wrapped around a pontoon rail, trying to wipe.
Eventually, I got the sails up and set off. By now, my hangover, the wet of my pants legs, the chill and immobility were all conspiring against me in earnest. That’s when I began to think the hull was sinking ever so slowly. Not really sinking so much as riding lower in the water. Perhaps it’s just the sail, I thought, pushing the bow under a bit. I lowered the sail to see, and the hull did seem to rise somewhat. I raised the sail again and the hull seemed to stay level, but then a moment later, it looked like it had sunk somewhat again. A burning coal seam on the shore had forced me out quite a ways onto the sea; I’d rather dodge stray ice chunks than breathe burning coal smoke and the chop wasn’t bad. But now I wished I was closer to shore. I wished I was somewhere I could pull over easily. It occurred to me that I was committed; I am on a ride I cannot get off.
And at that moment I could not be on the water any longer. I hauled sail and tacked in towards a smoking ridge of gray rock surrounded by black desert. And for the first time this trip, I pulled up my sea-skirt and reached back for my PFD. I slipped it over my head and though I’d been cold a minute ago, the formed life vest set me to sweating. But my hands were freezing. The wind whispered east ever so subtly and I was in the middle of that crazed phantasmagoric smoke, coughing. Coughing, eyes tearing and stinging, blinded. I tacked back out again. Breathe as slowly as you can, Sarah. Try not to breathe at all, but then breathe.
I reassured myself that even if the hull had a leak, even if the whole boat swamped, the float bags would keep the boat going. I tacked away from the smoke. I forced myself out towards the ocean. My heart raced and I thought I would puke. The sea loomed dizzily in front of me, floating ice drifts at the edge of the blue horizon warped and quivered. My heart was going so fast and yet there was no blood in my body. I tacked closer in towards shore, I tacked so that I could see the smoldering ruins of hills where coal had ruptured the surface and now burned interminably. I breathed soot-laden air in great grateful gulps. More than anything, I wanted to be in my parents’ Northport home, in my growing up bedroom, on my waterbed, in the dark. I wanted dark.
They should call them uncertainty attacks. Or maybe even more accurately, certainty attacks. Or maybe both. Certainty: my kayak rode lower in the water than the day before. Certainty: I’d drunkenly gone after my own boat the night before, an attack that could have damaged it. Uncertainty: I couldn’t visualize ever filling the float bags with air. Uncertainty: I had no confidence in my hull-inspection capabilities this morning.
The fact remained, in my head, I could sink. And if I sank, could I swim? My father would recite the arctic drowning statistics like favorite poems, like onomatopoeic tongue twisters, the tan wrinkles around his eyes contracting with pleasure. Within two minutes the body begins to go completely numb, five minutes and you stop trying to swim, ten minutes and you’re gladly gulping water instead of air, if you’re bothering to breathe at all. That’s if you’ve got your PFD on. The leading cause of death for Inuit kids is drowning. And they know how to swim. And they know the arctic.
I began to calculate my chances. I figured I was about three hundred yards from shore. I tried to do the math, divide swim times by distance, while accounting for a gradual drain of energy as I spent myself. But all I could think was, I want to get off. I want to get off. I want to get off.
There is no getting off this ride, Sarah. The only way you’ll go home is if you row another five weeks east.
You row, every single day.
July 25
I hurled my last full whiskey bottle out into the ocean last night and soon much regretted it. I didn’t sleep a wink, my skin crawling with muscle hurt, fear ricocheting off my mind’s walls. I left the tent on the hour—about every time I thought I was dozing off—to see if it was bears I heard out on the tundra. All I saw was the flashing tail of what might have been a fox.
I was too tired to make breakfast. Instead, I packed the boat haphazardly and stuffed my shirt pockets with dry granola and pushed off. I fell asleep with the sail up.
I slept nearly twenty minutes, I think. That’s terrifying. I easily could have died. I could have sailed through a mystery web of cracked apart ice right to the North Pole that might, as it was several summers ago, actually be open water this year. And what would I do then? Fucking die is what I’d do. I’d die dead. I slept and dreamt. I only woke up because in my dream they were shooting closer and closer to me and there was no where else to turn but consciousness. I’m beginning to wonder if I actually want to make it. I’m beginning to question whether part of me simply wants to die here, curl up in a ball and fade into arctic winter.
This isn’t the first time in my life that I’ve thought I would die out on the water. But all the other times there were specific, adrenaline producing things happening right then and there that made me think I was going to die and fight off death at the same time. This is different. This is watching myself drift further and further from the beginning of what seems a doomed mission, an impossible mission. It’s days without end waiting for my own end to catch me like the monster in a nightmare and swallow me whole. It’s like living in Jerusalem when the bombs are going off daily in Ben Yehudah Square, and parents are afraid to let their kids play in Har Hertzel and snipers take nightly aim at the streets of Kiriat Moshe. Except here there’s no one to buck up in front of, no one to make moribund comments to, no one to share terror with. There’s no one. And my nap helped, and when I woke up I was as grateful as I was glad as I was angry because I was alive and I felt slightly if ever so slightly better rested. I was even on course. I felt a tremendous wave of guilt for not da’avening this morning.
Perhaps things will be better without the booze.
I can hardly enjoy the landscape these days, I’m so self-obsessed, so riveted with questions of my own survival, and then questions of whether I care about my own survival and then questions about what that must mean about my faith. I just want a break from my own company, a little time off from myself. There were clouds for the first time today, and I suspect rain will soon be here. A surprising twist, given how dry this climate usually is, precipitation only coming a few times a year, in the winter. Ugh. I once read a book in which the first person narrator stated that the reader should always assume he was smoking a cigarette