It’s not that I don’t have notebooks of my own. I do. And pens, and a camera, and a digital voice recording device—all the necessary tools for a member of the fourth estate.
My assignment, for Popular Anarchist Quarterly, was to accompany the team from a newly formed oceanic protection agency (as they like to be called) on their maiden voyage. The organization, operating under the handle Save Our Sea Mammals, or SOSM, is in its infancy, but its organizers are hardly unknowns in the world of nautical activism. In fact, just last year, I did a profile on SOSM founder Erica Luntz for her work in various West Coast ports of call sabotaging naval icebreakers bound for the North Pole. These boats, it seems, present a terrible danger to both polar bears and their adorable prey.
The story was a hit with Popular Anarchist readers and my editors were keen for a follow-up with Luntz on her newest venture. For five weeks of embedded reporting, I was promised the cover and an eight-page spread.
Does this seem like a lot to go through for top billing in a niche magazine? Perhaps. But let me assure you, Popular Anarchist is the premier journal for radical discourse. It’s a thoughtful publication. No syndicalist screeds or dirty bomb recipes to be found in its pages. Rather, it promotes a more moderate approach for smashing the state.
So this is kind of a big break for me. Especially because—I’ll be the first to admit—I am not a very good reporter. I have a tendency to sacrifice accuracy for style. I’d rather write something that sounds good than something that’s true. I never lie. But I do embellish. For example, whenever I am writing about a group of people coming together for any purpose, I always like to say, “a crowd gathered,” no matter how many people there really were, crowd-like or not.
I hope you can see then why I might want to keep a record of these events separate from my work. It’s a matter of clarity and veracity.
From the notebook of Captain C.J. Wyle, February 8
Around noon, a crowd gathered at the stern. Someone had spotted something. Gideon, Plymouth, and I stared out at a single blemish in the otherwise unmarred blue of the stupid endless sky. The blemish appeared to be moving toward us.
“It’s a plane,” Gideon said with the real excitement of someone who really believes he’s looking at a real airplane.
He took off his bright yellow SOSM t-shirt and waved it above his head.
I looked up at the thing, silent and encased in atmosphere. Even far away it was too small to be a plane.
“It’s only a bird,” I said. “Probably an albatross.”
“No. There’s no such thing as an albatross,” Gideon countered, still whipping his shirt around. “They’re just something Disney made up for that movie about the mice who go to Australia.”
“You’re thinking of pterodactyls,” I said. “And The Land Before Time wasn’t a Disney film. It was Spielberg.”
“Pterodactyls? No, you’re thinking of mastodons. And that’s not even the right movie anyway.”
“A mastodon doesn’t fly,” I corrected. “It’s like a woolly mammoth. There’s no way that is a mastodon.”
I pointed to the object in the sky for emphasis, but it was gone.
From the notebook of Captain C.J. Wyle, February 9
This has to be the sleepiest dog on Earth. Or at least the sleepiest dog in the Pacific Ocean. I’m watching Plymouth nap in the skinny shade of a portside fender. It’s not the rabbit-chasing-dream kind of dog nap. I’d take him for dead if not for the gentle rise and fall of his rib cage.
Has there been a change in his behavior since the storm? Before, I didn’t pay him much attention beyond the passing pat on the head. Clearly, he’s upset. But is it just the weather (too hot for so much fur), or does he sense the gravity of his circumstances?
Gideon says Plymouth is part Saint Bernard. Funny, I would have guessed beagle. It’s in the markings, not the size, Gideon insists. I insist that if Plymouth is a Saint Bernard, he ought to do a better job of rescuing us and bringing me tiny barrels of brandy while we wait.
In the evenings, Plymouth wakes up and sticks his head through the guardrails, barking from time to time at something below us neither Gideon or I can see. Phantom sea-mailmen? I have suspicions otherwise and it makes the hair on the back of my neck rise like the first touch from something deep-water-cold and deliberate.
From the notebook of Captain C.J. Wyle, February 14
I have come to suspect two things about Gideon. First, I suspect that Gideon is not his real name. It’s a terribly inappropriate handle for someone so gawky, so freckled, so sullen. Even when he was in the womb, his parents must have known better. I broached this subject delicately this morning while we were sunning ourselves topside, or as he likes to call it, “Keeping lookout for rescue parties.”
“Was Plymouth always called Plymouth?” I asked.
Upon hearing his name, the dog moved his tongue back into his heat-addled mouth and wagged his tail.
“What do you mean?” Gideon asked.
“What I said. Has this animal, now or prior, in this state or any other, been known by a different name?”
“Yeah. When I got him from the shelter he had another name,” Gideon said.
“And you elected to change it on his behalf? Did you consult with him first?”
“He’s my dog, I can call him what I want.”
I conceded this was fair.
“Besides,” Gideon said, “some names are just stupid names.”
“Such as?”
Gideon tousled the dog’s too-long ears.
“Andrew, for one,” he said.
“That is indeed a terrible name for a dog,” I agreed.
I asked him how he’d settled on the new title instead.
“It’s from the Bible,” Gideon said. He said it the way little boys state facts they believe ought to be obvious to everyone everywhere and how could you be so dumb?
This is the other thing I suspect of Gideon, that he is not of age. What age he isn’t of, I can’t be sure. Certainly not of drinking age. Voting age, maybe. That he is not yet of shaving-regularly age doesn’t help his case. We’ve been rationing water for ten days and the best he’s managed in that time is some chin scruff.
But the point I’m trying to make is that Gideon is a very private individual. Not one to talk about his personal life. Then, who is? But I have this amazing ability—a super power if you will. It turns out, when I am trapped at sea on a trimaran for two weeks with just one other person, I can see into that person’s inner-most being.
What do I know about Gideon? Somewhere, a sunny antiseptic suburb is missing a punk kid. A black-jeans-wearing, Dead-Kennedys-listening, establishment-dissing, animal rights-espousing cliché with a skateboard.
Too much of a boy for the pirating life. But oh, these “oceanic activists,” they’ll take anyone with a student ID card, slap a life jacket on them, and call them an “intern.” When I first came to this conclusion, I was horrified for Gideon, taken advantage of like that.
“Do your parents know where you are?” I asked.
“No one knows where I am!” he shouted.
From the notebook of Captain C.J. Wyle, February 15
A trimaran, in case you don’t know, is a kind of sailboat with three hulls. There’s one big hull in the middle where all the stuff goes—the rooms, the pipes, the wires, the food, the maps, the spoons, the salad forks, the people, etc. On either side are two smaller hulls. They are like