How I Began My Sea Adventure
To begin with, I was sick.
It was probably righteous irony--before the voyage, and for the first day of motoring across Buzzards Bay in relatively calm waters, I thought I was going to be fine and was rather smug about what I'd seen in the past. Because I'd been out on whale-watches, hadn't I? And I'd come through the entire day-trip fine and smiling, and rather smug about not having imitated all the poor tourists who had been eating Dramamine and hanging over the rail. I knew that I was tougher than that.
Think again. Late in the day on Sept. 2nd, I began to feel slightly wobbly and unwell. It was the constant rolling of the deck--it wouldn't have been hard to deal with in a small, two-hour dose, but it went on and on and grew harder as the wind rose and it started to rain. That made my legs tired, shifting and staggering about in an effort to compensate. The professional crew all seemed to be balanced on gimbals, like the dinner tables, remaining perpetually in balance no matter how the ship rocked.
We were keeping watches of six hours in the daytime and four hours at night. Three watches--I was on C Watch. When they woke me for us to go on deck in the early hours of Sept. 3, I got up to the lab and couldn't quite get command of myself. The lab was in a deck-house, a little structure with portholes all round, but they were closed against the rain, so it was dark and stuffy and going up and down. The science officer tried to interest us in zooplankton as seen through a microscope, to no avail.
It was the birthday of one of the girls going off watch. "I passed out and a bunch of people threw up," she said. I'd made the mistake of drinking coffee and eating cookies before coming on deck. It was a waste of good coffee as it all went over the side.
Not to pursue a painful theme in too much depth, I lost everything I ate that day. That wouldn't have worried me--when I was younger, I would sometimes go for a day without eating, just to see if I could do it, and it never did me any harm--but I couldn't keep water down for long either, and that was really upsetting. You can be fine for a surprisingly long time without food, but not without water. I would drink it a few sips at a time and walk around on deck to make sure it would have some quality time in my stomach. As long as I was on deck, in the wind, walking about and looking at the horizon, I was fine. It was when I was in the deckhouse or below decks that I became queasy. Whenever I was off-duty, I fell into my bunk and went to sleep. Then I felt fine. When you're horizontal and in your sleeping bag, the pitching, tossing ship just feels nice, like a rocking horse.
The crew couldn't have been nicer. Whatever you were doing, they would tell you to take as much time as you needed when you were overtaken by queasiness and had to run to the leeward rail. This was fortunate, as we all had to do dawn cleanup right after the first watch when I threw up. The combination of motion sickness, Clorox smell, and having to grovel around on our knees scrubbing the linoleum below decks, was a fatal one. Everybody was green and shaky and kept dashing up the ladder.
Altogether, it was a humiliating day after all the patting myself on the back I'd done. One of my consolations was that I was fine on deck; another was that I was able to keep functioning and even be cheerful as long as my stomach was empty. Yet another was that most other students were also pretty sick, in one way or another. About the only one who didn't throw up was Arthur, a beautiful and slightly dopey youth with golden curls and a classic profile. He was nice; I complained and he sympathized with me, saying, "Well, you know, I'm the one who should really be sick right now, because I was totally asking for it. I wouldn't take Dramamine because I said, 'If puking was good enough for Melville, then it's good enough for me!'" I said shakily, "Well, I also said that puking was good enough for Melville and good enough for me, and it turns out it is!"
But it wears right off in the end. I didn't take medication. If it had continued for longer than a day, I would have, but I wanted to see if I could get over it on my own, and it turns out that I can. Everyone did. The day seemed to last a week, because I slept and woke and did watch and slept and woke and did watch and slept. By the late afternoon, my appetite had returned enough that I devoured a chocolate muffin served for the birthday girl's sake. (She said, " 'How did you spend your birthday, Roxanne?' 'Oh, I watched a bunch of people throw up. And I counted zooplankton. And I passed out. Not cause I was drunk or anything. Just cause I was retarded.' ")
Well, I lost the chocolate muffin too, but that was the last time I was sick. After that, things got slowly and steadily less grim. That was the only bad part--being afraid that it would never stop throughout the trip. When I felt it receding, I could have done a little dance, I was so happy. For myself, I got through it by walking up and down the deck to get used to the swaying, by singing under my breath (you can't use your diaphragm to sing and get the heaves at the same time) and by reciting bits of funny old horror movies and musicals in the back of my mind. There was this one Boris Karloff movie where I played the same five minutes about twenty times in the private movie theater of my head. I don't know how everybody else stayed sane, but it was good seeing people recover and start to take an interest in life again, around the same time that I did. The butter biscuit I ate for breakfast on Sept. 4th was the best biscuit I've ever eaten.
Other than that, I don't really remember much that went on during the initial Sept. 3rd. rainstorm. It rained, it blew, a bunch of us threw up everything we consumed, and we did a science station which involved taking a sample from the ocean floor and towing a net over the side to collect phytoplankton. The whole science portion of the program left me cold; on land, I would have been mildly interested, but the sailing skills we were learning were so much more engaging to me that I only wanted to spend my time learning to handle sails, steer, take bearings, plot our position and chart a course. Compared to all that, it isn't terribly exciting to stare through a microscope at a slide full of copepods (sp?), small zooplankton which look like rather gross mini-shrimp and pile up by the thousand inside a net tow. I felt like the scientist who said, "Oh, f__, not another phylum", only with us it was one damn copepod after another. Hear the one about the scientist who couldn't find the copepod? There were too many copepods in the way. Now, I wish I could work up more interest in them, because my mother is a zoologist and she's very well-informed about marine life, and I kinda want to see what she sees in it all. But the deep can keep most of its mysteries, for my part. It's good to know they're there, but I don't need to look at every single one. Also, microscopic animals haven't much personal appeal. I was kinda hoping for a squid or octopod, but no such luck, and our instruments weren't really designed to capture them, anyhow. (It would probably have died while we examined it, anyhow, so better off staying far from us.) All in all, I like macro-sized sea life, the kind you can look in the eye. More on that next time. Oh, the crab larva was cute, though. It was black, graceful, and leggy, with two luminous blue eyes that glared at us. I hope it got away safely after we put it back in the sea.