escape from limbo

Puttering in the kitchen, preparing a late lunch, my mother brings up Beth, the baby doll she found in the back of my closet.

“I slept with the baby last night.”
“What?”
“I slept with the–”
“No, I heard you. I heard you. What I meant was, Why?”
“I don’t know, it just looked uncomfortable. In the morning I sat it back up. The eyes open when you sit it up.”
“…”
“Its hair kind of reminds me of those women, you know, in World War II, who sleep with the enemy soldiers and then get dragged off and shaved once the other side retreats. A few months later, when it’s growing back in.”
“Is that why you like it so much?”
“Not really. Just an observation.”
“I think I’m the one who cut its hair. I don’t remember, but I must have, when I was little.”
“Aah. Yeah. It seemed like it couldn’t have come that way, when I was washing it. Like straw. I thought about using conditioner, but then I thought that might not do much.”
“Conditioner?”
“You know, because it’s not real hair.”
“You do realize that if someone else were doing these things, it would be like, a classic sign of some sort of psychotic break, right? You see that, don’t you?”
“Huh. That hadn’t occurred to me. But I suppose you’re right.”
“It’s only because it’s you that I’m not freaking out.”
“Yeah. I think with me you probably need to start worrying when I stop doing things like this. When I refuse to bathe the baby doll I found and put it to sleep, that’s when you need to call the doctor.”

Internet, the peace and quiet of the ship is no longer.

As predicted, I’ve had to hit the ground running here in Seoul. Since Saturday night there have been meals and drinks and discussions and babies and outings and fights and a little boy who really really really wanted me to draw him a triceratops (I did) and peaches, lots and lots of peaches, and not enough sleep, not quite. So, for now, just photos. Lots of them. Some with captions, some without.

Hanjin Copenhagen Exterior:

Hanjin Copenhagen Interior:

Hanjin Copenhagen Engine Room:

Hanjin Copenhagen Filipino Karaoke:

Hanjin Copenhagen Disembarkation:

My mother does this thing sometimes. All the time. Matthew, actually, put it very succinctly: “Boss Lady is always solving; she even solves solutions.”

We had a solution to my getting from Busan to Seoul, we really did. I even wrote about it on this very blog: my cousin was going to pick me up, and I was going to owe her big. There were a lot of reasons for this particular solution, chief among them the fact that I had around two hundred and fifty literal pounds of luggage. No passenger plane would allow this without some sort of blood offering, as I explained to my mother weeks ago, and there was no human way for me to wrangle it all onto a train. Hiring a car would have cost a ridiculous amount. And so we solved this actual problem, with my cousin’s help. Done.

Only my mother, while I was spending my last night on the ship, continued solving. To try and make things easier, faster, better.

Long story short, my mother’s non-solution (“i called the port agent and he says he’ll drive you to the airport, so just fly! pay to fly all your books home with you! how much can it possibly be? [answer: Too Much] it’s quicker! and Taehee can sleep in! so I told her she didn’t need to go anymore! and now she’s asleep, because it’s two a.m.! huzzah!”) of the established solution led to several hours of yelling on the phone in my cabin, then a lot of scrambling, then me figuring out a way to get myself and my books halfway up the peninsula without landing us in the poorhouse too prematurely. (We are headed there, certainly, eventually, but my hope is to prolong the process as much as possible: a gentle descent, as it were, rather than a plummet. I’m all about extravagance [see: ocean voyage], but only when I feel like what you’re buying has some sort of value, i.e. Continuous Horizons and Filipino Karaoke [pictures soon].) And I succeeded. I solved the non-solution. I found a cheap way to freight three of my bags home (the biggest was too heavy for the freight company to accept), decided a single stupidly heavy bag probably was humanly possible to wrangle, and took the train.

It was hectic, and I very nearly disjointed my shoulder dragging this one stupid, idiotic, ridiculous bag out of Seoul Station to the taxi stand, but I got home.

So it all worked out, and one kind of lovely result was that a very old and loquacious man sat with me for a significant portion of my three-hour wait in Busan station, and, delighted to find that I spoke Korean, told me he liked my face, and that he would love to have a daughter-in-law like me. He was very disappointed to hear that I have a boyfriend (a lie, but my general rule is always to say Yes, when asked this question by a stranger), but still told me all about his son, who went to a four-year university and has a very stable job as a locksmith and owns a 1,500 square foot apartment. He was going to be a boxer, see, and he was good, very good, but in his third year of college he broke his ribs in a fight, and so he never did get to compete at the international level. But that was just his pal-ja. His destiny; his fate.

Not unlike how it was just my palja to be born to a mother who is always solving solutions. A mother whose brilliance, when it comes to certain strictly defined areas of life and study, knows no match, but one who also does things like this:

This is what I saw when I walked in to the apartment after my twelve-hour sojourn from boat to domicile. It is every piece of bedding I have ever owned, starting in childhood, all freshly washed and dried (air-dried, on racks, one at a time, because she never uses the dryer, no one knows why) and folded, then laid out around the living room floor in neat stacks so that I can look at them all at once and choose which set I’d like to use on my bed. Solution. To the nonexistent problem of bedding-choice. As for that doll, yes, that one, the one in the foreground of the photo, the one that’s not surprising or strange at all —  it is a doll I used to carry around twenty-odd years ago. She found this doll in the back of my closet while executing Solution #1 and felt sorry for it, as it had been stuck back there in the dark for so long. So she took it, cleaned it, carefully wiping its various surfaces with a soft cloth, and then washed and ironed its dress and undergarments, then set it out so it could breathe a little.

Solution. To the problem of doll-sadness.

I believe this doll’s name, if I remember correctly, is Beth. I don’t remember cutting off all of Beth’s hair like that, but I don’t think there’s any denying that I must, at some point and for some reason, have done precisely that.

There’s also no denying that in a certain light, these are the borderline-heartbreaking actions/solutions of a crazy person. I think if someone else had done these things, I would likely be moved and alarmed. Because it’s my mom, though, and this is just how things go, how they’ve always gone, more or less, my reaction was pretty much: ‘Oh, mom.‘  Sitcom-style.

It’s going to be an interesting year.

Just had my peace-out meeting with The Captain, settling up my bill for the ‘slop chest’ (12 2-Liter bottles of water “without gas,” 2 12-can cases of Sprite, and 2 bottles of Cutty Sark whiskey, all totaling less than forty dollars, because this is the ocean, and the ocean is tax-free!) and figuring out more precisely how this whole disembarking thing is going to go. It seems we will be docking around midnight, and that the customs official will likely come on board soon after that, around 1 or 2 a.m. So then I will be granted entry, and then I will go back to my cabin and go to bed, and actually do my entering tomorrow when my ride gets here.

– break –

Just ate my final on-board lunch (just one more dinner and one more breakfast now), which was fish and potato salad and this tomato thing that was pretty good. I haven’t really described the meal process itself yet, have I? I think I just noted the rigidity of their timing.

So what happens is I show up, three times a day, and walk into the officer’s mess — a smallish greenish room with three round tables in it, each with four chairs. There are six people who eat in this room, myself included, and we each have a designated seat. The Captain (short, German, mustachioed, gruff), the Chief Mate (a.k.a. The Polish Giant), and the Chief Engineer (kindly Polish screamer of engine explanations) sit at the farthest table (from the door); the Third Mate (Felix the German unicorn) and the Second Engineer (misanthropic Polish complainer-about-the-food) sit together at the table closest to the buffet; and I sit, alone, at the table closest to the door, the table presumably reserved for passengers.

This seating arrangement is not nearly as awkward/exclusive as it may sound. Despite the fact that we are being served the same meal, it’s pretty much every man for himself, regardless of the seat. People just show up sometime during the designated half-hour window, sit, inhale their food, and then leave. Any given moment sees a different constellation of diners in the room. So sometimes it’s just me in there, and sometimes it’s me and one, two, three, or four other people. (I don’t think all six of us have ever eaten at the same time, beginning to end. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve only seen The Giant in there once, in fourteen days — so over the course of almost fifty meals, we have overlapped once.) And, perhaps strangest of all, even when the room has 2+ people in it, and even when these 2+ people are seated at the same table, they very very rarely speak. Sometimes The Chief yells something rapid and Polish at his Second, who, remember, sits at the other table, and they have a brief yell-exchange, but that’s it. So yeah. My last 40+ meals, all of them, have been eaten in silence. Companionable silence, but silence. In the company of one-to-four seamen, also silently eating.

Of course, this whole time, the Steward, who told me a few nights ago, drunkenly, all about “The Seaman’s Life,” moves quietly and courteously through and around the room in his white smock-type garment, informing us of what is being served that day and bringing us things and taking them away.

Also, sometimes there is ice cream for dessert, and sometimes the Captain eats it. With whipped cream from a can. Managing to be both silent and gruff at the same time.

I love these meals.

– break –

Also also, have I mentioned that these men all refer to themselves as ‘seamen’ with great frequency?

– break –

Just got back from what may well be my final walk around the ship’s upper deck. It is, by far, the most gorgeous day of the entire crossing. The skies are clear except for a smattering of exquisitely formed cartoon-clouds, the temperature is perfect pick-your-sleeve-length, and there is serious sparkling of waves happening everywhere I look. This is what ‘gorgeous’ means, I think.

– break –

Very close to fully packed.

So, there are things I haven’t posted about, believe it or not, over the last nine days. Some because they didn’t merit it, and that’s fine, or better than fine —  but others because this mariner’s email machine is not secure. As in, the Captain has the Power to read them. And while I am almost completely certain that this particular captain would have less than zero interest in reading other people’s emails, there’s that .0000001 percent chance that he might get reeeeeeeeeaaaally bored or something. (If that has happened, Hello, Captain!) Anyway. I bring this up because some of these things that I haven’t talked about are pretty funny, if embarrassing, and my instinct is to write about them as soon as I get home. HOWever, it is also occurring to me that this might be a valuable overall metric by which to carry on this business of blogging from here on out: don’t tell the Internet anything you wouldn’t want the Captain of your cargo ship to know about.

Food for thought.

– break –

Almost home.

– break –

(Though I’m not sure yet if it actually is where my harrr is.)

Japan, today. That’s what I’m looking at, out my window and on my walks along the various decks. The northern coast of Japan — soon to become the western, as we tip our trajectory south.

There are other boats in the water now — still only big ones, like us, and always at a fairly respectable distance, but it’s a marked shift from the sense of total isolation that’s characterized the last week.

Tomorrow night we berth in Busan around midnight, and the day after that my long-suffering and spectacularly fabulous cousin, Taehee, is driving the four or five hours from Seoul to come pick me up. It’s a big favor, and I suspect it means that she pretty much gets to be the boss of me forever. And ever.

I find I am a little sad at the thought of all this coming to a close, though I am certainly happy about getting home and seeing my mom and  beginning my lifetime of servitude under Taehee. I’m going to hug people and talktalktalk and haul my four hundred pounds of luggage (=books) up the stairs of our apartment building. Then I’m going to shower in a shower that doesn’t move so damn much and maybe hug people all over again, less stinky hugs, and then I will eat home food, mom food. God, I forgot about the mom food. That alone is really making me feel less sad already. And then I’m going to plug back into the Internet, Internet. Plug back into you, as it were. That will be nice. I really wanted to look up Bruce Willis’s filmography the other day, and couldn’t. That was rough.

So I am happy about getting home. That’s established. My only regret is that I think I still have more ocean days in me. In fact, if we were to remove the ever-present threat of karaoke from the equation (I try, I do, and it’s all very stimulating, but it does kind of stress me out a bit), I’m certain I could do quite a few more weeks without any real complaint.

I wonder if it’s a sign of how gradual/incremental the pace of this trip has been that I’m working through all this already when I’m still two full days from actually being done. Perhaps, perhaps.

I wonder if this means I should really try and save up and plan and do it, the three-month round-the-world voyage.

I wonder if I should maybe sleep on that one a few more times, possibly on dry land, before making any big decisions. It could be that I am just suffering from anticipated-nostalgia, which happens oftener than I like to own up to.

Yeah. That sounds right. Sleep.

A long one, because I’m starting to think the kilobyte limit might be lies and want to test it.

Well, the Polish Giant, a.k.a. stern but gentle Keeper of the Bridge from several posts ago, is now everywhere. Which is totally in keeping with how the universe works. You hear about a thing for a while but don’t see it, and you start to think, where is this thing that people talk about so much? How come I never see the thing? Is the thing avoiding me? And then you see the thing once, at long last, and you’re like, I saw the thing! I saw the thing! And then after that the thing is everywhere you go. You can’t get away from the thing. Not that you would want to, necessarily.

That is the Polish Giant Situation.

It’s kind of comforting to know that certain rules of human existence still work pretty much the same even in the middle of the ocean. Though, actually, we are past the middle now. In fact, I’m pretty sure we are approaching Japanese waters. Just two or three more days until we dock in Busan, and then a possible additional night of sleeping on board while in port, until the customs officials come on board to sort me out and authorize my entry into the land of the morning calm.

I wonder what that will be like.

One of the most remarkable things about this whole experience so far is how human it’s been. Beginning with the officials/workers at the Port of Portland, everyone/thing has been relentlessly nice and reasonable. For example, when I first got on board, the Third Mate, a young blonde German man named Felix, came to find me and get my passport for the captain (I think I mentioned this). When I asked if he would also like to take my ticket, he just thought about it for a moment, then said, Okay, Maybe the captain will want that also.

I think I am failing to capture the utter ease of this interaction, and it’s certainly possible that the strength of my reaction is just a testament to how many soulless, dehumanizing, and infuriating ticketing/immigration situations I’ve had to deal with in the past, but the fact remains that this Blew. My. Mind. The combination of logic and independent thought, this willingness to casually take on the responsibility of moving a potentially crucial piece of paper from point A to point B without having been specifically told to do so by a higher-up– just, the utter lack of bureaucratic affect/posturing– all made manifest in a be-sneakered youngster with a sheepish smile– it felt like I was seeing a unicorn. A unicorn I kind of wanted to kiss on the mouth.

The whole voyage has been like this. Unicorns everywhere. For example, the access I’ve been given to the ship at large is totally unprecedented in my experience, travel-related and otherwise, and it all works in the same easygoing, reasonable way. Want to go walk around the deck and maybe sit in weird places to read for a while? Go for it. Can’t find a hard hat for the hard hat area? Eh, nobody really wears the hard hats anyway. Have a good time. Think you’d like to climb around and almost get your sunglasses blown off your face by the insane wind and then maybe try sidling up and down the spaces between some of the containers? Just for shits and giggles? That’s cool. Go right ahead. No, no need to report back that you’re still alive and haven’t been swept overboard or fallen off one of the countless ladder-things and broken a bone. I know it says you should, in the handbook that we gave you, I know, but between you and me, you don’t seem like a total idiot, so I’ll just trust you to not do anything totally idiotic.

I maintain that in this day and age, in any sort of situation where liability is involved, this sort of treatment is nothing short of epic.

In a similar vein, today’s main event went a little something like this: Oh, you’d like to see the engine? The fucking ENORMOUS engine that takes up a significant portion of the CAVERNOUS space that is the belly of this beast? The monolith that looks like something out of that one Alien movie, the one where they’re on the prison planet? Sure thing, how about after ‘morning coffee’? Maybe ten thirty? That’s a good time for me. To take you into this apocalyptic space of heat and steam and intense noise where I will get real close and patiently SCREAM lengthy explanations about the eighty different kinds of pumps you are looking at, scream them directly into your earmuff-protector-thing, lips on plastic, breath on neck. You will still only be able to make out one word in five, faint, distant, but you will nod and smile and mouth “Cool!” over and over. Because it is. It is fucking cool. And I will show it to you, after coffee. No big deal.

Friends, the engine was so fucking cool. And huuuuuuuge. This boat, according to the Chief Engineer, generates enough power to run “hmmm, perhaps, a medium size village.” The last boat he worked on, though, which was bigger, could have powered ”you know, a small town.”

I like this so much. So so much. The unspoken and unquestioned faith in the universality/clarity of this distinction between villages and towns of various sizes.

Another thing I like* is that this man who I just spent a truly unforgettable forty-five minutes with, touring this awesomeX2 (badass and awe-inspiring, both) space, is known to me only as the Chief Engineer, or, “The Chief.” Everyone is like this. Everyone is either The Chief, or The Captain/The Master, or The Second Mate, or The Third Engineer, or The SM (Ship’s Mechanic), or The Electrician, or The Bosun, or The Cook, or The Steward, etc. etc. I’ve picked up several given names, most from my first day, when I was still making normal introductions — Felix (third mate), Simon (steward), Patrice (SM) — but no one ever refers to/addresses anyone else by anything other than their title, so I don’t think I’ve ever used them. And because I stopped asking, many of these people who I have now spent some real time with are only known to me by their job titles.

I have one, too. A title, that is.

I am totally The Passenger.

Today, Day Seven, I find myself a part of this tiny community of titles lurching forward through the waves.
I don’t know that I will ever stop enjoying this fact.

‘Til tomorrow.

XOXO,
The Passenger

*There’s this whole moment in ChangRae Lee’s “Native Speaker” where the Korean-American main character’s white wife freaks out about this phenomenon: he doesn’t know the name of the housekeeper he grew up with, because (though she doesn’t investigate, and the husband, infuriatingly, fails to explain) in Korean this happens a lot– you address people by the title of their relationship to you rather than their actual names. The wife in the book decided it was disrespectful and dehumanizing, that he didn’t know this name. Reading the book as a teenager, I decided the wife was a small-minded, patronizing, culturally insensitive imbecile. Names aren’t what make us real to one another. Anyway, there is a culture of the ship, too, and while it’s a different situation (the ship’s language is English, with all the requisite baggage), the parallel is compelling enough for me that after some consideration, I’ve decided not to be like the white wife in “Native Speaker,” and just chill out about it. I like these people, they like me, and what we call one another is up for grabs.

I had thoughts, you know. To tell you, Internet. About the sky and the ocean and this desire to capture, to catalogue, to synthesize, this urge I’ve been struggling with for what feels like forever, but definitely more so ever since I started traveling this summer. Thoughts. Impressions. Ideas. And then, on top of that, today has been All Alice Munro, All The Time, so my head has become this very eloquent place, at least to itself; her sentences, her incredible sentences, have yet to fade completely.

But, no, it is another karaoke night. These men do not ever stop singing, ever.

I feel like my reluctance to be rude gets me into trouble sometimes. And also like maybe my definition of ‘rude’ is too broad. Bowing out of a single karaoke night might not qualify as actively rude, I think.  But they’re just so nice, and they’re so pleased, as the steward put it, that there is “a girl” on board, even though this fact of my identity is largely academic in practice. I think that’s part of it–it’s this sympathy I feel, that they are so lonely for feminine anything that I, I, with my size and my lackadaisical attitude and my ratty sweatshirt and jeans, the same jeans I have worn all week, am cause for any sort of fanfare. I feel like the least I can do, as a fellow human being, is sit and laugh and smile and drink for a few hours. Besides, who knows when, if ever, my mere presence will ever be so celebrated again? I should enjoy it while it lasts.

More importantly, who knows when, if ever, I will be granted so much time and space to really listen to and enjoy Shania Twain?

These are the questions I leave you with this evening. Get back to me.

Well, I was right. I may have been tipsy as I wrote the last post, and it may also be true, reading back, that when I am tipsy I feel the need to ‘admit’ things a lot, but I was still right. Last night definitely did become a night to remember. A night that demands remembrance, really. A night that will not stand for anything less than a commemorative plaque of some sort.

It’s too much to get into, especially via this fitful email situation, so let it just be said that there was a serious Bon Jovi singalong. Set against footage of a ridiculously, painfully sunburned man wandering around an outdoor mall of some kind, possibly in England.*

And that wasn’t even the climax.

Today has been a bit rough, largely because of yesterday, but I did make it up to The Bridge, alone, unannounced, and apropos of nothing other than what some might call a “feeling.” Once there, a large, silent Polish man (who I have never seen before, despite the fact that I have been on this ship for almost ten days now, and he must be one of the twenty-one) magnanimously allowed me to loiter a bit and prowl around outside and take photos. I liked him. A stern but gentle vibe.

So, yeah. I don’t want to brag or anything, but I’ve totally developed the “feeling,” you guys. About when I can go to The Bridge and not get pirate-shot. As is evinced by the fact that I went to The Bridge, and didn’t get pirate-shot.

The waves are incredibly strong today (my first time actually having to use the safety hand-rails that line all the hallways), though the skies are the clearest they’ve been.

Mysterious, this ocean, with all its Ways.

——

*I really want to know where they get these videos. And then I want to figure out a way to play them on loop as the background of my life.

——

ATTN: COACH! Did you not get my ocean email?

Quickly, because I have literally just ducked out of Filipino Karaoke Night Part Deux: Bananarama Strikes.

Today was good. Quiet and productive, up until a couple of hours ago, when I was press-ganged into another night of crew festivities. The electrician is wide awake tonight, and claiming that it was my rendition of “Come Together” the last time that put him to sleep. While I have managed to fend off singing requests so far, I am on my fourth Filipino beer and I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to hold out. I have been told no less than three times that ‘What happens on the ship stays on the ship.” I think this is meant to be comforting, but I must admit that it mostly just leaves me feeling a bit out of it. Like a fever dream.

Okay but anyway, the reason I snuck away to send this message in a bottle out to the Internet via lazy lazy satellite: the most amazing part of all this is the stock footage that plays in the background of the incredibly incredible (yeah, that’s right. Incredibly Incredible.) song choices these wonderful men keep making. “Final Countdown” set to koalas falling asleep and munching eucalyptus. Creed’s “Arms Wide Open” set to children riding ponies and then, suddenly and inexplicably, a man determinedly fording a creek, followed by a couple having an idyllic picnic.

I have to admit, I may have lost my cool a little when “Final Countdown” came on.

I have a feeling it’s going to be a night to remember.

Another exchange with P, the aged Chilean, who is rapidly establishing himself as the Mr. Miyagi figure of this particular voyage.

P: How is your email?
M: My email?
P: How is it?
M: It’s… fine?
P: My email take five hour. To go from Chile.
M: Oh! Yes! Mine, too! Very frustrating. But not Chile. America.
P: Yes. Yes, is Satellite Problems. What time in America?
M: Now? In Portland?
P: Yes, what time?
M: I’m not sure. What time is it here? It’s four hours from now, I think.
P: And Korea?
M: Oh, I don’t know.
P: You no emailing Korea?
M: Only a little. More emailing America.
P: Where is your harr?
M: Sorry?
P: Where is your harr?
M: I’m sorry, I don’t understand.
P (pounds his chest, his heart, hard): Your harrr. America or Korea?
M: Oh.
P (expectant, but patient): …
M: …I’m not sure.
P (laughing, wise): Aah. You do not know.
M (laughing, lost): Well, more emails to America, for now.
P (suddenly serious): For now, yes. For now.