hard liquor, ugly answers

   
I know what you want and this aint it; a story of the sea, of some kind of victory, of leaving port on a good tide and making landfall some time after, with rum-eyes and a sailor’s walk. Well, not this time, not this tune.    
   
This time I took to the sea and the sea didn’t want me. Just twelve hours in, seas steep and ugly, short hard breaking waves that pitched us up up and over, gut-emptying up and overs, and by then both my crew bedridden with seasickness, or fear, or both, and so in the darkness, 100 miles off the coast, I ate my heart and turned my boat around, retuned to the port I had left, kicked the two landlubbers off the boat and took to that other song of the sailor; the long wait for a weather window.    
   
Did that part alone. Too much time alone. Had time to think on fear, to think on failure, to run my mind over the plan a thousand times. Got drunk a couple of nights, just me and the boat tied to a wharf. I began to hate the Tasman sea swells pounding hard on the breakwall beside the harbor, them sometimes playful, sometimes powerful enough to shake the ground, always worse at night. That noise became a hollow thing, a taunt, a thing full of heavy fear, until even getting drunk wouldn’t shut it out. I began to think of selling the boat, the idea bad, me not ready, luck against me. The plan to cross this ocean in dead winter seeming as foolish, as vain, as wanton as anything a man says he will do on a warm night while miles away. And still the waiting. The waiting, the days counting down just three to go now, one last chance to grab a weather window before the boat will have to stay here, stay tied here until summer, while I fly to another country to work, for the kind of money that makes boats go, and it will feel like running.  
   
Still the boat hangs here, like a dead weight on my sailor’s heart, but the weather man says wait another two days, or three, then throw your lines. By god I’ll tell you I am afraid of the sea still beating on the seawall, the boat still waiting to be tried. Why did I ever say I would do this? I don’t have an answer for that. Could be that I’m 45, could just be a mid-life thing, could just be the last song of a man who never grew beyond the need to prove and prove again, a sickness in me, the whine of the child who never got what he needed, and all the while sailors in the harbor come by to talk, to ask, to see what will happen now. All ask the same, “still gonna go?” and I straighten my back, say “yeah man, why not?”, and they nod, look over at the sea wall to where the pounding goes on and on, and the ‘why not’ is obvious, but still we talk and talk. I hate them too. I was never good at hollow talk, and worse still when mine is as bad, so don't tell them I've decided to go out alone this time, have added that now, would rather have an ending that never got written than sit here waiting for more crew to let me down. Will go alone. Of course I will. Will sink my body into that strange and restless place of no sleep and cold food, where voices call my name in the darkness and mistakes are made in every half awake hour. Ok then, alone it is.    
   
So I walk the decks drunk, tied to the land, afraid again, trying not to hear the pounding on the sea wall, and the weather man says wait two more days, just wait two more days, then throw your lines sailor, throw your lines sailor, and by god I will, even though I don’t want too, even though I don’t know why. By god I’ll go, and let this be the song that I sang, not a shanty, not stupid bravery, not even a tune of hope, just something simpler, a question that was asked and no answer given, except that it is there, that great and loveless place, and somewhere in me a sickness to go out on it and find out.    
   
Waiting is the worst part. Yes, waiting is the worst part.