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| Photo by Todd Quackenbush image courtesy of unsplash.com |
Crossing the earth’s largest ocean on foot was not the smartest thing I’ve ever tried to do. I don’t sink, and I don’t need food or water or shelter; I figured it would just take time, and like I said before I’ve got plenty of that. There were unexpected complications.
I figured my best bet was to get to somewhere on the west coast that I recognized, and head straight west. Sooner or later I’d get to Asia and the old world, which was as far from what I’d known growing up as I could think.
I came down out of what had to be the Sierra Nevada in early spring of the year after I’d started wandering. I’d wandered roughly back south the same way I’d gone north, sticking mostly to the mountains because they were more interesting. The days were as long as ever, and I kept heading west, and at night I tired sitting wherever I could be alone, and thinking of nothing like I had out on the ice in the winter. Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes not. I was mostly moving through woods and occasional small towns, so there weren’t as many people as I’d expected there to be. Some large fruit orchards. I don’t think I was moving as fast back then as I can now, so my best time over easy country was probably forty or fifty miles a day. I was taking it easy, but my days are long. Shortly after sunrise on the third day I was coming back down from the last low hills and I saw the water. I didn’t stop to look around, there wasn’t any real ceremony to the start of my journey. There was very little commotion at the water’s edge, few birds and small waves, too early for bathers. Before sunset I was far enough out to have lost sight of land.
It’s a boring thing to dwell on, but the pacific ocean is big. By that time I’d probably covered between five and six thousand miles of earth and water, going up north and then coming back down. It had taken me, the time spent sitting out on the ice excepted, all of the fall and winter and a fair portion of spring to cover that ground. Six thousand miles is about three-quarters of the average width of the pacific. I didn’t know this setting out, but I know about it now.
It would be a long and very repetitive story to tell you all about my journey across the ocean, so I’ll try and sketch out some of the problems I encountered.
First and foremost was time. Like I’ve said before, I’ve got plenty of it. An afternoon for me can last for what seems like dozens of hours or longer. Mostly this has worked to my advantage since I decided to walk around, it usually means I can cover a lot of ground, or water I guess, before losing the light of a single day.
Not long after I got out on the water however I realized that it was going to be a problem for me. I think I mentioned before that time speeds up to almost normal speed for me only when I’m around people. What I hadn’t thought of before starting this walk across the sea was that the opposite might also be true. It doesn’t really make any sense, because I was surely plenty far from most people when I was out on the ice over the long night of the winter. So maybe it wasn’t because I was far away from people, I really don’t know. But as slow as my days usually go, out there on the pacific they seemed to slow to a halt.
Mornings were easiest. My natural sense of direction isn’t a strong one, but I knew I was heading west, so I just had to keep the rising sun at my back and press onward. I would generally stop to sit and rest four or five times before the sun really started to climb up. I suppose for me personally this was something like a couple of days, maybe three or four, just before I got to noon. Afternoons weren’t much worse, because I had the sun to guide me. It glared into my eyes until I would pull my shirt up to cover my face, especially during what seemed like the last few days of the real day, and it was burning down just over the horizon. Sometimes I put my shirt over my eyes and left it there until twilight came. Sometimes the ocean was choppy and I got a break when the sun was behind waves. I often walked backward, though that made me tired. It was a pain, but at least I was oriented.
Noon and night were the worst, and of these noon was the utmost ordeal. During the nights I would generally keep moving into twilight without pausing for rest until I lost my sure sense of east and west, and I would sit down on the water and try to meditate. But I just had too much time for it, and I kept getting impatient. The sky was huge and bright and interesting, but after a while I would forget to see it. Often during the day I would long for the cool dark and the sight of the stars, because it was less monotonous than the endless endless blue of the flat warm meandering days, but when the sky rolled finally around it didn’t really have any savor, either. I guess I was critically under-stimulated. Thinking about nothing was next to impossible, I felt so restless in my imagination, and what’s worse the struggle to clear my mind had no charge to it at the time. It wasn’t satisfying when I could manage to think of nothing, it was just nothing. I think it was probably during the long thoughts of the night that I started to see the real dangers I was skirting on the journey, but I couldn’t see a way around them other than to go back. If there was anything to me more hateful than the bland boredom and endless drudgery of my chosen task, it was the thought of not seeing it through now that I’d started.
The problem with noon, apart from the navigational issues I mentioned above, is that it was always somehow the longest part of the day. Every time the sun neared its peak in the sky the day seemed to simply halt in place, as if it’d reached a kind of eternal balance at its aphelion and had no further momentum to expend. Every noon was a week long at least. There I was, a spirit moving over the face of the middle of an enormous, gently bowed and endless plane of water, and it felt exactly how I imagine solitary confinement to feel. There was nothing for it, I could not make it work. I would want to keep moving forward, but no matter how hard I tried I’d always lose confidence that I knew which way was the right way to go. At first I tried to make noon into a second period of meditation and repose, but it was no use. I would find myself getting to my feet, saying that I just needed to pace about for a moment, just to work out my energy. I felt like a droplet of rain at the end of a blade of grass in a breeze, unable to detach from whatever was holding me up and in place. Except the coolness of the image, when I conjured it, seated on the gentle waves, did nothing to relax my jittery brain. So I would walk.
I was certain then and I’m certain now that so long as I walked at noon I walked in circles. Day after day I would lose hours upon hours of time in useless pacing about. An image formed in my mind of a humongous mandala, traced on the curved outer wall of the planet itself, visible from space if I weren’t a ghost and if anyone were looking, of long graceful intricately curving and cross-curving lines lovingly formed entirely out of my not knowing where the hell I was. Eventually I got to thinking that there could be no real harm in my pacing about during the endless noons; mornings and afternoons, and even the two twilit periods bracing the day, were much longer in sum than just the peak of the day could possibly be. And so long as I was moving in the right direction at those times, I figured I could get lost as often and as thoroughly as I pleased without getting too badly off course. I thought of a fly buzzing this way and that as it crosses a room. It traces wide loops, even seems to backtrack sometimes, but its overall momentum is still all in one direction. Eventually it still crosses the room. Somehow the comparison did not comfort me.
But what was the worst that could happen? I couldn’t starve, I didn’t get thirsty. If I got lost on the water, when I found the shore it might take me longer than I’d planned to move on to the next step.
What was the next step. I didn’t like to think of it, I just kept walking, and the sun kept not moving anywhere in the sky.
What was the worst that could happen. I had to find the shore sometime. I had to.
Eventually I would see that I wasn’t mistaken, the sun had finally, finally started to sink again towards the horizon, and although feeling worn out and burnt up with anxieties I didn’t really fully understand I would take off like a shot, often jogging out of enthusiasm towards the distant horizon, following that imaginary line down the big blue bowl overhead, into the imaginary west.
But the next day it would seem like the sun stayed up higher when it got to the top, and stayed there longer than ever.
It wasn’t all bad. The thing that had troubled me the most in the planning phase, that is in those last few days on land after I got the idea to set out and before I saw the sea, was the idea of tropical storms. I didn’t think I could drown, and I’d never really suffered seasickness, but somehow the idea of being alone and isolated, practically naked against all the famous humongousness of the elements, was so deeply unsettling that I refused to dwell on it. In the end the worry hadn’t kept me on shore, so I must have had some idea of how I would cope, unless maybe I thought I would be lucky and not see one.
It was a long time before the first storm found me, looming calmly up above the horizon in a darkened grey wall of utter doom, and before it broke I spent a while trying to see if I could somehow get around it by walking faster than I normally did. The anticipation, as usual, was the worst part. The elements themselves, when I found their measure, were actually strangely fun. There was a lot of rain and wind; the latter didn’t effect me at all, and to this day I’m not sure if the former passed straight through me or not. I certainly got wet through, but that just seemed to be a reflection of the world around me. The ocean itself gets wetter in a big storm. Don’t ask me how this makes sense, just walk out there sometime if you can and you’ll see what I mean. The spray was a pleasant enough change from the eternal stagnant surface of the sea I’d cherished up a hatred of on what seemed like countless scorching middle-days. But it was the swells that I liked the most, probably for the same reason that when I’m on land I tend to favor mountains. They were never quite big enough for me. I suppose the biggest I saw were only twenty or so feet from base to peak, and of course when you take a moment to look around you realize that big waves are always much longer and wider than they are tall. But the miraculous thing, as it seemed to me at the time, was that the storms, no matter how violent, had no effect whatsoever on the rate at which I experienced time. Everything unfolded in unyielding slow-motion, even the drops of rain seemed to tumble down like long thin pieces of grey light, needling shards from some strange flowering tree invisible in the darkening sky above. The time I remember most vividly was during my third or fourth big storm, weeks and weeks into my journey. I had experimented with finding the place where the swells were greatest and meditating there, and it had been pleasant if futile to submit to tranquility and attempted non-existence among so much marvelous energy. If escaping distraction is a key to getting nirvana done, sitting where you’re rising and falling like a low-powered watery elevator is probably not the best first step, but it was a cool idea. Inevitably I would usually give up and just stare, still seated, all around me, at the jutting and slowly sliding angles of the great deep green waters. But this particular occasion I found the greatest waves, and among them one which seemed a prodigious monster, at least twenty feet if not twenty five. I was about to sit down when I noticed that it was peaking below my feet and traveling onward at about the rate that I was able to walk, albeit briskly. If I kept up my movement with the wave, I could stay at its top for as long as it lasted. So I did that. It turned out to be still growing, and it got quicker as it got taller, until I was jogging at a fair pace. Soon I began to feel winded. I was pretty sure I couldn’t drown or suffocate, so I must not have needed to breathe with whatever imaginary remnant of a body I still had, yet there I was with a stitch in my side, struggling to keep up with a wall of water. Yet I kept going. It wore me out, but it was the closest I got to actual meditation I think during the whole of that long journey. I rode it through the heart of the storm until it collapsed. The storm was dying down by then, and it was getting dark. I normally stay up if I can help it when I rest, and I rarely sleep for various reasons, but that time I was so worn out and happy with exhilaration and exhaustion that I forgot that I don’t like sleeping, and laid down and slept anyway. I did not dream, and when I woke up I felt better than I had in a while.
I kept walking, and it took forever. It’s a lousy story that basically goes “I got so bored that I almost forgot how to walk,” but that’s basically how this story goes. There were days when I got so stir crazy under the noonday sun that even sitting and thinking of riding the big wave didn’t help much to calm me down, and when that happened I walked about as much as I liked. There are long patches of time that I don’t really remember, and I think I was sort of crazy for that time. I’m not troubled much by that now, I think it was part of what I went out there looking for. It wasn’t the first time it had happened to me after all. But most times, after that big storm, I was able to remember riding the wave and that calmed me down.
The last few days of the journey I started to see lights in the sky at night on the horizon ahead, and I was more afraid than ever. What would I do? The ocean seemed safe to me now, so huge and familiar. I knew what I was like while I was trying to cross it. I have absolutely no idea how long it took me to get across, it must have been months of real time, so year on weary year of my own, but by the time it was over I think I’d mostly forgotten what I was like doing anything other than sitting and waiting and walking.
But after worrying my way through a night and a day and most of a second night’s thinking, I realized that I had to move onward, or go back. And by that time if there was anything in the world that I hated more than the long horrible wonderful journey I’d made part of myself, it was the idea of having ever, ever to do it again.
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