Passage

It was on the third day out that they both wanted to call somebody to pick them up. I was bringing dinner up one plate at a time. Damian took his plate and made the announcement. I smiled.

‘Damian,’ I had to look up at the sky and not at him. Little puffs of cloud on a stark and clear deep blue. ‘where do you think you are? You aren’t really asking to be picked up by somebody, are you?’

He nodded and Mark, behind him, was nodding too.

I came up out of the cabin and looked around at the rise of an oncoming swell framed by an empty horizon and distant other oncoming swells with their merging of greys and greens with little sparklings of the sun reflections. I stopped smiling.

He went on, ‘Yeah, we thought maybe a helicopter or some rescue boat could come and pick us up?’ He looked back at Mark who nodded vigorously. 

I looked over the other side at the expanse of see where the swells could not be defined after passing and rolling us.

‘Look, Damian.’ I was trying to think of the right wording. I was tired. ‘We are probably about a hundred to a hundred and fifty miles from Providencia-San Andreas. We are about three hundred miles from Cartagena and about four hundred miles from Grand Cayman. Now, we could go to Providencia but we are not. We could turn around and go back to Cartagena but we are not. We could go to Grand Cayman and we are. There is nobody out here but us. This route is not a well travelled one, is it? Have you seen any ships?”

They both looked around like they hadn’t noticed that we were in the middle of the Caribbean Sea before. I felt sorry for them.

Mark spoke a little loudly over our very consistent breeze, ‘Rod, we just want to get off. This is too scary. Just, well, you know, just scary. Last night was the thing…like, every night being like that. Damian and I both feel that it is too much..’

‘I understand.’ I said, trying my best not to smirk. ‘The thing is there is no getting off out here, unless you want to take a very long swim.’ I smiled in sympathy. ‘We are almost half way there. Another four days’, I thought I said the wrong thing there. ‘ and we’ll be in Cayman, if this breeze stays steady, in less time then that. You are here now and the best way to handle it is just to take your watches, think of other things, read when off watch, look out at the beauty all about, that kind of thing, you know.’

‘But,’ Mark was on the verge of tears. ‘I just want to go home.’

I nodded, again in sympathy, ‘I understand, Mark.’ I went below and brought up the second meal, handing it to Mark. ‘Look, mate, I remember telling both of you that we would be out of sight of land in the deep blue water and you were both smiling and happy about getting away from it all like back in Cartagena. Remember that? You guys had been with the Peace Corps out in the jungle living with the people, surviving with the least amount, that kind of thing. Snakes, bugs, mossies, poison plants, mossies ( I repeated with a smile) and here all we have is a swell to contend with and a little vomiting every now and then. But, you are taking your food now, so’

Damian interrupted, ‘That’s just it. The vomiting, well, no. Maybe we both misrepresented our times in the village. Maybe it wasn’t that bad.’

‘What?’ I asked, curious about how it could not be that bad. I had been in the Columbian jungle and my experience wasn’t good. Beautiful but hot, humid, sweaty and mosquito swatting.

‘Well,’ Mark looked sideways a bit too much. ‘well, you see, it started like that, you know, real dirty and lots of mosquitoes and all. The villagers were used to it and rubbed themselves with some really stinky stuff…’

Damian interrupted, ‘It was bad. The village had shit all around in spots they just dug up and buried and sometimes animals would come and dig the shit up and roll in it and I think they ate it even. It was dirty.’

They were both steadying themselves to the rolls with shins against the lee side of the cockpit.

‘Yeah,’ Mark carried on, ‘well, I told my Dad about the shack they had for us to live in with the tarantulas and scorpions…’

Damian interrupted, ‘… and the villagers thought nothing of the flies all over the food. Well, I told my Dad about it all and he came out by helicopter to visit us. He took time off a busy schedule in Virginia to come out and see how I was doing. Amazing. He is high up in the State Department. Well, he saw how we were living and called in the calvary.’ Damian was smiling for the first time today. ‘There were some special ops training Columbians near our village and he had them build us a suitable accommodation out of a kind of instantly expanding concrete. They even put in windows. And then they gave us an improved version of our radio-telephone system so we could get music from around the world. Mark’s Dad worked in Communications at State. All that was done in, what, four days.’

I looked at Mark who was wanting to add to this story. I nodded to him and he added.

‘Yeah, well the problem was,’ he paused and they both chuckled, ‘the natives wanted to live with us.’

‘Yeah,’ Damian was shaking his head up and down, ‘it was insane. We had to..’

It was my turn to interrupt, ‘Wait, wait, you guys were there to do what exactly?’

Damian answered, ‘We were showing them how to divert water from a river to their village for planting stuff. You know, so the women wouldn’t have to carry buckets from the river to water their plants. This way they could have more stuff to eat. But, they wanted to all come in our house. Oh, but one of the special ops guys had been an engineer in real life and ran a stream right under our house so it acted like air conditioning sort of.’

‘Under your house.’ I almost asked.

‘It was on stilts like their shacks, but the guys put slits in the flooring for air flow. It was amazing, man. So, all the villagers wanted to come in our house and listen to the radio and make themselves at home. That messed up the air conditioning thing until we had to make a two person limit to visits. Remember that?’ Damian looked to Mark, who nodded and smiled.

‘Okay,’ I looked at both of them, then at the self-steering wind paddle’ tiny jerks. ‘This is the deal. You stand your watches. You eat your meals. You sleep out in the cockpit for company. You arrive in Cayman. You get off my boat.’

They both looked the same from then on and I actually mixed up their names at times before getting them off the boat as soon as Immigration left us at Georgetown, Grand Cayman.