Paradise Park (7 page)

At first it seemed like an adventure, sails down, battens locked, all of us cooped below, but the rolling kept getting worse.
Gaia
started pitching at higher and higher angles; and, while before we’d laughed and gasped like we were on a ride, one huge slam-down ended all that roller-coaster stuff and punched the laughter right out. And our own captain, Abernathy, looked scared, and all of us started cursing. It was like a party getting ugly; you watched it happening, but it wouldn’t stop.
Gaia
was top-heavy. And we all crouched there, seven of us in life vests,
Abernathy and Sean, and Brian and Imo, Geoffrey, Rich, and me. Each of us knew that at this point a wave could knock
Gaia
so she’d roll over, and then she’d be too heavy in this surf to right herself.

I felt for my silver watch in my pocket, only this time
Gaia
was the one who was seasick, tossing and retching. We heard her straining in the tempest. She was like an old chair, and it was as if the ocean was one enormous fat person determined to sit on her. She was splintering under the weight. There was no light. All the darkness was howling. The water started coming in and seeping up, and we took turns pumping by hand, because the electric pump was dead. Abernathy and Sean were up on deck. They had ropes tied around their waists, and they were trying to unload the heavy stuff up there, and slip it off. The rest of us were down below and Brian and Imo were pumping, and Rich was swearing and Geoffrey was praying. Everyone was doing his or her thing except for me. I didn’t know what my thing was. I was just holding on to the side of my bunk, trying not to fall.

The boat rose and rose, and then it fell, and water came in on us from all sides. We were wet and shivering and the ocean drove at us. It was strange, but in the troughs, in the ravines and alleyways between the giant waves, there would be these moments of calm, because, ironically when the waves rose up on either side they sheltered us from the wind. In the seconds before the boat got swept up high again there would be still moments where you could hear and see, and you checked yourself and felt your racing heart and how cold you were. I would catch my breath and obvious yet intense ideas would occur to me. Such as: My life was shorter than I thought.

We tossed and whirled. Tilt-A-Whirl, like at carnivals, only higher, only deeper. Down we dove, and each time we swooped down lower. This was drowning. Like an underwater Ferris wheel. We were still wheeling up and around, but soon it would be our turn below. Down, down, down.

Now Geoffrey was pumping, and as he pumped, he was chanting prayers. Another wave and I knocked against him hard, and I heard him repeating like a broken record: “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.” And I thought, That isn’t right. That’s a land poem; that’s not relevant to oceans. And I wanted to yell and scream, Think of something else, damn it. Except no
one would have heard me. The rain was beating down; the wind was so loud. And then that calm moment would come right before we smashed back down; the calm inside the storm—just enough to fall back in your skin again. And I thought, But I’m still young. I thought, I haven’t done anything—besides internships and getting thrown out of school and that one trip cross country, which was a sham; I was just along for the ride; he didn’t love me. I thought, Please, please, please, there’s so much I could do workwise. For the earth, or for women, or for peace. I haven’t even had a chance hardly. Please. If I’d known it was going to be like this, I wouldn’t have wasted so much time.

S
OMEWHERE
in the night the in-between times got a little longer. The waves dropped back, and then calmed down, and quieted. When the light came up over the water, the sky was clearing. We lifted up our heads and looked. The cabin was all wet; our stuff was sopping, but Abernathy had the pump running again. To tell the truth, in the height of the storm he’d saved us by pushing all the oceanographic gear over the side.

On deck the sun came up and warmed and dried us and turned the whole world gold. The water was so calm it was thin, almost transparent. Then almost green. We wrung out our clothes. We opened up the logbooks in the sun to dry. I sat and stared at Grandpa Irving’s lucky watch and I looked around the boat where we were huddled up, and I thought, Here we are with our lives.

Find a Pearl

T
HE
noise was a shock. The cars, and the car horns, and the buses, and the pedestrians scurrying around to get out of the way. Honolulu was riddled with people. My ears were ringing; my eyes were tired from looking up and down and everywhere. All those colors and all those trees. What was I still doing here? I kept wondering. Wasn’t I supposed to be lost at sea? I should have been dragged under the boat! Who, at the last minute, reached out and saved me? Nobody. Only good luck. Could that be? I couldn’t sleep, I was so jangled. There I was, safe—yet not sound, way too confused to be sound. At night the streetlights shone through my window from University Avenue. My brain was flooded with that milky imitation night you get in cities.

The worst of it was realizing: if I had died, nobody—except maybe Corinne—would have even cared. If I’d drowned, nobody would have noticed! Especially since my closest friends would have drowned with me. And now, the irony was, having almost drowned together, the whole experience was driving our little group apart. Rich and Geoffrey were back in the department crunching numbers from the trip, and they didn’t want my help, they made that clear. Brian and Imo were not exactly available. They were obsessed with showing the university and
their granting agencies they had done nothing wrong. The two of them were sweating it, since it turned out some of the equipment Abernathy had to toss over the side was not officially supposed to be on
Gaia
in the first place. They swore about three hundred times that they had no idea he’d been overloading
Gaia.
They’d been completely unaware that he was sailing her unsafely. And I thought, Wow, slandering their own friend and colleague! I even came to Brian and asked him how he could say things like that. And he put his feet on his desk and leaned back in his chair and totally evaded the issue. He looked at me over the tops of his leather sandals and he basically said, “Sharon, this ain’t any of your business.” None of it was my business anymore. Not the boobies, not the research, not the data analysis, not the storm at sea.

The fall semester was starting. Brian was teaching and writing up results with Imo, and no one even thought to ask me to help. I caught Brian in Spaulding where he was picking up his mail. There he was, coming from class, all dressed up, wearing a shirt.

“Sharon.” He stood there by the mailboxes holding his letters.

“I feel like I’ve been dismissed,” I told him.

“Why?”

“Because on the islands—I mean, I worked out there and I lived out there—I
lived
this whole bird study and now it’s like my contribution didn’t even exist.”

“Your contribution did exist,” he said.

“Not if I’m not helping with the paper! Not if I’m not part of the journal article! I thought I was working alongside all of you. I thought I was on the team. And now I’m not even going to get any kind of acknowledgment!”

“Oh, no, we’ll definitely include you in the acknowledgments,” Brian said.

“You mean down at the bottom? In a paragraph at the end? Brian, I was on the
team.
I want to be an author.”

“An author of the journal article,” Brian said.

“Yes!”

“Sharon,” Brian told me, “you are an unregistered, unfunded, unaffiliated—”

“So what?” I said. “What does that have to do with anything? That’s nomenclature.”

“Sharon, look …”

“What?”

He pulled me out into the hall. “Come on, this whole conversation—”

“What?”

“Sharon, that’s just not how journal articles work. You were an intern, you had a great experience, and you learned a lot over there on the count. But you know that was all that was going on there. And this thing about authorship—full authorship—it’s just not done in our community.”

“What community?”

“The scientific community. The community of Pacific ornithologists. I think if you just sit down and—”

“Brian, I think you’re full of shit,” I said. “And you’re talking about all these protocols and affiliations, but you know that on Tonic there was equality, almost the whole time. You know I was working with you. I was living with you guys. Smoking with you. Observing with you. Practically getting drowned with you!
That
was full participation in the study, okay? That was the reality of the whole trip, and that’s what you’re betraying now.”

Then he just sighed and he looked at me like he was trying to be really patient, and like he was full of regret, since it was his own fault I’d ever stepped aboard
Gaia
and come along and got into his work, and he said, “Sharon—”

But I turned away.

“Sharon, you don’t need a publication. What you need is to go back to school and turn on your brain and get an education.”

I whirled around. “But that’s what I’ve been doing. That’s what I’ve been doing all this time! What do you think I was doing in French Frigate Shoals? I was working my ass off
learning.
And I’m asking for some credit for it!”

“Well, it doesn’t work that way,” he said.

W
OUNDED
and resentful—sure I’d never speak to Brian again—I limped back to my splintery old room at the Y and tucked my head under my wing. I lay there on my bed with the shades down, just trying to process all I’d been through. Just sitting in the shadows, trying to create a little darkroom for my soul.

I had my guitar back from Corinne, and my fingers tried to make music, but they were stiff and out of practice. They still had their positions and their chords inside of them, but they were like old-lady fingers trying to get where they were supposed to go. So I wrote some sad, slow songs about the sea and stars falling down. I put down the lyrics in my notebook, but then I ripped out the pages and crumpled them up. None of the songs was doing what I wanted. I was trying to capture how big the whole universe was around this earth. And how the earth seems so real but is really nothing more than sand in the hourglass, and how hope and love are dashed to pieces in an instant. But I wanted to say all this in new fresh ways; that was the problem.

If I could have afforded it I probably would have nursed my wounds for longer, but I was out of cash again. I didn’t have the heart to work at the university anymore and see all those people from zoology. I couldn’t stand that anymore: academia. I couldn’t stand Honolulu. The place was such a scam. You got there, and you were so excited, and the sky was shining; the beaches were pure white sand; the streets lined with glossy trees. And then it turned out the only thing anyone cared about was rules and regulations. You needed cash and affiliations. If I’d kept my return ticket, I would have been on the next plane. As it was, I couldn’t afford breakfast cereal, let alone a ticket out of there. I remember actually sitting down and writing a letter to my dad.