RUNNING
Time trickles, surges, crawls by. It never stops. No matter the fetter, time presses on. No one knows the relative value of the a.m. and the p.m. like the nighttime worker, like the early riser. Waking from deep sleep at 7:30 p.m. as the evening shadows crawl and the air is sweet and warm. A day’s work beginning at 2:30 a.m. The deep hours of the night, the murky expanses of the true dark are mysterious to many people, to children, to some adults. Maybe not the college student or the night owl, but their romance with these lean hours is often wrapped up in self-involvement and/or intoxication.
Three hours after midnight poses a sort of unworn quality to the waking, a freshness of disposition. 4 p.m. is a tired worn hour, noon a trite and old companion but 3 a.m., as sober as sober can be magical. Transformative. And to be running on the Norsel from south to north, north to south, the engine purring, lulling, sedating. And to be pulled, a heavy fish, as it were, from the depths of sleep, lifted the entanglement of vivid dreams and lashes fluttering and dull waking eyes sweeping the dim rafters of the fo’c’sle to the sound of your name: “Julia, it's time for your watch.”
To rise, to lurch out into the whining din of the engine room, climb the ladder and emerge, into what? What time? What weather? What time of year? What planet? Implacable blue skies and glassy water. Moody socked in heavy fog with anxious seas; Or, dark, dead of night. Blood stirring in the night by thick, black bitter coffee and nicotine’s venous quickening. To take your watch and assume responsibility of the chugging 52 foot vessel with four other souls in its belly, and to find that 3 a.m. is Celtic hour on sat radio.
And three hours of pure, unadulterated selfhood. Watching as stray photons leech into the sky. Gloaming in the east. From the first hint, the first suggestion of anything but the inside-of-a-whale darkness: a subtle negation of the night’s hegemony over your retinas. The slow rising of the light, especially subtle in days of bad weather, of mists and fog and rain, and suddenly you and your animal eyes realize that you’re witnessing the dawn, the dawn of another day in Alaska and that time slips on.
You can’t help but be changed subtly by these mornings. These mornings, and infinite other moments of the day and night and in between, I am overwhelmed by a physical sense of gratitude. Not an emotion, not a thought. Those continue on, a muted track of daily consciousness, but there is a clutching in the chest, a sort of momentary transcendence, and thoughts and hurts and excitements fall away to this physical gratitude. Here I am. This is an adventure. I am blessed.
