The Wanderer

by Sharon Creech

  “Quit poking me,” Cody said.

  Their arguing roused Uncle Mo from his bunk down below. “You calling my son an idjit?” Uncle Mo demanded.

  Uncle Stew reeled around and faced Uncle Mo. “I said he sounds like an idjit half the time—”

  “So you’re calling him an idjit? And you think that wimpy son of yours is smarter than my son? Is that what you’re saying?” Then Uncle Mo started jabbing his finger at Uncle Stew.

  Uncle Stew pushed Uncle Mo. “Brian has more brains in his little toe than Cody has in his whole idjit body!”

  I think they were just about to toss a few blows when Uncle Dock intervened.

  “Knock it off,” Uncle Dock said. “There isn’t room on this boat for grown men to be acting like spoiled kids.”

  “You calling me a spoiled kid?” Uncle Mo shouted.

  “Yep,” Uncle Dock said.

  Uncle Mo sucked in a load of air and sputtered it out and turned around to Cody and said, “Why do you always have to start something?”

  “Me?” Cody said.

  “Yes, you,” Uncle Mo said. “Now get down below and start making lunch!”

  Cody just shook his head and went down below, and Uncle Mo followed him. I heard them yelling at each other for a while, and then it was quiet, and pretty soon they brought lunch up for the rest of us, and everyone sat around not looking at each other, just eating lunch and trying to forget the fight.

  This morning we saw the sun for the first time since we left Grand Manan, and it sure was a welcome sight. Sun, sun, sun! Beautiful brilliant sun! Everyone wanted to be on deck, worshiping it. It wrapped us all in the most brilliant light and warmed our faces and our bones; it dried our clothes; it flickered along the waves.

  The repair work we had to do was easier with the sun beaming down on us. We took down the mainsail, dried off the ripped grommet holes, and put strips of sticky-back sail tape around the sides of the sail to cover the holes. The sail tape wasn’t sticky enough, though, so I stitched along the sides to keep them secure.

  Brian couldn’t resist saying, “It’s a good thing we have a girl aboard so she can sew things.”

  Grrrr. Sewing sails is heavy work! The material is stiff and thick, and you have to use special needles and a palm thimble to push the needle through.

  After I stitched the sails, Cody and I punched new holes through the sailcloth and put in new brass grommets. Cody lashed some thin line through the new grommet holes to the slides, and we were done.

  In full hearing of Uncle Stew, Cody said, “Look, Sierra-Oscar. We done fixed up the hole thingys and now they’ll work on the metal thingys easy peasy.” He smiled at Uncle Stew, and before Uncle Stew could erupt, Cody said, “And, Sierra-Oscar, if you want to use fancy words, you can call these hole thingys grommets and you can call these metal thingys slides.”

  Before we raised the sail again, Cody noticed that the outhaul line (“the line thingy, but if you want to use its fancy word you should call it an outhaul line,” he said) up by the boom was chafing, so I got my bosun’s chair and harness and hooked myself up to the halyard, and Cody hauled me up. Usually I try to haul myself up, but when the waves are big, you just want to concentrate on not smashing into the mast.

  As soon as I was a couple of inches off the deck, I was flying out over the waves, swinging in my chair, while the boat tossed and turned like a runaway seesaw. You swing out over the rolling waves, and the boat rolls and the waves roll and you roll, and you are up in the air in the wind, flying along!

  I taped up the line as slowly as I could so that I’d have as much time up there as possible.

  “What’s the matter, Sophie?” Uncle Stew called. “Having trouble? Can’t do it?”

  “I’m doing just fine, Sierra-Tango-Echo-Whiskey,” I said. I was just about to add “you idjit” to that, but then I looked down on him and he looked so small below, small and rumpled and a little pitiful, so I swallowed the “idjit” part.

  Our fish count is zero. I don’t know what we’re doing wrong. I’m relieved, though. I hated killing those fish.

  But we’ve seen birds (where do they come from?) and they love the lures. Today a gull tried to make a grab for the lure but instead got tangled in the line. Cody made a dramatic rescue, pulling the bird on deck and untangling the line from around its wing and then gently placing it back in the water.

  “Bye-bye, birdie,” Cody called as it floated away.

  We also saw dolphins last night and again this morning—three of them leaping and diving, having a grand time.

  “Hello-oooo, darlings!” Cody called.

  I love to see the dolphins. I feel as if they are messengers. For me.

  This morning’s sun didn’t last long, and now there is rain, rain, more rain. We’ve also had serious fog at night, but good wind.

  Last night in the fog, when Brian and I were scanning the radar, we spotted two blips moving together about five miles northeast of us. We figured this was a tugboat pulling a barge. We then noticed another blip about three miles southeast of us, moving fast and right for us, so I went up on deck and blew the air horn, and Cody tried to call the vessel on the radio. No reply.

  It was a tense time. It’s eerie when you can’t see anything and yet the radar tells you something is near. You keep expecting to be rammed by a huge ship zooming out of the fog. My heart was pound-pound-pounding, expecting that huge something to appear any minute.

  We turned on the engine and prepared to change course if the thing got closer than two miles, but then the blip blew right past us. A little later, five more blips, but still no answer on the radio. It was scary, fearing that a big barge could plow right over you and keep going, not even knowing it had hit you.

  Uncle Stew spent a lot of time flipping through manuals, and what he concluded is that since we’d been getting cloudbursts all night, our radar was probably picking up rain clouds! We felt stupid to think that we’d been blowing our horn at rain clouds and trying to call them on the radio.

  Morale seems okay among the boat family today, but we don’t get enough sleep. I think the reason we seem so tired—beyond not getting unbroken stretches of sleep—is that every thing we do, even the simplest of actions, requires such effort. Just walking a few steps is a major production. It’s like rock climbing, where you have to plot where each hand and each foot is going to go before you can actually move.

  I walk at the pace of a ninety-year-old woman or someone with broken legs. You have to brace yourself at every wave and be prepared for the shock of slamming into a wall. You can’t stand freely for more than a few seconds without losing your balance from the motion of the boat.

  Cooking is difficult because even though the stove is on a gimbal, which rocks around with the boat to keep the surface level, everything else flies around, spills, falls off shelves, and generally makes a mess.

  When you eat, you can’t ever let go of your plate, and you can’t drink while you eat because then you’d have to put something down, and you don’t have enough hands.

  Sleeping is another challenge. You keep odd hours; there’s always lots of noise (things clanging about, people bumping into things, sails flapping, people talking); you sleep in a different bed every time (whichever one is empty); and there’s always the threat of rolling out of your bed and having things fly off shelves and onto your head, or having a leak appear over your sleeping bag.

  But still, in spite of all that, I like living on a boat. I like being this whole self-contained unit that can charge across the ocean with the wind.

  Last night, in my fitful sleep, I dreamed my recurring dream, the one with The Wave. It rose up so high, towering higher, higher, a huge black wall of water, and then it curled at the top and I was a little blot beneath it and down turned The Wave and I woke up with my mouth wide open, ready to scream.

  I hate that dream.

  CHAPTER 30

  KNOTS

  Learned an end-knot from Sierra-Oscar (Sophie) today. Easy! Yo
u put these little knots at the ends of the lines so they don’t slip through the hole thingys and go flapping out in the water.

  When I asked Sophie where she’d learned all these knots, she got this look that she sometimes gets when you ask her questions. She gazes out across the water, as if the answer might be there on the horizon. “I dunno,” she said. She looked down at the rope between her fingers. “Maybe someone showed me a long time ago.”

  Got the radio code memorized. Beat Mr. Know-it-all to it. Huh, huh, huh.

  Both sun and dolphins joined us today, so it was a fine day. You can’t beat sun and dolphins. Even my father came up on deck to watch the dolphins. He said, “Makes you wish you were a fish, doesn’t it?”

  First time we’ve agreed on anything in a long, long time. You look at those dolphins and they seem so carefree. Nobody’s scolding them for doing things wrong. They’re just enjoying the water and their flips into the air.

  While Dad was up on deck, he saw the drawings I’d made of a clove hitch and an end-knot. “Hey,” he said, “when did you learn how to draw?”

  I could either take that as an insult, as in I have been so unaware of you that I haven’t noticed that you’ve been drawing for the past couple years, or a compliment, as in Hey! You draw pretty well!

  I wonder which it is, insult or compliment?

  CHAPTER 31

  ROSALIE

  A week at sea, and no one has been strangled or thrown overboard yet.

  We haven’t had much wind for the past few days, and fog and clouds have kept us from seeing the sun, moon, and stars for much of our trip. I never realized how much I’d miss those things. I thought I’d be standing on deck out here in the middle of the ocean, gazing out into the depths of the sky, but most of what I see is gray mist.

  Without sun it’s hard to dry out anything, and most of our clothes are damp. We each have a secret hoard of dry T-shirts wedged into our backpacks; we guard them carefully, and pull one out only when we can’t bear another minute of dampness. Ah, that dry shirt, how good it feels!

  We’ve had animal visitors the last few days, and it surprises me how eager I am to see them. Company! Yesterday, a little black bird landed in the cockpit, looking pitiful and bedraggled. I called Cody up from the cabin to see it. “Hey, there, birdie,” he said, gently tapping its webbed feet and stroking its bill. “Where’d you get this lump on your beak? Where’d you come from? How’d you get so wet?”

  Cody warmed it in his hands and dried it against his shirt. “It’s a cute little peep, isn’t it?” Cody said. And so we started calling it Little Peep.

  By the time I woke up for my next watch, Little Peep had made her way down below deck and into the cupboard next to the navigation table. Uncle Mo was sitting there drawing her portrait, and he showed me how to draw scraggly feathers. Little Peep stayed in the cupboard for a few hours, as if she liked posing.

  Another bird just like Little Peep followed the boat all night and into the next day. We figured it might be Little Peep’s mate, but the other bird didn’t land, and Little Peep didn’t seem to notice.

  Cody tried putting her inside his shirt to warm her up, but I think that scared her, because she started flapping her wings. She flew shakily to the lifeline and then took off again and slowly circled the boat, not very gracefully, before taking off over the waves.

  “Bye-bye, Little Peep,” Cody called.

  I didn’t want her to go; I could hardly bear it, seeing her all alone out there.

  “You sound stupid,” Brian said, imitating Cody: “‘Oh, Little Peep! Oh, Little Peep!’” Brian raised his arms in the air, as if he were sending a message up to heaven. “We are just a floating refuge for lost souls.”

  Cody looked Brian up and down. “Ain’t that the truth?” he said.

  Yesterday we also saw whales, little pilot whales that look like dolphins, except that their heads are round instead of tapering into a long nose.

  “Whales ahoy!” Cody shouted.

  We lay flat on our stomachs on the deck watching them. The whales came close to the boat, but not as close as the dolphins, and they stayed at the stern. After a while, we could identify some of them—a mother and her baby swimming side by side, and one really huge one off to starboard.

  I was hypnotized by this threesome. I decided the huge whale off to the side was the father, and he was circling around, protecting the mother and the baby. Mostly the baby whale stayed right up next to the mother, bumping into her, but occasionally the baby would veer away and wobble and look very silly, and then it would swim back to its mother and bump into her again. It seemed very important to me that they stay all together, and I felt nervous and touchy when I couldn’t see all three of them.

  Uncle Dock joined us. “Most beauteous!” he said. And as we watched the whales, Uncle Dock told us the story of a woman he’d known. Her name was Rosalie and she loved whales with all her heart. She read everything there was to read about whales and she saw every movie that ever had a whale in it and she had pictures of whales on her walls and little stuffed toy whales and tiny whale figurines.

  “But she’d never seen a real live whale,” Uncle Dock said, “not up front, you know? And one day I rented a boat and took her out on the ocean, and all day long we searched for whales and all day long she prayed for whales. It was a beautiful day.”

  “And did you see a whale?” I asked.

  “Not that day.”

  “You went again?”

  “Yep. I traded my best fishing rod to the boat’s owner because I was about as poor as a flea, and off we went again. All day long we searched for whales—”

  “And all day long she prayed for whales—”

  “That’s right,” Uncle Dock said. “And then—there—just as we were turning back to shore—there—oh it was magnificent! A pearly gray whale rose slowly up out of the water, and Rosalie—oh, Rosalie! She opened her mouth in a big wide ‘O’ and her eyes were so big and bright and we watched that beautiful whale as he glided along, and then he disappeared back into the sea.”

  Uncle Dock sighed a long, long sigh.

  “And Rosalie?” I said. “What happened to Rosalie?”

  Dock stood and brushed off his trousers, as if he were brushing away the memory. “Oh, she married somebody else.”

  Cody stood and opened his arms wide and shouted out across the water, “Rosalie! Oh, Rosalie!”

  Dock smiled and joined in. “Rosalie! Oh, Rosalie!”

  Then Dock shook his head and ambled away, disappearing below deck.

  Brian was watching me watch the whales. “Sophie the Whale Girl,” he said.

  “Don’t you ever get interested in what’s out there?” I asked him. “Don’t you think they’re amazing?”

  “Enh,” he said.

  “Don’t you think they’re more interesting than books and charts?” I asked him.

  “Enh,” he repeated, but he came and stood beside me and he even laughed once, when the baby whale banged into her mother, but then he seemed embarrassed to be caught enjoying himself and he retreated to his charts.

  Today, more dolphins came and played in the bow waves. One of them jumped clear out of the water, right in front of the bow, as if to say, “Watch me! Wow!”

  I was fixed on a mother-and-baby pair who swam in perfect synchronization, as if they were the same being.

  “The baby’s like a replica of its mother,” Brian said, “just smaller, but with all its mother’s grace and speed—”

  “Brian,” I said, “are you actually getting interested in these things?”

  “Look,” he said. “It’s like she’s teaching it how to play,” and then he said, “Why do you think they trust us so much?”

  And that’s exactly the feeling I had, that they instinctively trusted us, and really, it made me want to cry. It should have made me want to laugh, because it was as if they were inviting us to join them, be a part of their play. They seemed so overwhelmingly happy: playing, investigating, glid
ing and leaping and rolling. I don’t know why it made me want to cry. I just kept thinking that there they were and here I was. They didn’t have any burdens and they wanted to be with us, but I was way up on deck and I felt as if I weighed a ton.

  Uncle Mo brought out his sketchpad and quickly, deftly, drew the dolphins leaping in the air. He said, “They remind you of being a child, with all that curiosity and energy. They remind you that this is what you could be, not what you should grow out of.” He looked around at me and Cody and Brian, as if he’d just realized we were there, and then turned back to his drawing, mumbling, “Or something like that.”

  CHAPTER 32

  BOMPIE AND THE SWIMMING HOLE

  Fog, fog, fog, fog, fog.

  And I’m talking radio code in my sleep. Hotel-Echo-Lima-Papa! (HELP!)

  We’ve seen whales and dolphins and a little black bird. I want to be a fish or a bird. Swim in the water or fly in the air.

  Sophie got really attached to the bird and worried and fretted over it. I told her she’d better watch it because she was becoming just like Uncle Stew.

  “I am not!” she said.

  Every time dolphins or whales come and play by the boat, Sophie is up there watching. She can’t take her eyes off them, and then she starts wondering where they came from and where they’re going and why they’re here and if they are part of a family, if they’re all related.

  Brian had to get his two cents in about orphans again. First, he kept calling Little Peep the orphan bird, and then, when we were watching the dolphins, Brian was going on about how the baby dolphin was imitating the mother. “I wonder what happens to orphan dolphins,” he said. “How do they learn anything?”

  Sophie said, “I guess they’re smart enough to figure it out on their own. They probably don’t have a lot of choice.”

  And Brian said, “Is that what you did, figure it out on your own?”