Neptunian Dream

By Michael H. Kew

Eventually the Kalopaga slipped from Fakaofo’s green-palmed hip and plowed a jagged white froth head-on into the swell. Decks awash, portholes splashed, its fuel drums and colorful cargo cubes all smooshed snugly, all gleamingly brightly wet beneath the yellow late-afternoon Tokelauan sky. Little to do but eat and sleep. Freshening exits from our deeply air-conditioned quarters and out into the windy humidity beyond the heavy steel bunk door of seclusion. Brain ahaze with benzodiazepine and scopolamine, I savored schools of flying fish and distant squalls and the beautiful ship’s surfing of the temporarily endless whitecaps, the great abandonment of land, the ruminant introspect long known to seafarers. Again echoed the words of Leary, that surfing was “a merging of your own body neuromusculature, or brain body, with the power/energy/rhythm of nature.” Indeed the Pacific manifested a deep genetic memory, cobalt wilderness four billion years old, chaotic yet rhythmic, violent yet languid, its currents and its waves broadsiding the ship and the holy sunlight sparkling from the chop, succumbing all to the night, all to the wind and to all meditations, all giving back until to all none did.

Excerpted from “Rainbownesia,” my new volume of Oceania immersion, available here, from Amazon, and select retail outlets.