Conscious life, hear me roar.
When I was 21, I set sail on an old cargo ship for Europe and North Africa.
Two years prior, I’d finished college in Italy, had backpacked Europe and Tunisia by myself, and had finally come back to Cape Cod – as you might imagine, a fully changed woman. It was good to eat home-cooked food again, good to sleep in my childhood bed again and to be loved by family. But that calling to leave again was strong. Defiant. Addictive.
To this day, whenever I do come back home from trips to the city or a long vacation and cross one of the bridges to the island I can’t help but think of Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again. The title comes from the finale of the novel when protagonist George Webber realizes, “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood…back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame…back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”
At 21, coming home meant failure, old boyfriends, people who knew my rocky past, people who were content to live a life half lived. Not me. Not anymore.
The chance to hop a ship for three months and get paid to travel sounded like a pretty good gig.
Roughly 1000 sailors in training were on that ship – many, not far off from my age – and no matter what I did, I was a curiousity.
Having been raised in a household of men and surrounded by boy cousins growing up, I had no fear of hopping on a ship full to the brim with them for free travel. I had Kerouac’s The Subterraneans and Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, I postured myself as an intense writer, a habitual smoker and a drinker of coffee. My favorite place for reading those books was at the top of the ship on the Flying Bridge, a smoke in hand and hot coffee to warm me from a North Atlantic winter. On the move, channeling Kerouac, life was at an optimum. Oh, to be away.
But life out at sea for a long period of time has its own politics, government and unspoken rules. There are defined pecking orders and social taboos out at sea that would seem completely illogical, or at least not so amplified if you weren’t out there on a big ship. If I talked to a cadet for too long it meant I was having sex with him. If I left my bedroom door open to vent the cigarette smoke, it meant I wanted sex and would result in men doused in cologne congregating outside my door. I finally decided that I would just be a bitch to keep everyone away.
I ran the salad bar for all those men and it was their favorite part of eating because they could put together their own meal. Piss me off? I threatened to spit in it. Question why there was wilted lettuce? I’d give a long stare that would make them never ask again.
The bitch.
Sometimes life in a small place like Cape Cod is much like ship life. Everyone knows you and you can’t escape the politics of a small town, but you can get good at coping. The one thing that stays constant is how you react to what you are surrounded with. I’ve become an “angry” woman living here. I am the “crazy lady” who will battle the local school system so that my kids don’t have to wear uniforms. I am that woman who raises her hand at the town meeting with two others to oppose lazy, local lawmakers. I am that woman who stands up to the neighbor who says my green lawn full of clover would look better fertilized to say: “I don’t believe in poison.”
As we age, do we just become bitter and cynical? Maybe we just become more open to the fact that the world is truly a Confederacy of Dunces and we are but one dunce cap away from being one of them if we don’t fight to stay awake. Thomas Wolfe may have been right about going home: we are who we are on the inside when we go back. Whether we’re ready or not, life is constantly altering and changing us, taking away the blinders, the rose-colored glasses, the smokes and coffee and showing us itself in true form. No matter where we go, there we are, whether it’s nestled safely in our childhood home or riding camels in the Sahara under a full moon.
There are no temporary fixes. No way you can run away when it’s you who is different. When it’s you who is always the stranger in town.
Between the Lines, is a weekly column navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of life and culture between city and country.
Image: whatmegsaid
