Boat Ride

January 8^th. Time is getting away from me. We have had very sketchy internet service the last few days and I am also having a hard time finding time to write—such is traveling with children, I suppose. I also feel very apologetic that there are still no pictures as this time I simply forgot to download them into my computer. If they were here, I'd be able to but alas... For now, you'll have to get by with just words.

Before I start, I need to tell you that I have always been prone to getting car sick and sea sick. That seemingly random fact will come into play a bit later in the story. The other thing I need to say is that if I weren’t sufficiently humbled by this experience I’m about to relay, I’d be doubled over with hysterics because, if I recall correctly, I just recently waxed poetic about how I wanted to know the ocean better--to really experience what it is like to be a part of the ocean. Well, Nance, here you go, says the Universe.

On Tuesday, we woke up, packed up and took a bus to the boat launch. We were bound for Stewart Island—the southern-most inhabited land in the world aside from Antarctica. The bus ride was fine. The boat ride, not so much. The boat took us across the Fovereaux Straight in about an hour. It was a fast boat—I think they said 25 knots for those of whom that means anything. But the straight was not a smooth and easy crossing. Apparently, it gets all stirred up by the Pacific to the east, the Tasman Sea to the west and the Arctic Sea to the south and because of all that stirring, I suffered greatly.

For the first few minutes, all us sea-farers were screeching and laughing at how high in the air we flew and how hard we slapped back down on the water’s surface. Oooo! “It’s just like a roller coaster,” I told Gabe. Weee!!! I was hoping the kids wouldn’t get scared so I was really whooping it up to keep their fear at bay. Meanwhile, after each plummet, I’d have to go searching on the floor for my stomach and try to replace it. The enormous crests and troughs came so close together that I stopped being able to re-gather my innards in between waves. Eventually, where my stomach used to live, there was a deep, black hole and it was filling up with queasiness. The queasiness grew in strength until it grabbed all my senses by the ears and dragged them down toward that nausea. I could focus on nothing except surviving each undulation of that blasted sea. I could think of nothing else, that is, except my children’s stomachs and how sick they might be feeling and whether I was going to have to try to show up in a motherly fashion if either of them got really sick. Gabe seemed okay and Jordan wasn’t greening up anymore than the faint shade she had taken on early in the trip. Mark was sitting two rows behind us and when I looked at him early in the trip, he seemed fine. The idea of turning around to check on him later in the trip became an impossibility. Any turn of my head would have negatively affected everyone around me.

To add insult to injury, around me there were people throwing up. I don’t know who and I didn’t catch a glimpse of anyone (which you should be grateful for because I might have written about that too.) But I do know they were because I picked up on it with my auditory and olfactory senses. There was also a boy reading a book sitting with his back to the front of the boat which made me almost as sick to look at as the vomiting passengers were to listen to. But what proved to me that this was some sort of cruel intestinal test, was the newspaper that was in plain sight. It’s cover story and graphic picture to match was about a teenager who’d been bludgeoned to death and, “left to die in his own blood.”

When we arrived on Stewart Island, we dropped our bags at our hotel and went directly to the airport depot, bought four plane tickets back to the mainland for the next day and were refunded by the boat people for our cancellation of our return trip.