Roll the Old Chariot Along
We recently had our first birthday of the trip, and the celebration came with a special request: could we sing my favourite sea shanty instead of the traditional Happy Birthday song?
It doesn’t take much more than that to convince me to sing a good sea shanty, especially since the favourite sea shanty in question was Roll the Old Chariot Along, a very fitting choice for this voyage, as the lyrics go like this:
We’ll be alright if we make it round the Horn
We’ll be alright if we make it round the Horn
We’ll be alright if we make it round the Horn
And we’ll all hang on behind
We will roll the old chariot along
We’ll roll the old chariot along
We’ll roll the old chariot along
We’ll all hang on behind
We might have jinxed ourselves with this song, as we have been getting rolling seas for a few days now, making every little task more challenging than usual.
Simply walking around requires the contribution of newly noticed muscles, and now is a great time to learn that every object left unsupervised will be seen taking off on flying adventures.
There are things we definitely won’t do with these movements, like using our washing machines, since they will remind us with very aggressive beeping that they never signed up for these horrible working conditions. The laptop in the library may also be seen with its screen facing the ceiling, having a complete existential crisis, probably wondering why it couldn’t have ended up in a normal office instead of on a rolling ship.
We can also forget any delicate and precise maintenance or office task that requires us to draw straight lines; chart corrections will have to wait.
We exercise our patience with the rolling, and every seasoned sailor knows to “wait for the roll”. This is one of the ocean’s first lessons: here, you can’t bypass what nature is giving you. Maybe you can cheat on the wind by starting the engine, but if the sea is giving you a roll, you roll your old chariot along.