Waiting Is…
Years ago, while traveling through the third world, I learned that sometimes, waiting is simply…waiting. The bus will come when it does. It will leave when it does. All thoughts of Western timeliness are lost in the simple reality that something will happen when it does and not before.
We come from many countries to meet upon this ship. Some of us have dreamt and saved for a year or more. Others decided to travel on mere days’ notice. We each arrived with expectations, hopes, dreams and yet…waiting is.
We are in the middle of The Drake Passage. This narrow strip of ocean separates the southernmost tip of South America from our destination of the Antarctic Peninsula. The Screaming Sixties (named for sixty degrees South of the Equator) are notorious in history and literature since the days of Magellan and Cook. Here the whirlwind of the Southern Ocean—spinning with relative ease across the Atlantic, under Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, beneath the wide Indian Ocean, below Australia, and the wide-open Pacific—is squeezed into the narrow gap of the Drake. There the waters can collide with legendary force.
And, on occasion, they don’t.
Then, the Drake gives up his lethal mien and presents the quiet face of tropical waters. But these don’t boast the warmth and crystalline clarity filled with wonders for scuba divers. The Drake flows cold, with the darkest, richest blue waters imaginable. If they shone, they might be sapphire, instead they are blue obsidian, inviting us to stare into the depths in wonder at what might lurk below.
Yet we flow lightly upon his surface. Gentle winds (with a chill held off by layers of thermal underclothes, woolen jumpers, heavy coats, all encased in foul weather sailing gear) ease us along. When the winds drop, the engine starts. When the wind returns, a silence settles through the ship as we again take our motive power from the world’s airs. It is a long-game balance of fuel, speed, and time.
But the reality remains: waiting is.
We stand our watches at helm, lookout, or sail handling. When there is no call out for handling, we wait. We paint, play cards, and sleep. But mostly we sit and wait, well wrapped in our own thoughts. Off-shift we eat, sleep, become less a ship of strangers, watch the albatrosses and giant petrels soar low above those dark blue waves, and learn to raise and lower the twenty-eight sails—though it remains the purview of the permanent crew to manage them.
The Drake Passage is half gone beneath us. The Ice—as Antarctica is commonly known—draws nearer with each rise and fall over the waves. Each of us, as full as the oceanic depths with our hopes and expectations, remain curiously, almost dispassionately calm.
Aboard, the mood is thickly palpable. While our dreams lie ahead, we remain—suspended in the curiously routine task of working the ship across the dreaded Drake passage in one of his calmer moods.
We are all caught up in that curious moment when waiting simply…is.