Silver Lining

Each night on a passage, as Jennifer and I exchange watch responsibilities, we uncoil a USB cable from atop our ham radio, run it upstairs to the laptop at the navigation desk, attach it, and double-click on the Airmail 3 icon on the tool bar at the bottom of the computer screen. A window pops open, indicating we're connected to the ham radio and the attached modem. After the blinking modem settles on a channel, we're connected to the outside world, conditions permitting. Aside from the Iridium phone at $1.25/minute, it's our only form of connection to our family, friends, and to weather reports. The ritual occurs each night we're on passage, if only to send off the compacted report of our daily position, our course and speed, and a short message conveying a qualitative sense of our condition. (You can track our position and read these reports by clicking on the links on the left-hand side of the blog; to summarize our condition: all is well on board.)

We also use the radio each morning in a scheduled "conference call" with cruisers also headed north and west, a daily check-in of positions, weather updates, progress reports, and highlights: birthdays, fish caught, etc. On rare occasions, on these cruisers' nets, we hear of boats in distress, as referenced in the last blog, when our German friends' boat was dismasted. By way of update, after a brief visit to French Guiana, they've jerry-rigged a sail, and are now motor-limping their way to Grenada for repairs.) These twice-daily connections are vital to Jennifer and me: on passages, we attend religiously to our nightly email connection and to our morning ham radio net, and we count the days until our treasured Sunday Iridium calls to our kids. Despite our isolation, we don't feel all alone out here, as long as conditions permit a connection.

We're not the only ones connecting. Tuning into the evening frequencies for our email and weather traffic, or the morning net frequencies, I'm struck by the almost whimsical medley of background sounds that emanate from the ham radio's scratchy speakers: clicks, whirs, chirps, hums, pulsating tones, the odd garbled word, maybe English but probably not, and last night, the unmistakable sound of a child's voice in some foreign language, echoing in our tiny cabin on a tiny boat here in the South Atlantic. Some of the sounds represent nature's glory - the crackle of electricity in towering thunderclouds; the static of solar storms. It's a mess up there.

There are radio waves, at every frequency, originating from all over this planet, continuously, arcing across continents, some striking atmospheric layers just dense enough, at just the right angle, so that the signal reflects back to earth. Some signals are absorbed by the atmosphere, the layers too dense, while other radio waves strike the atmosphere at too sharp an angle, and the waves pass into outer space, to travel outward from earth until their signal strength falls to undetectable levels. When the atmospheric conditions are just right, you can pull in signals from thousands of miles away, but the skies are mercurial. Some nights, we have a weak connection for email and weather; other mornings, we can hear a distant cruiser as if he's in the next cabin. It's all in the propagation, the weather, the atmospheric conditions, and the volume of competing traffic.

Humanity has evolved to produce a lot of electromagnetic energy - radio, TV, cell phone, microwave, satellite -- you name it, each source radiating energy and information in both digitized and analog form. Spinning the dial on our ham radio reveals dozens of digital and analog broadcasts, beeps from China, voices from South Africa, a mix of both from ships at sea. At home, Radio Shack sells radio scanners that pick up traffic among first responders; the baby monitor at your bed side sometimes gurgles with the sounds of a neighbor's feeding infant. We tune the dial to talk to our friends, and to hear from our family, but can't help transmitting our news to unintended recipients, and sometimes can't avoid overhearing the unexpected from an unintended source. The skies are noisy; propagation varies; signals come into and out of coherence.

As go radio waves, so go our lives. Each of us is constantly sending, receiving, and sorting information -- signal and noise -- trying to make sense of ourselves, the world and the people around us. For what are we if not nodes, on some grand network, each of us living within a complex array of relationships and transactions, sending messages, continuously filtering the incoming wheat from the chaff, deciding who and what to respond to, relishing the evening reunion with loved ones, dreading the midnight call from an emergency room? Being connected, sending and receiving, seems to define us as human beings, and it's no stretch to imagine us each as a full-time radio operator, dialing into agreed-upon channels, talking to our loved ones, rotating the dial to experience the essential, fighting off the static.

In a noisy world, we long for the pure connection of togetherness. It seems that to retain a sense of ourselves, we need to maintain relationships with others, as if by remaining connected, we can triangulate back to ourselves and thus define our position in the cosmos. But sometimes, as I'm discovering, this longing for connection comes at a price. Increasingly, our reliance on external channels, others' voices, has led to us ignoring -- or becoming unable to hear - the messages of our own creation, our own experiences, our internal channels. We're inundated by noise and signals originating from without; we hear everything outside ourselves, and meanwhile, the voice inside ourselves - the voice that asks "what voice?" - is drowned out, rendered silent, struck dumb.

My emerging awareness of our growing deafness to internal voices crystallized on this latest passage - our longest yet at an expected 30 days. We're pretty isolated out here, with watch schedules being what they are. To combat the isolation, every afternoon, we make sure to spend time together, engaged in boat chores, talking about the latest books we're reading, playing a game of Scrabble, the daily conversations and interactions of two life mates on a circumnavigation. Most days, these few hours together are enough - sometimes just enough - to stave off the inevitable feelings of isolation and loneliness.

But there's a lot of "alone" time, whether we like it or not - time when we're on our solo watches, when we're lying in our bunks just before falling asleep, or slumbering in the drowsy wakefulness of a sultry afternoon. During those hours of solitude, I've noticed that my time is often spent in the presence of of memory, encountering snippets of my life arising in the foreground of consciousness, the past returning, unsolicited, demanding attention. When the atmospheric conditions are just right, I experience vivid memories from dozens of years ago, whether I want to or not, unbidden, replaying conversations and witnessing scenes from my past.

It's as if my mind, unable to tune into others' transmissions and broadcasts, turns inward for stimulation, subconsciously scanning itself - exploring the intra-cranial transmissions and channels among and between my billions of neurons, and randomly selecting one or another discreet memory. Each resulting image, fully formed, cascades into preceding and succeeding images and recollections, until my scanner locks onto an event, an encounter. It's as if my skull is acting like the earth's atmosphere - its uneven propagation presenting some memories clearly, while others lay obscured by static, their specifics just out of reach. Even when conditions aren't exactly perfect, my mind's built-in receiver picks up memories of long-ago events.

This emergence of memory is not a new phenomenon; I've written on this earlier, but having spent 30 of the last 37 days at sea, it's clear that one of the most tangible differences between my pre-voyage life on land, and my life on a circumnavigating boat, has been the reality and impact of isolation. While incomparably distinct from the prisoner in solitary confinement, the absence of daily interaction with friends and family has been difficult for us. Even the most introverted person craves human contact, and for extroverts, isolation creates an especially painful environment. It's a profound challenge living on a boat in near-constant and near-total solitude, but if there is to be a silver lining in our chosen pastime, it might be this: without the daily stimulus of news reports, breakfast meetings, visits with friends, meals with family, and if the atmospheric conditions are just right, we are liberated to experience the continuous upwelling of memory.

For when our minds are deprived of - or freed from -- the assault of 'in-the-moment' stimuli, the emanations of our life's experiences are given the bandwidth to emerge anew, take fresh shape, and become fodder for reflection, insight, and self-knowledge. We've always known this: retreats, vows of silence, "quiet time alone," meditation -- these are all strategies designed to give ourselves the space and freedom to free our minds from the undifferentiated barrage of demands for our time and attention. On this, a long passage to the Caribbean, I have a lot of time to myself, time where memories flood forth, flickering, hovering, awaiting examination and context. It's not always a comfortable sensation, but when propagation conditions are right, I've found it impossible to turn the volume down on memory.

Disconcertingly, my stream of emerging memories seem biased to instances where I find reason to regret a behavior, a decision, a lack of attention to fact or feeling. My mind brings forth the painful memory: the lack of sympathy to a breaking heart; the intemperate word; the selfish focus on speed at the expense of togetherness. Sure -- with effort, I can consciously extract happy, self-validating memories, replay successes, create my own Top Ten lists, but if I yield to my subconscious, any life highlights zoom through my consciousness, barely noted, and their signals pass into space, local conditions too poor for reception.

No, memories borne of this isolation, the memories that remain trapped inside my personal atmosphere, those that come forth in the evenings after a long watch, tend to be the painful ones where honest retrospection reveals, as often as not, selfish, ignorant, or thoughtless behaviors. I find myself reliving these low-light moments during these alone moments, sometimes over and over as I fall asleep, as if some uncontrollable part of my brain is helplessly pushing the replay button. After re-living the harshly-edited and admittedly-skewed version of This Is My Life, my resulting emotions of regret and recrimination often linger well past the end of the episode, and often re-surface the following morning, or on torpid afternoons when the tropical heat threatens to suffocate us.

In this isolated space, I'm beginning to accept the regular emergence of my memory of this event or that episode in my life, and I now yield to my memory's implicit demand that I focus on this or that. Some nights, previously-reviewed memories return, suggesting there's more to be plumbed, that somehow I have yet to extract or divine the words I should have used that day long ago, the decision I should have made, the path I should have taken. Isolated from outside stimuli, hearing only my inner voices, I draw connections between one memory and the other, examine my behaviors, and often as not, experience regret, and sometimes, distill a lesson. I find myself hoping that I might be a bit wiser for the effort.

But then I'm back on watch, or the wind shifts or a sail change is required; dinner needs fixing; there are dishes to wash. It might be time for another ham radio connection, or a game of Scrabble. Conditions change, the propagation isn't what it was before. The specific memory fades back into the unconscious, any distilled wisdom seemingly lost amid the din of the boat's wake, the rush of the wind, the distractions of life. Is this how it goes? To pay the price of living through things twice, never seeing a benefit? I hope not, and it's not long before I'm once again alone, and the memories return. Weeks at sea, with hours spent alone, I've got plenty of time to listen to my inner channels, plenty of time to decipher their messages.

So we sail northwest, across an isolated ocean of memory. We sail through the invisible radio waves of digitized emails, radio-transmitted weather faxes, morning nets and weekly calls to our kids, bombarded by radio waves, the garbled accents of foreign tongues, the chatter of a small child, the static of solar flares. We stay connected to family and friends and to each other, under trying circumstances, knowing that our humanity depends on it. We struggle with our remoteness, the loneliness borne of distance, seclusion, and isolation. And through it all, I try to make sense of memories, memories that arrive, unsolicited and unscreened, in atmospheric conditions ideal for propagation, for reflection.

During these days of aloneness and longing, I've come to be thankful for the enforced and unrelenting solitude of an extended passage on a tiny vessel across a great ocean, for the silence that brings forth memory, for the quiet time that allows me to examine these memories, to turn them over, to extract and distill their embedded wisdom, and to do so again and again. I've come to realize that these cloudy confines of unnatural isolation hide a silver lining -- the uncovering of memory - and so I parse the signals; adjust my course; press onward.