When I was ten and my father was sick we sailed to Alaska, which
only sounds like a heartwarming memoir. We ate spam sandwiches
and visited canneries and it was almost always cloudy; the sailing
wasn’t very good. Often I wished I was home, doing normal things like
seeing my friends or taking a shower. Dolphins and orcas sometimes swam
right next to the boat. We tried to find somewhere calm to anchor each night.
We ran aground twice, once on a sandbar with icebergs ominously circling
in the late summer evening light, once with the rudder clicking Morse code
into the ragged ridge of reef at morning’s low tide. Those events imprinted
into me deeply, both the terror of being shipwrecked and sunk but also
the euphoria of surviving and setting back out. There was a button on the
coffee thermos my dad brought out on deck on those long, light evenings
that clicked in the most satisfying way when you opened the spout. Waves
and wind grew calm as night fell, and I pressed it over and over again,
my own morse message carrying far as it does across water. Scientists have
discovered a sun they call the farthest star, halfway across the universe
and twenty-eight billion light-years away. By the time it was dark enough to see the stars
I was too tired to remember what my dad told me about them. The farthest star
burnt out billions of years ago, but its light moves across the empty expanses
of darkness, still transmitting some kind of message to us through the night.
