No Horizon

It’s still sprinkling here off the coast of Maui. Our ship set sail late at night, several hours past sundown, and, as I have done on cruises before, I walked to one of the forward observation decks to watch what I could of our departure.

Hawaii’s population is fairly small compared to that of my home region. The lights speckling the shore looked cozily sparse compared to the crowded lights of the city, and they swung across and past my vision over the fifteen minutes it took for the ship to leave its moorings and settle into its course around the island. As the white and orange lights of the city swept from the field of vision, only a few points of light were left hovering here and there; the cloud cover meant that there were no stars or moon to light the waves, and all that could still be seen were the bright green beacons of the buoys marking the extremes of the harbor. Beyond that: waves and night.

Our ship’s not particularly big by present-day cruise ship standards, weighing in at something just under 48,000 tons, and as such, its motion is more subject to the movements of the sea than some of the other passengers might like. The rocking isn’t violent… for that, try cruising the Atlantic just east of the Caribbean… here in the Pacific it's gentle enough to be calming while still requiring you to be awake enough to maintain your own sense of balance while standing at the prow. I look over the forward railing as the last of the buoys passes quietly by the port side… the buoys were the last bright indicators of where heaven met earth or sea. Now I stare into near total darkness, with no real knowledge of where the horizon lies, or where it meets the darkness of the overcast sky. For a few minutes, all I can feel is the rolling of the ship and the wind blowing warmly into my face.

But after those few moments, my eyes adjust enough to let me see the waves. At least I think I see them… they loom out of the darkness in front of me, hundreds of feet in front and several stories below my vantage point. I sense them but I’m not really sure that I see them; they seem to take forms of darkness more solid than the rest of the unlit expanse. Maybe I’m guessing at their presence by the sounds of the sea, the low roar of the wind, and the otherworldly feeling of the ground moving beneath my feet. Maybe my mind is just filling in the blanks, conjuring inky swells within the sensory blind spot, too used to seeing order or too uncomfortable with the unknown to leave the space so visually empty.

Hints of great but gentle shapes against a black background. This is not the kind of darkness that engenders fear. Rather, I scan the night earnestly, trying to make out the waves, trying to get even the most illusory sense of the implied majesty. For a moment I forget myself, imagining that I can reach out across that great expanse and feel for the waves with my hands, or hover over the empty expanse like a lonely spirit searching for a long-lost home.

Why isn’t this scary? Why doesn’t the looming unknown make me afraid? Because this darkness is more like the mystery that lies behind hope. Not the ominous penumbra of some tenebrous predator. I can’t see where the unreachable sky meets the navigable horizon. I don’t know what’s possible and what’s not. It makes me want to try to reach out, to grasp for something that I hope is there, whether it’s just a trick of the imagination or a warm and gentle surge of tropical waters. Sometimes hope can be so much more bearable than the light of reality, where I wake up hoping to see a forested paradise teeming with water and sun situated off the railing, only to find a vast, empty expanse of overcast ocean with no inviting shores to be found in any direction.