— Bob Marley
Easy-breathing. Relentless flutter all the way up high, thick white sails fly arms wide-open, as they embrace the blue-white sky; the solid mast poses set and rigid, exposing all of its various parts that loosely hold that giant wrinkly sheet of slack relaxed. Breezy. Designed to pick up speed and gain momentum, each passing instant reveals one more en route cloud, loosely drifting and floating pendent. Sailing. Captured and imprisoned, the sails stop their fluttering quick; drooping ropes flop up and pulled; tightly poised. Breathing-easy the salty breezes, the majestic boat sets sail; its crew all ready to cast an anchor on cloud nine.
Preparing to set sail into the boundless Caribbean Sea that lay ahead, the boat erupted with excitement, as each passenger quickly realized that the only surroundings in the next seven days ahead would consist of the tepid pale turquoise waters glistening in the sun. The five travelers aboard— my two good friends from high school, Craig & Joe, my father, family friend & Captain, Enrico, and myself— can still, to this day, identify every song, either by name or by lyric, from Bob Marley's Legend. The only CD on board, those peaceful Jamaican words blew loud and clear with their aboriginal salty Caribbean wind; creating a soothing one-week rerun: composed, in it's entirety, by 50% wind, 25% singalong (5% of that singalong came from the two grown men of forty-five, reliving their teens, and who, although possessed excellent singing-voices, spoke with the thickest Italian accents to orchestrate The Caribbean since 15th century Christopher Columbus sailed through, with his abundant crew Italian explorers), and 25% Bob & Wailers coming from the twenty or so surrounding outdoor speakers; elegantly hidden and dispersed from both sight and liquids. Seven days of nonstop practice, singing out hearts and lungs from sunrise to sunset, I guess our performance had improved from what once fit the best characterization of a badly blended lump of noise— or whatever one may call that which struggles to barely move, let alone ring or resonate. However, despite how terribly wrong we sounded, we sounded; to say the very least: our lump of noise was a loud one. It was a very loud one.
Indeed, entire islands could hear our crazy sailboat coming for miles. Upon reaching land, we took the average five or six locals who offered us puffs of "Jah almighty green herbs" as standard Caribbean custom. A bartender shook his head at us, disgruntled, as we pondered why so many people smoked so openly on the islands, as he started, "Lawd 'ave mercy pan yuh..." and hypothesized the incessant marijuana offers have a correlation with the enthusiastic blasting and shouting of Jamaican hymns that came from our boat. We scratched our chins, sipped our beers in thought, stared at him with narrowing squinted eyes, paid him, tipped him, and then walked away corrected. We began to lower the volume of both music and voice when approaching an island; lo and behold the number of sellers changed from 6 or 7 to only about 2— "ehy! what ehn estrraorrdinarri chenjhe, no!?" My father and Enrico only spoke in Italian with each other, but promised me to force English when around Joe and Craig, so as to let them feel more at ease; and also, simply for the sake of understanding one another. Their agreement surprised me. In fact, the polite translations only lasted for the length of about 2 plane rides and 1 bus ride. Introduced to our sailboat for the first time, they grew like children with excitement— Italian excitement, so it would have it— and immediately chose to cease their forced English from that moment on. Mind you, these were supposed to be the two responsible adults, taking care of three seventeen-year olds living out at sea for a week in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. Indeed. Sometimes, it would come out in fairly commendable grammatically-correct English; sometimes, it sounded like a bit of both (some sort of Italienglish; of which neither linguistic use nor term I have ever heard mention from any other English-Italian bilingual speaker); oftentimes —which amounted to about 95% of time— I heard the tongues of genuine and decipherable northern Italian; sometimes, when I heard a bit of their conversation, I came led to theorize that they had either gone insane, or they had invented their own language. We set sail to leave and anchored to return with the same opening song, "Is This Love." Our return to home dock definitely sounded much better than departure; indubitably, still blaring from stern to bow.
Five men living on a boat for three weeks can lead to seasickness, and above all, obscenity. A fifty-foot sailboat does come fully equipped with a bathroom, but to use it for anything other than urination would govern one of the few rules on-board. The solution to the problem found an easy solution—what better place to rid oneself of a “number-two” than within the expansions of the ocean? Hopefully, the sea creatures didn’t mind our vulgarity, but out there on the ocean, it was pure human survival, which goes to say that some of the amenities, which most take for granted on land, remained groundless wishes while living on a boat.
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