It was pretty surreal. But not awesome.
In continuing my reflection on the Sea Education Association program that occupied the last three months of existence, let’s talk about the hard stuff.
Abstractly, sailing a tall ship and doing science research in the tropical Atlantic sounds pretty ideal. Sunsets and sunrises, moonlight on the water, an outdoor classroom, six weeks without the worry or distractions of life on land.
It should have been that romantic. I knew the whole time it should; but it wasn’t.
The struggle at its most basic, I believe, was the lack of control. Before my time at sea I didn’t think of myself as a control freak, but when you take every ounce and every second of my life out of my control, I sure respond like one.
First was the lack of physical control. I couldn’t sit still, I couldn’t stand still, I couldn’t lie still. My body, incessantly trying to rebalance and resist the rocking, never came to rest, which translated to exhaustion and frustration.
I was also mentally out of control.
Me looking really happy about science.
At Puget Sound I was finally in a place where I knew some stuff about the stuff I was doing, and that felt good. Then I got to sea and none of those skill sets or random facts about gastropod sex meant anything. The learning curve aboard the Cramer was what you might call exponential, with three tons of non-quite-sticky-enough spaghetti. I often felt like I was the fat kid trying to run uphill to understand, and there were more noodles of knowledge thrown at us than could possibly all stick (even on my large surface area).
This feeling of ignorance would have been manageable, indeed I spend much of my time on land feeling ignorant about one thing or another (examples: global affairs, chemistry, geography, fashion, the college social life), except it never went away. Every time I thought I knew something, the routine changed or there was a new detail to consider. Understanding the big picture was out of the question, but I couldn’t even master the basics before the problem sets shifted and the lessons moved on. And everything was new. There were no small victories of familiar tasks; even the toilet flushing was a challenge.
The loss of control was complete, and the ignorance was perpetual.
I was unraveled. And then came the real problem: “staff leadership” is just another way to say “external control”.
So, you get me already on the edge with no way to unwind, and then you tell me to take my hat off at the dinner table. Go ahead, do it. See what happens.
Meet Mary Krauszer, the youngest child whose kindergarten teacher described as “different”. Meet Mary Krauszer, who evaded bullies in elementary school by not running away when they chased her, while the other girls squealed and fled. Meet Mary Krauszer, who sometimes asks your opinion so she can do the opposite. Meet Mary Krauszer who doesn’t give a hill of beans about you and your nonsensical, “it’s just boat culture” BS. I’ve never really been one who liked to be controlled.
Meet Mary Krauszer who will feel really, really bad about it later.
The dark and ominous Corwith Cramer.
Unraveled and reduced to my basics. All that patience and attitude-attenuating that “adult” life had taught me sat looming behind my tired eyes, just glowering disapprovingly on all my rash and childish actions. And thus, I felt worse.
I should probably mention that my perspective on the events aboard the Cramer are as one-sided and self-centered as you may expect of an account of ‘personal struggle’. I’m sure no one else aboard (especially the staff) saw me as the problem child. (I know, because I asked them.) But I sure felt like the problem child.
I wrote an “unpublishable” blog entry for the ship’s website (which you can read published here http://blogs.ups.edu/studentlife/2011/03/28/the-blog-that-sea-wouldnt-publish/). I refused to follow the proper procedure for passing the tutu from J-LO to J-LO at watch turn-overs (don’t worry about it if you don’t really understand that sentence). I threw a screaming, literally screaming, hissy fit on the science deck at 2 am, which the mate on duty walked into the midst of and promptly fled without interrupting. I never learned to tie a rolling hitch.
I was not the most composed or pleasant human I have ever been. But I tried to remain reflective. And thus began the walking identity crisis that disembarked from the Cramer, visited briefly at Puget Sound, and is now masquerading as a student in a new program.
In my very first blog entry about SEA back in January, I opened with the regular half-sarcasm, hyphen-riddled, Mary-Krauszer-list style, defining the “normal” study abroad experience as a “paradigm-shifting, character-challenging, horizon-expanding once-in-a-lifetime adventure”, and claiming that I, in avoiding such a fate, was instead going looking for sea monsters.
Perhaps, I am not altogether immune to normalcy. Or, more to my liking, perhaps the monster I found in the Atlantic latched on with its claws of repressed psychology and suckers of self-reflection and came home with me.
Which sounds like it would make a good Christopher More novel, but not a good last line.
Just to lighten the mood, here's a bunch of butts furling the mains'l.