Another day rolling on the ferry, slowly up and down and side to side. Another day hanging out. Yup. Time for a nap. Time to get to the bathroom. Time to straighten up my sleeping bag. Uh oh. That took exertion. Time for another nap.
The sleeping became better each night, probably from a combination of growing accustomed to the ferry’s ambiance plus being surrounded by a quieter crowd. My head still woke up cold and not quite right, as if the blood flow in my body had changed to heat my head more and my head muscles were tensed all night. That was an inefficient way to add heat with entropy. As usual though, the somewhat unbroken chunk of sleep at night was not enough, especially with no hungry tigers around to keep me vertical and running. So the ferry solution was to be horizontal and take one extended nap during the day, with extra shut-eye time to accumulate enough sleep hours overall. Scheduling the nap was at my leisure of course, since everything on the ferry was done at my leisure. If I needed to relieve myself in the men’s room, my options were open on timing, route, and duration of relievement.
The most interesting part of this ferry trip continued to be the other passengers. Nat told me more stories about trucking and life in California. While Andy, the blonde backpacker, simply bullshitted about bullshit.
A nurse from Anchorage occupied a lot of my time. She told stories of her special group that did long distance medical rescues for people on fishing boats, trapped on mountainsides, or other oddball places as needed. She would hop on a jet and travel a thousand miles for four or five hours to a small gravel airstrip on one of the Aleutian Islands. A person who had fallen into a crab cooker or cut off a hand would be waiting for them, assuming that the Coast Guard had already done its part. Gruesome stuff usually, especially considering that they only travel on these multi-thousand dollar flights for bad cases, and the people waiting had been bleeding to death or oozing from burns for many hours already.
She worked seven days on and seven days off, with two five-week vacation periods per year. Not a bad schedule at all. She enjoyed the large amount of off time because she generally disliked people yet loved traveling with her husband and two young sons.
Being a nurse and mother while disliking people was a contradiction, but she wanted to retire in a few years (though only in her forties) and buy a home in the mountains far away from everyone. She certainly loved her kids, though. She was thinking of even switching her job to be a school nurse so she could work when her kids were in school, and then travel with the family in the summer. Her husband, a CPA, could have worked overtime in the tax season and gallivanted off with her afterwards in the summer too. It was all getting planned out, and she seemed the type to actually do it if she felt the strengthening urge.
Another guy, in his early twenties and from Seattle, was a good American boy representation of Alfred E. Neuman’s face. He was returning from his job in the Aleutian Islands working for a joint Soviet-American fishing company. I got him talking with the nurse. They even shared a watered down dislike for people. He wanted to like people, but tired of them easily.
A job with outdoor equipment store REI was all lined up for the upcoming summer, taking him as a guide to trek through southern areas of the Soviet Union. Quite the summer job. Having majored in Russian and being interested in the Soviets, he wanted to organize something around that. He predicted the markets would grow between the US and USSR. He was looking for opportunities to pursue, but realized the generality of his idea and current lack of opportunities, so a mildly directed aimlessness was his new way of living.
The person I enjoyed talking with most – and was most attracted to – was blonde and from Sweden. Of course, right? Not necessarily. She was pretty in the way I liked pretty: a real, no makeup appearance that looked as good when she woke up as she did the night before. OK, that was the initial attraction, but a late night talk with her on the bow woke me up to a very in-tune person. At the least, she was in tune to my wavelengths, which may or may not be considered out of tune.
Osa was the first person in my life who noticed clouds like I did. We were watching from the bow behind the Solarium, with cold wind beating at our backs to just below the point of shiver. The moon was harsh and most everyone else was asleep, but we were fine with being popsicles and had one of the most relaxed, enjoyable conversations ever. I was half seriously thinking that perhaps I should move to Sweden.