Girl Who Circumnavigated the World_list.html

Giant world. Never out of myself for a heart-instant- The sea's horizon edges curl up. Centered in an immense blue wafer, 1 snack on a red and white box of ACME saltines packed in plastic at sandy Cape Hatteras. I remember the smell of the pines there, but their shapes fade. Everything begin's to resemble the sea's flat sweep, the frayed sound that resembles sleep. Even my mother's indisputable consonants are reduced to a distant flicker. A fog lowers, and the sea recedes. 

Why the cry and cry of gulls over my thin silver rail? This bright line divides me and the heavens, me and the anxious sea. Is there some erratically-edged cloud of chaos out there that makes the heavy birds call out so loudly to themselves? A darkness or obstacle in the dark that my long solitude cannot perceive? A large gull came scrambling on to the boat the other day and attacked a sweetly buttered sandwich I had left forward while I stepped back into my captain's bucket to tend a complaining line. 

Actually, I had batted him back with a wicket. It was a slim gift given to me by an admiring Brit, mired in Britain and wishing he was as mobile as me. I would like to have seen him. His Picture wasn't included with the tinfoiled gift. A gold oblong shimmering by the mailbox until mom collected it in the empty afternoon of her domestic routine. 

I gave the empty air a swat after the albatross was lost to the immense horizon, too. 

The cold ocean is schooling me in its horrid choices. 

After the thin, tin taste of lunch had evaporated yesterday, I saw a column of lonely steel approaching my right at an infinite distance that my more rational mind had calculated to be twelve miles, nautical reckoning. It was an incredibly intense vortex of energy and needle-vigorous grey action ripping up at me from what seemed to be the apex of the horizon's tensed bow. 

It was an heavenly waterspout. Muscled like God and headed straight for my boat. My tender boat the shape of a slick eyelet and composed entirely of jello, I would've sworn at that moment. 

I telescoped the wailing sail down to its most timid height. 

I cleared the decks and with a Spartan heart, lashed the mahogany rudder against a moaning cleat. I did a million things all at once; my rubber-soled feet sinking into the jello decks, swimming in the pink, viscous impossibleness of the entire situation at the same time as I did them, accomplished the lock-up. 

I am seventeen and panic-stricken. My arms churned with a thousand years of tiredness. 

In the left, amphitheatric porthole, the sky retained its acetylene pinch, the blue clear and hurting still, hurting even more so in its promise of endless days of peace as the porthole now slurring against my cheek, the right one, became increasingly clotted, a bruise or tumor refusing to be warmed by my face. The nautical needle jiggled nearer. 

I stared into the roaring hole. 

Was it jumping at my scalp like an ax? Or would it whistle by my eye as harmlessly as a hummingbird? 

As I stared, first my astonished head, and then my jangling eye, increased to the size o:of the vortexing porthole. There was the center of my mystery. My American soul had somehow threaded the eye of God's needle and wound up out there, toiling in the waters. The tortured water shimmered in jaded sparks. Lights collapsed from afternoon acres of ochre to these jarring and carded spinning jennies of blue midnight. I stared and stared, moving my awareness into the waters, dousing the spirit's source in those intense mists. 

And then, as I left the white world of my seagoing needle entirely behind, I felt myself coming up against the steel piling of the waterspout as though it were a peir of safety. Lord, how I howled and scrambled to enter it! 

I arrived in calmness. 

Through the top of the waterspout's jet-engine oval, I had glided and arrived. Blenching waters uplifted me, columns of air were fashioned like stilts for my feet. I myself was dissolving into some watery-eyed substance. 

Once aloft, I looked around. 

The high walls were glass, murky, and revolving at an incredible speed. It seemed that if I had extended but a single finger to that, now silent, whirling wall, my dissolution would finish itself in a shattering. A fluttering Manta Ray distinguished itself for a flickering instant out of the dense murk and whirled away. I was reluctant to touch, but could not contain a gasp as I had looked into its rearing eye. Then the wall resumed its plainness, swirled like the hurricane glass mom contained candles with. And then another monster, or moment, came churning up at me out of the quavering dark. 

Was it a hammerheaded incarnation, or a whipping eel unfurling from its skull of teeth, or merely the massed ectoplasm of a risen and backlit herd of jellyfish? I did not know. I myself was whirling in the churlish darkness. My face was leaning dangerously close to the rapid wall in front of me. Still more creatures flooded up out of the well I was held terrified within. Barracuda, with their long backs of sharp silver, flowed by, and then hovered above, shivering me. Choice salmon with their beaked faces and angry bodies angled past my rotoring eye. Other things, some thin and ethereal, others tiny and translucent as angels escaping from their pins, mooned by and were as lost to me as the heavens. 

I was prepped and baited for some magnificent epiphany. 

Here I was, in the stranglehold of a waterspout, with all the wet faces of life spinning past me. I was certainly pinned-in to witness something. Wasn't I? Then one of the awful walls began motioning closer. The columns of air, which had held me up as carefully as handmaids, began to spirit me even farther upward as the terrible black walls got narrower and narrower. I was shooting for the open top of the spout, but kept thinking that my head would get @caught before my body escaped, like the soft tip of a tongue in a camera shutter. 

I was racing in the heart of a kaleidescope, my helpless legs and arms mixing with its blitzed images. 

The chute moaned closer. But my speed had actually slowed, and I was levitating to the sky side of the chute only an inch or two at a time. I felt that the roaring throat would swallow me back down. I couldn't try to claw my way higher without hitting the blur-blue sides of my prisonhouse. It seemed as inescapable as a chinese fingertrap. But I must have been moving, because I felt the crown of my head escaping into a dry, cold wind, the wind of the world. Oh, when would my trapped eyes be blasted by that free air! My underwater lungs struggled against collapse. I was still gaining my freedom. Half-inch, half-inch. 

Instant tears started in my eyes. Incredible salt washes of grief and release. I could see nothing for a moment but the hurting water again, and I was afraid that I had fallen back into the demon blackness. But the thin wind held, and the water in my eyes cleared to light. 

I hadn't felt that released in eons, my head unwrapped like the silent lady's in Escher's Rind, the still face half wind, half paper. 

The ocean herself had returned to the bottom of tub. Blue, contented, distant. My dry eye rolled like a marble against its flat distances. I sifted into wind. Flakes of me suffered banishment noiselessly, dry and serene. I lifted and lifted. 7fI myself was air.My more human spirit had flared into stark stratospheres. 

. . . . . 

My stiff neck was noosed in a hot wreath of sweat. 

My face pulled from the pillow, filled with indecipherable impressions. My tongue clung to the top of my mouth, a lump of tar. out of what cold depth of sleep was I leaping? The new", porthole was a sky-blue puncture floating at the level of my ear. I shrank back from its limitless clarity. 

It was day. I was alive. 

But what was really happening? What had gone on in my unconsciousness? What reality that I couldn't name had pinned me to the worsted pillow? 

I abandoned my bed and headed towards the magnifying mirror my vanity had carried on board with me. My hand hit the electric clock-calendar as I stood up in front of the built-in. The date had slipped ahead by two days. 

Shit! 

I looked in the wobbly mirror and gave myself an inflated grin through a face wrecked with bruises. 

I couldn't wait to hop home to the applauding hands of my friends.