Of course Beth was talking about amenities: the lack of internet bringing us all back to reading books, the absence of any true privacy reminding us how to work with others (merrily! ), our Spartan bunks recalling an earlier time—our first few days of dormitory living or even, decades ago, when we had to share a bed with siblings. “Intense communal living”, as the crew calls it, has had its rewards.

 

But the conversation left me suddenly thinking about my life in Alpena, Michigan; the family and friends and partner I hadn’t seen in weeks. And that’s the way they come to me out here, and the missing: slinking in and surprising me at seemingly unprompted moments. There’s much to love about sailing, but it’s a fact of life that you leave people behind when you join a ship. That you watch a home blur away in your wake. 

 

What type of person does it take to resist to these comforts for extended stretches of time? Cell phone reception out here is spotty at best, especially in Superior. Still usually I get to talk to someone back home each day. Immigrants in the late 1870s didn’t have that option.   It was steamboat smoke all the way to American shores and a train to NYC, then a schooner would carry them to Chicago or Detroit or Green Bay, it all accumulating to over a month of travel.   And those deckhands, captains, cooks setting forth for a last run of the season, late November, one last trip home to the Midwest. The strongest storms of the season ripening out on the water. Zero modern navigational equipment. 

 

Some of Sullivan’s crew has been aboard for almost a year. In characteristic Sullivan fashion, we don’t talk to each other about who or what we miss. What “home” means. Maybe the crew finds it easier that way, avoiding subjects that strike hard or sink in and stay at the gut. Or perhaps they relish that last bit of privacy that this ship allows: one’s inner life. The who and what of what we think about in our bunks, before sleep, all six or seven of us in the same dark room. 

 

What we have is the water, night watch, the ship, Angela’s from-scratch tomato soup, rainy sunrises and dirty clothes and warm fleece, calluses on our hands, and we have each other.   And maybe that’s it—or enough—maybe the crew of the Sullivan has built a home, right here on the ship.  

 

 

Just yesterday, we celebrated Joe Ewing, our educational programs director’s, birthday.   I won’t mention any ages, but we baked him a chocolate chip cookie cake shaped like the five Great Lakes (okay, sort of). Some of the crewmembers who blue-light as musicians—Angela, Rebecca, Rick—got their instruments out and re-wrote The Kinks’ “Lola” (their version entitled “Joe-a”), surprising him on deck just as the sun was setting.  

 

Joe said something then that confirmed this theory. “If I can’t be at home” he said, “there’s nowhere else I’d rather be than on this ship.” He paused and bit into a chocolate-dotted Lake Erie.