It was our third and “final” voyage” with Semester at Sea (SAS) where I had signed on to teach my last final set of courses as a regular professor as I had already retired as an emeritus at Whittier College. This odyssey started with us in Bremerhaven where the professors boarded the ship and we sailed to Antwerp to pickup the students, about five hundred from primarily US colleges and universities with a global sprinkling from other countries. It was a pleasant voyage as we ended the first phase in Greece and we were supposed to proceed through the Suez Canal to Jordan and India. Our schedule was unexpectedly changed as the war in Israel erupted with the hostage taking of Jews on October 7th.
With US Navy helicopters flying over us and students and staff sending off frantic e-mails to family friends, and SAS staff, we knew our voyage was in for a change.
The voyage changed dramatically as SAS made the decision to keep us safe and the ship was refocused to take a eight thousand kilometer detour to the Canary Island and then the down the entire west coast of Africa, to Cape Town, South Africa, with no port stopes. It was a thirteen-day detour that changed lives, ports, teaching, and relationships.
It was a BIG course change and made us all leery of our fates as we sailed new seas and worried what it meant for us all. While I was confident that Alicia and I would survive and prosper from the change, it was evident that the fates were at work with lives and psossibilities’
Perhaps our biggest issue was with sleep and the dreams that danced around us most evenings. The days during the BIG detour were filled with different events, new talks, and other distractions, to push back against the waves that hissed and beat against the ship most nights. I self-medicated with breathing and memory exercises, exhaling ego puffs, inhaling salty kisses, giving up hope and wait for a morning mediation with strangers, a temporary release from the ocean serpents that lurk beneath the waves, mocking me, reminding me of the childhood fears and champions that rode together across the skies, always searching for a new day, then time to leave the others, to wash and rouse my beloved who sleeps well on sea or land
the diversion lasted thirteen days, a bad number, as we abandoned the Suez Canal, moving at knot speed down the African coast, 4,500 miles from the Canaries to the Cape of Good Hope, for a round of white meals amid the vineyards, no blacks in sight beyond those with fingers out looking for a short ride anywhere but where they are
today some of the students came and sat with me during office hours, maybe seven or seven hundred as I’ve seen so many over the years, a few reminding me of so many others, most avowing their readiness to leave school albeit uncertain about what path would bring any certainty about how they would live according to what they learned with me and the others who profess to know a little about something
there is one, maybe two, who ask wordlessly about how to prepare for the next chapter, the one that calls them beyond the given, the ordinary, the expected, the one that terrifies them with wings that will fly them to new lands, to new loves, to cliffs where they pray that the winds will catch and carry them far away, maybe even to a new land where another soul will welcome them with a kiss, a dare
hard to admit the truth that I’m tired of treks to new lands that have only old memories and regrets, where most of the faces are too familiar, looking old, tired, sad, so where are the sirens that called me to this sea, this voyage, this chapter or is this journey just an epilogue, an ellipsis, a failed meditation
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