Just last week, I was reminiscing about my trip from San Francisco (SF) to Taipei, Taiwan, at age eight. I totally breezed over the boat trip itself.
Before I get into it, I want to explain why these are “Adventures in Irony.” Unlike most people, I remember my birth. Most people don’t, as you well know, but I remember. I know something about being born that almost no one else knows — it’s a hoot. Your adrenaline kicks in, you find yourself participating and you don’t know why. When you find out why it’s like, “Whoa, the lights, the lights!” The experience colors your expectations for the rest of your life.
So anyway, my mother takes me by train from Seattle to SF. We end up boarding a merchant marine ship there. The USNS General Edwin D Patrick, about 609 feet long, speed 19 knots. Adventure!
The very first thing that happened was we were called on deck to get safety instructions even before we passed out of SF Bay under the Golden Gate Bridge, and I found a girl there who was also eight years old. Her name was Diana. OK, sing it with me: “She called herself Diana.”
We were both nerds. Me the math science type, her the ancient Greek mythology type.
The first two days I was seasick to the max. Our romance consisted mainly of her bringing me Ritz Crackers so I could have something in my stomach to heave over the side of the ship. We shared whale and dolphin sightings in between puking.
Around the third day, I could join my mother in the ship’s galley and have real food. The menu, to my horror, was entirely seafood. I picked the halibut steak because steak was in its name. It was the first time I ever agreed to eat fish. Before that it was all peanut butter, burgers and hot dogs. Cheese, no fish, no eggs.
After I recovered, Diana and I became inseparable. We started hanging out with other kids in a community room. I learned various card and string games from them, like Cat’s Cradle. It was interesting, but the other kids were a bit tiresome. This was not Diana’s first trip on an oceangoing ship so she knew just what to do and took me past all sorts of signs saying authorized personnel only. She told me not to worry; her dad was a naval officer.
We found our way to the engine room by a door leading to a catwalk over the engine, and the crew watched as we used the relative privacy to smooch.
About midway through the trip, we crossed the international date line, and I had to be initiated into the Domain of the Golden Dragon. This meant I had to wear my pants inside out with underwear on the outside, and I had to borrow a clip-on earring from my mother. I lost the earring at the end of the day in the ship’s theater. As I recall, the theater was showing an all-cartoon show just for us kids. Anyway, I passed the initiation and still have the framed certificate.
One of my favorite things to do on the ship was to follow our progress across the ocean on the giant map. The giant map took up one side of a room just below the ship’s bridge, one place Diana and I did not go. It showed our position on a great circle arc across the Pacific, first from SF to Tokyo, where we got to stop for half a day, and then from Tokyo by way of Okinawa to Taipei.
On the twelfth day of the whole trip we docked at Okinawa, and Diana and her father disembarked. I tried to convince my mother she should let me go with them, but she put up a strong fight with all sorts of reasons, like it was illegal, and what would your father say? By this time in my life, I knew I was smarter than my mother. Although she could be clever at times, when it came to logic she was generally feeble, so I expected her failure to see reason. She was, sadly, the one in charge.
Diana considered herself, literally, an incarnation of the goddess of the hunt. I was skeptical at the time but I can see the truth of it in retrospect.
Dr. Wes is the Real Change Circulation Specialist, but, in addition to his skills with a spreadsheet, he writes this weekly column about whatever recent going-ons caught his attention. Dr. Wes has contributed to the paper since 1994. Curious about his process or have a response to one of his columns? Connect with him at [email protected].
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