Résumé
Call him Jonah. He hated this seafarer curse his shipmates had given him,
Call him drunk, angry and afraid. An apologist might say one condition causes the others and wise minds might argue that one is just part of the other two. If you asked him, he would shrug his shoulders and change the subject.
Call him a hopeless addict, it was his true nature. It shouted out over the muted whispers of an educated mind, a sensitive heart, a life, a spirit and a fire that was suffocating itself from within.
Call him a merchant seaman, an avocation rather than vocation. It fit his wanderlust perfectly. He sailed across oceans matching his inner turmoil with the chaotic rhythm of the sea. Few cared to recognize the torment inside of him. One exception, a dockworker in Hong Kong who had once told him, as he was staring at water below the gangway lapping between the hull and wharf, "If you want to see your true reflection, water must be still. Be still .”
He knew not stillness nor peace or serenity. His boyhood catachism told that peace was left him and peace was given him, but now, he knew not the gift or where the giver left it.
He understood peace in a more worldly way. Schooling had taught him the grand scheme of survival, that from the time the first traders used the water to exchange their goods, peace was defined by strength and force. Peace was not an end; it was the means to barter without interference. But his education did not show him the sublime, more important view that personal peace is marked by the absence of interference, especially from the turmoil within.
This story is about a sailor called Jonah, who was standing his last midnight watch on the foredeck of an eastward-bound ship crossing the Pacific, steaming from China and one day's sailing from San Francisco.