Portugal and the Flat Calm

Today the Atlantic did something I had not seen it do. It went flat.

Not calm in the ordinary sense, where the swell reduces and the ship settles. Flat. A wide plate of pale water going all the way out to a horizon that had stopped being a line and had become a suggestion. The wake was the only interruption in any direction and it ran back behind us for what looked like miles.

I stood at the rail after breakfast and stayed there for about an hour. I did not take a photograph, mostly because the photograph would have been of nothing. I did not check my phone, because my phone has been switched off in the bottom of the duffel since Savannah and I have constructed an elaborate personal fiction that it is not available to me. The ship has Starlink. The fiction is doing a lot of work.

Elena came out at one point with a coffee for herself and stood a little way along the rail without saying anything, and after a couple of minutes she said "this is the good part," and went back in.

She is right. There will be Suez, and Singapore, and whatever the Pacific decides to do to me in October. But there was also this: a Saturday morning off Portugal, a flat sea, a coffee, and a total absence of anything that required my attention.

Container is level with my chest.