Sunset

Have you never seen the sun go down at sea? Never been in middle of that vast, moving wasteland which is our ocean home and felt the bittersweet pull on your heart as the last limb of the sun winks out below the infinite horizon? Surrounded only by the men and women who work the ship with you, this mechanical beast of steel, your island home?

Then you’ve never known the faces of those around you as they bleach from sun-baked red to khaki in gradual steps before momentarily turning into a frozen, sepia-stained tintype as the last colors wash out. Never heard the clatter through the ship as darken ship fittings are set, hatches clanging shut as sailors rush to prepare leviathan for the watches of the night.

When the sun goes down at sea, time seems to stop moving for moment – it is though the world has asked us all to stop, to take a picture. Yellow shirts, the royalty of the flight deck, stand mutely next to brown-shirted plane captains, men wearing multiple arrays of 20-pound tie-down chains flung over their shoulders and who look like nothing so much as galley slaves thus attired, all of them staring now with round, grateful eyes. The sun touches, sinks, and winks out, finally – almost reluctantly, taking with it the last of the summer’s shockingly brutal heat. Another day is gone. One day closer to home.