Exit 41, Part One

Sartre in his absurdist drama “No Exit” once indicated that hell is other people, but as is often the case with such high-flown observations of grand philosophical import, he was wrong; it’s really road trips, and occasionally billboards. But I get ahead of myself, so let’s start from somewhere else, perhaps a point of light.

It is 4:30 in the morning at the Vineyard Haven ferry dock and a deeply textured sky of layered indigo seems to blanket the entire harbor except for a few shafts of brilliance reflecting off the bay- lights from a cadre of small yachts, seabourn little adventurers now anchored and bobbing quietly on the waves in plain sight of the pier. It really is quite magical and almost perfectly still, although the dead-of-night aura stealthily and invisibly is beginning to give way. Just as I am starting to channel Melville and Conrad I realize that If I were not totally and completely wiped out after being torturously kept awake for upwards of twenty-four hours, the absolute serenity and mystery of the scene combined with the damp, reassuring smell of the ocean surely would be something in which to revel and possibly exalt; as it is though, I am in that strange netherworld between dozing envy and bare semi-consciousness that is causing me to wonder how long it will take to start hallucinating. Ugh, bummer! Romantic visions of Lord Jim, Ishmael and Billy Budd dashed to pieces! My husband drowsily points out from where he’s slumped in the driver’s seat that in the near distance a crazed skunk appears to be scampering to and fro at intervals, from ticket office to nearby bushes and then back again to ticket office. We imagine the little creature wanting to be the first to snag a coveted round trip spot on the ferry for the holiday weekend when the counter finally opens, much in the same way that we are the first and only people in line for standby in more or less the middle of the night in order to leave the island on the first boat, or any boat, without a reservation. As I sink tiredly into the pre-dawn comfort of the salty air and a watery blue heaven devoid of the usual noise and distraction of life on solid land, my transcendental swoon intermittently gives way to thoughts about the effects of sleep deprivation, along with vague notions of how long I actually can go without the benefits of delta waves or even short bursts of REM as we face up to the long trip ahead. . . 

Why would anyone want to leave such a phantasmagorical tableau of nautical charm- a veritable aquatic Valhalla- and return to the jarring and rude terra firma of the mainland, and at such an ungodly hour? I guess you could say it all began the moment we went online looking for “a nice place to stay. . . ."