Mal-de-mer

When I was a boy nine or ten-years-old, I joined my father and uncles and grandfather in piloting their 21-foot boat, “The Nereid,” from Little Ferry, New Jersey to the Manasquan Inlet. We started down the Hackensack River, crossing Newark Bay, and then connected to the Hudson River which flowed to the Narrows separating the upper and lower bays between Staten Island and Brooklyn, and then sailed down the Atlantic Ocean until reaching the inlet. It was 1962, the boat launched annually from dry dock, and this nautical journey undertaken, in early to mid-April, depending on the weather.

For a boy a few weeks shy of his tenth birthday, it was an almost mystical experience watching smaller tributaries and currents merge with larger bodies of water and ultimately a very large body of water. I remember crossing the Verrazano Narrows into the lower bay, a great liquid expanse glittering in the April sunlight under a mottle of blue sky and clouds, so that the quicksilver flashes on its surface moved and shifted as the boat scudded through the emerging swells.

Water pollution was evident and rampant almost from the time we left the marina in Little Ferry but grew worse as we approached Newark Bay. I remember laughing at the yellow-white foam of Sulphur-based chemicals smelling like rotten eggs, or laughing at red dyes or blooms of plastic waste bobbing like strange jellyfish in the Nereid’s wake and sometimes clinging to the river banks. I was young, and my glee over pollution was somehow tied into the death wish, pretty normal for boys that age, like the drawings of skulls and monsters and ghouls in the margins of my school notebooks. But the polluters and despoilers of the planet still seem to have those 10-year-old boy brains, consumed by the death wish in their worship of Mammon and insatiable lust for power and world domination. Despite my young age, I now look back on those feelings with shame. My father and uncles also tossed beer cans and their lunch bags into the river. It would be eight years until the first Earth Day, everyone was littering and polluting, and there’d been little to no awareness or consciousness regarding ecology and the environment. I’m still stunned and amazed when I recall how different the waterways had been, the places you were no longer allowed to fish or swim in again until years later.
            My father and uncles were drinking beer, my father inhaling his Marlboros with cork-tipped filters, his older brother smoking a pipe, younger brother drinking but not smoking. Everyone looked a little rough and unshaven. I understood that part of my making the journey with them encompassed this vicarious initiation into “man stuff,” and I did want the beer and cigarette for the sheer sake of imitation. I had a few years to go before handling alcohol and tobacco, especially on a cabin-cruiser rocking back and forth. As soon as we reached the ocean I felt an incipient nausea and couldn’t understand the reason for it. My father stopped the boat for a while and everyone fished, and the rocking boat rocked more violently. My grandfather fished with a hand line and said it was a more natural way to fish. He was regarded as a bit eccentric, though he’d captained large merchant marine vessels in two world wars and the Korean conflict. I couldn’t stand the up-and-down rocking motion of the boat and headed into the cabin to lie down, but then the creeping illness grew worse in a confined space as I stared at the lures and tackle and life preservers and tarps rising and falling the same as me, and I soon raced from cabin, leaned over the starboard bow and threw up into the ocean, the ugly spatter of half-digested food, bile and peptic acid borne away quickly and easily on the salt tide. I felt that I was going to die, but the men didn’t seem all that concerned. They were long familiar with mal-de-mer and began to employ abundant vernacular language in characterizing my episode of regurgitation. My grandfather genteelly stated that I had “yipped my groceries,” which triggered a round of laughter, not at my expense necessarily but over the phrase that he’d used. “Throw up” also seemed a bit tame as well as the Latinate “regurgitate.”  “Puke” “Barf” “Upchuck” “Retch” “Vomit” better described the sensation of my insides erupting like Vesuvius through my nose and mouth. “Hurling chunks,” or “Ralphing,” favorites among millennials, had not yet come into fashion. Oh, what the hell, you’ll find more brilliant and hilarious examples here---339 of ‘em in fact. http://www.c4vct.com/kym/humor/puke.htm

My uncle told me that I would feel instantly better as soon as the boat docked, the moment my feet touched terra firma. I was incredulous, having never experienced the horror of seasickness before, but the prediction turned out to be true. The weirdest sensation, though, was the gentle rocking that occurred for hours after the boat had docked. The sensation was especially acute when sitting still in a chair, or worse, when lying in bed trying to fall asleep. I felt that I was back on the boat and believed I heard the sound of the bow planks creaking with this rocking motion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verrazano%E2%80%93Narrows_Bridge

Passing through the Verrazano Narrows I looked upwards to see the unfinished construction of the famous bridge. The work had started in 1959 and the upper level was finished in 1964, and the lower level would not be completed until 1969. I remember seeing a red crane and a truck on the bridge and from my vantage they were like Matchbox toys. The perspective gave you an idea of how long and high the Verrazano Narrows Bridge would be when big construction equipment looked dwarfed from our 21-foot cabin cruiser named “The Nereid” as it passed underneath the bridge.

James Braddock, the mid-1930s heavyweight boxing champ, had worked on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, and my father and uncles had known Braddock. When they were building their boat in a rented garage in North Bergen, they’d bought boat equipment from Braddock who owned and ran a marine junkyard in the neighborhood. They referred to him as a “junk man.” I hadn’t known there were wrecking yards for boats as there were for cars, but it made sense.

Although you will never quite control it, I’ve learned a few rules over the years about seasickness that definitely helped and either led to a good day of fishing or at least mitigated the symptoms and their severity.

1.    If possible, take a seasick pill the night before, or even better, 24 hours before going on a boat.

2.    Do not drink alcohol the night before.

3.    Get a good night’s sleep.

4.    Eat a light breakfast and don’t drink too much coffee.

5.    Keep moving when on the boat, do stuff and look at the horizon often.