The Pacific Ocean is not kind. I want to be clear about this because the word honest, which I am using to describe it, can imply a warmth that the Pacific does not consistently provide. The Pacific is honest in the specific sense of not providing any of the infrastructure that allows dishonesty: there is nothing in the open ocean between the Galapagos and the Marquesas that allows a person to be other than what they actually are, and the three weeks it takes to cross it remove, one by one, the mechanisms that the land life provides for managing the presentation of the self.
The phone is present but the urgency it usually carries is absent. The professional identity is present but the professional context that gives it meaning is five thousand miles away. The social performance that the successful land life requires is present as a habit but the specific audience that the habit was developed for is not aboard, and the habit gradually loses the energy that the audience provided and settles into something simpler and more direct. By day ten of a Pacific crossing, the people aboard are closer to the actual versions of themselves than they have been since the last time the offshore context removed the alternatives.
What the Pacific Removes
The Pacific removes the alternatives. This is its specific gift and its specific demand simultaneously. The person who is uncomfortable with their own company in the absence of the distractions that the land provides will find the Pacific crossing the most difficult passage of the Naora route.
The person who has been waiting, consciously or not, for the specific quality of sustained time with themselves that the land life systematically prevents will find it the most valuable. Both responses are available to the same person depending on the day: the Pacific crossing that begins as the former often arrives at the Marquesas as the latter, because three weeks is long enough for the discomfort of the alternative’s absence to become the comfort of the alternative’s replacement.
What replaces the alternatives is the present: the specific physical reality of the boat on the ocean, the wind in the sail, the swell pattern, the stars at night and the clouds at dawn and the specific quality of the Pacific light that is different from any other light we have sailed under across twenty-five years of offshore work.
The present is always available. The Pacific crossing is the context that removes everything that competes with it for the attention, and what remains when the competition is removed is the specific quality of being fully in the thing you are in that the word honest is trying to describe.
What It Produces
The Pacific crossing produces in the people who make it a specific quality of clarity that the land alternatives do not consistently produce. Not wisdom in the abstract sense: the specific, nameable clarity about what matters and what does not that arrives when the things that do not matter have been absent long enough for the distinction to become visible.
The person who leaves the Galapagos with an unresolved question about the direction of their professional life or their personal one does not necessarily arrive at the Marquesas with the answer. They arrive with the question in a form that is clear enough to be answered, which is a different and more valuable condition than the question in the form that the land noise had been maintaining it: important but unexamined, urgent but undefined.
This is what I mean when I say the Pacific is the most honest place I have been. Not that it tells you truths you did not know. That it removes the conditions that were preventing you from knowing the truths you already had.
