The Butterfly

When dusk had fallen and the New York skyline had long sunk below the horizon, I wandered the top decks and looked at the sea. I found a little corner near the forward sun deck and vaped for a while.

Note for later: first impressions of others' reactions to vaping came that first evening - impressions which would cool off towards the end of the long trip.

A calm, endless sea is such a complicatedly simple thing to observe. It stretches from your closest vantage until you simply can't see it anymore, and in between: a rolling, random tumble of interacting wavelets and counterwavelets and tiny bulges trading small energies with each other. Below the surface, all is hidden by this rippling curtain of minuscule interacting forces. I had the sense that the ship's passage affected that rippling curtain, but I couldn't point and say, "There's our contribution," or, "This is because we're here." Almost as if the ship, despite its size and density and precious cargo, glided on into a sea as a tear slides down the face: leaving behind a small trail, crossing an expanse oblivious in outward reaction to its presence, and yet with motion that was filled with such importance and meaning that the surface's nerves are afire with the smallest progression of its movement. I could intuit the sea's awareness of our presence, of the water's inexorable shifting to account for our displacement, of the grandeur and noise and tumult of passage that must be witnessed by thousands of sea creatures hidden by the curtain.

As these thoughts crossed my mind, I saw a black butterfly flitting helplessly in the sea breeze above the forward deck. The passengers negligently batted it away as it interrupted their lives in its fleeting desperation. A pang of sorrow struck me at its plight.

Lost at sea without sustenance, carried by forces incomprehensible and immense in its small world, the butterfly was caught in the sea-soaked air of a foreign environment. I thought of its quest for food, of its biological desire to expand its senses to find vegetation and mate, of its fight against the turbulent breeze that tossed it about in its frantic attempts at control.

How much had we unknowingly carried with us in these ocean crossings? And to what end? Perhaps this butterfly could find some small sustenance on the ship and carry on its existence. Perhaps it could even find its way to Bermuda, and rough an extended existence passing New York pollen onto Bermudan flowers.

Could such small wings cause the cliched storm when passed between such disparate shores? The fragility of island ecologies is stereotypical in evolutionary theory; such a small creature, carried so indiscriminately by our massive boat, could bring a new form of life to a place of such isolation, and a destructive imbalance to the awaiting pocket of island creatures.

And yet, I hoped for the butterfly in its struggle against forces it couldn't control. The forces that buffeted it were paralleled in the forces that buffet us all, unseen and immense, and, if effects were dire, then so be it. I accepted the butterfly, and knew that from unknown doom springs hope for a stronger future.