Dark Seas (ON HOLD)

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I'VE OFTEN THOUGHT about what my sixth grade science teacher told us when we were learning about the lunar landing.

The man was mostly full of shit–one of those hacks that believed it was all a conspiracy theory. The images we have of the astronauts on the moon are men jumping around in costumes in some desert in Arizona or New Mexico.

There is one thing that stuck with me that I learned from Mr. Byers, though. As we sat in that classroom picking our noses while he filled our minds with mostly mush and facts about volcanoes, he said this: We know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the bottoms of our own oceans.

We are so interested in searching for life outside of our world, we forget to look within it. Perhaps the strangest things aren't in outer space, millions of light years away. Perhaps they are right here, within our own oceans.

I've thought about sample sizes.

You look at enough patches at the bottom of the ocean, and you can reasonably convince yourself "that's it." Weird sulfur eating worms and ugly fish with lanterns on their heads are about all we are going to find down there.

But can you every really know for sure?

I thought about those things as I stared over the railing, into the deep abyss of the Pacific Ocean.

I also thought about the Nalgene bottle I had hidden in the base of my duffle bag that I'd snuck onto the vessel when we left the Port of Long Beach three days ago.

One sip wouldn't make a difference. No one would notice one sip.

No.

It was for emergencies only. I shouldn't have even brought it. I pushed it from my mind.

"Isn't it amazing, Leigh?" Dakota stood next to me, pressing her hands against the railing and letting her upper body lean over the side of the vessel like she thought she was Rose on the Titanic.

The salty night breeze whipped through her blonde hair and sent a shiver down my spine. I crossed my arms in front of myself, trying to keep warm in my itchy boiler suit. When I'd heard our route would be between California and Hawaii in the middle of summer, my head'd told me, Leigh, it's going to be balls hot. Don't pack a sweatshirt!

Well, my brain forgot to account for the fact that we'd be out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean at night. As calm a route as it was, the wind on the open seas has a nasty way of chilling you even when temperatures are in the high eighties or low nineties every day.

"I didn't realize it would get this cold at night," I said.

"Yeah, me neither, but God, this view! Have you ever seen the stars like this at home?"

With no light pollution around for hundreds of miles, the entire Milky Way was as thick as soup. It glistened like a hurricane of glitter frozen in time. The water of the Pacific Ocean was so indigo it was purple, illuminated only by the stars, the moon, and the lights from the Jupiter Seas.

"Yeah, they're beautiful." I pushed back a few strands of stray hair that had escaped my ponytail. My fingers smelled like metal and paint.

Resting my hands on the railing again, I took a deep breath of the cool, salty air. Waves crashed against the bow—a gentle roar in the otherwise quiet night. We stood on the aft end of second deck, just outside our cabin. The stacks of containers we were transporting to Hawaii towered behind us, and the rest of the deckhouse loomed ahead, blocking a good portion of the wind.