As an undergrad, Beryl Kahn takes a semester at sea after a bad breakup and gets rocked by the swells of the sea -- and her emotions.
Beryl Kahn is finishing up her second year as a Masters' student at Columbia University's department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology, or E3B, where she's been studying the genetics of pollution resilience in oysters. Prior to starting grad school, she worked as an educator and restoration tech at Randall's Island Park in New York City, which cemented her niche as an urban marine ecologist.
This story originally aired on March 22, 2019 in an episode titled “Ocean Adventures.”
Story Transcript
So the motto of the ship that I did my Study Abroad Program on was ‘Ship, Shipmate, Self’. Unfortunately, I spent a lot of that trip focusing mostly on the ‘self’ part.
I was a junior and, obviously, a little bit in my junior year my first semester things started to go wrong pretty early on when I was still on campus. I had my heart broken and just went into this spiral of self-loathing and just getting into a darker and darker place which, obviously, was a little tough considering I was about to go out into the middle of the Pacific Ocean at the next semester.
Unfortunately, that spiral kind of blossomed into full-on anxiety and depression, great things to be going out into the middle of the wasteland of the ocean a semester later, but I went out and did it anyway.
So it was a tall ship, only about 134 feet. So full rig, sails: triangle, square sails, etcetera. I had only been on very tiny boats before so this was a huge learning curve. And when you go on a tall ship, especially, there's a whole new language you have to learn when you're going aboard.
First of all there aren’t walls anymore. They're called bulkheads. There aren’t floors anymore. They call them soles. And I can’t tell you how many times I got yelled at for calling the head the bathroom. They're like, “What are you? Some kind of landlubber?”
I’m like, “Yeah, actually. Sorry about it.”
In addition to all of that, you have to throw some seasickness in there. Not only is your sense of motion and sense of balance completely thrown off but I also had this extra layer of emotional balance that was thrown off. I found that I couldn’t really relate to my shipmates. It seemed almost that every interaction with them was as if it was happening behind one of those cheap, acrylic glass plates that are in those liquor stores and you kind of have to talk between a tiny little space at the bottom.
It was really hard in order to actually be on this ship so closed into myself and yet we’re in the middle of nowhere. The first week was me just trying to get my sea legs and figure all this out and just everything seemed to be going wrong. Not only could I not figure out how to walk on this boat but I'd be smashing into the sides so I'd be getting bruised. I had bruises on top of bruises and just getting yelled at for making stupid mistakes, because with this loop of anxiety in my head I was screwing up the most basic instructions. It’s like, wow, I can’t even pull on a rope. Something is wrong here.
So after that first week I decided, okay, I’m on my deck watch. I’m going to go down below decks and do an inspection of the engine room, because we had to do that once every hour to make sure the ship is not going to explode, so kind of important.
I went down into the hold, checked on everything. It seemed like the engine was running just fine so I was ready to head back up above decks. And the bottom of the hold has all these watertight doors that are in this passageway. It’s basically a crawl space. It’s airless down there. It’s hot down there. It smells like engine oil. It smells awful and you can feel all the motion of the boat because you're right at the very bottom of it.
You're supposed to close the watertight doors after you leave because, I don't know if you've seen the movie Titanic but that is kind of an important safety measure. So I try to shut this door behind me and the door does not close. It will not seal for the life of me. I’m struggling. I’m sweating. The air and the oil-smell is starting to get to me and this door is just defeating me at every turn. And that added to what the whole week had been of me falling and me making mistakes. It just became too much.
Of course, my inclination was just flop onto the floor, or I guess I should say the sole, and just start bawling. I just lay there in this pathetic little heap in the hold and I was very grateful nobody was there because it was really sad.
Then after a while it started to occur to me that if I was going to let myself get defeated by a door there's no way I was going to survive and make it to the rest of the trip. So I got up and I kind of pulled myself together and then just threw my entire weight at this damn door and twist it into place and it worked. It was like, “Oh, okay. I did something right. This is amazing.”
The rest of the weeks began to proceed. I was going on from there, went into this kind of stasis where I was still really anxious, still unable to connect with my shipmates, but I was able to go about my days. I collect zooplankton. I identify their species. I would collect sea surface temperature. But it’s always happening pretty mechanically, like it was kind of as if I was working in a fog.
One day, I was not on duty, which was quite nice. I got to go up on deck and of course we’d sailed from Hawaii so the weather was beautiful, extremely just gorgeous so I got to go up on deck and do some reading, because I was off duty. I was walking up out onto the decks and all of a sudden the ship’s bell started ringing and people started shouting.
They're like, “Man overboard. This is not a drill.”
Of course everybody just snaps into action. We had rehearsed this when we were in the harbor in Honolulu, luckily. And that loop of anxiety that was causing me to screw up everything else fortunately broke, because my instincts kicked in and I'd been positioned to go up on the lookout in this event in this kind of drill.
So I ran up to the bowsprit. Everyone else, the whole ship was in action. People were throwing life preservers over the side. The people who were on sail handling duty were hauling down the sails and slowing our trajectory to try to turn the ship around.
Meanwhile, from my lookout point on the bow, I look back and there's my classmate Dan just a tiny little speck zipping away into the distance in the smooth wake of the ship. It was just this moment of like, “Oh, my God. We’re really out in the middle of nowhere.”
Fortunately, because my shipmates had thrown over life preservers and poles and things, he had grabbed onto some so he was managing to stay afloat. That was lucky. And he was holding onto what was known as an MOB Pole. It has this flag at the top so just in case you lose sight of somebody in between the troughs you can still see them.
That was exactly what was happening. These swells were probably between twelve and fourteen feet. They were giant. So he would get lost in between these giant swells but we’d see just the tip of that flag so, thankfully, we knew where he was. And fortunately, the team who were actually on the sail handling side of things managed to pull the ship around and eventually we got so that he was in front of us.
Now, here I am on the bow and he ends up directly beneath me. I’m looking down between the netting on the bowsprit and he's just there with his life preservers. He looks up through the netting at me and he seems very mellow, considering that he could potentially die, and he just looks at me and he goes, “Please don’t hit me.”
So I turn around and I shout over my shoulder, “Turn to port.”
So I go this as really down the length of the ship, 130-feet worth of, “Turn to port, turn to port, turn to port.” Whoever is at the helm turns to port and then he drifts to port with us.
So I have to yell, “Turn to starboard.” And then there's this, “Turn to starboard, turn to starboard, turn to starboard,” all the way back to the helmsmen.
Eventually, Dan drifts alongside us. Fortunately, the first mate has some like badass cowboy skills with a rope because he gets this knotted rope and he swings it around and flings it over the side, like he's in Pirates of the Caribbean or something, and pulls Dan back to safety, thankfully.
There was this moment, once we got him back on deck, we all just gathered in the stern and just kind of stared at each other and all of us just hugged even though he was soaking wet. It was just this moment where I could definitely begin to see why they have that motto and why ‘shipmate’ comes before ‘self’.