My Voyage to America

We departed early in the morning. I was one in a swollen mass, bubbling and gushing aboard a great ship with broad sides and high masts, the tips of which disappeared in the gray fog coming off the sea. Our tickets were taken, and people began to gravitate towards walls, corners and other people, hoping for some measure of security. Some looked frightened and unsure, and though I did not look it I felt the same way. I strained my eyes as long as I could looking at the shore, watching as everything I knew and loved was slowly eaten by the fog.

Suddenly I felt very cold. I made my way below deck, and settled behind a stairwell with my back to a wall, pulling my legs to my chest and rubbing my hands together. We had sold everything that we had to earn me passage across the sea. My mother and my two younger brothers and sister were to stay with my grandmother in Oslo, while I departed from Stavanger. If we could afford it in the future, my mother said, they would send my oldest brother Halvard, fifteen, to join me in America. But in any case, we had sold most everything, leaving me with everything I owned in a medium sized leather satchel. I didn’t have much: one blanket, my father’s bone carved pipe, a cedar snuffbox, food for the fourteen days at sea (mostly bread and dried meat, some dried fruit), a canteen of water, a small pan, a pair of boots, a picture of my mother, father and brothers (before he was killed, and before my sister was born of my stepfather), a pocket knife and a gold watch that I would trade for money when I arrived. All the clothes I had I wore on myself in layers. I looked like a mess of coats, scarves and bandannas with two brooding eyes. No one spoke to me. Anyone who tried didn’t get very far anyway. I would carve bits of wood I found into figures of animals and fish.

Below deck, the air was oily and thick with the smell of sweat, stale water and disease. Sickness traveled quickly in such a confined place, and it didn’t help that we were delayed a week in the ice of winter. I could not imagine passage before the steam ships, trapped in this decaying wooden and steel organism without air for up to three months. One little girl was dead for hours before they realized she wasn’t sleeping. I guess it was too much for her fragile immune system to handle.

I would often go up on the deck late at night, when everyone else was asleep, so I could smell the salty sea, feel it spray on my face, and smoke in comfort. Somewhere in this ocean, my father’s bones lay in some deep trench. Each night I was lulled to sleep by the creaking of wood and the lapping of waves. Sometimes I would wake out of a nightmare, mistaking the moaning hull for his hushed voice, or the scream of steam for his desperate cries against the crushing waves.

Like I said, people didn’t talk to me much. I don’t blame them.