So we get to Harwick a little early. More specifically, when we step onto the platform at the station and go up and over the tracks and into the vast and empty gate office/waiting room, we've got roughly six hours and some change to kill before our overnight ferry to Holland begins boarding. It's not even docked yet, and is nowhere to be seen. Epic.
There had been a kindly old couple on the train that started small talk with us because we had funny accents and maybe we were a little loud. Well, not so much loud as talkative, which maybe just sounded loud because it's in such contrast to the stone-wall silence that hung over the other passengers in our half-empty car. When we had gotten on at Liverpool Station, it had been packed and as soon as our bags had found proper lodging and our bums proper seating, Grant was gone, headphones in, lights out. Max and I spared some time to write stupid, silly things down in notebooks and on London postcards, before expiring as well, surrendered to heavy eyes and weary bodies from the day's trek; surrendered to Cat Power's soft drawl a-ramblin' in my ears, runnin' the backs of her sweet Southern fingers down, guiding the lids over my eyeballs so that the last thing I'm thinking about as conscience fades is the lengths of my unconditional love for her and the silky, deep voice she is to me in my head. I would marry her.
And then "hey, presto" the old city's gone and it's just the gold summer seas and tree grooves waving in the wind as we fly by. And the car's half empty and there's a kindly old couple sitting across the way from us. He's reading the paper. She's working needlepoint. Grant and Max have been up for I don't know how long. The batteries are recharged. Slowly and surely, the excitement of our present predicament is once again shining on all our faces, and when talk turns inevitably to the World Cup and soccer matches, we've fully engaged the attentions of those weathered, fair-skinned leather faces on the other side of the walkway.
"The boys just weren't shining this year." He's gruff, but friendly. She absolutely loves to talk to us. They tell us stories of times before we were born, of the lands we're training through, of their children, their grandchildren, and of course, of the ole' boys from English national teams past. They're from a small quiet town on the Channel a few stops past Harwick and they're sweethearts from the one primary school in their one-school little English town. They've got all the charm and social etiquette that one expects from an elderly couple from Frinton. When they talk, it's soft so that you have to lean in inquisitively just to hear their "back then" stories over the loud hum of the train rushing us through the English countryside. It's polite and drawn out and kind of trails off at the end. Maybe that's all it takes to sound dear and sincere. To make all those elaborate descriptions of awe-inspiring plays on the pitch back in England's "hay-day" so real as to make one think that he'd been right there on the pitch itself.
But something told me he wasn't. Something told me he had been at home, listening to it on the radio, sweetheart's hand in his. And so it probably was, and as to be expected. They've never really left Frinton, save to visit their children in London, of course. And before they leave us out on the platform at Harwick, waving back at us, they tell us exactly what it is we might find to do in our six hour interim; nothing. There's a quaint pub and a diner they say, two or so miles' distance from the track. But our packs seem somehow heavier than they had in the morning, and we've had enough walking for one day anyways.
So we wait. In the waiting room. On the hard, hard rows of plastic and metal seats with their thin, hard, glued-on cushions that seem more aesthetic than functional. Reading, writing, dozing off here and there, finding solace and solitude in the familiar rhythms and melodies always thrumming in my ears. A breadth of a laugh. It's recollection, short-term nostalgia of a year's passing, keeping one baby-toe firmly cemented in life's realities, the good and the bad, the somber and the sweet. Songs shuffled, bitches.
Three hours to go. We find ourselves playing a game of all-terrain, no boundaries, balled-up paper bochi ball. Extreme Bochi Ball. Off the walls, down the escalator, up the escalator. Into planters, desperately nibbling at the last cliff-bar in the pack to hold us over to dinner on the Stena Hollandica. Passengers begin to arrive, finally, just a little before the Germany-Uruguay match for third place comes on the telly. A few more on every other train. Then more so. We take seats with a good angle at the TV and breath easy. The match will take us right up to boarding time. Germany, behind Mueller, is the dominant force throughout the game. With Suarez out due to a red card and an ejection in the quarter-final match against Ghana, the entirety of Uruguay's offense depends on Diego Forlan, the mighty south-foot. He's their shining light. Our ferry arrive and passengers from Holland begin to get off. A Balinese man and his son give me twenty euros to carry their bags over the causeway to the platform. Always hustlin'. We start boarding right as Forlan's free kick bounces off the crossbar.
Now I've never been on a cruise-ship before. Maybe a ferry or two long ago when my parents would take me on road trips back and forth and all around the western United States. Every now and again we'd have to pull that beast of a '92 Ford Aerostar onto a ferry to cross some river that was too wide or too expensive to bridge over. Those ferries looked like ferries; an exposed deck ladled with automobiles and meandering passengers, a tower from which the pilot navigated, and maybe some conservative observation deck that looked more like a patio over the car deck. The Stena Hollandica is no such ferry. Having been in the waiting room for all of about six hours, we hadn't seen her come in. Outside is dark now. Walking up the causeway to board, we get our first sight of the mighty ship. It's got the hull of an ocean-liner, not like those dinky barge-ferries back in the States. I can see all the portholes lighting up from people finding their rooms up and down the side. We keep walking along, dumbfounded, as the causeway slowly ascends parallel to the apparent luxury ferry-liner we're going to be sleeping on tonight.
At the top, we turn right and walk down a clean, varnished, stained-wood corridor. It still has that new ferry-liner smell; can't be more than a couple years old. The corridor's well-lit and lavish-like with lights that shine with a bright, warm-yellow glow that gives the stained wood a gold tint. It opens up onto the main stairwell, which is much of the same, only more so. It's brighter, warmer, more lavish, more gold. Although starvation and dehydration may probably be contributing factors, we're quite literally taken aback by the scene before us. People everywhere shuffling along, to their rooms, to the dining hall, to the outside deck, the television media room. We discreetly collect ourselves and hustle off to find our rooms. Quick work's made of dropping our bags off. Quick showers, clean clothes. The rooms are ship-quaint and immaculate with matching dark navy blue carpet and comforters. Max and Grant split a bunk-bed and I take the single. "So, uh, good call on the ferry guys."
"YUP." We're all surprisingly chipper, considering our stomachs are panging away desperate hunger and dragging us to the mess hall. Grub time.
I don't really remember what we have for dinner. All I remember is inhaling it. It's one of those food blackouts, I suppose. Oh well, we start buying pitchers. We'd chit-chatted with a trio of backpackers from Texas earlier in the waiting room. Now they come to sit with us, and they start buying pitchers. Then this Rastafarian-looking fella with dreads past his shoulders comes and sits with us. He tells us he's from Brooklyn. And then he starts buying pitchers. As you can well imagine, it's a rather sloppy, slap-happy sort of night. We play hockey and quarters and pitcher after pitcher falls by the wayside. A short, rather promiscuous looking girl from the cockney side of London finds a seat between Max and I. And she starts buying pitchers. It's not too long before she's showing us the Green Day song tattooed on her back, three verses, chorus, and all. What song is it? I don't know. Who cares. It's a Green Day song, and it's tattooed on her back in that trite tattoo cursive that people get song quotes in. Shoulder-blades to the small of her back, covered in it. Epic. They stop serving alcohol at 2:00, but by that time it doesn't matter. We're all smashed. Max sits in on a couple hands of blackjack at the table by the smoking room. We smoke our remaining weed out of an apple outside on the deck with our newly found high school clique. A few shady looking strangers appear out of the shadows and smoke us out too. We talk about where we're each from and the World Cup and Amsterdam and about music. Our dread-locked companion, who also happens to be studying engineering at Harvard raps freestyle for about ten minutes. It's incredible, and that's not just the booze and the weed talking. The man's got a real talent for stringing together words off the top of his head. There's a certain command of the English language present and a quickness of mind that proves his Harvard caliber to me. It's a thing disguised to the world under the generic identity of a pot-head Rastafarian. And that's the best thing about knowing him, I think. But hey, what do I know? I'm high.
Around 4:00, eyes heavy, we bid each other adieu, promising to meet up in the morning when we get to the Hook. The Green Day pixie coincidentally has a room right across the hall from ours, but nothing came of it. She just hugs each of us in the hallway, squeezing tight before saying goodnight. And when she turns to closed the door, she chances a glance at each of us in our respective rooms looking back, and there's a glint from the fire of a drunk passion in her eyes. What a fucking night.
