Prompt #5 Response

Donovan looked over the rail.  The waves rocked the small ship, crashing against the bow.  Every now and then he’d spy the silver-blue flash of a dolphin riding the crest of surf thrown up by the prow of the sturdy sailing vessel.  He’d never imagined a life as a sailor.  He figured he’d grow up and go into farming, just like his father, meet a nice girl, get married and grow old all without ever leaving the confines of his small town.  Perhaps a trip into the city for special occasions.  But overall, a hardworking, though largely sedentary life.

All that had changed when his father had taken him to the port city of Shiloh to see the prince.  It was a rare opportunity for folks in his part of the kingdom.  The royal family so rarely ventured outside the capitol.  But it wasn’t the royal procession that had caught Donovan’s imagination.  It was the tall ships, standing proudly at anchor out in the harbor, or tied up alongside the quay.  Masts thrust into the sky like naked trees, sails billowed and the rich scent of exotic spices and the strange sight of foreign cargos promised adventures just over the horizon.

All at once, the possibilities of life lay open to Donovan.  The sea promised escape.  An asylum from a life of drudgery and boredom that he had never felt, but now desperately feared.  His father hadn’t taken it well when Donovan first broached the subject.  But eventually he gave in, realizing that he really couldn’t keep Donovan on the farm – that he would just run away.  And deep down, he had felt the constraining nature of life in the small hamlet he called home.  He could hardly begrudge his only son the opportunity to see more of the wide world than he himself had seen.  So Donovan left with his father’s blessing, and headed back to Shiloh to try and make his way in the world.

In the year and half since leaving home, he had traversed the narrow sea and the broad ocean.  He had travelled to foreign ports and met foreign women, very different from the girls back home.  Whenever they pulled into Shiloh, Donovan would post a letter to his father, to let him know that he was alright and to fill him in on his latest adventures.

Of course, it wasn’t all fun.  Life on a sailing vessel was no easier than life on a farm.  In some ways, it was a good deal harder.  His first month on board, Donovan could scarcely keep a meal down.  The other sailors had a good laugh at his expense, but eventually he found his sea legs.  Perhaps the worst experience happened that first winter.  The weather had turned nasty, and while Donovan had lived through winter storms before, he had always done so on the farm, where you could depend on the ground to remain firm, no matter how badly the howling winds shook the rafters.  But a winter storm on a ship was a very different matter.

He both cursed and blessed the pounding rain and blowing winds, as they hid both his tears and his terrified wails from his fellow crewman.  As the ship stormed up tall crests and plunged into deep troughs, Donovan was sure he was about to die.  He tried to hide under a dry space near the bow, his head tucked under the gunwale to keep the rain off.  He used his body to shelter the piece of parchment as he scratched out a goodbye to his father.  The words were barely legible due to the rocking of the ship and the streaming rain.  But Donovan spelled out how much he loved his father and then jammed the paper into a bottle, corking it as well as he could.

He closed his eyes, said a small prayer that his missive would somehow find its way to Shiloh, where perhaps the postmaster would read it and send it on.  Then he rose up over the rail and hurled the bottle into the storm, one final letter, without a stamp.