A Glorified Raft and Grey Horizons

Author’s Note: this is the sixth part of a series about Farren’s journey through a limbo world where everyone is trying to reach the peak of a mountain but have a rope tied to their ankle. Catch up by reading Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5

After the first night of Farren and Gesa sleeping on the beach together, they began working on the boat that would carry them across the ocean.

“Why do you want to focus on building a house first?” Gesa asked confused.

“Just a shelter,” Farren clarified, “Like a simple lean-to. It would help you, since you’re stuck out here in the sun. And we’ll need one on the boat either way. It would help us practice with the rope and we can see how durable our knots are before we start building a hull this way.”

“But the hull is the most important part. And I’m proof that we can’t die of overexposure. I swam the whole ocean and didn’t have a sunburn. Whatever is keeping us healthy seems to apply to long-term skin damage. I just felt tired after a while swimming, even if I was following currents.”

“But if we build a shelter we can take breaks,” Farren continued, “then we won’t be as tired, can build more and can get this done sooner.”

“Sooner,” She said with a chuckle, “I don’t think you’ve quite grasped this concept of eternity. We have all the time in the world to do this.”

Farren thought about it, she was right, he didn’t know why he was in a hurry or why the order they built the boat was important. They could spend years just researching and developing how to tie a knot most efficiently, why am I so obsessed with doing things quickly? he wondered.

“I’ll help you build the shelter,” she admitted looking over at the trees. “It’s your rope after all, and I’ll admit it would be nice to sit somewhere that isn’t in the sun.”

“Great!” Farren exclaimed before he had time to answer the question of why everything was so urgent to him. “Now we just have to figure out how to cut down trees with only ropes and rocks.”

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Without picking up his rope, Farren lost track of time. He had a feeling this was why everything had seemed more important to him than Gesa. She had never tracked time here. She never had a way to. And now as he was halted on the shore not able to follow his rope and track the months all he had was the progress on the boat to gauge time.

The boat had made substantial progress since the first day they argued over what to start building. He spent his morning cutting down trees with a rudimentary rock axe that he built and kept improving.

Using the rope closest to his ankle, he dragged the wood back to shore. In the heat of the early afternoon, they took a nap in the large lean-to he and Gesa started on the first day. Then in the early afternoon and evening, he helped Gesa put together the parts of the boat she had prepared in the morning. This work was the main two-person task and they had to work together to do it.

Today they were tying logs to the deck of the ship so that they could keep their balls of rope corralled as they sailed.

“You know I’m pretty sure most people would just leave the rope laying on the deck as they traveled.” Gesa pointed out. She was always teasing Farren about his pedantic preparations.

“Why? so I can trip on it, fall overboard, and drown?” He had been preaching the importance of keeping balls of rope tidy since she first started working with his rope. She mocked the religiousness of his practice, but he stood by it. Usually saying something like, “when you have all your slack in one place you’ll understand why it’s important.” They both were silently doubtful that the day would ever come that they could see the knot of their ankle, the knot on their rock, and all of the rope that connected the two.

Gesa was about to respond with what Farren was confident would be a funny jest, but they both heard splashing in the distance. It wasn’t the metronomic patting of the waves on the shore either. They looked up from their work and saw a white figure floating in from the sea.

Farren realized he had seen this before as he watched the figure drop their log that they used to float across the ocean and collapse on the shore in exhaustion.

“Did that person just swim across the ocean?” Gesa asked with more wonder than Farren expected from someone who had done it herself.

“I suspect so,” Farren replied.

“I didn’t think anyone else would be dumb enough to do it. You should go talk to them.”

Farren was curious and was glad Gesa felt the same. He didn’t want her to feel as if he was leaving her for the new exciting person that washed up on shore. He agreed and climbed off the makeshift deck of the ship.

Farren took his slack and approached the man on the beach. His clothes were soaked, and Farren could see through the white linens the man wore.

The two men talked for a while. Farren explained why he was building a boat and Gesa’s situation. The man shared his logic for crossing the ocean, which mirrored Gesa’s original reasoning. Once the man caught his breath and his clothes were dry from the sun, he picked up his rope and bid Farren farewell. Farren watched the man lumber off into the thin woods and towards the mountain and his line never got stuck like Gesa’s.

When he returned to the deck of the boat, he filled Gesa in on the conversation. As they mindlessly worked on knots for the deck.

“And then he just walked away?” She asked baffled.

“Yeah,” Farren shrugged without thinking. “He wanted to get to the mountain, and he had caught his breath. I wasn’t going to stop him. He was less than interested to go back out on the ocean.”

“But he was able to just walk away from the shore like that?” Gesa said obviously offended by the unfairness.

Farren realized why she was upset. “He’ll get stuck eventually I suspect.”

“He couldn’t have landed ten meters from where I did,” she continued, “yet he didn’t get caught on anything!” Gesa had stopped all the knots she had been mindlessly tying.

Farren muttered something about currents and rock sizes, but he knew it wasn’t helping her.

“It’s just not fair. I did everything he did, and he just got to walk away while I’m stuck here building a ship so I can remove my rock from some gods damned coral.” Gesa’s face grew bright red in anger. Her mood was a grand departure from her typical sunny disposition.

Farren knew this wasn’t something she was going to be laughing off any time soon, “It’s not anything you did wrong,” Farren felt like he needed to clarify. “These things can’t be controlled. I’m sure that once you dislodge your rock you’ll be able to pass him on your way up the mountain.” Farren had told himself the same thing every time someone laughed at his idea of picking up all his slack.

“I doubt it. If it’s not one thing, it will be another. I’ll probably get lost on my way to the mountain and spend eternity traveling parallel to the base. Then whatever gods stuck us here will be laughing at me.” She climbed off the boat to stand on the sand.

Farren watched her not sure what to say to get her out of the mood. She picked up her rope from the shore and tugged at it.

“Do you want help?” Farren asked.

When she growled and cursed at the rope but didn’t respond Farren picked up the work where she had left off.

Gesa kept tugging at her rope on and off for a few days but was soon back to working on the boat full time. When Farren left to gather trees, he would place sticks on the man’s rope, and if they had moved the next day, he would know the man was still making progress. It was an almost religious fascination with the man’s journey, and he added to the tracking of progress into his day to day life.

After months of building the boat and tracking the progress of the man’s rope, it stopped moving. When the line was still for a few days in a row, Farren informed Gesa. However, she was less in awe than he expected her to be. 

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After what the pair felt like was the better part of a year they had finally finished the boat.

“You know it’s a hell of a step up from what I used to get over here,” Gesa said as they looked at the boat the night before its maiden voyage.

“Thanks for the help,” Farren responded.

“You know I really thought it was going to be a glorified raft,” Gesa said poking fun at him and his planning.

Farren had worked through everything and probably over engineered it. There was a rudder and a mast, although they had no sail to put on it. His original idea of a lean-to on the boat evolved into an entire cabin between the deck of the ship and the hull. There were some corrals for his rope and Gesa’s as well whenever she started accumulating it.

However, the pride of the whole ship was that he figured out how to use sap from the trees to waterproof the hull. He didn’t have many balls of rope left since they had to use so much length to tie the ship together, but he knew they’d be accumulating more as they traveled.

The next morning they loaded up Farren’s two remaining balls of rope into the corral and set off to sea.

It took them a while to get out past the waves that pushed them towards the shore, but they pulled on their ropes with all their strength and eventually were clear from being pushed back to where they started. They tied their lines to the deck and took a break.

Gesa simply stared at her slack. She had accumulated a few hundred yards in the process of leaving the shore. “I really didn’t think I would ever see this much of my rope in one place.”

“If you spent a year swimming across the ocean you’re going to wind up seeing a bit more than that. He showed her how to tie it up into a ball. And after a bit of fussing it was in a neat sphere twice the size of a coconut.

“Well now it’s not nearly as impressive,” she complained.

“Don’t worry it will grow,” Farren answered absentmindedly as he untied his rope so they could begin pulling themselves across the ocean again.

A little before sunset the two sailors ran into a problem. Farren had feared it would happen as they built the boat but never spoke it out loud knowing that it was out of his control one way or the other. Gesa’s rope had split paths from his.

“What should we do?” He asked her as they tied the ropes to the mast to take a break. If they had two boats, they would have split paths as he did with Teekola. But now they were sharing a ship, and there was no way they could follow both lines.

“I hate to be selfish, but I think we’re going to have to follow my line,” Gesa responded eying Farren’s slack. “You have a bit more slack, and I think we could make good progress towards my rock before you run out.”

“What if I run out?” Farren asked trying to imagine the situation where neither of them had the slack to chase a rock.

“We would have to let my line out and get yours. It would be a constant back and forth of tracing one line back then another. Eventually, we would get to my rock or the shore.”

“We could be out here for ages.” Farren realized out loud.

“It’s a good thing we didn’t have to pack food,” Gesa replied with a chuckle. “We’ve got all eternity. You really should work to grasp that concept,” she teased.

The next morning they began letting Farren’s slack out to find Gesa’s rock.

They quickly found out that they had to automate how Farren’s line let out slack because Gesa’s rope pulled them against the ocean’s current. It took the two of them to drag the weight of the ship against the tide and without two people pulling they would make no progress or lose progress with a misstep.

After they got into the habit of pulling in the line the boat made good progress across the sea. Farren realized that his two balls of rope would give them more distance than he suspected initially because pulling Gesa’s line in didn’t always require his slack to let the same length out. The math of the situation eluded him, but Gesa assured him it was because the rope they were dragging could have slack in it since they were floating in the ocean. She suspected that they were still making indirect progress towards his rock as well.

One early morning before the sun was up Farren woke with the realization that his boulder might be at the bottom of the ocean as well. And if his rock was the biggest one the gods had on this world, then there would be no way to pick it up.

After sharing this fearful realization with Gesa, she responded with, “Well if it’s as big as you say it is then that will mean that you’ll probably get your own private island. You and your balls of rope can just hang out there and wait for castaways like me to float by. Maybe I’ll even come to visit you after I make it up the mountain and they give me wings.”

However, as dawn came on them that day they realized they had a much bigger problem to face. On the horizon was a storm cloud that was slate grey with streaks of black shadows. The blue sky they were floating under was cut off by thick grey storm clouds. They could see lightning going off inside it, but it was still too far away to hear.

“I didn’t know this world had weather,” Farren thought out loud.

Gesa sighed. “This would be my luck. I finally start making some progress towards being unstuck, and the gods throw a storm at me.” She sat down leaning against the side of the boat.

Farren inspected their crudely made boat and had some doubts of its ability to survive a drizzle let alone a massive lightning storm like the one on their horizon.

“Could we go around it?” He asked her as he eyed the rudder they built but never used.

“I don’t think so,” she answered in a small voice as the wind picked up, “and even if we could, I’m sure we would just run into some other kind of issue.”

Farren realized that there was one thing that they still had that could help them survive this situation. He began pulling in as much slack from his line as possible. When it was taught he tied it to the opposite side of the boat as Gesa’s line.

He double checked Gesa’s rope making sure the line was taught, and they had tightly fastened it to the wood of the boat.

The storm was moving towards them fast now. And the wind had picked up so much that his white linen shirt was billowing like a sail. Farren looked at Gesa who hadn’t moved since realizing the storm’s power.

“Gesa, let’s get under the deck,” Farren suggested as he picked up her arm.

“Why? It’s not like the storm will kill us. It will just shock us a little and make us wet.” Her face looked pitiful. The hopelessness of the situation was shutting her down.

“Because,” Farren failed to find a good reason to get under the deck, “Because if we are under the deck, we won’t have to swim back to the boat after this is over.”

Gesa got up, too lazy to think of a retort to his poor excuse.

They climbed down the small ladder that put them out of the wind. Farren looked at the hole in the deck they had entered through and realized despite his meticulous planning he had forgotten something in the design of their ship.

“I don’t have a way to close that,” he said to Gesa who wasn’t listening.

Then the rain started to fall, soft for a few seconds then hard. Farren looked down at his wet feet realizing that the waterproofing of his hull was about to be his downfall.

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The Tipping Point