Polyphony

Notes from my MIDI keyboard

This is Clouds Form Over Land, weekly writing about resilience, imperfectionism, and our relationship to the earth.

Hollandes Cays, Guna Yala, Panama

We have a stowaway aboard Azimuth in the shape of a piano.

Sixty-one keys can fill the hull with music, so long as it's plugged into a computer with the volume up.

Back in San Diego, California we circled around hundreds of what-ifs for the route ahead. We retrieved many packages from the Amazon Lockers in a 7-Eleven on Grape Street, plucking items from that vast catalog in anticipation of potentially limited supplies.

We filled a locker with spare engine parts, electrical bits and bobs, and filters galore. Pool floats and guide books and bug nets. Man overboard beacons to attach to our lifejackets. We ditched a box of wool sweaters and other items unsuitable for the tropics in a friend's basement (thanks Kate!). I dove down the rabbit hole of just-add-water foods and stashed dehydrated delights we still eat today in rough seas.

We adopted a cat.

Scott went to Guitar Center and brought a keyboard home in the dinghy. Everything came home in the dinghy while anchored not far from the city lights.

The keyboard has gone mostly untouched, aside from a spirited stint of Frosty the Snowman practice in the Sea of Cortez last Christmastime. It slides into a wooden shelf Scott built and clips in like an astronaut to ride the high seas.

Two weeks ago the stars aligned and the clouds parted to make way for more piano practice. I opened the Simply Piano app to learn how to play this thing. Or maybe just to check for Frosty in the song library?

The lessons whisked me away to somewhere less consequential than anchoring the boat or checking the weather for our next passage, but slightly more substantial than staring into the abyss of my social media feeds. Soon I was playing notes in treble clef with my right hand and bass with my left. I was playing simplified versions of “Let it Be” and “Summer Lovin’” along with electric guitars and unnamed vocalists that likely abided by some licensing agreement. My inner child band geek was practically squealing with delight at tapping this long-stowed-away knowledge.

A bit before the piano frenzy began, a friend was aboard and Scott shared the idea of polyphony, a word for how many notes can be played simultaneously. This stat is reported on piano and keyboard fact sheets — ours can do 28 at once, which amounts to putting one’s forearms across the keys. By contrast, wind instruments play one note at a time. When the concept came up, we were likely talking about the voyage as a whole and how different people, places, tasks, and trials weave in simultaneously or play the occasional solo.

Polyphony was tossed back into conversations onboard while sitting under the night sky a few days later. We were at the tail end of our friend Ananda's visit and thinking about how guests’ presence sticks around the boat a bit after they go, not unlike the latter portion of a long note in the air as the new melody begins. This layering of experiences resonates this time of year as holiday celebrations blend into other year-end obligations and layer on top of traditions and memories of days gone by.

We are a bit out of sync from the hustle and bustle here in the tropics. The length of days doesn’t differ much this close to the equator; the shortest day of the year is only 30 minutes less than the longest. A low-pressure system in the western Caribbean has us lingering at the dock longer than expected. The rainy season is waning in calendar days, but still dumping buckets — encouraging indoor recess and revealing new leaks overhead in the boat. We are waiting on the weather and are in good company with the other Northern Hemisphere animals in slowing down for the winter.

I was sitting at the navigation desk the other day bumbling through “Over the Rainbow” for perhaps the eightieth time, when the sneaky saboteur inside my head said, 'oh is this what you're doing with our time?’. Hmm. We intended to be settled into a new life on land by now, home for the holidays as it were. As variables of the voyage arose and choices chosen, staying south until spring emerged as a trifecta of safe, easy, and fun.

Life is slower down here. In part because of the eighty and ninety degree days and high humidity bogging things down, but also due to priorities that stray a bit from the go-go-go of capitalism. I miss playing the complex chords and melodic lines of fulfilling paid work, book clubs, sailing races, family visits, and accomplishing more than one errand per day with the help of a car and the predictability of operating in own’s home country and language.

I love sailing passages in part because it's like playing just one note at a time. Sleep, drive the boat, eat. Look at the stars, horizon, sea, and navigational instruments. Listen to downloads — both media stored on my phone and those insights beaming through my brain that seem accessible only on or in water.

Someday I won’t be waiting for the weather at a marina in Panama. My to-dos won’t include a five-hour taxi ride for passport stamps or filling diesel or ordering groceries online in Spanish. I know I’ll miss this strange song.

So this is the weather for learning piano. For logging the hours to reacquaint myself with sheet music and coordinate my mits to do a few things at once in time with the metronome. For taking stock of what’s onboard and what else I hoped to do on this trip. For discovering what’s possible in our current circumstances, taking note of what I’m yearning for, and make a song out of it.

Can Do List:

1. Grab a few finished books from your shelf and exchange it for something that piques your interest at a community shelf or little free library.

2. Revisit an activity you enjoyed in 2007.

3. Take one event off the calendar to add some spaciousness to the season.

4. Spend an hour doing a bit of life admin before years end.

Written in the spirit of not letting what we can’t do get in the way of what we can.

Did you try any of these? I’d love to hear about it.