Joey Cloudy online

Isaiah Jones versus the Sea (A 21st Century Odyssey)

Day One Grounded; the Wrong side of the Buoy*

Chapter 5 Galveston to Key West: prelude; January 1st, 2022

“Same as it ever was, same as it ever was

Same as it ever was, look where my hand was

Time isn’t holding up, time isn’t after us

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was”

-Talking Heads

Isaiah kept the city lights of the Galveston skyline in sight portside as he sailed east into the deep, dark waters of the Gulf of Mexico towards Florida’s Key West under the light of the full moon. Originally, the first leg of his journey was going to begin with a stop in New Orleans. After years of studying maps of these waters, he knew that if he sailed east from Kemah, near Houston, to New Orleans, the trip would take six days in all (sailing the ICW ‘Inter Coastal Waterways’). At the last minute, something in his gut told him to stay away from Louisiana, so Isaiah decided to skip New Orleans as he continued to sail east towards the Florida Keys.

There would be few obstacles in the dark waters of the Gulf of Mexico, only the multitude of oil rigs and floating refineries, some rising over 2000 feet (about twice the height of the Empire State Building) above the surface of the sea between here and just east of Louisiana. He knew that many of the old rigs were abandoned and without power or lights, so he moved slowly at night, trusting the ship’s navigational systems to spot any towers he missed by the light of the full moon.

The freighters, super tankers, and luxury cruise ships would be further south out in the sea lanes proper, so he only worried about the metal behemoths rising out of the water like the skeletal remains of a long-extinct aquatic beast and local fishermen in small power boats he passed occasionally in the early morning hours whose tanned and leathered faces smiled and waved as the black sails of the Exodus glided by silently over the morning mist.

Isaiah continued the prep work, setting sail and beating into the wind on Galveston Bay, and then the trip east the next morning, passing beneath Sabine Pass. He continued to rebuild, refit, and prepare the prototype Monarch Ti-44 Sailboat for the eventual blue water Atlantic crossing from Barbados to Africa, the longest and final leg of the cruising journey.

With her solid-piece titanium hull and keel design, Zero Keel, OMEGA rudder, center cockpit, Solent rigged sloop, the prototype Monarch Ti-44, with her main unfurled Genoa slotted in a strong wind to beam, sailed a hundred and twenty-five nautical miles in a day.

Unlike the faster catamarans he grew up sailing around the Bahamas on summer vacations with his family the Exodus was far more stable and quieter while not as speedy as the cats her monohull was better going to head winds and the 5ft fin keel and the weight of the prototype’s titanium hull meant she smashed through the waves and was less bouncy and less affected by chop, more stable, and quieter while moored in harbor.

Isaiah was still beating himself up for hitting the sandbar before he was even out of the port of Galveston that first night out. The fear of the deep dark water still terrified him, just as it had all of his life, and always, he would jump into the water with the fear, let it surround, let it devour him whole.

Even when they were in the crystal-clear waters of the Caribbean during the summer breaks on his parent’s catamaran, he still felt vulnerable in the open water. He felt slow, defenseless. You could not hear danger coming, and you still moved too slowly; you were the bald monkey in the swirling viscous maw of beast water. In the ocean, you were no longer at the top of the food chain; in the permanent dark of the sea, you were just another piece of swimming meat.

Still, even with the terror, he would climb into the water with a small rubber-covered baby sledgehammer and give the keel a few good taps to be sure the ceramic resin that protected the metal was intact and undamaged, not delaminating or flaking off at the part of the keel that impacted the sandbar. First, he plunged his hand into the dark water; he could feel the bones of the ancestors gathered on the muddy bottom of the sea, sitting in vigil.

The skulls looked up with hollow eyes from the deep-sea coral-encrusted skulls beneath tombstones made of cresting waves. Their names were written in white caps and salty spray of the sea; the Atlantic is a mass grave concealing the Negro Holocaust. A million skeletal arms rose in the mire to touch his hand, and the Hebrews have a saying: “Never forget.” The sea holds the remains of millions cast into the abyss for centuries. We’re the keepers of the graves of the sacred memories; we guard the ancestors’ ivory bones like an elephant’s graveyard.

January 1st, 2122,

“Water dissolving and water removing

There is water at the bottom of the ocean

Under the water, carry the water

Remove the water from the bottom of the ocean

Water dissolving and water removing”

-Talking Heads

The century since Isaiah’s arrival on the dark continent had been a time of monumental change. The population of black people in the US plummeted from 13% to just under 3% as people of African descent decolonized their minds and a paradigm shift occurred. Descent and societal unrest in the us soared as the African American population continued to migrate to Port Garvey in Ghana on the west coast of Africa. They, like Isaiah, all kept their American citizenship, voted, and paid taxes on their US properties and businesses and acquired dual citizenship after living in Ghana for a year, qualifying for the right of return.

Within three generations, they were gone from the US population in the continent. The Latino populations followed suit and began to return to their Latin American home nations to the south. Yet the American prison system grew in the percentage of the nation’s population incarcerated. The poor, working-class, and even middle-class whites were now filling the corporate state’s demand for prisoners/slaves and their free labor in the nation’s ever-growing for-profit prisons.

Crime rates increased across the board as people of color disappeared from the American population, and the police shifted their attention to the poor and working-poor white population to fill their quotas for arrest and feed the prison-industrial complex with bodies. The American fantasy of a crime-free nation without people of color or immigrants exploded, and finally, they were forced to concede the evil inherent in their own culture without black folks to scapegoat.

After the black and brown population was reduced, the prison-industrial complex continued to grow and fill the empty cells with white bodies in the absence of colored ones. Americans subconsciously had lived in a fantasy world that blamed all their nation’s ills on people of color.

Without that scapegoat, the Republican’s nationalistic policies collapsed as the middle class, poor, and working-class whites filled the cells of what soon grew from number two to the world’s largest prison system. Middle-class and poor Whites continued to vote Republican until the population of black people dropped from 13% to 3% in less than 60 years.

The city of Port Garvey in Ghana was the first city built and designed using AI to house the population that grew around the community of African American expatriates along the west coast of the newly unified African continent. Their numbers in Ghana had grown from 3000 in 2020 to over 30 million in a mere century, doubling the population of the nation.

The returning peoples became a part of the diaspora zeitgeist great look inward across as the use of modern techniques in farming were applied across Ghana and the west coast of the continent. The land was some of the richest and most fertile soil on the planet, and those who returned from the diaspora worked with the tribes and ai to grow crops and advance farming using robotics and unmanned AI controlled farms. This increased yields and created surpluses for the international markets.

Moammar Gaddafi was proven right posthumously; the purging of colonial forces, expulsion of Europeans, and all hostile foreign influence led to the unification of the continent’s nations under a single currency. An African Great Awakening occurred, heralding the Second Renaissance following the return of the lost tribes to the Motherland. The nations of the continent’s new wealth redirected into infrastructure freed the people from the exploitation of Europeans and the systemic racism of the EU tribes of world banks.

Isaiah’s father always said there is no need to reinvent the wheel; follow the example of the peoples who defeated your enemy in the past. It was obvious that the Arab oil states organized to form OPEC. The schools shifted to the Hebrew system, a scriptural model of education, and the goal is for the student to BECOME what the teacher IS. Knowledge is acquired as a by-product, while the goal is to shape the character of the student.

The Prussian method was abandoned in favor of educational systems that reflected real science and neurology with human child brain development and psychology. The abandonment of the antiquated flailing Western educational systems. In the Greek method, knowledge is separated and organized into subjects and implemented through curriculums.

Abandoning the Greek method that had failed black folks for centuries the peoples embraced the proven successful tradition of deep learning and The Montessori method of education techniques English was fading as the primary the Chinese languages sweeping across the port cities as generations studied abroad in Hong Kong, increasing cultural and economic ties to the nations of the East while the Western empire continued its collapse into economic decline and stagnation.

[notes] [Once in a Lifetime] [And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack

And you may find yourself in another part of the world

And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile

And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife

And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down

Letting the days go by, water flowing underground

Into the blue again, after the money’s gone

Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

And you may ask yourself, “How do I work this?”

And you may ask yourself, “Where is that large automobile?”

And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful house”

And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful wife”

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down

Letting the days go by, water flowing underground

Into the blue again, after the money’s gone

Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was

Water dissolving and water removing

There is water at the bottom of the ocean

Under the water, carry the water

Remove the water from the bottom of the ocean

Water dissolving and water removing

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down

Letting the days go by, water flowing underground

Into the blue again, into the silent water

Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down

Letting the days go by, water flowing underground

Into the blue again, after the money’s gone

Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

You may ask yourself, “What is that beautiful house?”

You may ask yourself, “Where does that highway go to?”

And you may ask yourself, “Am I right, am I wrong?”

And you may say to yourself, “My God, what have I done?”

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down

Letting the days go by, water flowing underground

Into the blue again, into the silent water

Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down

Letting the days go by, water flowing underground

Into the blue again, after the money’s gone

Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was

Same as it ever was, look where my hand was

Time isn’t holding up, time isn’t after us

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was (I couldn’t get no rest)

Same as it ever was, hey let’s all twist our thumbs

Here comes the twister

Letting the days go by (same as it ever was, same as it ever was)

Letting the days go by (same as it ever was, same as it ever was)

Once in a lifetime, let the water hold me down

Letting the days go by, water flowing underground

[“Indigenous inhabitants of Galveston Island called the island Auia.[8] Though there is no certainty regarding their route and their landings, Cabeza de Vaca and his crew were shipwrecked at a place he called “Isla de Malhado” in November 1528. This could have referred to Galveston Island or San Luis Island.[9] During his charting of the Gulf Coast in 1785, the Spanish explorer José de Evia labeled the water features surrounding the island “Bd. de Galvestown” and “Bahia de Galvestowm” [sic]. He was working under the orders of Bernardo de Gálvez. In his early chart, he calls the western end of the island “Isla de San Luis” and the eastern end “Pt. de Culebras”. Evia did not label the island itself on his map of 1799. Just five years later Alexander von Humboldt borrowed the place names Isla de San Luis, Pte. De Culebras, and Bahia de Galveston. Stephen F. Austin followed his predecessors in the use of “San Luis Island”, but introduced “Galveston” to refer to the little village at the east end of the island. Evidence of the name Galveston Island appears on the 1833 David H. Burr.[8]

The island’s first permanent European settlements were constructed around 1816 by the pirate Louis-Michel Aury to support Mexico’s rebellion against Spain. In 1817, Aury returned from an unsuccessful raid against Spain to find Galveston occupied by the pirate Jean Lafitte.[10] Lafitte organized Galveston into a pirate “kingdom” he called “Campeche”, anointing himself the island’s “head of government”.[11] Lafitte remained in Galveston until 1821, when the United States Navy forced him and his raiders off the island.[11][12]”]

About the author:

JD Cloudy’s poetry has disappeared in the literary journals: Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, Texas.