FEATURE
Text and photos by Malcolm Gunn
“One thing had impressed us deeply on this little voyage: the great world dropped away very quickly.”
—John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez
It’s funny how things happen in slow motion once they become irreversible, like falling off your bike or knocking over a glass of red wine onto a white tablecloth. This is especially so when the event that starts to unfold in painstaking detail is something that you know you’ll regret later—the
result of some ill-considered act that will return to haunt you.
Like throwing my mobile phone across the office because it had
just cut out in the same infuriating way that it had done ever
since I bought it.
A mobile phone in flight is not especially
graceful—just a piece of low-altitude space junk, really.
My office is small too, so that it hardly completed a single
spin before its flight was arrested by the arm of a chair. The
hard, unyielding, cold steel arm of a chair that’s as unaccommodating
of flying mobile phones as my own temperament is of disobedient
ones. Somehow during its flight, I’d had time to wonder
if it would survive. I almost hoped that it would. Almost. And
then it became so many pieces that any hope I had imploded as
the infernal thing did the opposite on that chair arm. For a
moment, it continued its flight, but in different directions,
and it bounced and scattered like the contents of a bag of peanuts
dropped from a balcony.
Then life resumed its normal pace.
As I gathered the shattered pieces from the carpet, I asked
myself—did I just lose control, or was that a reasonable
act of retribution? Either way, one thing was certain—it
was time to go sea kayaking.
I sent an email telling my friends
and associates that my mobile phone was no longer operational.
Then I opened my drawer, took out a small folder, unfolded
the airline ticket inside and glanced at the list of stops
on my itinerary—Wellington, Auckland, Los Angeles, Loreto—and
then the date. I had only four more days to go.
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