Page 64 of The Hitchhiker in Panama
Jonas didn’t even look up from his laptop. “I will hose you off if I have to.”
Eivind grinned.
“Wanna try it?”
He tentatively took a bite and chewed. He looked thoughtful, a sommelier tasting the hottest new vintage. Swallowing, he brought his coffee up and took a few large gulps.
“Disgusting,” he confirmed.
“You eat pickled herring.”
He shrugged. “I like lutefisk better.”
“What’s that?”
He grinned at me. “Dried fish with salt . . . pickled in . . .”
“Lye,” Marcella supplied.
He nodded. “Lye.”
I grimaced and offered the Vegemite around the table, but no one else wanted a bite.
“I’ve had it before,” Marcella said. “No, thank you.”
Fine, this jar of Vegemite was all mine.
Twenty-Nine
While napping, I awoke to a knock on our door. Eivind and I were both in bed, clothed and sleeping, so he lifted his head and said to come in.
The door opened enough for Elayna’s head to fit through. “It is almost time to do the equator crossing!”
“Okay, we will be up in a few minutes.”
For hundreds of years, sailors have held ceremonies as they crossed the equator, and it was our turn. We were “pollywogs,” the uninitiated bottom-of-the-barrel crew, hoping to cross the equator with a blessing from King Neptune and earn our new title of “shellback.”
The crew had warned me about it before we left Panama, and I’d researched the tradition, my eyes growing with the crazy stories of sailors being dunked in rotten kitchen scraps or forced to drink beer until they puked, but Eivind had assured me that our equator crossing was strictly fun—a talent show and playtime.
Eivind and I dressed in our bathers and came outside, where we helped Elayna and Marcella bring the sails in. First, they furled in the genoa sail in the front, then brought the boat into the wind and dropped the mainsail. Eivind pulled out a little bit of the genoa sail again, “to keep us on course,” he said.
We inched our way toward the equator. The chartplotter, in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, had our exact coordinates, and we estimated we had about twenty minutes to go.
A laugh burst out of me when Jonas came up the stairs in full King Neptune attire: a bedsheet toga was slung over one shoulder, an aluminum foil crown was on his head, and a great big bushy fake beard was strapped to his chin. In one hand he held a makeshift trident, made from a boat hook and some cardboard; in his other hand he’d created a scroll out of two paper towel rolls. I couldn’t stop grinning at the normally serious Jonas going through all this effort to make today special for us.
He dropped one of the cardboard tubes and the scroll unfurled, revealing printer paper taped together, making the scroll a meter long. In a deep, booming voice, inexplicably tinged with a British accent, Jonas read:
“Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye. I am King Neptune’s representative, sent to escort the shipEikon its journey from the northern hemisphere to the southern hemisphere. King Neptune demands a sacrifice to be made for safe passage across the equator. Who dares to go first?”
Eivind stepped forward and saluted King Neptune. “I am First Mate Eivind.”
I grabbed an invisible skirt hem and curtsied. “I am Lila, a hitchhiker.”
“A hitchhiker? How rebellious of you. Very well, I shall hear you plead your case.”
Eivind sat in the corner of the cockpit bench and I sat behind him on the backrest. He strummed his ukulele a few times before breaking into the opening bars of “Over the Rainbow.” I joined in singing—I’m not very good, but I kept up with it and Eivind sang the melody, complementing my voice.
When we were done, the rest of the crew applauded, and we bowed for our audience.
