Currents

You have to lose your way, if you ever hope to find home

Eighteen months into a seven-year stretch, I learned the difference between being lost and losing your way.

Not that I had a choice.

Mercer, a stocky guy with Popeye forearms and tattoos that climbed his neck like vines, locked across from me. Talked all night long.

"It's how sailors navigated before GPS and satellites," he said, scraping dried toothpaste from his toothbrush with his thumbnail.

"You calculate your current position based on your last known fixed position, see. Factor in speed, time, drift. You basically plot your course without external reference points."

He laughed. "Unreliable as hell! That's why they call it 'dead' reckoning. One small miscalculation is all it takes. Multiplied over time, you’re fucked."

Last Known Position

August 19th. Our kitchen table. Breakfast dishes crusted with egg yolk. Caroline's hands wrapped around a coffee cup gone cold. Morning light through the blinds painting zebra stripes across her arms.

When the pounding started, she didn't flinch. Like she'd been waiting for it.

"James Kilroy," they said, "you're under arrest for possession with intent to distribute."

Three grams. A thimble full. That's what separates probation from seven years. Three fucking grams and a cop a little too eager to do his job.

Caroline didn't come to the trial. She knew enough to steer clear.

Read the Water

My dad taught me to navigate whitewater when I was eleven.

A quick study, he called me. Good instincts.

He'd shout from the stern of our canoe - "Read the water, not the rocks! Look where you want to go, not what you want to avoid!"

In prison, I learned to read different waters. The currents of power, the shoals of racial politics, the treacherous rapids of reputation.

Some days the river carried me; other days I fought until my muscles burned and my lip bled.

Time moves different when confined.

No way to gauge your speed when the scenery never changes.

"Speed over ground," Mercer blabbed one night. "That's different from speed through water, see. Current can push you forward or hold you back. You think you're making six knots, but ground truth says you've barely moved."

I watched these currents hang men out to dry.

Some fought the pull, exhausting themselves against forces they couldn't overcome. Others surrendered completely, becoming flotsam, carried wherever the system decided to deposit them.

I tried to chart a middle course.

Pull

The social worker who ran our re-entry program talked about recidivism like it was a force of nature. Invisible but measurable. Predictable even.

"67% of parolees are rearrested within three years," she recited from behind horn-rimmed glasses. "76% within five years."

She split us into groups. We mapped it out: unemployment, unstable housing, substance abuse, broken families. Each a vector, a force acting upon our plotted course.

Mercer got out three months before me. Heard he found work on a commercial fishing boat out of Portland.

Never thought of him again.

Cast Away

Caroline came to visit eleven months in. Hair shorter, face thinner. Her wedding ring loose on her finger, like she'd been forgetting to eat.

"I'm moving back to Tennessee," she said. "My mom needs help after her surgery."

We both knew this wasn't the whole truth. Her course correction, steering away from the wreckage.

"I've been sober fourteen months," I said, as if this might change her calculations.

She nodded. "That's good, James. That's really good."

"I'm taking classes. Computer programming. There's decent work for that, even with a record."

"You always were smart," she said.

Her smile held genuine warmth, which was somehow worse than anger would’ve been.

We sat in silence as the minutes of our visit ticked away. Two ships passing at safe distance, signaling recognition without need to change course.

"I'll keep writing," she said as the guard called time.

"I'd like that."

She wrote once to keep that promise. Then the letters stopped.

The Chart Room

Three years in, I got assigned to the library. A promotion of sorts. Quiet work cataloging books, helping others with research, and maintaining the small computer lab where men could look up case law online.

Tacked to the wall above my desk, I kept a calendar, a certificate from my first programming course, a list of companies known to hire felons, and a photo of Caroline I should have taken down but didn't.

At night, after lockdown, I'd lie in my bunk calculating.

If I completed X courses by release, saved Y dollars from prison jobs, and established Z contacts for re-entry support... coordinates plotted on an imaginary chart leading toward some future harbor.

I wondered where my calculations had first gone wrong.

Which turn had been the fatal miscalculation?

The first prescription after my back injury? Hustling pills off the street when the prescriptions ran out? The moment I decided Caroline didn't need to know where the extra money came from?

True North

Even compasses are subject to deviations. Local magnetic fields pull the needle away from where it should point.

People carry their own deviations.

Dorje taught meditation in the east yard on Saturday mornings. Former accountant doing time for embezzlement.

A dozen budding Buddhists sitting cross-legged on the handball court, learning to breathe through rage, pain, and boredom.

"The mind creates its own prison," Dorje said in his soft accent. "Our thoughts can be a wicked warden."

I joined them sometimes. More often watched from the weight pit. Tried to reconcile Dorje's calm with the violence surrounding us.

Carrigan from D-block, shanked in the shower over two packs of ramen. Wilkes hanged himself with a bedsheet after his appeal was denied. Rodriguez celebrated his release date by punching a guard, adding three years to his sentence.

"We can't control circumstances," Dorje once told me, "so we work to free ourselves from our compulsive responses."

Uncoordinated

Five years, two months, seventeen days.

My release came on a Tuesday morning in October. Drizzling rain beaded on the garbage bag holding my possessions. One hundred sixty-three dollars gate money. All that was left after a bus ticket to Detroit.

No one waiting on the other side.

I'd written to Caroline a month before, telling her I was getting out. No response. I hadn't expected one, but still checked the mail every day until release.

The halfway house was a converted motel alongside I-94. Peeling paint, suspicious sticky patches on old shag carpet. But it had a roof, a case manager who knew about job placement for felons, and a weekly NA meeting in the former breakfast area.

First night there, I couldn't sleep. The room too quiet without the breathing of other men, the distant clang of doors, the shuffle of guards making rounds.

I opened the window just to hear traffic.

In navigation, a running fix is when only one landmark or object is visible.

You take two bearings on the same object at different times, noting the distance traveled between bearings. By plotting both bearings and the distance traveled, sailors can approximate their position.

I collected my data points carefully.

First job interview. First paycheck. First month clean on the outside. First night without nightmares. First day not spinning around to see who wasn’t there.

Small bearings charting my position.

Dead Reckoning

Two years out, I sat in a coffee shop near campus, textbooks spread across the table. Programming languages. Logic structures. Unfamiliar waters. New maps for new territories.

A man at the next table kept glancing over. Something familiar in his profile. The way he held his cup.

"Kilroy?" he finally said. "James Kilroy?"

Mercer. Heavier now, beard gone gray. Tattoos hidden beneath a rugged turtleneck.

We regarded each other with the careful assessment of men who only knew each other in the context of cages.

"You didn't go back," I said. Not a question.

"Three years clean," he huffed, like the chore it was. "Working tugboats now. Harbor operations."

We talked for an hour. Comparing notes.

After he left, I watched ordinary life flow around me. Students with bright futures. Parents with somewhere to be. People who'd never lost their way.

I gathered my books, calculating the hours until my evening class, the days until midterms, the semesters until graduation.

Small measurements. Manageable distances.

Outside, I paused to get my bearings. The sky had cleared. Morning rain washed everything clean.

Sun, warm on my face. I could see clearly in all directions.

I plotted my course and moved forward, leaving my last known position behind.

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Special thanks to Embla Munk Rynkebjerg on Unsplash for the beautiful photo that accompanies this essay. Thank you, Embla.

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