JANUARY 22, 11:50 P.M. West of the International Date Line
TONIGHT, FEELING cabin-feverish, I decided to see what it felt like to walk among the containers in a snowstorm. Gave myself something of a scare. A couple of days ago, the weather service recommended the Great Circle route after all. We're now way out in the Graveyard of the Pacific, and you can tell, you can feel the big swell moving under the hull. Back inside the Ottawa's eight-story house, the habitable part of the ship, I learned from an oiler named Joel Nipales that solitary, nocturnal circumambulations of the main deck are strictly forbidden. If an officer or deckhand has to go out at night, he alerts the bridge, puts on foul-weather gear, and brings a walkie-talkie. It wouldn't have taken much to knock me overboard: a stumble, a snowy gust. No one would have discovered my absence until morning. Cast away in dark, frigid water four miles deep, I would have watched the Ottawa's running lights appear and disappear beyond the crests, as if blinking on and off, diminishing into the swirling snow.