It has long been said that history repeats itself.
Recently, when our region was assaulted by the first freezing storm, and boats were set dragging in Eagle Harbor, Dave Ullin, reluctant island icon, rescued a young mother and her baby from drifting into the shipping lanes after her boat broke loose from its mooring. He somehow managed to lasso the ungainly, thirty-something foot vessel and secure it to his tug in the midst of a freezing, howling gale under oar power alone.
I thought it heroic enough of me to get up and lash the halyards frapping against Old Hand's mast.
Now, here is a story told by Jo (Monk) Helman, daughter of Bainbridge's most influential boat designer, Ed Monk Sr, of an event that occurred in the nineteen twenties aboard the Ann Saunders. It was recorded by Bet Oliver in her biography Ed Monk and the Tradition of Classic Boats:
We were anchored in Winslow …my father commuted to work on the passenger steamer, in fact he stayed in Seattle overnight. The wind came up one night and we were adrift in the dark. I wonder what my mother was thinking, alone in the boat with two small girls? In the harbor was an old sailing boat, The Conqueror, and living aboard was Captain Hershey... He became aware of our troubles and tied us to his ship.
Though separated by some eighty years, these tales of heroism occurred in the same harbor. Perhaps, the same fierce Northwesterly raged with a similar intensity and broke loose boats that even experienced sailors thought securely moored. Nature has a say in this drama, and no one knew better than Captain Hershey the imperious dictates of a Northwesterly gale to set, even a consummate mariner like Ed Monk, adrift.
Captain Hershey was one of the more colorful characters in our Island's celebrated maritime history. He went on to become consultant with MGM in the production of Hollywood sea epics like Captain's Courageous and Mutiny on the Bounty.
Sometimes, in its bewildering interweaving of past/present, hero's/villains, fact and fiction, life resembles a vast Hollywood production. It's difficult to know what to believe or how to interpret “hard facts”.
These two tales of heroism are true.
But I wonder at our collective grasp of reality when it can be so distorted that Dave must live under threat of eviction for “trespass” simply because he chooses, like our venerable Hershey and Monk, to live on the water.
I am told to accept that we live in different times. That may be, but is it progress when Dave's heroic and selfless actions are met with the threat of banishment? This is an example of the absurdity at which we arrive by a stolid adherence to the letter of the law, and when the arcane convolutions of our legal system become so ponderous as to threaten those very citizens it claims to protect. To force unseaworthy boats out of one of our few safe anchorages during the harsh winter season is the height of irresponsibility.
Whether these boats ought to be seaworthy is another matter. That fact remains that many are not. And I would think few would like to have on their conscience the responsibility for the bad end that would result: a hefty bill for salvage, rescue, or, God forbid, death.
Living on Eagle Harbor has always been a part of Bainbridge Island's heritage. Its preservation is still part of the comprehensive plan and is supported by a majority of Islanders. Why can't COBI arrive at a workable arrangement with DNR? Both seem to wish to avoid taking responsibility for this unseasonable eviction of our historic community and we are caught in a bewildering web of contradictions.
Imagine what might have happened if Monk's family had no safe anchorage, no Captain Hersey, no Conqeror. The world might be quite different. It may have had a devastating impact on Monk's career, and the world would never had known the boats Ed designed for the builder of modest means, and the vessels built expressly for that colorful, sometimes unseemly class of citizen, the liveaboard.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Saturday, November 27, 2010
The impecunious Professor and the sea
As much as the DNR and all who would oppose live aboard rights are concerned, the issue has been settled and the demise of our community is immanent. But there are those whose flukes will hold fast in the murky depths of DNR bottom lands and will remain until forceful eviction, hell freezes over, or both.
It seems that nature has a part to play in this. With the sub-freezing temperatures this holiday season, the game has taken on a more serious tone, as we are forced to consider moving into a hostile environment ravaged by uncertainties of weather and boats ill-prepared for the open sea.
Consider the case of the Professor:
With the eviction deadline looming like flashes on the horizon from an approaching storm, the impecunious Professor cut his painter and set sail for the far Northern promised land in an engineless Buccaneer that sailed like Grandma's gravy dish. He'd gotten as far as Sunrise Bluff and sat for nearly a week rolling at anchor in the wakes of hideous container ships and buffeted by squalls.
The forecast called for North winds of ten knots as the crew of Old Hand, all brave lads and true, set out to tow the hapless Prof to safe harbor. As we steamed around Point Monroe and bore away South the wind rose steadily. Aboard was Dave Ullin and Marc the camera man. Marc is shooting a documentary on the live aboard drama and Dave was using the opportunity to pass some of his vast maritime wisdom to generations of future mariners.
We were rolling fitfully in a four foot sea that had built up with the Arctic blast and sent its jackbooted minions all the way from the Alaskan tundra, setting Old Hand on her beam ends.
Cut to the offices of the Department of Natural Resources where decisions regarding private use of public lands are made. Lobbyists sip lattes with politicians behind closed doors.
Music: Bob Marley's Exodus/Movement of the people.
So the wind howls in the rigging as Dave tosses the Prof a tow line and the two vessels bash together in a flurry of spray. Securing the tow and unable to make headway against the Northerly, we point our bowsprit South and with the seas crashing over the port quarter, motor sail back to Eagle Harbor.
This is what this cruel eviction leads to: Unseaworthy vessels forced into harsh Winter conditions, risk of life and limb, a mass exodus of the poor driven out by market forces. It's a story repeated all over the globe: The Roma of France, Sudanese, Nigerians- or people whose only crime it is to lower property values by their very existence. Here, a few shore side property owners inconvenienced by the sight of poverty marring their million dollar views are powerful enough to influence government policy on regulation of our public lands.
It seems that nature has a part to play in this. With the sub-freezing temperatures this holiday season, the game has taken on a more serious tone, as we are forced to consider moving into a hostile environment ravaged by uncertainties of weather and boats ill-prepared for the open sea.
Consider the case of the Professor:
With the eviction deadline looming like flashes on the horizon from an approaching storm, the impecunious Professor cut his painter and set sail for the far Northern promised land in an engineless Buccaneer that sailed like Grandma's gravy dish. He'd gotten as far as Sunrise Bluff and sat for nearly a week rolling at anchor in the wakes of hideous container ships and buffeted by squalls.
The forecast called for North winds of ten knots as the crew of Old Hand, all brave lads and true, set out to tow the hapless Prof to safe harbor. As we steamed around Point Monroe and bore away South the wind rose steadily. Aboard was Dave Ullin and Marc the camera man. Marc is shooting a documentary on the live aboard drama and Dave was using the opportunity to pass some of his vast maritime wisdom to generations of future mariners.
We were rolling fitfully in a four foot sea that had built up with the Arctic blast and sent its jackbooted minions all the way from the Alaskan tundra, setting Old Hand on her beam ends.
Cut to the offices of the Department of Natural Resources where decisions regarding private use of public lands are made. Lobbyists sip lattes with politicians behind closed doors.
Music: Bob Marley's Exodus/Movement of the people.
So the wind howls in the rigging as Dave tosses the Prof a tow line and the two vessels bash together in a flurry of spray. Securing the tow and unable to make headway against the Northerly, we point our bowsprit South and with the seas crashing over the port quarter, motor sail back to Eagle Harbor.
This is what this cruel eviction leads to: Unseaworthy vessels forced into harsh Winter conditions, risk of life and limb, a mass exodus of the poor driven out by market forces. It's a story repeated all over the globe: The Roma of France, Sudanese, Nigerians- or people whose only crime it is to lower property values by their very existence. Here, a few shore side property owners inconvenienced by the sight of poverty marring their million dollar views are powerful enough to influence government policy on regulation of our public lands.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Navigating the seas of reverie 4
Dedicated to Bucko Billy Sims
Bells from distant harbors echo over the vast ocean. Anchorages left astern with the new moon's crescent fall into shadow and sink below the headland. Echoes of future landfalls are heard over the dim sea while courses drawn on a dog-eared, yellow chart note the progression of points that make up the perpetual departure of Old Hand.
The slanted cross of the waypoint rises on the GPS screen and the light on the Sierra Echo buoy flashes a mile to starboard as I sheet in a for a close reach with the wind on the starboard bow. To the west, above Point no Point, the dark hills of the Kitsap Peninsula stands vivid against a red sky streaked with lime green and violet clouds.
“Time we switched on pilot house light, lad.”
My face is suddenly revealed, glowing red in the wheel house window.
Illumined by the masthead light, the gracefully curving staysail draws us onward, its rise and fall foretelling every shift of wind. From the darkness ahead the tolling bell off Foulwheather Bluff is accompanied by sea lions barking from the wildly swaying buoy. The swell is steep past the headland, but we are finally able to ease sheets and fall a few points to the west northwest on a faster and easier point of sail. Smashing into the rut of the seas, Old Hand is set on her beam ends as the wind rises to force six.
“Good job we tucked a reef in the main.”
“That it is.
We are just able to lay the Foulweather buoy and, taking it's black profile to starboard, we sail past with but few yards to spare. Rain begins to pelt the wheel house windows and the mournful sound of the bell is heard over the howling wind as Old Hand pitches into seas built up by cold wind blowing from the far north. The confusion of cross seas make it difficult to pick out the Kinney Point light off the south shore of Marristone Island.
Squinting into the radar screen McWhirr's face seems lit by the fires of hell.
“Fall off a few points to west. There's a deep draft bearing down on us from the north east.”
“A few points west it is, sir.”
On we plunge into the darkness, the bow lifting high and falling into the phosphorescent troughs of steep waves. The wind sings a tremulous note in the rigging and a fan of spray strikes the working jib with wrathful vehemence.
Suddenly, in the lee of Marristone Island, the wind suddenly falls and we ghost into the peaceful waters of Oak Bay and head for the Port Townsend canal.
As we steam through the cut, I peer anxiously aloft. Our mast seems about to scrape the steel I-beams of the bridge. But we motor safely past the rip rap surrounded piles and open the wind-ruffled waters of Port Townsend. Leaving the naval instalation at Wallan Point far to starboard, we motorsail past the pulp mill's foul plume blowing athwart our course. The shadowy hulks of fishing boats moored off Boathaven fall astern, and we hand all sail before dropping anchor under the dark towers of Port Townsend.
Later, after a stroll on the deck, I say:
“It's a beautiful evening, Skipper."
The golden glow of the oil lamp illumines the hourglass while McWhirr scans the chart, compass in his gaunt hand, sweeping vast arcs across the eastern straits.
“Best we were under weigh at 0800 hours."
Though, at times, I am exasperated by McWhirr's terse manner, we are of one mind about wanting to make all passages under sail, prefering to use Phyllis only when necessary. An early start will give us plenty time.
~~~
Stars vanish one by one with the violet traces of dawn and the smooth water reflects the waterfront's red, earthen glow. The town hall tower tolls six bells as we fall to kippers and joe around the salon table.
McWhirr stikes me as a bit off this morning. Something in his glaucous eye--like a landed mackerel.
Swatting at something invisible before his face, he says:
“I had a strange dream last night.”
My ears perk up this pronouncement, so unlike his normally reticent manner.
“A dream, Sir?”
“Aye, I was wandering in a lovely green field.”
“Indeed?
“Let it be. Our rendevous with slack water is at 1400 hours.”
Now this is strange. Being a confirmed Francophobe, he's not given to bandying about such high-fallutin' terms. Something is amiss.
“More joseph, sir?”
Smiling serenely he says:
“Aye, that'll do nicely, old son."
We are underweigh across the Admiralty Inlet entrance with the last of the ebb, while keeping Partridge Point fine on the port bow.
I stand by the the mast, uncoiling hallyards.
“Ready to set the Main." Calls McWhirr from the helm.
“All ready, Skipper.”
Perhaps he can smell a wind somewhere.
As I haul on the halyard, the mainsail rises, brilliant white against the cerulean blue sky.
After crossing the Admiralty Inlet traffic lanes we bear away west-northwest.
"Good lad. Now lay our course 318 degrees. That'll carry us past the Romeo Alfa buoy. Call me if the wind rises.”
McWhirr has gone below for a spell, entrusting the solitary weight of command to me.
To the sound of Phyllis' rhythmic thumping we float over the flat water while Porpoise wheel below the surface and again rise in graceful arcs, flashing toward distant Hein Bank.
Upon darksome terrors of the deep we steam, over seaweed rising from lost schooners in graceful arabesques to entwine Old Hand's keel in a languid embrace.
Partridge Bank recedes into a perfectly calm sea off the port quarter.
The rig of a ketch has hove in sight, its white sail hanging motionless on the straits. Reflected from polished fittings, light scatters in incandescent beams. Even the gulls seem stalled-- flattened against the dome of sky while the torpid heat drives all energy from the weary face of the world. There's nothing to measure time's passage but the hypnotic heave of the glassy swell tolling the bell buoy's diapason over the boundless surface of the main.
We are West of Smith Island early. Nothing for it but to head to and wait for slack water and listen to the lugubrious monody for a dearly departed breeze.
To the far west, a laden deep draft looms, hull down, out of the blue haze.
An icon mounted above the radar screen's mandala shows Gabriel standing north up; guardian of the Boreal quarter where come cardinal winds from the northern Salish Sea. A blip moves toward us through the seven concentric circles like a wrathful Deity seeking tribute; an Archon holding Old Hand in irons within the lower spheres and from whose deliverance we yet nurse a forlorn hope.
The way point cross of the GPS fixes this fleeting moment on the motionless sea where all time converges. Vast spaces are enclosed in the mystic rose of compass points, and binds our present passage to ancient voyages beyond the worlds edge where the sunlight's vertical descent meets the reflective sea and time intersects infinity.
How long, my son, I have yearned to tell you...They are spirits owed a second body by the fates. They drink deep of the river Lethe's currents there, long drafts that will set them free of cares, oblivious forever.
Hmmm. 1400 hours and slack water. The flood will kick in soon.
Maybe I should wake McWhirr. No, I can command this vessel as manfully as he. He needs a rest. There was something odd in his normally salty manner--like a beatific glow.
The ominous blip on the radar is now five miles off and bearing steadily on our position. Which way will it turn?
“Skipper?”
No response.
“Sir?"
Hurrying below, I call again: "Captain!"
I rush to the forepeak. "Where...?"
He's gone.
A tattered paperback lies on the pilot berth. It's Virgil's Aeneid . Opening it at random, I see a passage underlined in bright yellow:
From me learn patience and true courage, from others the meaning of fortune.
McWhirr has absconded to the far shore, cut his painter and withdrawn through the diaphanous veils of occultation. In a realm between the offices of master and mate he floats supine. Like the stone effigy from an ancient line of kings he sleeps; hands crossed over his long white beard, hourglass laid aside, in surrender to to the ebbing stream where all noble hearts must finally hie. He is the true sovereign of the watery sphere which has long held me captive. He is the enlightened aspect of my inner Captain Bligh, the Noah of my being, guiding me safely past treacherous maelstroms where the faithless whirl forever amid skeletal hulks and drowned chain.
I'm roused by the sound of halyards frapping against the mast and go on deck. To northwest the horizon darkens with catspaws padding southward and the genoa is soon unfurled before a freshening breeze. The somnolent spell cast over the straits is broken. I set my course after the dolphins wake toward Hein Bank, furthest extent of Old Hand's reach into the deep blue marine.
Aloft, the immense wingspan of a crystalline white eagle soars in the high cirrus toward the Western entrance, where the great indraught of the Pacific flows past the promontory and into the open inlets of the soul. It's a messenger to mind me of my former estate, a call of return to my forgotten kingdom.
The Goddess of the living waters is heard singing over the ocean, absolving Old Hand's crew of impiety and forgetfulness of her benign reign. Yemaya, Ardvasura Anahita, Our Lady of the Reef: all praise is of you and your healing waters by which we live.
Even McWhirr has seen that this is what the winds demand.
```
With the rising wind, we point the bowsprit toward Salmon Bank. On this heading Old Hand will be set by the current back to north east through Cattle Pass at the height of the flood.
The skipper looks up at the foresail. "Now keep the genoa filled, lad."
"Aye, Skipper"
"Blast it, the genny's fouled on the forestay. Head up!"
I have a habit of addressing myself thus when alone at sea.
Captain Spencer is a horn-fisted salt with little tolerance for nonsense.
Call me Ascanius.
I
Bells from distant harbors echo over the vast ocean. Anchorages left astern with the new moon's crescent fall into shadow and sink below the headland. Echoes of future landfalls are heard over the dim sea while courses drawn on a dog-eared, yellow chart note the progression of points that make up the perpetual departure of Old Hand.
The slanted cross of the waypoint rises on the GPS screen and the light on the Sierra Echo buoy flashes a mile to starboard as I sheet in a for a close reach with the wind on the starboard bow. To the west, above Point no Point, the dark hills of the Kitsap Peninsula stands vivid against a red sky streaked with lime green and violet clouds.
“Time we switched on pilot house light, lad.”
My face is suddenly revealed, glowing red in the wheel house window.
Illumined by the masthead light, the gracefully curving staysail draws us onward, its rise and fall foretelling every shift of wind. From the darkness ahead the tolling bell off Foulwheather Bluff is accompanied by sea lions barking from the wildly swaying buoy. The swell is steep past the headland, but we are finally able to ease sheets and fall a few points to the west northwest on a faster and easier point of sail. Smashing into the rut of the seas, Old Hand is set on her beam ends as the wind rises to force six.
“Good job we tucked a reef in the main.”
“That it is.
We are just able to lay the Foulweather buoy and, taking it's black profile to starboard, we sail past with but few yards to spare. Rain begins to pelt the wheel house windows and the mournful sound of the bell is heard over the howling wind as Old Hand pitches into seas built up by cold wind blowing from the far north. The confusion of cross seas make it difficult to pick out the Kinney Point light off the south shore of Marristone Island.
Squinting into the radar screen McWhirr's face seems lit by the fires of hell.
“Fall off a few points to west. There's a deep draft bearing down on us from the north east.”
“A few points west it is, sir.”
On we plunge into the darkness, the bow lifting high and falling into the phosphorescent troughs of steep waves. The wind sings a tremulous note in the rigging and a fan of spray strikes the working jib with wrathful vehemence.
Suddenly, in the lee of Marristone Island, the wind suddenly falls and we ghost into the peaceful waters of Oak Bay and head for the Port Townsend canal.
As we steam through the cut, I peer anxiously aloft. Our mast seems about to scrape the steel I-beams of the bridge. But we motor safely past the rip rap surrounded piles and open the wind-ruffled waters of Port Townsend. Leaving the naval instalation at Wallan Point far to starboard, we motorsail past the pulp mill's foul plume blowing athwart our course. The shadowy hulks of fishing boats moored off Boathaven fall astern, and we hand all sail before dropping anchor under the dark towers of Port Townsend.
Later, after a stroll on the deck, I say:
“It's a beautiful evening, Skipper."
The golden glow of the oil lamp illumines the hourglass while McWhirr scans the chart, compass in his gaunt hand, sweeping vast arcs across the eastern straits.
“Best we were under weigh at 0800 hours."
Though, at times, I am exasperated by McWhirr's terse manner, we are of one mind about wanting to make all passages under sail, prefering to use Phyllis only when necessary. An early start will give us plenty time.
~~~
Stars vanish one by one with the violet traces of dawn and the smooth water reflects the waterfront's red, earthen glow. The town hall tower tolls six bells as we fall to kippers and joe around the salon table.
McWhirr stikes me as a bit off this morning. Something in his glaucous eye--like a landed mackerel.
Swatting at something invisible before his face, he says:
“I had a strange dream last night.”
My ears perk up this pronouncement, so unlike his normally reticent manner.
“A dream, Sir?”
“Aye, I was wandering in a lovely green field.”
“Indeed?
“Let it be. Our rendevous with slack water is at 1400 hours.”
Now this is strange. Being a confirmed Francophobe, he's not given to bandying about such high-fallutin' terms. Something is amiss.
“More joseph, sir?”
Smiling serenely he says:
“Aye, that'll do nicely, old son."
We are underweigh across the Admiralty Inlet entrance with the last of the ebb, while keeping Partridge Point fine on the port bow.
I stand by the the mast, uncoiling hallyards.
“Ready to set the Main." Calls McWhirr from the helm.
“All ready, Skipper.”
Perhaps he can smell a wind somewhere.
As I haul on the halyard, the mainsail rises, brilliant white against the cerulean blue sky.
After crossing the Admiralty Inlet traffic lanes we bear away west-northwest.
"Good lad. Now lay our course 318 degrees. That'll carry us past the Romeo Alfa buoy. Call me if the wind rises.”
McWhirr has gone below for a spell, entrusting the solitary weight of command to me.
To the sound of Phyllis' rhythmic thumping we float over the flat water while Porpoise wheel below the surface and again rise in graceful arcs, flashing toward distant Hein Bank.
Upon darksome terrors of the deep we steam, over seaweed rising from lost schooners in graceful arabesques to entwine Old Hand's keel in a languid embrace.
Partridge Bank recedes into a perfectly calm sea off the port quarter.
The rig of a ketch has hove in sight, its white sail hanging motionless on the straits. Reflected from polished fittings, light scatters in incandescent beams. Even the gulls seem stalled-- flattened against the dome of sky while the torpid heat drives all energy from the weary face of the world. There's nothing to measure time's passage but the hypnotic heave of the glassy swell tolling the bell buoy's diapason over the boundless surface of the main.
We are West of Smith Island early. Nothing for it but to head to and wait for slack water and listen to the lugubrious monody for a dearly departed breeze.
To the far west, a laden deep draft looms, hull down, out of the blue haze.
An icon mounted above the radar screen's mandala shows Gabriel standing north up; guardian of the Boreal quarter where come cardinal winds from the northern Salish Sea. A blip moves toward us through the seven concentric circles like a wrathful Deity seeking tribute; an Archon holding Old Hand in irons within the lower spheres and from whose deliverance we yet nurse a forlorn hope.
The way point cross of the GPS fixes this fleeting moment on the motionless sea where all time converges. Vast spaces are enclosed in the mystic rose of compass points, and binds our present passage to ancient voyages beyond the worlds edge where the sunlight's vertical descent meets the reflective sea and time intersects infinity.
How long, my son, I have yearned to tell you...They are spirits owed a second body by the fates. They drink deep of the river Lethe's currents there, long drafts that will set them free of cares, oblivious forever.
Hmmm. 1400 hours and slack water. The flood will kick in soon.
Maybe I should wake McWhirr. No, I can command this vessel as manfully as he. He needs a rest. There was something odd in his normally salty manner--like a beatific glow.
The ominous blip on the radar is now five miles off and bearing steadily on our position. Which way will it turn?
“Skipper?”
No response.
“Sir?"
Hurrying below, I call again: "Captain!"
I rush to the forepeak. "Where...?"
He's gone.
A tattered paperback lies on the pilot berth. It's Virgil's Aeneid . Opening it at random, I see a passage underlined in bright yellow:
From me learn patience and true courage, from others the meaning of fortune.
McWhirr has absconded to the far shore, cut his painter and withdrawn through the diaphanous veils of occultation. In a realm between the offices of master and mate he floats supine. Like the stone effigy from an ancient line of kings he sleeps; hands crossed over his long white beard, hourglass laid aside, in surrender to to the ebbing stream where all noble hearts must finally hie. He is the true sovereign of the watery sphere which has long held me captive. He is the enlightened aspect of my inner Captain Bligh, the Noah of my being, guiding me safely past treacherous maelstroms where the faithless whirl forever amid skeletal hulks and drowned chain.
I'm roused by the sound of halyards frapping against the mast and go on deck. To northwest the horizon darkens with catspaws padding southward and the genoa is soon unfurled before a freshening breeze. The somnolent spell cast over the straits is broken. I set my course after the dolphins wake toward Hein Bank, furthest extent of Old Hand's reach into the deep blue marine.
Aloft, the immense wingspan of a crystalline white eagle soars in the high cirrus toward the Western entrance, where the great indraught of the Pacific flows past the promontory and into the open inlets of the soul. It's a messenger to mind me of my former estate, a call of return to my forgotten kingdom.
The Goddess of the living waters is heard singing over the ocean, absolving Old Hand's crew of impiety and forgetfulness of her benign reign. Yemaya, Ardvasura Anahita, Our Lady of the Reef: all praise is of you and your healing waters by which we live.
Even McWhirr has seen that this is what the winds demand.
```
With the rising wind, we point the bowsprit toward Salmon Bank. On this heading Old Hand will be set by the current back to north east through Cattle Pass at the height of the flood.
The skipper looks up at the foresail. "Now keep the genoa filled, lad."
"Aye, Skipper"
"Blast it, the genny's fouled on the forestay. Head up!"
I have a habit of addressing myself thus when alone at sea.
Captain Spencer is a horn-fisted salt with little tolerance for nonsense.
Call me Ascanius.
I
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Navigating the seas of reverie 1
Grebes paddle across the bows as Phyllis, my Sabb, two cylinder diesel engine, provides the steady, thumping pace. Old Hand steams into the channel, giving the south shore sands of Eagle Harbor a wide berth. Once past the red nun marking the southern extent of Tyee shoal, I head up into the wind and raise jib and staysail before falling off on a port tack, close-hauled into a twelve knot northerly breeze.
Something in us is endlessly departing into the rarefied air of spiritual quest, and the soul is forever receding into mythic seas on courses, set in youth, upon imaginal meridians.
“Ready to come about, Mister Spencer, and try to keep us off the beach at Yeomalt point.”
“Ready about.”
I have a habit of addressing myself like this when alone at sea. But sometimes, in my bi-polar dialogue between captain and first mate, there are mutinies which needs be put down with a firm hand.
Call him/me, Captain McWhirr.
Turning to port, I reach through the wheel house door to let go the the starboard jib sheet and secure the flogging jib on the opposite tack and we settle into an easy groove with Yeomalt point looming off the bow.
“Steady up.”
“Steady it is, Captain.”
Every casting off, no matter how modest the voyage, holds the promise of high adventure.
Grand embarkations, like Watteau's Voyage to Cytheria, show jaded yet frolicsome gentry waltzing down to a moored lugger awaiting passage to Aphrodite's fair isle.
Epic Adieus ring down through the ages. There's Agamemnon's dramatic farewell and blood kin offered to the gods for a fair breeze toward the final act on Windy Troy. Oaths hurled into the winds teeth bring down the curtain. Soliloquies are delivered in drawn out scenes at the taffrail, and swords are brandished against a blood red sky in a Hollywood version of the ultimate departure.
“Prepare to come about. We'll never make our offing at Yeomalt Point if you don't stop dreaming and skip lively, mate.” McWhirr is testy this morning.
“Ready about it is, sir.”
Under her gracefully curving genoa, the brilliant white hull of a classic yawl glides over green water dappled with cobalt blue reflections of sky as she runs before the freshening breeze toward Tyee Light.
Now we are on an easterly heading toward the shipping lanes and Magnolia Bluffs beyond, to gain Easting before the long board past Skiff point. But the wind is backing to northward and we may not make it with out Phyllis' assistance.
The wind continues to freshen, and after another tack, Old Hand is pounding into seas made steep by the wild contention of wind and tide, hell bent on making our offing clear of the rapidly drying shingle on Skiff Point. Through the port shrouds, gulls and herons gather on the mudflats of Murden Cove, only now showing with the fast ebbing tide.
~~~
The atmosphere was electric that September morning in Laguna Beach. I stood in front of my dad's house and and looked over the expanse of ocean spreading before a clear, blue sky and beheld long lines of swells advancing from the far south. Carrying my fins and kneeboard, I walked down Virginia Way past chicken shacks, bamboo and peacocks strutting in the dust of Southern California real estate, to the steps at the top of the 10th Street break.
Its the same travail Aeneas underwent in founding the promised land of Alba Longa and begetting the vast progeny that, to his day, rules the occident as decreed by the All Mighty.
On the beach, all was deserted. All appeared benign enough, until, far out on the horizon, on a reef I'd not known existed, a deep blue line approached and lifted to a height that seemed to touch the empyrean's lofty manor.
Huge, green walls stood up on Mysto Reef, peeling with uncanny precision from left to left to right, and the shore break was a raging mass of white foam tossing lobster pots and wrecked galleons.
Go!
Why must we hurl ourselves into the spume at Neptune's mercy, when we might be placidly lounging, beer in hand, before the latest remake of the same old sea story, far from even the remotest chance of drowning? There's something that calls like the siren's lydian melodies from behind this storm. A whole cast of players inform this chubasco, come from the primal intelligence to crash in fury upon my young person and reprove green hubris.
“Blast it, lad, we'll have to make another eastward tack to make our offing.”
McWhirr's hail rouses me from reflection to see his saturnian profile etched against the sky, his gnarled hand grasping the weather shrouds with overly dramatic emphasis.
Indeed, the wind backing further to the north is rapidly putting us on Skiff point.
“Ready about.”
“Ready Captain.”
Something in us is endlessly departing into the rarefied air of spiritual quest, and the soul is forever receding into mythic seas on courses, set in youth, upon imaginal meridians.
“Ready to come about, Mister Spencer, and try to keep us off the beach at Yeomalt point.”
“Ready about.”
I have a habit of addressing myself like this when alone at sea. But sometimes, in my bi-polar dialogue between captain and first mate, there are mutinies which needs be put down with a firm hand.
Call him/me, Captain McWhirr.
Turning to port, I reach through the wheel house door to let go the the starboard jib sheet and secure the flogging jib on the opposite tack and we settle into an easy groove with Yeomalt point looming off the bow.
“Steady up.”
“Steady it is, Captain.”
Every casting off, no matter how modest the voyage, holds the promise of high adventure.
Grand embarkations, like Watteau's Voyage to Cytheria, show jaded yet frolicsome gentry waltzing down to a moored lugger awaiting passage to Aphrodite's fair isle.
Epic Adieus ring down through the ages. There's Agamemnon's dramatic farewell and blood kin offered to the gods for a fair breeze toward the final act on Windy Troy. Oaths hurled into the winds teeth bring down the curtain. Soliloquies are delivered in drawn out scenes at the taffrail, and swords are brandished against a blood red sky in a Hollywood version of the ultimate departure.
“Prepare to come about. We'll never make our offing at Yeomalt Point if you don't stop dreaming and skip lively, mate.” McWhirr is testy this morning.
“Ready about it is, sir.”
Under her gracefully curving genoa, the brilliant white hull of a classic yawl glides over green water dappled with cobalt blue reflections of sky as she runs before the freshening breeze toward Tyee Light.
Now we are on an easterly heading toward the shipping lanes and Magnolia Bluffs beyond, to gain Easting before the long board past Skiff point. But the wind is backing to northward and we may not make it with out Phyllis' assistance.
The wind continues to freshen, and after another tack, Old Hand is pounding into seas made steep by the wild contention of wind and tide, hell bent on making our offing clear of the rapidly drying shingle on Skiff Point. Through the port shrouds, gulls and herons gather on the mudflats of Murden Cove, only now showing with the fast ebbing tide.
~~~
The atmosphere was electric that September morning in Laguna Beach. I stood in front of my dad's house and and looked over the expanse of ocean spreading before a clear, blue sky and beheld long lines of swells advancing from the far south. Carrying my fins and kneeboard, I walked down Virginia Way past chicken shacks, bamboo and peacocks strutting in the dust of Southern California real estate, to the steps at the top of the 10th Street break.
Its the same travail Aeneas underwent in founding the promised land of Alba Longa and begetting the vast progeny that, to his day, rules the occident as decreed by the All Mighty.
On the beach, all was deserted. All appeared benign enough, until, far out on the horizon, on a reef I'd not known existed, a deep blue line approached and lifted to a height that seemed to touch the empyrean's lofty manor.
Huge, green walls stood up on Mysto Reef, peeling with uncanny precision from left to left to right, and the shore break was a raging mass of white foam tossing lobster pots and wrecked galleons.
Go!
Why must we hurl ourselves into the spume at Neptune's mercy, when we might be placidly lounging, beer in hand, before the latest remake of the same old sea story, far from even the remotest chance of drowning? There's something that calls like the siren's lydian melodies from behind this storm. A whole cast of players inform this chubasco, come from the primal intelligence to crash in fury upon my young person and reprove green hubris.
“Blast it, lad, we'll have to make another eastward tack to make our offing.”
McWhirr's hail rouses me from reflection to see his saturnian profile etched against the sky, his gnarled hand grasping the weather shrouds with overly dramatic emphasis.
Indeed, the wind backing further to the north is rapidly putting us on Skiff point.
“Ready about.”
“Ready Captain.”
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Navigating the seas of reverie 2
The horizon darkens cerulean blue with the advancing swell. Waters around me eddy and swirl as the towering face jacks up on Mysto Reef. Lifting its translucent arch skyward, the massive wave breaks like the crack of doom as indignant pelicans take flight.
The following sea bears down like judgement day, forever stalled in mid career; a constant moment leaving me spellbound by its lofty grandeur. I'm lifted high on the watery messenger from Africus' torrid zone, that's come to break in a crescendo of spume on my home town beach. Far down the glistening green wall I behold the western realm of infinite light and repose.
Where has he gone, that apparitional self, who looked into the hollow maw of fear?
*****
In a garage sale, in a dream, I found my old copy of the Aeneid among carved wooden heads intoning prophesies from a laurel shaded altar.
In his wheelchair, dad held vigil from a South Laguna hill, searching the horizon for whales. A watch held in his once stout heart, vestige of the ancient clan, now closeted amid the holies like an old hat. There, shelves of brown lore lay darkening in the suburbs; now dusted off for our perusal, only in dreams.
On the cover was Baskin's drawing of Anchises, hoisted on the shoulders of his fated son, fleeing the streets of burning Troy.
“We are becalmed, mate.” McWhirr's voice seems far away.
“I thought there was always a breeze in Port Madison.” I say.
“Always a memory of one, anyway.”
The boom swings and the mainsail flogs to the sound of pans clattering below. To the North, an abomination of a container ship rounds Jefferson Head, pushing a bright bow wave as it turns southeasterly past the Sierra Foxtrot buoy.
McWhirr, taking his pipe out of his mouth, says:
“How about we crank up old Phyllis and motor over to Indianola Marsh and drop the hook?”
Ducking below, I release the compression levers and bear down on them again as Phyllis springs to life with a steady, thumping rhythm.
Now back on deck, I uncleat the topping lift and drop the main boom onto the gallows before going forward to lower the jib and secure it to the stanchions. Returning to the pilot house to turn the wheel to starboard, I head for the anchorage just off the marsh, passing sodden fishermen tending lines hung over bent gunwales, looking bereft of hope for even an anemic cod.
“Three fathoms. Let go here Mister Spencer.”
“ Aye Captain!” I send the CQR anchor splashing into the depths and pay out twelve fathoms of chain.
Old Hand slowly turns to face northeast.
“The flood has set in already.” observes McWhirr while taking bearings off Point Monroe.
The clouds have lifted to the East where the sky turns violet before falling off to slate gray above the snow covered Cascade Range. Gulls wheel their plaintive cry overhead, dropping white poop into the water forward of the starboard bow.
“ Have I ever told you about the wave I caught in Laguna?”
“I seem to recall the one you didn't”
Let it go then. That was another lifetime. Another has signed on as swab this voyage. I was but a nipper who beheld the hollow countenance of Saturn in the form of a towering breaker long spent on a Southern California shore. Just as now, he faces down from the Northern black clouds; a stern inverted profile mirrored on the sea. He's rough-hewn on the rocky peak yonder, endlessly stumping his sluggish round and enclosing our modest endeavors like the laurel tree's shadow circling over the household gods, ever counter to the golden sun.
“Guess I'll turn in. Goodnight Mister Spencer.”
“And pleasant dreams to you Captain.”
McWhirr goes below and soon the stillness is broken only by his regular snore.
I hear a rush of air from over the rail. A fine mist shoots up and hangs, dispersing into the black sky, before gently closing over the deep sounding whales back.
It's a spirit spout beckoning our ship toward far latitudes where the dark isle enfolds my father's wrack. The whale left this memento falling back into the source this gentle night, calling us to the eminence beyond the Eastern mountains. What salvation can we hope for from that quarter? What windy advent heralds vistas brighter for being reborn? I see beyond the blue peaks to a presence shining from the Seraphim's mansions, an Orient that looms all the more lucid for its absolute inscrutability.
I drift off with Old Hand's easy rocking on the waves abeam.
The night is a vast inter-tidal zone, where I lie aground in dreams until a remembrance intoned, as if from a wooden head inside my own, sings: Wake from the dream of life and see.
The following sea bears down like judgement day, forever stalled in mid career; a constant moment leaving me spellbound by its lofty grandeur. I'm lifted high on the watery messenger from Africus' torrid zone, that's come to break in a crescendo of spume on my home town beach. Far down the glistening green wall I behold the western realm of infinite light and repose.
Where has he gone, that apparitional self, who looked into the hollow maw of fear?
*****
In a garage sale, in a dream, I found my old copy of the Aeneid among carved wooden heads intoning prophesies from a laurel shaded altar.
In his wheelchair, dad held vigil from a South Laguna hill, searching the horizon for whales. A watch held in his once stout heart, vestige of the ancient clan, now closeted amid the holies like an old hat. There, shelves of brown lore lay darkening in the suburbs; now dusted off for our perusal, only in dreams.
On the cover was Baskin's drawing of Anchises, hoisted on the shoulders of his fated son, fleeing the streets of burning Troy.
“We are becalmed, mate.” McWhirr's voice seems far away.
“I thought there was always a breeze in Port Madison.” I say.
“Always a memory of one, anyway.”
The boom swings and the mainsail flogs to the sound of pans clattering below. To the North, an abomination of a container ship rounds Jefferson Head, pushing a bright bow wave as it turns southeasterly past the Sierra Foxtrot buoy.
McWhirr, taking his pipe out of his mouth, says:
“How about we crank up old Phyllis and motor over to Indianola Marsh and drop the hook?”
Ducking below, I release the compression levers and bear down on them again as Phyllis springs to life with a steady, thumping rhythm.
Now back on deck, I uncleat the topping lift and drop the main boom onto the gallows before going forward to lower the jib and secure it to the stanchions. Returning to the pilot house to turn the wheel to starboard, I head for the anchorage just off the marsh, passing sodden fishermen tending lines hung over bent gunwales, looking bereft of hope for even an anemic cod.
“Three fathoms. Let go here Mister Spencer.”
“ Aye Captain!” I send the CQR anchor splashing into the depths and pay out twelve fathoms of chain.
Old Hand slowly turns to face northeast.
“The flood has set in already.” observes McWhirr while taking bearings off Point Monroe.
The clouds have lifted to the East where the sky turns violet before falling off to slate gray above the snow covered Cascade Range. Gulls wheel their plaintive cry overhead, dropping white poop into the water forward of the starboard bow.
“ Have I ever told you about the wave I caught in Laguna?”
“I seem to recall the one you didn't”
Let it go then. That was another lifetime. Another has signed on as swab this voyage. I was but a nipper who beheld the hollow countenance of Saturn in the form of a towering breaker long spent on a Southern California shore. Just as now, he faces down from the Northern black clouds; a stern inverted profile mirrored on the sea. He's rough-hewn on the rocky peak yonder, endlessly stumping his sluggish round and enclosing our modest endeavors like the laurel tree's shadow circling over the household gods, ever counter to the golden sun.
“Guess I'll turn in. Goodnight Mister Spencer.”
“And pleasant dreams to you Captain.”
McWhirr goes below and soon the stillness is broken only by his regular snore.
I hear a rush of air from over the rail. A fine mist shoots up and hangs, dispersing into the black sky, before gently closing over the deep sounding whales back.
It's a spirit spout beckoning our ship toward far latitudes where the dark isle enfolds my father's wrack. The whale left this memento falling back into the source this gentle night, calling us to the eminence beyond the Eastern mountains. What salvation can we hope for from that quarter? What windy advent heralds vistas brighter for being reborn? I see beyond the blue peaks to a presence shining from the Seraphim's mansions, an Orient that looms all the more lucid for its absolute inscrutability.
I drift off with Old Hand's easy rocking on the waves abeam.
The night is a vast inter-tidal zone, where I lie aground in dreams until a remembrance intoned, as if from a wooden head inside my own, sings: Wake from the dream of life and see.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Navigating the seas 3
“Watch yer jibe, ya square headed flounder!”
“Aye, Cap'n.”
Looking up at the lifting boom, I turn the wheel to weather and it settles again to horizontal.
“That's better, lad, ye'll be a sailor before long.”
I've a mind to tell McWhirr he's an imperious old stiff. But there's no call to sulk this fine Spring day.
The Genoa blossoms before the following breeze like the sweet buds of May. As McWhirr scans the far horizon, I venture a change of subject:
“Last night there was a spirit spout rising into the sky.”
“That so?”
“Aye, sure as I'm standin' here.”
“What's all this about Anneas? Wasn't he a Roman?”
“A Trojan, sir.”
“And what has he to do with this voyage?”
“I don't know Cap'n.”
“Then I suggest you leave off dreaming and mind your course in the here and now, old son.”
McWhirr is not given to associative thought, being a gnarly old salt with little tolerance for nonsense, lording it over my left hemisphere.
President point is abeam and the Kingston ferry can be seen heading East three miles ahead.
“Better get some rest, lad, as we won't be raising the canal before dark.”
At McWhirr's welcome suggestion I go below and fall out on the pilot berth.
Golden coins of sunlight play on the deckbeams as I gaze at the weatherglass mounted on the bulkhead. Cloudy vapors churn and turbid forms emerge from the glass's hylic mist like foam lifted against the windblown sea in a spray of rainbow light. Waves rise and fall with a gentle caress on the ocean's silver mirror. The virgin, rising from the engulfing flood, floats before me with the elegant symmetry of old Mexican icons. It was her three tears dropped in widening circles on the samsaric sea that caused erring tars to lift their eyes to higher spheres where mercy reigns supreme. She is called Our Lady of the Reef.
Goddess, grant that I may descend the shadowy realm and again take my father's hand. Your tears forever engraved on the waters' face left this cypher; a testament to your power to guide my pilgrimage. Dad's image rose before me, drawing me on this quest among these shades. Along the shore his bones still roll with the tides uneasy flow. From San Pedro docks he fought to stem the pachuco tide, defending baseball and satanic chemical industry. It is for me alone to give the proper rites that he may rest peacefully in the verdant Elysian grove. It was foretold that his ghostly hands held the last strand in the long thread binding this epic yarn.
~~~
I'd driven sixty miles west over washboard road, past boojums and datillo in my scoolbus yellow VW van, listening to 60's surf music and breathing dust. Past checkpoints manned by green clad boys with machine guns glinting, past bones of donkeys bleached by the sun, until the sea breeze cleared my vision and a vast estuary opened on the blue Pacific.
Abreojos is a small fishing village of plywood shacks on the Baja coast, where grinding barrels break over shallow reefs and the wind howls blue blazes every afternoon, throwing white rooster tails off the backs of pitching breakers. The town has a fishing co-op, but their only boat broke up on the rocks when, after a tequila fueled celebration, a storm caught them napping. Now the fore section of its big hull lay on the main town playa, a warning to all to keep a weather eye out for the Chubasco's wrath. A caution against disunity of purpose among various aspects of someone or something.
Abreojos. The town's name seems apt. It means Open Eyes, and the longer I stayed in the village, the more my eyes opened to its stark beauty.
There's a graveyard on the dunes South of the village where gaudily painted tombs hold the remains of dead fishermen. Glass covered niches in whitewashed sepulchres hold relics of its tenants lives: baseball gloves, plastic action figures or cheap guitars, to commemorate their passions and ease their dark journey in the next world.
The light of the full moon bleached the strand as I walked south along the path winding through thorny scrub, past half buried debris, to the dunes base. My shadow rose before me as I ascended the hill. An Albedo moon, washing over the sand, left the charred hollows blacker than black. The air was filled with swirling breezes telling of fisher men's ghosts hovering among these dunes, mending starry nets and singing the old Mexican birthday song.
In daytime, the graveyard is a riot of color revealed with garish splendor by the high noon sun. By night, darkness obscures the stony epitaph and shadows hover over all. By day, the wind-blasted salt flats glare with a clarity that burns the eyes. The thousand phantoms night disclose withdraw in sunlight and take their repose, sleeping peacefully under plastic flowers, a threat no more to pious souls.
What truth do these images reveal: The broken hull, the bleached tombs, the revelation of Our Lady of the Reef? What visible expression of the invisible?
It was your image, come in dreams, dear father, that set my course toward your dark habitation. I long to clasp your hand once more and learn the fate of our future clan.
Three times I have tried to nail this story. Three time its vain words have left me grasping at empty air. Like you I struggle to find expression of an unnamed, ancient rage. Like you, I transmute the leaden ore of misshapen phrases into avowals of love from the hearts golden core.
McWhirr rouses me with his loud hail:
“Ready to jibe mate!”
“All ready, Cap'n.”
I haul in the mainshheet as Mcwhirr turns the helm, presenting Old Hand's port quarter to the southerly breeze. We are making a good run past Appletree Point and the fishing boats off Point No Point can be seen five miles beyond the starboard bow. We are rolling wildly now in the wake of a passing ship and from below comes a cacophony of pots and pans.
McWhirr's weathered face is a study of angular detail as he looks at the chart.
“We should make Foulweather Bluff by nightfall.”
“Would you care for crumpets and tea, Captain?”
“Does the haddock fly? Make it nice and strong. We'll need it for this night's passage.”
On Old Hand, tea is observed with the decorum of high ritual and to shirk tea duty incurs the displeasure of Captain McWhirr.
Nothing better than tea and salt horse as the Ventures regale the crew with sonic arppegios and soaring reverb while porpoise frolic at the bows.
“Aye, Cap'n.”
Looking up at the lifting boom, I turn the wheel to weather and it settles again to horizontal.
“That's better, lad, ye'll be a sailor before long.”
I've a mind to tell McWhirr he's an imperious old stiff. But there's no call to sulk this fine Spring day.
The Genoa blossoms before the following breeze like the sweet buds of May. As McWhirr scans the far horizon, I venture a change of subject:
“Last night there was a spirit spout rising into the sky.”
“That so?”
“Aye, sure as I'm standin' here.”
“What's all this about Anneas? Wasn't he a Roman?”
“A Trojan, sir.”
“And what has he to do with this voyage?”
“I don't know Cap'n.”
“Then I suggest you leave off dreaming and mind your course in the here and now, old son.”
McWhirr is not given to associative thought, being a gnarly old salt with little tolerance for nonsense, lording it over my left hemisphere.
President point is abeam and the Kingston ferry can be seen heading East three miles ahead.
“Better get some rest, lad, as we won't be raising the canal before dark.”
At McWhirr's welcome suggestion I go below and fall out on the pilot berth.
Golden coins of sunlight play on the deckbeams as I gaze at the weatherglass mounted on the bulkhead. Cloudy vapors churn and turbid forms emerge from the glass's hylic mist like foam lifted against the windblown sea in a spray of rainbow light. Waves rise and fall with a gentle caress on the ocean's silver mirror. The virgin, rising from the engulfing flood, floats before me with the elegant symmetry of old Mexican icons. It was her three tears dropped in widening circles on the samsaric sea that caused erring tars to lift their eyes to higher spheres where mercy reigns supreme. She is called Our Lady of the Reef.
Goddess, grant that I may descend the shadowy realm and again take my father's hand. Your tears forever engraved on the waters' face left this cypher; a testament to your power to guide my pilgrimage. Dad's image rose before me, drawing me on this quest among these shades. Along the shore his bones still roll with the tides uneasy flow. From San Pedro docks he fought to stem the pachuco tide, defending baseball and satanic chemical industry. It is for me alone to give the proper rites that he may rest peacefully in the verdant Elysian grove. It was foretold that his ghostly hands held the last strand in the long thread binding this epic yarn.
~~~
I'd driven sixty miles west over washboard road, past boojums and datillo in my scoolbus yellow VW van, listening to 60's surf music and breathing dust. Past checkpoints manned by green clad boys with machine guns glinting, past bones of donkeys bleached by the sun, until the sea breeze cleared my vision and a vast estuary opened on the blue Pacific.
Abreojos is a small fishing village of plywood shacks on the Baja coast, where grinding barrels break over shallow reefs and the wind howls blue blazes every afternoon, throwing white rooster tails off the backs of pitching breakers. The town has a fishing co-op, but their only boat broke up on the rocks when, after a tequila fueled celebration, a storm caught them napping. Now the fore section of its big hull lay on the main town playa, a warning to all to keep a weather eye out for the Chubasco's wrath. A caution against disunity of purpose among various aspects of someone or something.
Abreojos. The town's name seems apt. It means Open Eyes, and the longer I stayed in the village, the more my eyes opened to its stark beauty.
There's a graveyard on the dunes South of the village where gaudily painted tombs hold the remains of dead fishermen. Glass covered niches in whitewashed sepulchres hold relics of its tenants lives: baseball gloves, plastic action figures or cheap guitars, to commemorate their passions and ease their dark journey in the next world.
The light of the full moon bleached the strand as I walked south along the path winding through thorny scrub, past half buried debris, to the dunes base. My shadow rose before me as I ascended the hill. An Albedo moon, washing over the sand, left the charred hollows blacker than black. The air was filled with swirling breezes telling of fisher men's ghosts hovering among these dunes, mending starry nets and singing the old Mexican birthday song.
In daytime, the graveyard is a riot of color revealed with garish splendor by the high noon sun. By night, darkness obscures the stony epitaph and shadows hover over all. By day, the wind-blasted salt flats glare with a clarity that burns the eyes. The thousand phantoms night disclose withdraw in sunlight and take their repose, sleeping peacefully under plastic flowers, a threat no more to pious souls.
What truth do these images reveal: The broken hull, the bleached tombs, the revelation of Our Lady of the Reef? What visible expression of the invisible?
It was your image, come in dreams, dear father, that set my course toward your dark habitation. I long to clasp your hand once more and learn the fate of our future clan.
Three times I have tried to nail this story. Three time its vain words have left me grasping at empty air. Like you I struggle to find expression of an unnamed, ancient rage. Like you, I transmute the leaden ore of misshapen phrases into avowals of love from the hearts golden core.
McWhirr rouses me with his loud hail:
“Ready to jibe mate!”
“All ready, Cap'n.”
I haul in the mainshheet as Mcwhirr turns the helm, presenting Old Hand's port quarter to the southerly breeze. We are making a good run past Appletree Point and the fishing boats off Point No Point can be seen five miles beyond the starboard bow. We are rolling wildly now in the wake of a passing ship and from below comes a cacophony of pots and pans.
McWhirr's weathered face is a study of angular detail as he looks at the chart.
“We should make Foulweather Bluff by nightfall.”
“Would you care for crumpets and tea, Captain?”
“Does the haddock fly? Make it nice and strong. We'll need it for this night's passage.”
On Old Hand, tea is observed with the decorum of high ritual and to shirk tea duty incurs the displeasure of Captain McWhirr.
Nothing better than tea and salt horse as the Ventures regale the crew with sonic arppegios and soaring reverb while porpoise frolic at the bows.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Shadowlands
3/4/10 1916 hrs. Wind calm
Today we moved a boat that had dragged. Apparently, a visiting power yacht had snagged the anchor gear and pulled it west, where it lay too close to Old Hand. So while Gale and Lee pulled on a 200 foot line rigged from Gale's houseboat to the sloop, Bruce reset the two heavy Danforth anchors in their original position. Amazing what can be done with a little friendly co-operation.
This concept of "shadow" is interesting. It refers to the to the area of bottom land over which boats turn around their anchors. It is the area of bottom "encumbered" (another intriguing term) by the circle of the vessel's scope.
This seems to be one of the main sticking points in negotiations with DNR regarding the open water marina plan and has presented no end of debate among the various parties. It seems we can't just expect to encumber that bottom mud for free while shore side dwellers have to pay such hefty property taxes.
But the landlubber's vantage point differs substantially in that theirs is fixed, while ours varies with the vicissitudes of wind and tide. When the tide ebbs, the scope and the square footage is greater. Therefore, boaters should pay a fluctuating rate for bottom land encumbered according to the water's depth, which is related to the height of the tide and the moon's phases. There needs to be a high tide rate, a low tide rate, and all the variations of depth between the two extremes need be calculated accordingly.
Also, since the prevailing wind is Southerly, boats spend a far greater time occupying the Northern segment of the circle. Why should we pay equally for the Southern? I ask you, is that fair?
But, more importantly, the overlapping circles of all those boats shadows present a perfect model for peaceful, harmonious accord. When the benign countenance of the South wind puffs his bearded cheeks and blows fair breezes into our lovely harbor, all boats on single point moorings turn in accord without one impinging upon the shadow of his neighbor. The space vacated by the Northern most vessel is occupied by it's Southern neighbor with no conflict. What better image of peaceful, coexistence?
It all comes back to this present place and time where our collective karma revolves.
So Thanks Bruce, Gale and Lee for playing your part in this mooring plan.
Today we moved a boat that had dragged. Apparently, a visiting power yacht had snagged the anchor gear and pulled it west, where it lay too close to Old Hand. So while Gale and Lee pulled on a 200 foot line rigged from Gale's houseboat to the sloop, Bruce reset the two heavy Danforth anchors in their original position. Amazing what can be done with a little friendly co-operation.
This concept of "shadow" is interesting. It refers to the to the area of bottom land over which boats turn around their anchors. It is the area of bottom "encumbered" (another intriguing term) by the circle of the vessel's scope.
This seems to be one of the main sticking points in negotiations with DNR regarding the open water marina plan and has presented no end of debate among the various parties. It seems we can't just expect to encumber that bottom mud for free while shore side dwellers have to pay such hefty property taxes.
But the landlubber's vantage point differs substantially in that theirs is fixed, while ours varies with the vicissitudes of wind and tide. When the tide ebbs, the scope and the square footage is greater. Therefore, boaters should pay a fluctuating rate for bottom land encumbered according to the water's depth, which is related to the height of the tide and the moon's phases. There needs to be a high tide rate, a low tide rate, and all the variations of depth between the two extremes need be calculated accordingly.
Also, since the prevailing wind is Southerly, boats spend a far greater time occupying the Northern segment of the circle. Why should we pay equally for the Southern? I ask you, is that fair?
But, more importantly, the overlapping circles of all those boats shadows present a perfect model for peaceful, harmonious accord. When the benign countenance of the South wind puffs his bearded cheeks and blows fair breezes into our lovely harbor, all boats on single point moorings turn in accord without one impinging upon the shadow of his neighbor. The space vacated by the Northern most vessel is occupied by it's Southern neighbor with no conflict. What better image of peaceful, coexistence?
It all comes back to this present place and time where our collective karma revolves.
So Thanks Bruce, Gale and Lee for playing your part in this mooring plan.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Pear tree
The fruit trees bloom this fine day with a luminosity that defies my humble powers of description. The pink flowers explode against the vivid, blue sky with a vibrancy that calls to mind the pointillist visions of Suerat.
I used to think free self expression the alpha and omega of art, but more and more this cherished self seems to dissolve into nothingness like the scintillating points of light emanating from Spring blossoms in Waterfront Park.
Claude Monet, who considered himself a nuts and bolts color scientist of the Industrial age was, whether acknowledged or not, as spiritual as the Russian icon painters. For all their alleged "realism", the Impressionists are forever beckoning us into the the arcane knowledge of the Brethren of Light. They may have jettisoned the stale claptrap of history and genre in an attempt to present modern Parisian life with unvarnished truthfulness, but in their glorification of light they achieved pure transcendence. Cezanne said of Monet: " He's only an eye, but what an eye!". I wonder at the meaning of Cezanne's ambiguous phrasing: Only an eye, but one that penetrates into the deepest heart of reality, where solid form dissolves into particles of Divine, rainbow light.
I don't pretend to speak for these venerable luminaries of 19th Century art, but even the darkest manifestations of human pathology reflects a call to spiritual release. Though seen as aberrant by the French Academy, the work of the Impressionists was an inspired response to the same impulse that drives the mystic into desert retreat or to reach for the bottle. Marion Woodman, in her work with anorexics, has explored stories and myths that can redirect this desire for liberation to healthier channels and show how these dysfunctional patterns conceal great, transformative energies. Buddhists have long known that all mental and emotional afflictions contain corresponding wisdoms.
The Gnostic's saw birth in human form as imprisonment in the darkness of matter, and the priesthood as prison guards whose task it was to restrain flights beyond our allotted sphere. Such themes of struggle are encountered nightly, when the fetters of the world fall away into the abyss of sleep, and dreams reveal psychic remnants in our collective memory of the first religious urge to seek salvation in light's triumph over darkness.
The great Sufi poet Attar, sang of the light at the end of the soul's journey and how all creation is but shadows cast by the light of God. The act of prayer is imagined as polishing the mirror, or increasing translucency in order to see the Divine radiance behind the play of the world's forms--to apprehend the symbolized behind the symbol.
So this pear tree, with all its opulent splendor, points to something beyond its role as mere stimulant of optic nerves, and becomes angelic presence.
I used to think free self expression the alpha and omega of art, but more and more this cherished self seems to dissolve into nothingness like the scintillating points of light emanating from Spring blossoms in Waterfront Park.
Claude Monet, who considered himself a nuts and bolts color scientist of the Industrial age was, whether acknowledged or not, as spiritual as the Russian icon painters. For all their alleged "realism", the Impressionists are forever beckoning us into the the arcane knowledge of the Brethren of Light. They may have jettisoned the stale claptrap of history and genre in an attempt to present modern Parisian life with unvarnished truthfulness, but in their glorification of light they achieved pure transcendence. Cezanne said of Monet: " He's only an eye, but what an eye!". I wonder at the meaning of Cezanne's ambiguous phrasing: Only an eye, but one that penetrates into the deepest heart of reality, where solid form dissolves into particles of Divine, rainbow light.
I don't pretend to speak for these venerable luminaries of 19th Century art, but even the darkest manifestations of human pathology reflects a call to spiritual release. Though seen as aberrant by the French Academy, the work of the Impressionists was an inspired response to the same impulse that drives the mystic into desert retreat or to reach for the bottle. Marion Woodman, in her work with anorexics, has explored stories and myths that can redirect this desire for liberation to healthier channels and show how these dysfunctional patterns conceal great, transformative energies. Buddhists have long known that all mental and emotional afflictions contain corresponding wisdoms.
The Gnostic's saw birth in human form as imprisonment in the darkness of matter, and the priesthood as prison guards whose task it was to restrain flights beyond our allotted sphere. Such themes of struggle are encountered nightly, when the fetters of the world fall away into the abyss of sleep, and dreams reveal psychic remnants in our collective memory of the first religious urge to seek salvation in light's triumph over darkness.
The great Sufi poet Attar, sang of the light at the end of the soul's journey and how all creation is but shadows cast by the light of God. The act of prayer is imagined as polishing the mirror, or increasing translucency in order to see the Divine radiance behind the play of the world's forms--to apprehend the symbolized behind the symbol.
So this pear tree, with all its opulent splendor, points to something beyond its role as mere stimulant of optic nerves, and becomes angelic presence.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Alright on the Jetsons
Some shore dwellers object mightily to derelict boats constantly before the picture windows of their vast houses. They have a point. It is important to validate the position of the "opposition". But when you have to get approval from a neighborhood association to moor in a marina, it is carrying things too far. One of the reasons I took up sailing, was to escape the gray/beige aesthetic of the American, urban landscape. My girlfriend just informed me that the BAMBI plan did, in a sense, call for a neighborhood association. That's the trouble with girlfriends, they have an irritating tendency to prick the self righteous bubbles of us menfolk.
But imagine , if you will, if the cliff dwellers of Athos had to conform to an officially ordained color scheme: Mediterranean blue with a dash of bougainvillea red. Or what if such fascist dictates were imposed upon the decor of gaudy, Mexican hacienda's? Pancho Villa would rise from the grave to lead that colorful citizenry in open rebellion.
I recently spoke to a local, well educated and tolerant woman who complained of her neighbor's color choice for his home. When I pointed out that it was the same hue and shade of the overhanging cedars, she replied: "Well, it's alright on trees!".
For a country that prides itself on our alleged liberties, we seem only too willing to abdicate our right to paint our dwellings whatever color we might fancy, whether it be chartreuse or viadurya blue. We cherish our freedom to choose between dish soaps over the freedoms that truly liberate us from the role of passive consumer; a role ruthlessly imposed upon our placid population by corporate "culture".
Once there was a live aboard in a lurid pink vessel that appeared to have zoomed straight out of the final frontier to land before the appalled citizens of the south shore, causing much gnashing of teeth among them. But the proud captain of this dilapidated, interstellar craft felt it worthy of a berth in the Museum of Science and Industry, and boasted of her status as a unique, Boeing prototype from Seattle's early sixties, golden age. Ah, but those days are long gone and I, for one, do not miss them. This was the era of the Jetsons aesthetic that brought us John Graham Junior's brutalist architecture and that phallic monument to Seattle kitch, the Space Needle. This abomination can be seen all the way from fair Wicca's deck. Can't some thing be done about that space hypo? I mean, it's alright on the Jetsons.
But imagine , if you will, if the cliff dwellers of Athos had to conform to an officially ordained color scheme: Mediterranean blue with a dash of bougainvillea red. Or what if such fascist dictates were imposed upon the decor of gaudy, Mexican hacienda's? Pancho Villa would rise from the grave to lead that colorful citizenry in open rebellion.
I recently spoke to a local, well educated and tolerant woman who complained of her neighbor's color choice for his home. When I pointed out that it was the same hue and shade of the overhanging cedars, she replied: "Well, it's alright on trees!".
For a country that prides itself on our alleged liberties, we seem only too willing to abdicate our right to paint our dwellings whatever color we might fancy, whether it be chartreuse or viadurya blue. We cherish our freedom to choose between dish soaps over the freedoms that truly liberate us from the role of passive consumer; a role ruthlessly imposed upon our placid population by corporate "culture".
Once there was a live aboard in a lurid pink vessel that appeared to have zoomed straight out of the final frontier to land before the appalled citizens of the south shore, causing much gnashing of teeth among them. But the proud captain of this dilapidated, interstellar craft felt it worthy of a berth in the Museum of Science and Industry, and boasted of her status as a unique, Boeing prototype from Seattle's early sixties, golden age. Ah, but those days are long gone and I, for one, do not miss them. This was the era of the Jetsons aesthetic that brought us John Graham Junior's brutalist architecture and that phallic monument to Seattle kitch, the Space Needle. This abomination can be seen all the way from fair Wicca's deck. Can't some thing be done about that space hypo? I mean, it's alright on the Jetsons.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Death of a Liveaboard
2/15/10 1415 hrs. Easterly wind @ 8 knots, Sunny.
Another lovely February day in Eagle Harbor.
Yes, there are some sad looking vessels about. They tug at their moorings like forlorn pooches awaiting their master's return. Whether these craft qualify for the designation, liveaboard, depends on your definition of the term.
With all the regulations restricting liveaboards of late, I wonder if our venerable lawmakers have considered restricting other categories of boaters as well. What about a prohibition against zombie mariners? No Undeadaboards.
Since nothing exists apart from it's contrary, the sailor's life has death as steadfast shipmate, and death's dark aspect attends us all across the ocean of samsara until we reach either the blissful pure land or the fiddler's green. We may recall the words of that sorcerer of the active imagination, Don Juan, who councils his obtuse apprentice, Carlos Casteneda: "Death is your only ally, he is always following you, six inches behind your left shoulder". How he came by this precise data is beyond me. I can only trust it emerged from a very real experience undergone by an equally unreal character, whose presence looms all the larger for his fictive power.
With the physics of color, every hue produces it's after image, it's opposite on the color wheel. When an artist chooses a red, it's compliment, green, is immediately present and demands to be resolved within the whole composition.
As that great western sage, William Blake, said: " Without contraries there is no progression".
Waking is to sleep as life is to death. Given the logic of this metaphysical equation, it is only fair to rule out waking aboard as well. Imagine the shipping lanes of the globe navigated by somnolent sailors snoring through long watches at the helm. But with the advent of ever newer technologies, this proposal may not be so far fetched after all.
And what might be the final solution to the liveaboard problem? Death? They might get life, aboard floating penal colonies, hefting rocks for the bulkheads of wealthy waterfront home owners.
When it comes time for me to stand before Saint Peter or the Lords of Death, as a final act of protest, I would like to pass away aboard Wicca, thereby asserting my right to my own meaningful death aboard.
Another lovely February day in Eagle Harbor.
Yes, there are some sad looking vessels about. They tug at their moorings like forlorn pooches awaiting their master's return. Whether these craft qualify for the designation, liveaboard, depends on your definition of the term.
With all the regulations restricting liveaboards of late, I wonder if our venerable lawmakers have considered restricting other categories of boaters as well. What about a prohibition against zombie mariners? No Undeadaboards.
Since nothing exists apart from it's contrary, the sailor's life has death as steadfast shipmate, and death's dark aspect attends us all across the ocean of samsara until we reach either the blissful pure land or the fiddler's green. We may recall the words of that sorcerer of the active imagination, Don Juan, who councils his obtuse apprentice, Carlos Casteneda: "Death is your only ally, he is always following you, six inches behind your left shoulder". How he came by this precise data is beyond me. I can only trust it emerged from a very real experience undergone by an equally unreal character, whose presence looms all the larger for his fictive power.
With the physics of color, every hue produces it's after image, it's opposite on the color wheel. When an artist chooses a red, it's compliment, green, is immediately present and demands to be resolved within the whole composition.
As that great western sage, William Blake, said: " Without contraries there is no progression".
Waking is to sleep as life is to death. Given the logic of this metaphysical equation, it is only fair to rule out waking aboard as well. Imagine the shipping lanes of the globe navigated by somnolent sailors snoring through long watches at the helm. But with the advent of ever newer technologies, this proposal may not be so far fetched after all.
And what might be the final solution to the liveaboard problem? Death? They might get life, aboard floating penal colonies, hefting rocks for the bulkheads of wealthy waterfront home owners.
When it comes time for me to stand before Saint Peter or the Lords of Death, as a final act of protest, I would like to pass away aboard Wicca, thereby asserting my right to my own meaningful death aboard.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
The point of it all
2/12/10, 1400 hours, wind N.W. @ 10-15 knots
The sun emerges again after a brief shower. Wicca is undergoing a refit after her perilous crossing of the Straits. To undergo such trials may be asking too much of the old gal who, face it, is no longer the spry ship of her prime when she shoved aside the most riotous seas with haughty disdain. Maybe it's time she rest on her laurels, anchored up some peaceful creek, far from the uncouth caresses of the turbulent ocean. Old mariners will stop their morning constitutional to gaze wistfully at her graceful lines, and hearken back to youthful days when Wicca's brave tops'ls could be descried running before a stiff southerly breeze off Hecate Head. "Aye, she sails like a witch."
After her sinking in Eagle Harbor, Ray stripped her soggy interior and now you can see in her cobbled frames, evidence of a venerable legacy of shipwrights, amateurs and neophytes who, over four decades, kept her sailing into posterity.
Her interior is cozy, with a spaciousness that seems to expand to the unbounded horizon.
1500 hours
A seal rises like a submarine to a surface dimpled with the drops of a fleeting shower. Captain Jack, a pleasant smile for everyone, hails Wicca as he rows past brandishing a honeycombed piece of corroded aluminum: "found art is everywhere" he calls, and tells of electrolysis produced by the ferry maintenance yard nearby. "Ten Amps a day", says he, or some figure that escapes recollection now. Jack comes from one of Bainbridge Island's founding families, with a street in Eagledale named after them. He is full of such maritime wisdom, and warns of swamped properties along the waterfront due to melting icecaps.
I'm still contemplating the Noah story. According to Emanuel Swedenborg, "Buddha of the North", Noah's time was when "the deceitful persuasions of man's being suffocated all truth and good". The Ark's cargo consisted of "everything that life still possessed and was worthy of possessing" after the essential truths of the most ancient church were mostly forgotten. These truths, hidden behind the arcane language of the bible, are the remnants of a time when man had immediate access to the Divine influx from Heaven, and was still connected with good of faith united with love and charity.
Swedenborg apprehends the story as one of an inner history of the soul. We are threatened with suffocation when the esoteric truths are immersed within us by an exclusive preoccupation with literal meaning and a need to have spiritual realities verified by the physical senses. These preoccupations drown out man's ability to speak with the tongue of angels, to hear their call, or even trust in their existence, since the physics of Angels do not conform to our obsession with "facts".
How do these themes play out in our own day? Is Noah still out there floating in some aged, barnacle festooned tug with no engine?
The sun emerges again after a brief shower. Wicca is undergoing a refit after her perilous crossing of the Straits. To undergo such trials may be asking too much of the old gal who, face it, is no longer the spry ship of her prime when she shoved aside the most riotous seas with haughty disdain. Maybe it's time she rest on her laurels, anchored up some peaceful creek, far from the uncouth caresses of the turbulent ocean. Old mariners will stop their morning constitutional to gaze wistfully at her graceful lines, and hearken back to youthful days when Wicca's brave tops'ls could be descried running before a stiff southerly breeze off Hecate Head. "Aye, she sails like a witch."
After her sinking in Eagle Harbor, Ray stripped her soggy interior and now you can see in her cobbled frames, evidence of a venerable legacy of shipwrights, amateurs and neophytes who, over four decades, kept her sailing into posterity.
Her interior is cozy, with a spaciousness that seems to expand to the unbounded horizon.
1500 hours
A seal rises like a submarine to a surface dimpled with the drops of a fleeting shower. Captain Jack, a pleasant smile for everyone, hails Wicca as he rows past brandishing a honeycombed piece of corroded aluminum: "found art is everywhere" he calls, and tells of electrolysis produced by the ferry maintenance yard nearby. "Ten Amps a day", says he, or some figure that escapes recollection now. Jack comes from one of Bainbridge Island's founding families, with a street in Eagledale named after them. He is full of such maritime wisdom, and warns of swamped properties along the waterfront due to melting icecaps.
I'm still contemplating the Noah story. According to Emanuel Swedenborg, "Buddha of the North", Noah's time was when "the deceitful persuasions of man's being suffocated all truth and good". The Ark's cargo consisted of "everything that life still possessed and was worthy of possessing" after the essential truths of the most ancient church were mostly forgotten. These truths, hidden behind the arcane language of the bible, are the remnants of a time when man had immediate access to the Divine influx from Heaven, and was still connected with good of faith united with love and charity.
Swedenborg apprehends the story as one of an inner history of the soul. We are threatened with suffocation when the esoteric truths are immersed within us by an exclusive preoccupation with literal meaning and a need to have spiritual realities verified by the physical senses. These preoccupations drown out man's ability to speak with the tongue of angels, to hear their call, or even trust in their existence, since the physics of Angels do not conform to our obsession with "facts".
How do these themes play out in our own day? Is Noah still out there floating in some aged, barnacle festooned tug with no engine?
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Gale
2/4/10 1320 hours, wind N.W. 45-50 knots, Eastern Straits of Juan de Fuca--
This is no time to be crossing the straits, but the ebb has already set in and there's no turning back now. Turning the wheel hard to port and pointing up to a tremendous wall of grey sea, I struggle to maintain steerage way as the angry crest topples onto Wicca's foredeck. It seems all the fiends of hell are loosed upon the Eastern Straits and I pray the house will not part from her concrete float.
Down, down into the trough, and just when I think Wicca will continue on into the very bowels of the ocean floor, she starts to rise again to meet the following wave. This is a massive beast of a comber, on whose face I seem to behold the countenance of some personal, malignant evil, bent on all manner of mischief against myself and my trusty, little vessel. I shouldn't like to lose her.
The massive sea, towering above the plastic owl perched on Wicca's dormer, hurls itself with redoubled fury against the front door, and jets of water stream in through the jamb like it issued from a fire hose. Lord!
Wicca seems have found her stride. She's a lofty ship, built before the war as a boat house and converted into a stout cutter by Renaldo Keys of Bainbridge Island in the early 70's. But that was long ago, and now her timbers creak and moan like some elderly dowager rising to Sunday ablutions and bingo. Smash!
Lightening etches the somber sky to the North where clouds hang in long melancholy streaks like the folds of Nosferatu's mackintosh as Wicca flounders in a confused cross-sea, pitching and rolling like a thing possessed. Steady lads.
Painting in these conditions is no child's play. I keep spilling the bloody turpentine.
I recall that great 19th Century artist, Joseph Mallord William Turner, who lashed himself to the mainmast like Ulysses in the Siren's offing, the better to portray the tempests fury. Though some call him a Romantic swab, I laud his stalwart heart and cockney vision to bring the typhoon's roar to the staid halls of the Royal Academy. I find it significant that his appearance was likened to a pilot of a North sea cutter.
But this is no time for such pleasant reflections. How long can Wicca withstand such rude treatment? She is fabled to have nine lives and was faced with extinction in a Port Ludlow wreaking yard when Big Ray mounted her on a new float, bringing her back home to Eagle Harbor in glory like a phoenix risen from the ashes.
Rain begins to pound the metal roof, adding a staccato hammering to the deafening cacophony of wind and raging sea...
This is no time to be crossing the straits, but the ebb has already set in and there's no turning back now. Turning the wheel hard to port and pointing up to a tremendous wall of grey sea, I struggle to maintain steerage way as the angry crest topples onto Wicca's foredeck. It seems all the fiends of hell are loosed upon the Eastern Straits and I pray the house will not part from her concrete float.
Down, down into the trough, and just when I think Wicca will continue on into the very bowels of the ocean floor, she starts to rise again to meet the following wave. This is a massive beast of a comber, on whose face I seem to behold the countenance of some personal, malignant evil, bent on all manner of mischief against myself and my trusty, little vessel. I shouldn't like to lose her.
The massive sea, towering above the plastic owl perched on Wicca's dormer, hurls itself with redoubled fury against the front door, and jets of water stream in through the jamb like it issued from a fire hose. Lord!
Wicca seems have found her stride. She's a lofty ship, built before the war as a boat house and converted into a stout cutter by Renaldo Keys of Bainbridge Island in the early 70's. But that was long ago, and now her timbers creak and moan like some elderly dowager rising to Sunday ablutions and bingo. Smash!
Lightening etches the somber sky to the North where clouds hang in long melancholy streaks like the folds of Nosferatu's mackintosh as Wicca flounders in a confused cross-sea, pitching and rolling like a thing possessed. Steady lads.
Painting in these conditions is no child's play. I keep spilling the bloody turpentine.
I recall that great 19th Century artist, Joseph Mallord William Turner, who lashed himself to the mainmast like Ulysses in the Siren's offing, the better to portray the tempests fury. Though some call him a Romantic swab, I laud his stalwart heart and cockney vision to bring the typhoon's roar to the staid halls of the Royal Academy. I find it significant that his appearance was likened to a pilot of a North sea cutter.
But this is no time for such pleasant reflections. How long can Wicca withstand such rude treatment? She is fabled to have nine lives and was faced with extinction in a Port Ludlow wreaking yard when Big Ray mounted her on a new float, bringing her back home to Eagle Harbor in glory like a phoenix risen from the ashes.
Rain begins to pound the metal roof, adding a staccato hammering to the deafening cacophony of wind and raging sea...
Saturday, January 30, 2010
a mooring plan
1/23/'10
2130 hours Eagle Harbor
All's quiet but for the sound of cars debarking the ferry. An otter splashes around the deck, trying to climb aboard and poop on the houseboat.
I worked on color studies for my painting of Wicca. After laying down a blue/violet ground it's time to consult the color wheel oracle. This magic talisman is a guide through the dizzying maze of color relationships in my attempt to capture Wicca's silhouette against the high drama of a Winter sunset. A perpetual circle dance, color harmony is a dynamic movement around the wheel and back to the opening theme-- the key color. In this case, it is blue/violet (Viadurya blue in Sanskrit) the color of open sky and healing.
It's a circle dance, like Wicca turning with the tides ebb and flow around the still point buried deep in DNR bottom land. It's all a vast mooring plan that extends far beyond the microcosm of the harbor to the infinite reaches of space and back again--back to meetings, networking, this blue canvas and the still point of it all.
Symbols are not invented but grow from the collective consciousness, from lived experience. For mariners, the anchor has long been an image tattooed on the psyche by centuries of storm-tossed sleep and dreams disturbed by the grind of shifting chain in the murky depths. Arms emblazoned with the fouled anchor express something deep in our collective memory and cherished cultural inheritance about the need for solidity in a changing universe. But faith in the almighty or faith in the holding power of a CQR, it all comes down to the same need.
A good model for a mooring plan would be the mandala of the Medicine Buddha. This is grounded in the fundamental principles that honor the interdependance of all beings, tolerance and compassion. He is firmly anchored in this bottom land no one owns yet open to the vast, open Viadurya blue sky.
2130 hours Eagle Harbor
All's quiet but for the sound of cars debarking the ferry. An otter splashes around the deck, trying to climb aboard and poop on the houseboat.
I worked on color studies for my painting of Wicca. After laying down a blue/violet ground it's time to consult the color wheel oracle. This magic talisman is a guide through the dizzying maze of color relationships in my attempt to capture Wicca's silhouette against the high drama of a Winter sunset. A perpetual circle dance, color harmony is a dynamic movement around the wheel and back to the opening theme-- the key color. In this case, it is blue/violet (Viadurya blue in Sanskrit) the color of open sky and healing.
It's a circle dance, like Wicca turning with the tides ebb and flow around the still point buried deep in DNR bottom land. It's all a vast mooring plan that extends far beyond the microcosm of the harbor to the infinite reaches of space and back again--back to meetings, networking, this blue canvas and the still point of it all.
Symbols are not invented but grow from the collective consciousness, from lived experience. For mariners, the anchor has long been an image tattooed on the psyche by centuries of storm-tossed sleep and dreams disturbed by the grind of shifting chain in the murky depths. Arms emblazoned with the fouled anchor express something deep in our collective memory and cherished cultural inheritance about the need for solidity in a changing universe. But faith in the almighty or faith in the holding power of a CQR, it all comes down to the same need.
A good model for a mooring plan would be the mandala of the Medicine Buddha. This is grounded in the fundamental principles that honor the interdependance of all beings, tolerance and compassion. He is firmly anchored in this bottom land no one owns yet open to the vast, open Viadurya blue sky.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Fog
1/26/10
1000 hrs Patchy fog, wind S.W. @6kts.
The fog lifts to reveal a blue heron ornamenting a cluttered raft while grebes swim past. After catching a fish, they surface with it wiggling in their beaks and, giving their heads a vigorous shake, down it goes.
1045 hrs.
Like some phantom ship from bygone days, Ocean emerges from the haze revealing her rugged work boat lines and fishing rig to give our fair harbor some funky class. Paul built this beauty years ago and Dave had a hand in her construction.
It's odd. Even as we celebrate Bainbridge Island's rich maritime heritage the forces gather to destroy it.
1200 hrs.
Wicca and her neighbors turn to face West when the ebb sets in.
Where do we find the myths and stories that speak to our present condition? The story of Noah tells of our persistence in the face of God's judgment, but the myth of the flood predates the good book by many centuries. The spiritual history which the early church designates by the word Noah discloses a profound truth that eludes a mere literal reading. Although the story relates events that transpire in the unseen realm, they interweave with the world of practicality and politics.
The skeptics of global warming may have their reasons, but try telling them to a South Sea Islander wading through his hut and watching his precious pig go down in the Briney deep.
There is William Blake's print showing Urizen, symbol of rationality cut adrift from the mooring of deep feeling and charity, sinking in the abysmal waters of materialism. Could this be the same sea Noah so wisely navigated? It's the same ocean threatening to inundate us all: Corporate takeover of politics, consumerism, and a few wealthy individuals funding lobbyists to displace a poor and long established liveaboard community.
1000 hrs Patchy fog, wind S.W. @6kts.
The fog lifts to reveal a blue heron ornamenting a cluttered raft while grebes swim past. After catching a fish, they surface with it wiggling in their beaks and, giving their heads a vigorous shake, down it goes.
1045 hrs.
Like some phantom ship from bygone days, Ocean emerges from the haze revealing her rugged work boat lines and fishing rig to give our fair harbor some funky class. Paul built this beauty years ago and Dave had a hand in her construction.
It's odd. Even as we celebrate Bainbridge Island's rich maritime heritage the forces gather to destroy it.
1200 hrs.
Wicca and her neighbors turn to face West when the ebb sets in.
Where do we find the myths and stories that speak to our present condition? The story of Noah tells of our persistence in the face of God's judgment, but the myth of the flood predates the good book by many centuries. The spiritual history which the early church designates by the word Noah discloses a profound truth that eludes a mere literal reading. Although the story relates events that transpire in the unseen realm, they interweave with the world of practicality and politics.
The skeptics of global warming may have their reasons, but try telling them to a South Sea Islander wading through his hut and watching his precious pig go down in the Briney deep.
There is William Blake's print showing Urizen, symbol of rationality cut adrift from the mooring of deep feeling and charity, sinking in the abysmal waters of materialism. Could this be the same sea Noah so wisely navigated? It's the same ocean threatening to inundate us all: Corporate takeover of politics, consumerism, and a few wealthy individuals funding lobbyists to displace a poor and long established liveaboard community.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Log of the Wicca
1/25/'10
2020 hours
47 37.35 N
122 30.25 W
Wind westerly at 5 knots
I set the easel on Wicca's foredeck on the warm, sunny January day. After laying down broad swaths of wet on wet color, it's a chore to corral these hues as the paint ebbs and flows across the canvas. Most people think painting is only a mere pleasant pastime but wrestling this messy, recalcitrant material into shape seems more like work. Purposeful work, as Dave calls it, though I doubt he would use that phrase to describe my humble efforts. We all contribute to the cause in our own way and Dave's approach is as artistic as Henry Moore's in his sensitivity to natural form and organic beauty.
2100 hrs.
Beneath the shimmering Seattle lights reflecting on Elliot Bay some eight miles East lurk huge octopus and sharks in depths over 100 fathoms.
I've seen the city ramparts rising above the haze of a Summer dawn and fancied it some fabled Shangrila, locus of all that's desirable to gods and men. Less and less I succumb to it's allure as ferry fares and traffic discourage voyaging beyond shipping lanes to seek misfortune. I have my own inner city of misconceptions where I am lost nightly amid dark alleys and shady types who leer suggestively at my cluelessness: "Hey sailor! Want a good time?" Er... no thanks.
A sparkling, old Taoist sage wearing only a funny hat once told me: " There is no desire". I didn't know what to make of his laconic pronouncement as I am so ensnared in that particular aspect of samsaric existence myself.
2020 hours
47 37.35 N
122 30.25 W
Wind westerly at 5 knots
I set the easel on Wicca's foredeck on the warm, sunny January day. After laying down broad swaths of wet on wet color, it's a chore to corral these hues as the paint ebbs and flows across the canvas. Most people think painting is only a mere pleasant pastime but wrestling this messy, recalcitrant material into shape seems more like work. Purposeful work, as Dave calls it, though I doubt he would use that phrase to describe my humble efforts. We all contribute to the cause in our own way and Dave's approach is as artistic as Henry Moore's in his sensitivity to natural form and organic beauty.
2100 hrs.
Beneath the shimmering Seattle lights reflecting on Elliot Bay some eight miles East lurk huge octopus and sharks in depths over 100 fathoms.
I've seen the city ramparts rising above the haze of a Summer dawn and fancied it some fabled Shangrila, locus of all that's desirable to gods and men. Less and less I succumb to it's allure as ferry fares and traffic discourage voyaging beyond shipping lanes to seek misfortune. I have my own inner city of misconceptions where I am lost nightly amid dark alleys and shady types who leer suggestively at my cluelessness: "Hey sailor! Want a good time?" Er... no thanks.
A sparkling, old Taoist sage wearing only a funny hat once told me: " There is no desire". I didn't know what to make of his laconic pronouncement as I am so ensnared in that particular aspect of samsaric existence myself.
2230 hrs.
The hightides have brought a boon! Huge logs drift up to Wicca's aft deck and the stove is fed with flotsam from distant shores guided hence by some unseen, beneficent hand while Wicca abides in the warm glow of her perpetual Spring. It's the parable of the flotsam. I'll ask Dave about it since he once made a living harvesting errant timber cast adrift from broken rafts on the Duwammish in days of yore.
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