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?
Saturday, February 13, 2010
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...
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