Explorers

           It’s snowing today. 

 

What I mean is that water is falling from the sky.  Moisture in the atmosphere has condensed and formed into clouds.  Sufficient moisture has precipitated that the clouds are too wet merely to float, and they drip.  But the temperature of the air near the ground is ten degrees above zero.  Therefore, the dripping water has frozen as it falls, and each drop has become a small particle of frozen water, colored white, each of which is individually shaped and pretty to look at. 

 

It’s snowing today. 

 

          Long ago, we humans said, “The gods have decreed that it snow today.”  If we had wanted snow right then, we would have rejoiced, and we might have thanked the gods by some act we hoped they would appreciate…by a sacrifice, for example. 

 

          Years ago, sailing in the old Monhegan Ocean Race, the crew and I were halfway between Cape Cod and Monhegan Island, at dawn, in a force 7 gale.  (This particular running of the Monhegan Ocean Race was tough.  Overall, the fleet suffered a knock-down, two dismastings, and a broken arm…to our astonishment, we finished third on adjusted time for our class, among fifty-three boats.) 

 

Here’s a snapshot of our condition at dawn.  Ferocious seas; ululating howl of  wind; grey wrack to windward; faint illumination streaked with yellow; rain sideways in bands of intensity blistering our faces and then scaling back; the seas breaking as high as the lower spreaders.    

 

As the light intensified and pushed back the night, a rival appeared on our windward quarter, between us and dawn.  We had seen no other boat for many a thrashing hour.  I watched her dully. I was battered, exhausted with the rest of the crew from the tending of the lines.  John and Arthur, our helmsmen, had swapped helm watches on the half hour, all they could stand.  They dropped, poleaxed, onto the cabin sole, asleep as they hit the deck for the twenty-eight minutes before their next helm watch. 

 

Were we winning?  I was indifferent, miserable, though the sight of a rival re-awakened my blood. 

 

Suddenly, our rival was thrust upward by a mighty comber and—for a single perfect instant, lasting as long as four or five seconds—she was entirely airborne, all 36 feet of her.  Suspended, she was, an interloper against the sky, as though she might have been some modern Icarus on a low, trial run. Keel to masthead, her every line was etched in sudden lightning clarity. 

 

All along the windward rail we were punching each other.  “Did you see that?  Wow!  Did you see that?”

 

Airborne, our rival was a symbol of man against chaos. 

 

          We humans believe in steel, wire, fiberglass, paint, microchips, and Dacron sails...do we not?  We like things we can touch and make into other things. 

          We search, therefore, for what we expect to find.  It’s safer that way.  We want to know where we are, not where we aren’t.  We believe a GPS can tell us where we are, despite the fact that only God knows where we are.

 

          God?  How did He creep in?   No, it’s the other way around.  God is everywhere already; we’re the creepers. 

 

          God knows where we are, so why do we tiptoe so shyly round God’s miraculous edge? 

 

It’s because we prefer to believe in things we can make, or in things we can make language about.  We studied and studied and came up with language useful to ourselves: why clouds drip and what becomes of the drips in ten degree air. 

 

With satisfaction I can tell you why a genoa jib, properly set, will increase the forward thrust of the mainsail: it’s a fluid dynamics thing…the wind is a fluid…differing pressures on opposite sides of the sail…that kind of a thing.  I am so pleased with myself to have learned the words to say. 

 

We like to rely on that distance, which we establish for our purpose, by which our own language holds us apart from God’s creation and from the purpose of His creation. 

 

Yet clouds dripped before we decided it was the pantheon of gods causing it. Wind blew and pressed flotsam across the sea, even before we thought of using the wind to batter a sloop uphill to the Monhegan bell only to turn her around and to slide her back home into Provincetown.         

 

          We have made ourselves powerful tools. We have created commanding language. All of creation may be explained by us into stillness, controlled by us always quite. But…how shall I explain that piercing image of our sailboat rival airborne, which whacked me a blow in the eye so hard I had my precious word-smithing jarred? 

 

The ancients pointed at the gods, which explained the world to their own satisfaction.  They performed their experiments, and their experiments proved their point.  Snow fell more regularly when sacrifices of gratitude were made.  The world was just what they expected. 

 

So, too, did the Greeks explain the world…Icarus dared, but he fell.  Just so.  He existed in an ordered universe, wherein the world of the gods and the world of man stayed separate, most of the time.  Trouble came when the gods longed after mortal women, or when mortal men challenged the sun.  Greek experiments proved their own point, too. 

 

Today, we are believers in dripping clouds and in the temperature gradients which make snow: our explanations of creation.  We have language that explains it all.  We are complacent, even sanctimonious in our certitude. 

 

But what, when we are confronted by the inexplicable?  What, when we explore beyond the edge?  What, when an event smashes into our language and breaks it?  What of a five-ton sailboat that can fly? 

 

How do we maintain our cognitive distance from the miraculous?  Should we maintain our cognitive distance from the miraculous?  Why would we desire to maintain our cognitive distance from the miraculous?

 

Explorers find what they expected to find, not what is there. 

 

         

Two Men on a Winter Beach, Evening

Cold, thick overcast, strong SW wind coming in across the sea: smells like snow. 

 

I intend to be alone as I walk down the pathway between dunes to Popham Beach, just east of Cape Small, Maine. My left knee has hurt during the past month, but it’s better today.  I am wearing my heavy boots and comfortable jeans.  The tide is low, just now, and I want to get down onto the wide expanse of wet sand and stride along in the gathering darkness, letting the weight of my left boot exercise my knee.  Otherwise I am bundled in my 2^nd heaviest jacket, ski cap and gloves.  I have not predicted the need for my heaviest jacket, or for my rabbit-fur bomber hat, my scarf, and mittens instead of gloves. 

 

            There is very little light.  Peripheral vision works best.  I steer my course to the beach by keeping the wind steadily on my right cheek. The sand surface at the top of the beach is dry and rough.  There are occasional baulks of driftwood over which to trip.  I trudge forward, not striding yet, pre-poised for balance in the event that a questing foot might strike a log.  What light there is reflects off the curl of breakers as they smash far away. Retirement is the reverse of striving, and it is not easy to put myself into reverse.  

 

            When the tide is very low at Popham, it is possible, this year, to walk out across acres of flat, wet sand all the way to Fox Island, a high bump of seamed granite standing fifty feet above the bar which connects the island to the mainland. You can do this, this year, almost without wetting your feet.  Each year, the shape of Popham Beach is changed by the powerful effects of tide flow, prevailing wind, welling of fresh water from the marsh behind the beach, and the angle of the crashing seas.  Some years, even at lowest tide, you must wade through a stream across the bar that is a foot deep, and swiftly flowing from west to east.  Not this year; change is all around me. 

 

            I make my way down through the dry sand to the wet.  The waves crash fifty yards away, making their sullen roar.  I angle down across the fifty yards and turn my course toward Fox Island, guided by the crescent of the breakers.  I am lower now, and the height behind me of the dry part of the beach shields me from some of the wind.  I unzip the top half of my jacket and pick up my speed to a purposeful stride, swinging my left boot with vigor.  My knee is stiff but it enjoys the stretch.  Long way to go, in the dark, to the island. 

 

            What are we willing to give up?  That is the question my wife and I ask ourselves. 

 

            I am nearing the island.  I know that when I reach the island, I will first encounter points of granite which thrust out into the beach, leaving sand avenues into the island between its granite projections.  I imagine myself making my way up a particular one of those sand avenues to where I must either climb the granite or turn back.  Climb?  How’s the knee? 

 

            One year ago, last winter, one month after retirement and three days before Christmas, I climbed that granite on a cold night such as this, all alone on the beach, but then the sky was utterly clear and spangled by stars.  The Milky Way, bright as diamonds, seemed, too, to share my joy at the end of corporate conference calls.

 

That night, last year, I sang from a ledge on Fox Island; I can’t sing.  But I sang.  No one was around to complain.  You should have heard me do Silent Night, again and again.  I sang with such lusty enthusiasm that maybe (though probably not) it was melodious.  This year, deafer than ever, even if my knee let me climb, I probably would not sing.  But if I sat there on a ledge of Fox Island, as the world dropped entirely into black, I might settle on something else we were willing to give up.  We had already given up most channels on cable TV; that was a start!

 

            What I liked was the early to bed, the reading of good books just because I felt like it, the warmth of my wife, and the no nights away.  What I liked was crafting these posts, and the books I’m finishing with my agent, and the thinking during daylight—on a weekday!—in theological terms.  What I liked was requiring only a little money and not a lot.  What I liked was our children and our grandchildren and having the time deeply to concern ourselves about their dreams, too.  What I liked was that we had done it, during thirty years, that we had kept at it, and that we had not given up. 

 

            I reached the sand avenue into the island and then the granite ledges.  My knee was good, and my hips felt loose, as though this evening were thirty years before.  I climbed.  I reached the saddle of the island, where the wind blew strong.  It was past evening, almost night.  Black around me; totally alone. 

 

            What?  What was that?  A flicker out of the corner of my eye, in the sky. 

 

            There it was again.  Concentrating my sight, it came into view and then disappeared.  When in view, it became a vast, curved, circumflex whipping back and forth in the sky.  It must be…it was!  It was a vast para-sail kite riding in the nighttime sky, a huge, C-shaped thing slicing the dark. 

 

            And if this sail were there, then some man must be there, too, controlling it in the dark by invisible lines. 

 

            Concentrating, I saw him then, vague against the shadowy beach.  Now and then he was even up off the beach, four feet off the sand, being pulled along by the force of the wind in his sail.  His arms were wide apart, steering himself with lines I could not see.  He’d lower himself downwards until his heels, on straight legs, would touch the sand, and he would ski on his heels across twenty yards of beach and then thrust himself once more into the sky. 

 

            So…in fact, on this dark beach, there were two men, after all, one the contemplater and one the athlete.  I had been an athlete such as he many years before, and maybe he would become a contemplater later, when his knees could no longer ski the sand by the force of the wind. 

 

            For what was he willing to strive during the next thirty years; what were my wife and I willing to give up? 

 

            When I descended finally from the granite of the island and set off back across the sand, my double had rolled up his kite and gone away.  I really was alone on the beach now.  My knee was beginning to stiffen back up. 

 

           

Chasing After Our Fathers

My father's poetic fame began in the early 1930s and subsided after about 1985 or so. I was born in 1946, so I ran along with Dad’s fame through my school, college, and graduate years, and then during my early career.

 

As any child does, I emerged into consciousness in the middle of the parental tale and needed to catch up. As I ran, I grabbed scraps of what I could understand, and I molded them around big pieces of what I couldn’t, and that made me a pair of patchwork sneakers to kept my feet off the stones.

 

        But were the sneakers…true?

 

        Dad might say, with his twinkle: “What’s truth, really, after all?”

 

        And if he were in a certain mood, he’d tell you about the times when he used to dine, as a young poet traipsing around Ireland, with William Butler Yeats, and AE, and Oliver St. John Gogarty, and that whole crowd. Especially he’d tell you of one particular one of those dinners, a long and exciting one, which was conducted entirely in Latin. Funny thing is, he’d then point out, biographers of Yeats have mentioned the man’s ignorance of Latin.

 

So what happened? Was Dad in a dream that night, in some Yeatsian trance, manipulated from…The Other Side? After all, he was enchanted, as a young acolyte must be, sitting at table and breaking bread with the Pope. Later, in the small hours of that morning after that particular dinner, walking the Dublin streets with Yeats, he was silent. They trod their way toward their turning, where one would go right and the other go left.

 

That night, after the Latin dinner, Dad couldn’t think of anything high enough to say to the master. As they approached their separation point, he longed for that one perfect line. Reverence? Gratitude? Jollity? The longing to be acknowledged as yet another who dreamt of the lost woods of Arcady?

 

The lamp. The corner. The streets, akimbo.

 

“Well, goodnight.”

 

“Yes, goodnight.”

 

It was done.

 

As described, this moment feels real to me. The Latin dinner? Well….

 

But I yearned to know: What is the mystery of men, and how do they make their lives work out?

 

                                      *****

 

The men; our fathers.

 

I have an image that has remained with me since a young boy. It is Christmas, and the morning joy has been replaced with anticipation of the afternoon family gathering. We are in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where my mother’s parents reside. Grandfather’s house is a three-story stucco classic with old-fashioned accoutrements, such as a conservatory, a maid’s quarters, a library, and a vestibule. The image in my head is located in the vestibule.

 

Grandfather’s front door is large and heavy and has a polished brass lion’s-head knocker in its center. It opens onto the vestibule, which is tiled and paneled in mahogany. Visitors hang their coats in the vestibule on one of several tall coat racks. Then they enter the inner house through a second door, which is set with glass panes in a pattern five across and eight high. The vestibule smells of eucalyptus, which Grandmother keeps in wide brass ewers set on a bureau on the other side from the coat racks.

 

        Okay, it’s Christmas. I am six or seven. My pacifist grandmother has been kind enough to give me a set of new cap pistols and a double holster because I assured her I would only shoot people who are already dead. Things are going very well today.

 

It is early afternoon, and the men begin to arrive, complete with their families. I stand in the vestibule, wearing my guns. One after another, these tall men come through the outer door, smelling of cold snow and winter wind, their faces red. They all wear overcoats, which they doff as they trade greetings with my father and with Grandfather. The overcoats smell of the outdoors and swirl a cold air as they are swung off shoulders and hung among others already there. The men are well dressed, good-looking, competent. They chat with one another as though they were all members of that enviable club…the club of adult maleness. They notice me; they greet me. More than anything on earth, I long for membership in their club. I would give up my guns to be a man in an overcoat arriving out of the snow from a world in which I know how to make things happen. I would give up my guns to share what I see as their self-confidence.

 

        To male readers, if your experience is like mine, here’s the situation you needed to master along your way up, or, if you have failed to master it, you might have been harmed by it, even crushed. You came up and needed to encounter the well-lived lives of your fathers. These were decent men, who tried, and who succeeded. How do we sons compete against the well-lived lives of our fathers? 

 

Along the way, our fathers made their mistakes, of course. Eventually, all fathers display their weaknesses to their sons. However I believe that the sons already know what those weaknesses are, from the beginning. This is due to visceral sympathy which exists between the son and his father: a son knows his father in ways more intimate than intellectual knowing.

 

A son’s testimony is a testimony of the gut.

 

Some of us sons get angry at our fathers’ weaknesses, which anger may diminish our own lives for many years. Lucky sons have fathers who display their strengths as well, and whose strengths remain as the years go by, to counter the weaknesses, and to provide perspective against the anger.  Especially lucky sons have time. I had time…to cool off. 

 

I had the luxury to come back into Dad's presence—when he was a nice, round one hundred years old—and to say to him, “Well, Dad, it worked.”

 

“Good,”he said, acknowledging my effort at life building through the years. Then he twinkled at me, since he had his own satisfaction to report. “You know the critics?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“They’re all dead.”

 

“Yes?”

 

“And I’m not.”

 

        A line in my father’s poem Flux has always stayed with me. “Life is stranger than any of us expected.” That’s true. Take the whole of my life today, and the details are scarcely what I should have predicted as an eighteen-year-old.

 

But, the real story is how my life has been exactly—as it turns out—exactly as it was supposed to have been, that amazes.

 

During many years in my thirties and forties, I conceived that it was I—I!—who was blasting my life along, fighting to stay without, or within, my father’s hands. But it wasn’t Dad who had the reins of me. It was another Father entirely.

 

For good or ill.

 

        No. For good and ill.

 

        Devil and angel.    

 

        Devil and angel.

 

        Amen.

 

Love, Round Island, and Getting the Words Not Right

             


Do you always get your words just right?  I don't.  Even when I want very much that my words

should come out just right, sometimes they don't.  Here's an example. 

 

 

Maine is a good place for love; a Maine island, especially. 

 

 

I was twenty-nine.  My divorce was final.  On that summer day, Channa and I were sailing the Maine coast with another couple.  We had chartered a forty-foot, full-keel, clipper-bowed, gaff ketch.  The long-range weather report was favorable, and we anticipated a week or so of gunkholing and of short passage-making east of Penobscot Bay. 

 

 

In late morning of our initial day out, we anchored between Round and McGlathery Islands, neither one inhabited, seaward from Stonington.  While our friends remained aboard, Channa and I rowed ashore to Round.  I explored the coastline in one direction, and Channa wandered off toward the southern, the seaward end of the island.  A short time later, I came upon her.  She was sitting on the granite slab of the shore, just above the surf, completely still, staring out to sea, seemingly humbled, in the way that Moses might have been humbled when, at last, he was shown the Promised Land. 

 

Since our meeting nine months previously, Channa and I had been growing toward love, while I worked to disentangle myself from my marriage.  Channa takes words seriously.  Though my marriage had been a mere legal formality during the past two years, it was still, as she pointed out, a marriage, and therefore it was a bond which she had no intention to break.  So, until the bond was formally put aside by the State, we had held ourselves at the maybe stage of our love (albeit at an anticipating and at a hopeful stage of maybe).   

 

There, on Round Island, we made it almost all the way to yes! 

 

At first, I watched Channa’s absorption, and then I sat beside her on her rock.  She acknowledged my presence by the touch of her shoulder against mine, but by no other act…by no turn of her face toward me, no speech, no motion, no smile. She remained intent with her gaze toward the sea.  As I remember it, the air was warm, the breeze mild and on-shore.  No sound intruded, other than the sounds of surf and gulls.  

 

 

Channa allowed her silence to continue.  This was an intimate gift of great allurement for me.  Her silence allowed me to preoccupy myself, too, for I am a silent person, content with my own thoughts.  My inclination to silence was honored, just then, by hers. 

 

 

Our rapt consciousness continued for as much as an entire hour…and during a change of the tide.  

 

We were both, during that timeless time, subsumed entirely within the presence of that for which we both yearned. 

 

            Was it the sea, this thing for which we both yearned?  No.  Was it the harmony of the celestial spheres?  Was it some philosophical aesthetic?  No.  Was it God?  Maybe we found God there, too, but He—with due respect—wasn’t the point just then.  Was it our lambent awareness of one another—side by side, fulfilled just by the touch of our two shoulders, without speech, our two souls at last complete? 

 

That’s what it was. 

 

Then I did something I do not advise an ardent young swain to do after such a time of bliss beside his love.  As Channa’s body language began to show that she had returned from heaven and was ready to talk, I turned to this beautiful woman and, with my most soulful eyes, I indicated my love of her by breathing, “Being with you is like being alone.”

 

Yikes!

 

It was not until much later that evening, and after very much harried explanation by me, that we managed, at long last, to get the thing all straightened out.  What I had meant, of course, is that being with Channa was as good as being alone.  As good as.  This is what I had meant, of course.  Repeat after me, young ardent swain: being with your love at a time of absolute silent heavenly bliss is as good as being alone.  Remember that. 

 

Ever afterwards, during our subsequent thirty-seven years of marriage, “Round Island” has been a code phrase for us, now that my catastrophe of suggesting that Channa wasn’t even there had been washed away.  Round Island means absolute heavenly bliss...together. 

 

 

Post a comment and tell us whether you have ever gotten yours words all tangled up into error.  It's funny how that happens, is it not?