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.