Stories. Out of a Fired Ship.

Throwing Rocks at Playa Negra, Brian Kershisnik

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters;
These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.
For he commandeth and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof.
They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble.
They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits' end.
Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses.
He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still.
Then they are glad because they be quiet...

Psalm 107:23-30

When I was little I wanted to run away to sea.
Rather, I wanted to run away to the sea-faring England of the nineteenth (eighteenth? seventeenth?) century where (or should I say when?) first my heart and then my whole self might be carried off by a dashing captain instead of by the honorable but bloodless, um, curate? chosen for me by my careful but unimaginative landed gentry parents, to his ship (not the curate's ship, the captain's ship; keep up), The Black Emerald (or something), where I would win over his at-first-reluctant-crew and bring them luck and prosperity though not until the accomplishment of multiple and significant plot complications. Or, wait, no, be decorously courted by the same or a similar dashing sea captain after he spied me through the window of a, let me see, bookseller's establishment, instantly losing his here-to-for brave and unyielding heart to the lovely, book-buying vision who, alas, vanished (without a trace or clue!), till at last, but only after requisite strivings and sufferings on both our parts taking up page after page (in my journal, I suppose), he might wed me in the ancient rose-bound garden of my father's manor. Or, no--listen!--move the manor till it's high atop wave-lashed cliffs, where I can grow up watching the brave ships come and go (brave because rocky cliffs are murder on boats), frolicking among the roses (which are loving the salty air, we have a wonderful gardener, been with the family since...always; his loyalty will figure in later), kissed by their spray (the waves' spray; roses don't, of course, spray) and also (kissed) by a handsome reckless lad I played with as an innocent child, who, though not as high-born as some (the lad, not my winsome self) still made good through derring-do on the high seas and came back to my father's aforementioned salt-lashed, rose-swept garden for wooing both decorous and reckless, as occasion required. And, at the end, a wedding. After the wedding there need be no further recording of this story. It'll be too...fast-paced.

Here are the salient points of this particular facet of my childhood desires, in case you were overcome and missed them. Grip your smelling salts, loosen your corset and pay attention.
1-Ocean and more ocean. Ships with it.
2-Reckless, gentlemanly boy, taller than myself. Wind-swept. Laughing eyes. Reads by candlelight. Understands the use of a sword. Can sail, ride, not panic, perform advanced maths, fix what's broken even including animals and people, carry a compass and map in his head, is honest and true and a crack shot. My father taught me these are the essential characteristics of the ideal man and I never doubted him.
3-My self desired and sought after by said boy.
4-Comfortable life with sufficient means in an era before antibiotics, reliable communication or transportation, general understanding of basic sanitation, easily accessible chocolate, air-conditioning, reasonable health and dental care, and toilet paper. What mattered paltry, mundane, domestic detail to my ten year old self? All I knew was that satisfying description of the abundance and richness of such a life would demand an adjectival overload resulting in a significantly greater number of hyphens, exclamation points and parenthetical statements than ever I encountered in my own dull, dry century.

One might with reason assume all this was primarily about the boy.
But it was, in fact, about the ocean.
I was born in Seattle, lived in San Antonio and then in San Diego. Water was big, and it was there. I was about three years old when we moved to California. There was the beach and there was the bay and they were salty and you went into them, often, as often as your parents' lives allowed. There was also the marina where you walked up and down the bobbing sidewalks with your dad to look at boats and maybe get fish and chips at a water-side shop with gorgeous dark blue and green albacore-topped tables, marlins and swordfish stuffed on the walls and your dad unaccountably ordering fried clams. This is the birthright; smoothed stones and sand and salt water and gulls and sailing ships and sun and shells and fog and wind that tastes of the sea.

I am the captain and I have been told
That tomorrow we land and my ship has been sold.
Now losing this boat is worth scarce a mention
I think of the crew most of all the first ensign.
For all we learned the sea.

Not long before I turned eight we moved to Utah, where there are mountains instead of hills and wildfires on the desert and where bright little fast-moving streams tumble down over slick rocky beds through mountains to each of the valley towns pioneers built, intercepting, re-channeling the water through webs of irrigation ditches, garden and field furrows, flood plains, town just as big as each creek could sustain on its way out to the west deserts (you see on which side of the mountains I have always lived; I have no idea what happens to streams that flow down on the eastern slopes of mountain ranges). And, really, that was all the water there was. Fresh (but don't drink it; cows, you know) and noisy and shockingly, achingly cold with darkly glimpsed trout where it was deep and water skeeters zooming around where it was shallow, a teensy, invisible water frisbee under each of their six feet. You went to this new water as often as your parents' lives would allow. Between times you could run in the sprinkler and wade in the town ditches or, once you were big enough to ride that far on a bike, go slide down the spillway at the fast and dangerous dam. And Utah was weirdly comforting, oddly familiar because it had those unexplainable gulls. The child that was me knew the story about the gulls and the crickets of course, but no one ever explained what had possessed them to stay.

The summer after we moved to Kanosh we drove back to California for a visit and the strangest thing happened. I was lying down in the back of the gold station wagon (when I was little the color of a car functioned like its Christian name. We always spoke of cars by their full names; white van, green Dart, gold station wagon) on the folded-down seats with the little sisters and all our vacationing stuff eating fruit we had denied at the border. It was dark and we were nearly to Somewhere, California, my dad kept saying "about half an hour more" and all of a sudden the breeze changed. Just for a minute the air was utterly different, alive to me and I could taste it all the way to the inside of my soul. I yelled "what's that!?!" and sat up so fast I almost got sick and caused an accident. "What?" my dad asked but it was gone! and I waited but it didn't come back and I was too, too sad so I said "nothing" and lay back down on a sister that had usurped my spot. During the ensuing necessary fighting that magical air thing happened again and I yelled and lunged over the seat between my parents. "That! What is that smell!?" because smell was the closest I could get to this living, quivering sensation I could taste and feel. My parents were too nonplussed, I think, to get irritated at my histrionics but they had no idea what I was on about and then after a little moment my dad said, "Oh. I think she can smell the sea," and my mom said, no, we were way too far from the coast (it was a fib about being only half an hour away from "there") but my dad was right. It was the smell of the sea and I hadn't known it was gone till it came back. All my baby and little girlhood are bound up in that smell as my older childhood and teen years are in the of smell river willows and rain on fields of dry grass and grain.

The games of imagination and adventure I authored and choreographed fell roughly into one of three fairly equally important categories.
1. Huts. Building and maintenance.
2. Quests. My children called this game Gypsies or Faerie Wars. Some good friends called the same game Hobos. You dress up, fight people using sticks, make forts and shelters which must constantly be moved and remade due to famine, sword and fire, and fight more people using more sticks. It was for me mostly an excuse to wear the best cape, walk loudly and carry a long stick.
3. Ships.

Huts was played mostly alone amongst the sisters, we tended to fight over decor and made good neighbors but bad roommates.
Quest requires cast, we all played.
Ships was really for me alone. Played in groups it became just water bound Questing. The tall ships of my imaginings were no place for small sisters. You had to be always thinking on a ship, you couldn't be watching out for little landlubbers; they tended to be swept overboard and you just had to grit your teeth and carry on, admitting it was probably the best for all. Of course, you wanted to be careful, overly cavalier behavior could get you in some real trouble with the Admiral of the Ocean Sea when you made land and re-entered port for provisions at dinnertime.

In the deep back lot of the house my grandparents bought for their retirement, where we first lived in Kanosh, there was a massive tree trunk, limbs lopped off, burned on much of its surface, its sides and bottom covered in a thick charcoal. The top was not burned though, so once you accomplished the tricky ascent (tricky because my mom forbade any charcoal on clothing) the tree was so huge it was plenty big enough for seven year old me to walk all over it with ease, sit or even lay on it, far too broad for me to straddle it like a horse (I have never been a limber human). It was my first ship and it floated in a field of grassy waves, undulating like the surface of the bay where we used to swim, green waves in spring turning to gold as I sailed the great log through that first summer. Handily, if little sisters came clambering to join the crew, a captain longing for solitude could simply not throw them a line, lie back and close his eyes knowing they could not scale the charcoaled sides alone. If they ran crying to tattle, Mom would tell them she didn't want them to play there, anyway. In this way I learned a ship is both island and mountaintop. The deck of my ship was smoothly gray and softly fibrous, almost fraying like fabric, which I associate with old and weathered cottonwood or poplar. After my grandparents came and we moved up the street we still played endlessly on that tree, always a ship, in crews or as solitary sailors. Then one summer our tree ship was just suddenly gone, an enormous emptiness awaiting us beyond the watered, mowed lawn, in the dirt between it and the horse corrals. All that was left was a pile of its charcoal, as if it had slipped clean from its black cracked skin; a footprint, a shadow where it had faithfully floated all those years at anchor. Grandpa had burned it to make it go away. He told us it was in his way. The grasses grew into the space it had held but no use was ever made of the ground there. I knew how Grandpa disapproved of our daydreamy games, the way he disapproved of a pet, a dog that didn't work, herd or hunt, and I always wondered. "Why did he burn it up?" I asked my dad, heartbroken. "Well, honey." He stopped, sighed. "It was there."

Guiding a ship, it takes more than your skill,
It's the compass inside, it's the strength of your will.
The first ensign watched as tempests all tried me,
I sang in the wind as if God were beside me.
For all we learned the sea.

Miraculously and inexplicably there was a boat dry docked in the middle-to-deep backlot of the house my parents moved to, out beyond the blacksmith's shop and therefore hidden from the house. Not hidden from the other houses on the block, but who cared about them? Maybe no one even lived in them. Your own parents are the only ones you have to hide from as long as you're doing nothing wrong. We played there voraciously. Interestingly, this ship required crew. I never wanted to sail our acre-and-a-quarter lot solo in that vessel, I was too worried about the things I was pretty sure lived in it. Rats, you know, live in boats, and I was quite certain black widows lived in this one, too. Black widows seem appropriately associated with ships, don't you think? The mourning souls of the widows of sea-lost sailors hiding and rustling and scuttling about, avenging themselves by secret poison. Shudder. If it's a dangerous game, get younger people to play it with you so you can all be unsafe together. So I rode the grass billows of our backlot with a crew of sisters and cousins, all younger than myself, made brave by their busy humanity. We were very busy on that ship. Every moment of every day of that good ship's log recorded exercises in narrowly averted Tragedy and Disaster. You know, some of those things can take just hours and hours and a huge amount of yelling and throwing yourself about to avert. We came off conquerors, but it was always, always a near thing. I can't tell you how many times one or other of us stood on the burning deck, desperately bossing people, till mysteriously it fell someone else's turn to direct the narrative flow and another crew member shouldered the bossing. One day when we were all gone on bikes, my dad burned our boat. He explained, taken aback at our fury and outrage at the destruction of our possession, that the boat wasn't worth anything. "You could never use it, it could never float again. It wasn't ever going to be sea worthy. It was a terrible boat." It certainly was never going to float, dry and dusty in the center of a county that regularly receives less than a foot of precipitation a year. Worthy, though, is an interesting word. What gives worth, and how shall we judge it? I honestly believe that to my father (who has saved every issue of Wooden Boat since Noah first made up a subscriber list and began printing in order to raise money to fulfill his commandment from the Lord) that clunky, ugly boat rotting on the backlot, probably built by a Millard County farmer with pretensions to water, was an abomination. My dad was generally amenable to and supportive of our games so long as we held no one hostage and damaged no property. I think he must have truly assumed we all hated that landlocked plywood corpse, felt as strangled and trapped as he did whenever we looked at it. I believe my father's was a purifying fire.

You take the wheel, one more time like I showed you.
We've reached the straits once even I could not go through.

The best of my ships was our hay derrick. A box marked off by huge logs like the first layer of a log cabin, four smooth gray uprights leaning into the center, one from each corner, acting as lines or as mizzen and fore masts, the great central trunk of the derrick making a mighty mainmast with the triangular crane at the top for a sail. Derricks are made to move fairly easily so the crane swung a bit in the wind, creaking and groaning just as masts are supposed to groan and creak. Best of all, my father had laid stacks of rough-sawn wood on the derrick base and tied them down to cure and to dry straight. These made decks and ooh! below decks, cabins and a hold. This was the best ship of them all. This was where I played alone. I loved it most in a storm. Under normal summer conditions it was just too blazingly hot to play there, any metal on the derrick a branding iron, the decks of my ship searingly bright and blindingly hot. Who wants to play Crossing the Equator every darn day? I didn't have a clue what the Arabian Sea was like but I imagined it somehow as dry and dusty as Millard County, ships sliding down white sand dunes like the ones where people rolled Easter eggs at White Mountain. I wanted to sail something more like the Cornish coast. On a sunny day I avoided my derrick like a plague ship but the minute the wind shifted to the south west and brought the scent of rain, big clouds racking up behind South Mountain and then flooding over, spilling across the valley with the sound of thunder and far away flashes of sheet lightning and the suddenly cooler wind whipping around now out of the east, out of the canyon, I would abandon my huts, dump my sisters and cast off in the derrick, three sheets to the wind (not drunk, except on wind; look it up), headed north where the blackest clouds were now. That's the storm pattern in Kanosh, wind and clouds from the south west, twisting around to stack up big rain in the north. I would stand forever on the top deck, holding a line, wind whistling through the rigging and whipping my hair (released from its stupid braid) all over. Watching the storm, feeling it come. Holding on to the central pole, big enough I could really wrap myself around it, watching the lightning snaking all over the valley, feeling the gust and tug of the sails in the twisting of my mast, running before the wind. If it got really wild I could go below to sit in the storm's strange, yellow-gray half light, riding out the lightning and the thunder perfectly safe in my cabin under the lumber, only driven to the house by actual rain, and how often was that going to happen? Not having to defend my solitude as no one really wanted to play ship with me in a storm. "You're like your dad," my mom said, "watching tornadoes outside in the night." I came home from college and the derrick was gone. I was stunned. Too big for games? Over the loss of the last ship? Hardly. My dad loved the derrick, he'd never... "Where's the derrick," I asked my sister, "what happened to it?" She made her eyes big, responding to my anger and to her superior knowledge and to the drama of it all, the downing of The Derrick. "Oh," she breathed, "Dad had to take it down. It got hit by lightning and just blew up. It wasn't safe at all after and he had to burn it."

It's like four o'clock in the morning in some time zone, somewhere, and it's freezing. Noah's trying to wake me up, roll me off the bench in the snack bar where I'm wrapped up and trying to sleep, to sleep. "Come on, Mom. Wake up. You can see the White Cliffs of Dover. Come on." Everyone is asleep, Tom is sleeping and smiling because he's not going to get up, he's seen these cliffs. "Go without me," I say, and Noah leaves, disgusted and disappointed, but now I'm not sleeping. I leave the sleeping girls with the sleeping painter and walk to the top, pulling my scarf tighter against the cold, cold air. I don't tell Noah I'm there. Good thing the girls are asleep, the youngest gets so sick. England is rushing up and down but hardly getting closer. The further off from England, the nearer is to France. Is that how it goes? I look at the cliffs, the houses hugging the bay, the boats hugging the docks, my son hugging himself. Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the dance? I turn away from the chalk cliffs so that all that I can see, as far as I can see, is water.

I am a captain and I have been told
But I am not shaken I am eight years old
And you are still young but you'll understand
That the stars of the sea are the same for the land.
And we came to learn the sea.

We Learned the Sea
Dar Williams


White Boat, Brian Kershisnik