Muse Droppings
By:
C.C. Youngren

Sea Stories

A scene from a Tom Stoppard play begins on a pitch black stage.
Rosencrantz: Sure is dark.
Guildenstern: Not for night.
Rosencrantz: No, not for night. For day it’s dark.

Well here and now, for night it’s bright.  Just came inside from on deck where the sun is hanging a few degrees above the northern horizon.  It’s 12:30 AM.  “Here” is a little less than a hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, and “now” is the Summer Solstice. 

As a seascape, the scene tonight is not spectacular at all. The sun is an orange, well…orange, hanging in a hazy grey sky. (I had typed “orange grapefruit” but it just looked stupid.)  The water is a greyer reflection of the grey sky, and choppy amid the long-period swells.  There are folks taking pictures of the “midnight sun.”  I’ll find a prettier sunset off the coast of Bermuda in a few weeks to take mine.  Though it won’t be midnight then, it will be about as indistinguishable from a “midnight sun” photo as a picture of Notre Dame with the bells ringing or not ringing.

The sea does have moods and this just happens to be a less dramatic one.  It is colorless, of course (seawater is), and without silt or the far distant floor below to interrupt or absorb, it reflects what is a function of the color of the sky; grey tonight, but blue on other occasions, from deep cobalt to royal to powder depending on sun/eyeball vector orientation,.  And black at night—when it’s dark that is.

 Seawater doesn’t smell either, despite claims of Dad “smelling the salt air” as the family arrives at the beach.  What he and the sailor who “smells the shore” share in their nostrils is probably the gasses released from the decaying matter at the interface of sea and shore.  Unlike pure silence, or pitch blackness which slap your senses into recognition, appreciating, even noticing, no smell is an acquired olfactory skill.  I don’t blame Dad for not saying, “Ah, smell the gasses released from the decaying matter at the interface of sea and shore,” though.

The sea’s texture too is as much an optical phenomena as physical surface tension.  At times ripplets appearing as scales on the hides of waves in turn superimposed on swells, serve as harmonics of a great noisy chord.  Other times perfectly smooth, the ocean appears to have the viscosity of motor oil or even pudding, gently undulating or even perfectly flat.

While the sea-substance is interesting in itself, visions where the sea is an important if not essential backdrop, but not the center of consciousness, come most prominently to mind.  I have seen the sun set twice in one dusk, a refracted image of the over-the-horizon star following its sister into darkness.  An upside down city hanging over a ribbon of Ethiopian shore was, as optical illusions go (and these are physical phenomena, not hallucinations), a breathtaking experience.  The Old Salts aboard said it was Cairo—didn’t matter. 

The most stupefying, however, was an unforgettable incident decades distant.  The Suez Canal was made impassable by Israeli ordinance in 1967 and the voyage to India had to follow the early 16th century routes around the Cape of Good Hope.  The trip started with a 33 day leg from Norfolk to Karachi with a brief refueling stop at Asunción Island in the South Atlantic.  After tramping down the west coast of India, then up and back down the east coast, we left (then) Ceylon headed south to make a delivery in Capetown before steaming home.  It was northeast of Madagascar, on a bright moonlit night that I observed what could only happen in a dream—if three people were allowed to experience a common dream simultaneously.

I stood the “12 to 4” that trip; that is, my workday was midnight to 4 AM and Noon to 4 PM watching the engines whine and the boilers boil, with the pre-noon hours available for “overtime.”  Overtime was the routine except for Sundays, the only way any day of the week was distinguishable from any other.  Another routine was a 4 AM beer sitting on a canistered life raft with my feet on the rail looking at sea and sky and stars.  On clear, moonless nights, there was no horizon, and if the sea were calm, the reflections of individual stars on the surface made it seem as close to a deep space experience as I’ll ever know.  There was a bright moon this night however, and thus a distinct horizon and a faceted, sparkling sea surface.  The Mate peered over the bridge wing and beckoned me to come up.  He told me that in about twenty minutes there would be a partial eclipse of the moon if I cared to stay up.

Within the promised half hour a circular black disk began to move across the lower ¾ of the lunar surface.  When centered, it left an upper crescent showing and the local environment a significantly darker place. And the whistles began.  Similar to police whistles except they were a little higher in pitch and without the warble of that little ball rattling around.  The Mate, the AB (lookout) and I looked at each other, peeked over the bulwark onto the foredeck, and back along the boat deck to the fantail seeking an on-board source.  Then we looked out over the port bridge wing.  Porpoises!  Dozens of them, maybe more, rising out of the sea, some jumping, some just bobbing vertically, but all whistling—at the moon.  Within the next few minutes it was all over, full moonlight had returned and only the engine hum and hiss of the ship’s wake could be heard.  A few porpoises still raced along side occasionally arcing forward out of the water; doing normal porpoise stuff in silence.

When I think about how much I don’t know; about how infinitesimally small human understanding really is, I think about those porpoises.  I think about what they “knew” about the moon and what they thought they knew and whether they wanted to know more.  I think about whether they thought their actions made a difference in the outcome of events as we do.  It’s easy to think about these things when the horizon is a perfectly straight line, endless yet of finite length.

G: Are we dead?
R: No, we’re on a ship.
G: Maybe being dead is being on a ship.
R: Being dead is not being.  You can’t “not be” on a ship.
G: I’ve often not been on a ship.
R: What you have not been is, on a ship.

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