Tag: sailing
Thus spoke the Man of the Sea
The Secret Purpose–Seamarks continued
Milk of Madrepores
Here is another video of sailing and poetry from St.-John Perse. I misspelled Madrepores. They get really mad when you do that.
A Tale of Two Houses–a secret history of Port Madison
The rains have let up. I scan Port Madison’s northeast shore through binoculars to see the Farnham house, built above the old mill-site, where much of Bainbridge Island’s forests were milled in the mid-19th century. The house looks the same as when Judge John Farnham leaned on his hoe under his prize apple trees.
He first signed on the General Park Hill at the age of 12 and spent 3 years shipping cotton between South Carolina and Liverpool before trading in contraband silk between Shanghai and Hong Kong. He rounded the Horn in the rush of ’49 and headed north to Port Madison when loggers, ship builders and land speculators were rapidly displacing the indigenous Suquamish people. He commanded side-wheel steamers, worked as shipwright and, in an odd –if not downright ironic–turn of fortune, served as keeper of the Seattle Pest House.
This was when the Old Man House still stood; where creation was annually sung into being in the Winter Dances. It was the lofty, cedar temenos of the Suquamish tribe that was demolished by Albion’s brass-plated cannon of imperious might in 1870.
This is was the home of Princess Angeline.
After reading Jerusalem, I’ve come to see Blake’s Gothic, sweeping poetry entwined with the shadowy firs of Port Madison. A rummy wastrel turned Urizenic guardian of self-righteous law, Farnham became the very image of man’s fallen spiritual state, laboring eternally in the Satanic mills, separated from his Sophianic emanation and closed to the Divine Vision.
And I hear fair Angeline as the banished Jerusalem, still weeping over the bay for her lost and tender children.
Farnham’s end was tragic. He had begun exhibiting signs of odd behavior and was forcibly dismissed from office. He held out against the deputy sheriffs in the Port Madison courthouse (then the County seat) with a shot-gun for 3 days before being led away quietly–a man forsaken by his adamant God of Reason.
Ballasted with river rock, he boarded the Seattle ferry, planning to jump into the deep soundings off Elliot Bay. But the emergency crew fished him out and he died shortly after.
I honor John Farnham, respect his adventuresome spirit and outrageous character; whose salty yarn and prize apples are the true golden relics of another age.
Otter Weather
Rain hammers the deck as the wind roars over the high bank of the south shore. Like big, blue wings, the tarp on the derelict boat rafted alongside billows in the gusts and shoots spray high onto Old Hand’s wheelhouse windows. Windward is a sorry sight–the once proud Herreshoff racing sloop now lies rotting through the long Northwest winter rains. I used to pride myself on my tarpological creations, but now they are blown to blue tatters before the furious onslaught of the Pineapple Express.
A kingfisher chatters high over the rigging as the whole boathouse sways above Old Hand’s starboard rail. At times like this, I wonder if I should have used 10″ lag bolts to anchor the posts onto the dock. But it seems to be holding fine.
This is the weather the otter likes. One slithers onto the float and lies momentarily atop my inverted Livingston dinghy before again vanishing into the green depths of Port Madison. It’s good to see them 
again–my pals the otters–if I could only get them to use the cat box. But they scoff at such refinements, and prefer to poop all over the lines I’d so artfully coiled on the dock. Such is the life of those who toil at sea.
After all the work creating my art exhibit, I went through a depressed phase, exacerbated by a lingering cold. This down time usually accompanies the completion of a project. It’s just part of the process. It’s only natural that we feel emptied out after such an expenditure of energy, and the empty feeling, far from being bad, is just what I need. Rather than feeling washed up, it’s better to make friends with the emptiness and spaciousness in order to be filled again with the creative spirit.
So now I roll and split great oak rounds near the old Ed Monk workshop, repair Old Hand’s diesel heater and go over current tables–making long, Springtime passages over the Salish Sea of my imagination.
The Saga of Eagle Harbor
Here is a picture of me painting on the old houseboat, Wicca, in Eagle Harbor. Most of the liveaboards have been evicted since then. Here is a fine article about the destruction of this once vital community from the online sailing magazine, Three Sheets NW.
Old Hand’s Babyonian Voyage part 5 – The 9th Wave
“Hang on to yer hat, lad. Looks like we’re in for a dusting.” McWhirr pointed at the darkening horizon and commanded: “Ready to man the pumps.”
“Aye, Captain.”
I scrambled aft and pulled the aged, bronze pump from the lazarette before looking up to see the immense, glassy wall looming over the masthead like the adamant finale of doomsday.
Old Hand rose up the vertical wall to its breeze-feathered crest and launched skyward with a spray of rainbow light. It was as if she sought escape from her natural element, to take her place amid the constellations as guide to unborn mariners of this tropic-this weary globe where man has long toiled on the treacherous seas.
We landed in the trough with a bone-jarring crash as the wave broke with a deafening roar astern.
Old Hand yawed like a stunned boxer shaking off a vicious right hook and steadied up, ready to meet the next one. We mounted the second wave of the set and were again hurled down it’s backside, until I thought we might sound the very depths of the Mariana trench.
Each time McWhirr counted each wave until, after the 8th had thrown us rudely on our beam-ends, he said: “This is it, lad-the 9th wave. Say yer prayers, this may be the end of our pleasant, little cruise.”
The sight that met my eyes as I braced against the wheelhouse was enough to make Blackbeard blanch and Ahab drop to his knees and beg for mercy.
“No, it can’t be that big,” I said, upon seeing the wave’s awesome height. It’s aspect was all the more terrible for its calm refulgence-as gleaming and resolute as an executioner’s ax. The crystalline beauty of it seemed to mock all our puny efforts to survive.
Again, we faced the interminable ascent. As it jacked up over the reef, it turned a back-lit, emerald-green hue.
Good reader, we’ve all heard how time stands still, and the imagination falls prey to odd fancies in times of extreme terror. So it was with me. I thought I saw strange shapes in that massive beast of a sea-spectral figures who swam before my eyes and vanished again like mackerel flashing upon the wave’s face. One such apparition was dressed in a flowing white shirt and tight pants. He had the angelic look of one inspired by the muses and held, in his delicate hand, a goose-quill pen. His melodic words seemed to echo above the dismal keening of gulls that circled overhead:
…My spirit’s bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am born darkly, fearfully afar…
Poetry from Adonais by Percy Bysshe Shelly
Old Hand’s Babylonian Voyage-The Escape
Attention! Attention! Tsunami alert! Tsunami alert!
The speakers on the church walls crackled over the dismal howl of sirens.
Dust of crumbled masonry rose from the collapsed reliquary amid screams and prayers for deliverance. I ran into the streets and made for Old Hand. I leaped onto the dock as the engine roared to life above the frenzied tumult of the throng. McWhirr had just cast off the dock lines when a repulsive splog pirate wielding a cutlass grabbed my monkey jacket and said in a malodorous, rasping tone: “Are you sure you want to close your Babylon account?”
A blast from the ship’s deck sent him sprawling into the rank harbor. McWhirr threw aside his smoking musket and hauled me over the rail before jamming the ship full throttle and steaming for deep water. A glazzy spam-bot, with wires dangling from her stove-in side, gushed at McWhirr as we bore away from the pier-head: “Look! It’s Gregory Peck! I saw you on MeTube. Can I have your autograph?”
We headed for open sea just as a group of cyber-ruffians thundered onto the wharf with a volley of deprecatory oaths and small arms fire.
Once clear of musket range, I lifted my head above the rail to inhale the sea air. It lay calm and of a such a limpid sheen that I fell into tranquil revery. It felt as if all the fetid smog of Babylon were dispelled by the sweet Levantine zephyrs that wafted over the sun-dappled main like Mother Gaia’s beneficent caress. I silently offered a prayer for the gentle hand that had rocked the Adamic cradle of mankind. It was as if I quaffed from the verdant spring of the mystic Green One of Araby-that master of masterless souls who wander the globe’s Byzantine seaways seeking the vivifying elixir of immorality.
“Look sharp, Mister Spencer.”
McWhirr’s cautionary words roused me to behold the distant horizon demarcated by an edge of deep ultramarine blue that advanced steadily upon our gallant ship.
“We’re in for some fun and games now.”
Old Hand’s Babylonian Voyage-The Sermon
“Hey sailor, lookin’ for a good time?”
The voice hissed from the shadows. I turned to see a toothless hag in fish-net hose and leather thong clutching a length of chain in her skeletal hand.
“How ’bout I clap ye in virtual irons and tickle yer bum with me E-Lash?” she leered. “Just like the real thing.”
“Er, no thanks,” I said and quickened my pace.
As I walked through the lurid, labyrinthine back-alleys of cyberspace, I beheld woeful scenes of hunger and vice.
It was Sunday and, as a pious man, McWhirr had given me leave to knock about on my own; hoping, for the good of my soul, I might attend the sacred service to our lord.
I passed a low dive with a weathered sign that bore the name: Bucket of Spam. The carved, cedar chisel marks suggested its date of manufacture to be (roughly) early 21th century.
Below this it said: We have WI-fi.
I could see, through the fogged window, sleazy spam-bots lit by the eerie blue glow of duck-taped lap-tops inside. I went on.
At last, I arrived at the ancient stone church. An inscription on the facade said something about a guy named Swedenborg. Clear voices sounded through the ancient, stone walls:
“By the Rivers of Babylon…”
I pushed open the heavy oak door and found a pew. The congregation fell silent. A portly preacher in a plaid suit and brown toupee ascended the pulpit and solemnly spoke with the stentorian delivery of Orson Wells:
“And the lord spake unto Noah: I shall make it rain for 40 days and 40 nights.”
He looked up from the good book and continued in a confiding tone: “And here shipmates, we find already deeper truths than was ever sounded by our learned interpreters of holy texts-aye it comes from the lips of the almighty Himself. And what water are we speaking of here? Is it the water that flows from the reeking taps of the Babylonian waterworks?”
“No!” responded the pious congregation.
“Is it the water of sewers that carry Babylon’s foul waste into the vast oceans of the globe?”
At each interrogatory his voice grew urgent.
“Is it the rain that nourishes our genetically modified corn?”
“No Suh!” responded a dread-locked harpooneer.
“Is it the water which rose ever higher to make Babylon a busy, working port?”
“Make it plain!”
“No-o, it is another kind of rain of which I speak,” he warmed to his theme like a southern preacher:
“It is the flood of materialist greed which immerses ma-AN-kind in self-love and se-ELF-ish desires. He wishes ON-ly for con-firm-A-shun of his vile ways through sensory DAY-ta and the false gods of materialist SCI-ence. He EE-vun denies divine kn-OW-ledge and the possa-BIL-ity of an-GEL-ic per-CEP-SHUN.” He banged the pulpit with his meaty fist at each accented syllable. “This is the da-AY-luge that engulfs Babylon today: a flood of kn-OW-ledge that is comp-LETE-ly de-VOID of CHAR-IT-Y!”
The last words resonated with a low rumble that seemed to rise from beneath the worn flagstones of the church. The heavy arches over the altar swayed wildly and collapsed into dust with a thunderous roar. From somewhere in the distance came the mournful wail of sirens. A speaker sputtered and blared:
This is NOAA Weather Radio- Tsunami alert! Tsunami alert!
A View from the Wheelhouse 