These posts make more sense when read in order.
Please click here for the first article in this series.
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| The fish cleaning expert is on duty. William B. Folsom/NOAA. |
There is a sense of freedom when you’re out on the ocean and you can go in any direction on the compass. Ships are tiny floating islands that you sail on to your destination. While the sky and ocean are constantly changing, you come not to notice it until something attracts your attention—a storm arises or a whale surfaces. Most of the real action is taking place below the surface where you can’t see it.
The poet Langston Hughes expressed this in “Long Trip”, written when he was in his twenties working as a sailor.
The sea is a wilderness of waves,
A desert of water.
We dip and dive,
Rise and roll,
Hide and are hidden
On the sea.
Day, night,
Night, day,
The sea is a desert of waves,
A wilderness of water.
Still, there is that anticipation of exotic destinations. The men and women who work on the ships come to feel like the ship is their home, or a second home, yet they are voyagers and travelers to distant shores. Or they just travel the ocean harvesting fish, crabs, or other creatures of the sea.
While I do like being on ships, I much prefer being in harbors—particularly small ones. I find it calming to be around the docked boats. And I like the seafood restaurants. But mainly I seem to faintly recall harbors from long-forgotten childhood memories or dreams, almost as if they’re from a previous lifetime. They make me feel at home in harbors.
Here there’s the subdued presence of the sea and also an underlying sense of mystery and otherworldliness, especially during twilight when the lights come on and most of the workers are gone. The boats gently rock back and forth in time with the creaking and groaning of the wharf, while stars begin to shine and in the distance you hear the cry of a lone seabird, the ring of a bell, or the crash of the waves.
Philosophical writer Alan Watts lived part-time on a houseboat in Sausalito, just north of San Francisco. In Cloud Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown he tried to express its charm.
In some ways this is a rather messy waterfront, not just piers and boats, but junkyards, industrial buildings, and all the inevitable “litterature” of our culture. But somehow the land-and-seascape absorbs and pacifies the mess. Sheds and shacks thrown together out of old timbers and plywood, heaps of disused lumber, rusted machinery, and rotting hulls—all of this is transformed in the beneficent presence of the sea.
Perhaps it is the quality of the light, especially early in the morning and towards evening, when the distinction between sky and water becomes uncertain, when the whole of space becomes opalescent in a sort of pearly luminous grey, and when the rising or setting moon is straw yellow. In this light all the rambling mess of sheds and junkyards is magical, blessed with the patterns of masts and ropes and boats at anchor. It all puts me in mind of landfalls a long way off, and all the voyages one has dreamed of.
Large and small harbors have very different feels to them. In large harbors the great ships arrive from their long and distant journeys bringing with them cargo from other harbors scattered all over the globe. The fishing fleets come together with the merchant ships at the end of their separate voyages to unload their cargoes. Coming home, only to soon disburse again. The tugs, ferries, and pleasure craft also mingle here. With their breakwaters, wharves, docks, and jetties, they’re primarily designed to protect ships. When harbors aren’t available, ships are anchored in roadsteads just offshore.
To sailors like Joseph Conrad, ships represent freedom. Conrad worked as a sailor and eventually first mate for twenty years before he became famous with his novella, the Heart of Darkness. In The Mirror of the Sea, he wrote:
The view of ships lying moored in some of the older docks of London has always suggested to my mind the image of a flock of swans kept in the flooded backyard of grim tenement houses. The flatness of the walls surrounding the dark pool on which they float brings out wonderfully the flowing grace of the lines on which a ship’s hull is built.
The lightness of these forms, devised to meet the winds and the seas, makes, by contrast with the great piles of bricks, the chains and cables of their moorings appear very necessary, as if nothing less could prevent them from soaring upwards and over the roofs. The least puff of wind stealing round the corners of the dock buildings stirs these captives fettered to rigid shores. It is as if the soul of a ship were impatient of confinement.
Those masted hulls, relieved of their cargo, become restless at the slightest hint of the wind’s freedom. However tightly moored, they range a little at their berths, swaying imperceptibly the spire-like assemblages of cordage and spars. You can detect their impatience by watching the sway of the mastheads against the motionless, the soulless gravity of mortar and stones. As you pass alongside each hopeless prisoner chained to the quay, the slight grinding noise of the wooden fenders makes a sound of angry muttering.[...]
A ship anchored in an open roadstead, with cargo-lighters alongside and her own tackle swinging the burden over the rail, is accomplishing in freedom a function of her life. There is no restraint; there is space: clear water around her, and a clear sky above her mastheads, with a landscape of green hills and charming bays opening around her anchorage.
* * *
A departure, the last professional sight of land, is always good, or at least good enough. For, even if the weather be thick, it does not matter much to a ship having all the open sea before her bows.
A landfall may be good or bad. You encompass the earth with one particular spot of it in your eye. In all the devious tracings the course of a sailing-ship leaves upon the white paper of a chart she is always aiming for that one little spot—maybe a small island in the ocean, a single headland upon the long coast of a continent, a lighthouse on a bluff, or simply the peaked form of a mountain like an ant-heap afloat upon the waters. But if you have sighted it on the expected bearing, then that landfall is good. Fogs, snowstorms, gales thick with clouds and rain—those are the enemies of good landfalls.
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| The captain, roped to his wheel. N.C. Wyeth. |
Click here for the next article in this series:
A lonely light in the darkness
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