Seeking, Sought

Navarro Beach:

February 15, 2016

Navarro Beach & Rivermouth

Checking out a future paddling and fishing spot.

Captain's Log

Feeling Like The Captain:

I've felt like Captain Jack Sparrow for days now, having spent enough hours on the water last Thursday and Friday -- those bright, surgy days -- to absorb those rhythms and motions! I love that feeling.

By feeling like Captain Jack, I mean feeling wobbly and tilty and one with the sea.  He had the Black Pearl, and I have Sofia

 Log Jam:  While kayaking last Thursday, I was startled by a shape in the water, by a long brown shape, that I took to be a mature sea lion that I was suddenly much too close to.  Not a harbor seal, for the shape was too too long and broad, but a sea lion, and at close quarters, a full-grown sea lion could do plenty of defensive damage.  That brown shape was just a log, however, a carved-off tree-portion about six or seven feet long drifting in the cove.

Now, having been surprised by that log, that shape, I back-paddled furiously and avoided any collision.  Which would have been the right action, particularly if it had been a marine mammal.  Still, I am struck by how much my startled response came before any rational sense of "Hey, that might be a sea lion, so avoid hitting the creature"; and, from reading and teaching Laurence Gonzales' Deep Survival, I am well aware of the dynamics of amygdala trumping hippocampus, of emotional reaction before rational decision, but still I would like to have not been so afraid of a shape.  Haven't I trained for these situations?  Haven't I paddled and visualized enough to respond more thoughtfully?  Or, at least less fearfully?  Was this a failure of grace?   Or should I appreciate how much my core self, the body/emotional self, worked to take me out of (perceived) danger?

Running Aground Off Withaven Cove

Or, Time-Travel: 1988. Can you call it juvenilia, if you wrote it at age 21 or 22? Here's a poem I rediscovered while rummaging through old boxes in storage; I was supposed to be culling the past, and here I am, not or not yet. Listen: I'm not sure what I was trying to get at then, and there are phrases that make me cringe now, but I like how it all sounds, like the rhythms and the singing (yes, singing) still.

Besides having read my Melville, Stevenson, Coleridge, London, and such, I must have been reading John Gardner's The King's Indian at the time. (Also, "grim" sure shows up a lot; why? Was that my stab at "serious"?)

A slightly different version was published in Byzantium: Vol. III, by the Associated Students of UC Berkeley back in 1988. I'd written it a bit before that. I'm not claiming any merits beyond modeling exuberance by posting "Sea Doggerel" here.

SEA DOGGEREL

The hard deck heaves; the sea flames white.

The troubled crests shudder against the night

As the sky tumbles into the surge.

Melville stalks tavern planks, turning

A page--as the sea-swells do--and stark Ahab

Turns to in his mind. He drinks the mild Mermaid wine

And sets his words in stalwart verse, carefully

Weighed as an Emperor's gaze, falling far

Fathoms deep. (Through crusted hulls, clear songs breach,

The black and white leviathans of the deep.)

The untiring winds hurl us on. The old ropes snap

And flap and straight-a-way crack. The storm is strong.

"Land ho, ahoy!" a salt-washed sailor cries,

The clerk in tar-cloth, narrowing his eyes

At these winded shores of Withaven Cove.

The ship lists, to port, as his mind does rove

Where he hangs aloft ere Nowhere's icy rim,

Dangling fast from the mind's mainmast limb.

Aye, this shallow ship is shot, it leaks,

The broad beams split, and bald rats starving

Pace the hold, planking painted

With grim phosphorous--that stinking ship glow.

The salted clerk--no whaler, no mariner he--

Fears the great white birds that fail to flee.

Fall waters gnaw the windy shores. Siren

Songs call and the Christian seaman

Moans and rings the old church bell.

Ding-dong, dong-dirge, the cold

Swell's surge and the drowned man's bones

Shake and swell to fill the tones.

Words, grim words, are a seaman's lot,

The rotten grog that the Devil's wrought.

When the storm's aloft, it's grim advice

That whaler's bones be but hump-backed dice.

Mnemonic Devices: What Eliot Said About Fragments

What are those lines from "The Wasteland" so dear to the heart of every English major? Something like "with these fragments I have shored up my ruins"?

Quoting from memory: a sin and a pleasure.

Driftwood: wood, water, salt; shaped by oceanic forces, marine creatures, and time; collected at either Monastery Beach, Carmel, or Goat Head Beach, Jenner. Octopus: sculpture mix, glazed with transparent brown and celadon; salvaged.