A Hole in the Ice

Our vessel gives a particularly powerful showing this month as she makes visible her termini. A beginning to part the seas and an end to slip past them, leaving that perennial ephemera that we have termed wake which brings to mind Maria Rilke’s fourth sonnet in his Sonnets to Orpheus-

Oh you tender ones step now and then into the breath that takes no heed of you; let it part as it touches your cheek, it will quiver behind you, united again.

The Stem and the Stern Post. Beginning and end. Entrance and exit through space- unless motoring in reverse that is, which, as an act does not lend itself well to poetry- perhaps giving us insight into why poetry is so unpopular for us moderns.

All musings aside, we raised our proud, now 1 year old stem with our telescopic forklift while teetering on a 1 1/2” rebar axis- a technique borrowed from the success stories of the mid 16th century replica vessel San Salvador completed in 2015 with the laboring hands of Dove shipwright Frank Townsend. For such a momentous occasion, the operation was relatively simple and the fit required little additional adjustment.

The stem knee which sits atop the stem marrying it to its keelson and gripes took quite the reversal as the fit was laborious and the final installation nearly negligible to the layman’s eye toward visual progress, a fitting analogy for the bulk of the maritime trades. In viewing shipbuilding related blogs, instagram accounts, and youtube channels, deception reins as the glamorous is exulted and over emphasized no matter how momentary an occasion, while the sometimes monotonous and often tedious work that dominates the boat builders experience is more than frequently ignored by our culture of visual story telling as social media “content” or egoic reinforcement. Richard Henry Dana Jr knew this well and expressed it like this in his Two Years Before the Mast-

“The beautiful is linked with the revolting, the sublime with the commonplace, and the solemn with the ludicrous.”

All of this being said, we often remember and admire the massive, the impressive- the end result, while we allow process to peter and fall from our memory. This kind of optimistic selective processing of time may explain our industriousness or our civilizations success stories, which have just recently begun to be viewed cynically through cracked rose colored glasses.

Among the many success stories of Western civilization we find the story of the Ark and the Dove, one that I believe requires close examination and nuance in addressing as no colonial story should be read simplistically or through an easy narrative of good vs evil especially one considering religious freedom, that is, freedom of vantage. Books will continue to be written on the complexity of European colonization, the simultaneous creation and disruption of America, and the various revolutionary urges of sea faring and settlement- but for now let us mediate upon the Beginning and the Ending. That which parts and that which leaves a wake:

To part, that is, to separate and divide, but also drawing from the Latin partire, to share and distribute that which has been parted. Our stem, the bow of the vessel parting the seas of the Atlantic, the Chesapeake, parting the ways of colonial England and of America. To divide and distribute nature, culture, money, ideas, gods, treasures, plunders, dreams.

To leave a wake, to succeed, to follow, suggesting a coping with a disruption of some kind. Wake from the Old Norse vǫk- to leave a hole in the ice. What a foreboding image, a hole in the ice. Something which suggest stability and predictability, now revealed as fragile and threatening to collapse. To leave a path with such an effect demands coping through techniques of culture, religion, and civilization.

The success and merit of such attempts at coping may be judged by the moral philosophers, but with an interest in materialism, I’ve focused my lens around descriptive language. The parting, the wake.

To step into a kind of cosmic philosophical immunity or safeguard, we think of the sea and the seemingly ephemeral wake left by a teetering wooden speck upon an endless blue blanket recalling the devastating wake of one of my favorite thinkers who mused-

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history"—yet only a minute

Till next time

SH