FALLING IN

(From MAGIC HARBOR by Don Berry)

 

 

 

I've been thinking recently about falling overboard. If you live on the water, you're going to fall in the water from time to time. That's obvious. It is not an unusual event, but it has a particular dynamic, a scheme, a pattern, that has somehow e scaped the notice of philosophers. An inner meaning, so to speak, that is most often obscured in the splashing and shouting and general hooraw that accompanies falling in the water with your clothes on.

Myself, I've been pretty lucky, lately. I've only fallen in once in the last couple of years. And that wasn't even off my own boat, but off the barge where Phil lives and moors the little tug FAVORITE.

Just after dawn one morning, I was going out with FAVORITE as tourist/deck crew on a salvage call. Not an emergency, but a collison-damaged boat on the other side of the island that Phil was going to tow back into Eagle Harbor for repair.

The fog was so dense I almost bumped into Phil's barge before I could stop my dinghy, and you couldn't even see FAVORITE's wheelhouse from the kitchen window; a distance of no more than four feet.

When the fog settles on Puget Sound, the effect is a like a floating sensory deprivation tank, but one that extends into infinity. In these fogs, infinity seems to equal about an inch and a half, which is, in itself, an interesting twist to put your mind through.

For some reason I decided I wanted to travel through the fog that morning without any orientation at all. I didn't want to see the compass, the radar, the depth sounder, a chart or any other instrument that would give me some bearing on where I was, or what direction I was going. I don't remember why I thought that was a good idea.

So I took a cold and damp position huddled up on FAVORITE's foredeck on a coil of line. We set off down the narrow, dogleg channel that leads into Eagle Harbor, with Phil navigating by radar from the wheelhouse at my back.

While we were still in the comparatively small confines of Eagle Harbor, I could, I thought, sense where we were from familiarity. But once we had left buoy #3, and then #1, to starboard, I began to lose even that illusion of place. By the time we e merged into Puget Sound proper, all sense of direction or position or perspective had disappeared completely.

The water was almost dead calm, and FAVORITE nosed along at an even seven knots as though floating six inches above the water. Beneath my back the deck vibrated with a steady, hypnotic thrum from the 6-71 diesel in the engine room. From time to time I could hear the distant, lugubrious moan of foghorns on the Sound. There were half a dozen different vessels within hearing, each sounding its unique note in a lonely, mournful symphony.

Foghorns sound to me, as to most children, like invisible monsters calling out to each other. I always feel an odd emotional flavor on hearing them, a poignant sweet-and-sour of apprehension and sympathy. Apprehension for their invisible danger, sym pathy for their plaintive willingness to be heard, to reveal themselves.

And it is somehow clear they never hear each other at all. They are destined by their own condition to remain alone and unseen and unbeloved. Endlessly they call out across the gray world of invisibles, reaching out in their solitude for others of t heir kind, unable to utter any other message than the low moan of a breaking heart.

These somewhat bizarre images of invisible monsters were only a part of an increasingly disorganized movie that began to unroll across my mind's eye as I stared into the featureless void of fog. As FAVORITE moved south in the shipping channels, imag es rose and fell almost of their own volition, mostly based on sound.

In the fog whiteout it became impossible for me to tell whether my eyes were focussed in the near distance or the far. And, almost alarmingly, the formless, colorless world of white-on-white soon begins to dissolve into shifting rainbows.

I could not tell where these rainbow veils were. Did they have some kind of exterior existence? Were they the refraction of light from water droplets in the fog? Or were they something that was happening only in my mind? And, in the end, is there any real difference between physical existence and something that is happening only in my mind?

I concentrate. I look at the shifting rainbows as closely as I can, and there is no way to tell. There is no perceptible difference between an outside world and an inner one. I can't tell which one I'm looking at.

There is clearly a terrific metaphysical truth to be mined here, but for my own part, I am more confused than enlightened. Perhaps I have had the opportunity to become an accidental yogi, but blew it. Again.

However, the fog has not finished providing me with fantasies. Now it confronts me with an always popular moral dilemma, that of Resisting Temptation.

Now, I confess that I have always imaged Temptation in a highly sexist and politically incorrect fashion. I make no apologies for this. It was the way of my generation, and a damned pleasant way it was, too. It gives you images you can treasure, an d if you can't even treasure your own Temptations -- what good is it all?

In this case, however, my Temptation did not assume the form of sorceress nor seductress nor temptress, nor even Warrior Queen from Andromeda. It was the damned radar. I really wanted to go back in the wheelhouse and look at the radar. I just plain wanted to know where I was.

At the same time, I didn't want to know where I was. I had intentionally set out to not know where I was, and was doing good at it. The back and forth argument that ensued in the increasing vacuous space of my mind is obvious. Classic Temptation an d Resistance-to-Temptation.

In the end I never did look at the radar. I continued to face the fog on the foredeck, getting increasingly disoriented, all the way back around the island to Eagle Harbor. The whole voyage took about four hours, and I don't think my eyes have ever been open so long with so little coming in them.

By the time we got back to Phil's barge, I had completely succeeded in my project. I didn't have a clue where I was. Even when I actually knew where I was, I didn't know where I was. Everything was familiar enough, but didn't seem to be any more su bstantial than the images in the fog.

We tied FAVORITE off and Phil cooked up some fresh shellfish for lunch and when we finished lunch I walked out onto deck, headed vaguely for my dinghy and walked straight off the edge of the barge into the water. The swirling tendrils of fog that had taken over my mind disappeared instantaneously. All of a sudden, I knew exactly where I was.

Phil came out of the barge-house, looked over the edge at me, and said, "You're in the water."

Yeah, I knew where I was, all right. Sometimes it comes on you very quick. Falling in the water is kind of like waking up, but wetter.

The moral of this story is simple, but elegant: Falling in the water usually has something to do with a dinghy. It's the transitions that get you. Every time.

 

 

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Falling In
©1995 Don Berry