CONFESSIONS OF A PART-TIME TROLL

(From Magic Harbor by Don Berry)

 

 

 

 

Just at the point where my finances had crossed the line from hopeless to irrecoverable, I landed a gig as a part-time troll.

The job description for trolls hasn't changed from the beginning of the trade, whenever that was. It calls for a somewhat solitary, grouchy personage to live under a bridge and jump out and scare people from time to time. That seems straightforward enough, but like all specialized functions, it turned out to have unsuspected dimensions.

From the pictures I've seen, trolls usually work bridges in the rural countryside -- in my mind's eye I see rustic hand hewn timbers and wooden pegs, willows bending over a clear, swift stream, planked decking just wide enough for a pair of lovers to stroll across hand in hand.

But times change. My bridge, as it turned out, was not to be a nostalgic timbered span across a little stream. My bridge was on I-90, an eight lane Interstate highway that is a main commuting route east from Seattle. The long, curving concrete span s tower 80 feet over the water of Lake Washington. No strolling pairs of rustic lovers here, but a whish of eighteen wheelers, a clamor of Camaros, a chivaree of Chevrolets.

It was my oldest son David who hired me as a part-time troll. His construction company was building a boat launching ramp beneath the east end of the bridge where it leaves Mercer Island for the last quarter mile jump across the channel to the mainla nd. His 100' crane barge, loaded with tools and equipment, was anchored between the bridge pilings and highly vulnerable to vandalism, theft, and all the other random ills the big city is heir to. And the 4th of July holiday was coming up.

A troll was obviously called for, and I filled the bill exceedingly well. In addition to being solitary and grouchy, I lived on my own boat that could be anchored beside the crane barge as visible evidence there was a troll on 24 hour duty. On the m orning of July 3rd I headed out of the quiet waters of Eagle Harbor across Puget Sound, leaving a salt water island for another island in fresh water.

The Lake Washington Ship Canal cuts an eight mile channel directly through the center of Seattle, connecting the salt water of Puget Sound with freshwater Lake Washington.

Sailing through the Ship Canal takes you on an increasingly urban cruise thr ough the densely packed marine industry of the city, with the skyscrapers of downtown Seattle standing tall to the south. Hundreds of boats make this journey every day, ranging from huge barges and deep ocean fishing vessels down to tiny speedboats.

Traffic is dense. On this voyage to my troll post I had to squeeze over to the shore to avoid two gigantic Foss tugs maneuvering a long section of six-lane freeway down the canal. In a matter of two hours I had crossed over into a bustling, metropli tan world very different from my serene anchorage in Eagle Harbor.

In Lake Washington, I discovered I had unconsciously been harboring a completely false image in my mind. Only one of many false images I treasure, it is true, but this one was particularly dramatic. I had somehow expected that this inland lake would be more placid than the salt waters of the Sound.

It was a madhouse. On this sunny July afternoon the surface of the lake was like watching a beehive, with swarms of bees wildly dashing in every possible direction at top speed. There was a constant roar, whine, wheeze and zip of engines as powerboa ts skittered here and there on incomprehensible missions.

Most of this nautical bedlam was only confusing, but there were a few boats that went far beyond that; they were awe-inspiring. They were the offshore racers -- great fifty foot missiles with tiny open cockpits perched aft, thunderboats with names li ke Top Gun and Miss Behavin, designed for open ocean racing at speeds over 100 miles per hour. (I find it interesting that their speeds are most often referred to in MPH rather than knots -- shoreside values seem to prevail here.)

Though I lead a monastic life myself, there are certain areas in which I have a great admiration for sheer excess, and these stupendous machines are excessive in every respect. They are too rich, too big, too powerful, too loud, too fast, too dangero us. Like the unlimited hydroplanes that race on fresh water, these offshore racers probably consume more fuel in three minutes than I use in a year, and for no useful purpose whatever. Being an ecologically sincere troll I can't approve of that, of cour se.

But I can get off on it, and I do.

I think what moves me most is not the speed, but the sound. The rumbling growl, the ferocious snarl of thousands of wasted horsepower goes without saying -- easy to identify as Engine. But there is another sound, not made by all of them, that seems very mysterious to me. I call it the Boom Bubble.

Some of these offshore racers seem to trail behind them a great, smooth bubble of sound that is not a snarl at all, but a continuous, deep boom without beginning or end. I can't even relate it to engines -- it is more like an aura, an insubstantial s phere of the deepest bass a human can comprehend, and it occurs even when the boats are going slowly. If you could hear the resonance of the earth itself, it would sound something like this. And even when it is overwhelming, it is somehow comforting.

There is a severe price for all this internal combustion marine madness, and I started paying it within seconds of taking my troll post under the I-90 bridge, next to the crane barge. The surface of the water was more like the North Sea in winter tha n the placid image of a "lake" I had in mind.

My boat tossed and rolled continuously in the confused, choppy wakes and cross-wakes of all the powerboats that roared past. The channel here is only a few hundred yards wide, and every wake not only interacted with every other wake, but was reflecte d back from the shore until there was no pattern at all, and no way I could anchor to minimize the random violence of the water.

Had I been cruising, I would have immediately picked up my hook and run for another harbor, but my professional troll duties required me to be here, and stay here. This was to endure for thirteen days and nights. You may think living under a bridge with nothing to do but scare people is a cushy job, but I tell you different. We trolls have our own problems.

The rhythm of days began with dawn water skiers about 5:30 A.M. and gradually built to a confused climax late in the afternoon. The center of my troll world was the barge, where a 70 ton crane grumbled and roared, driving steel piles for the launchin g ramp. During the daylight hours I anchored 100 feet out from the barge, and when the construction day ended, came in to raft up in the shadow of the crane.

At the end of the day, when the construction crew left the site, a kind of eerie silence suddenly descended around the great crane barge; a mechanical brontosaurus settling into sleep with an almost perceptible sigh. The consciousness of action slipp ed away, and of awareness only the troll remained, solitary and still.

As the offshore racers had their Boom Bubble, the sleeping crane barge had a Bubble of Silence. There was plenty of physical sound, of course. Traffic on the bridge, the multi-toned grumbling, whining and shrieking of the powerboats streaming past i n the channel, but it was somehow distant -- in the Other Place.

At the barge itself there was an invisible barrier, as though in sleep it had quietly slipped into another dimension, slightly crossways to the normal ones. All around it is the bustle and hurly burly of big city life, the dashing back and forth, the frustrations of traffic, the ambitions and fulfillments, the waiting families and cold dinners, the exuberance of water skiers, the triumphs of the power hungry, the quarrels of the irritable, the defeats of the shy ones.

But the barge is silent. It exists within the World, but is not part of it. It waits.

And the troll waits. Enclosed within a bubble of silence beneath his bridge, the troll is unknown to the Others as they pass by on their frantic errands. He perceives it all, and identifies with none of it. The universe is cleanly, precisely divide d into what is Self, and what is Other. The distinction is known to trolls. The Self is perceived by knowing what is Not the Self.

So it must be when the baby first says "No" to the limitless universe, and begins to perceive itself as a separate entity. "No," says the two-year old. "I am not this. I am independent of this. I am self. No. No. No." It is by acts of refusal we define the limits of self.

Saying No to the North, and No to the South, and No to the East, and No to the West, the child gives birth to the ultimate separation of the world into Self and Other. And with this limitation begin both the pleasures of conscious experience, and the pain of separation from what is eternal; the exchange of the Self that is universal for the self that is unique.

That is the moment when the troll hides beneath his bridge, partly in the silence of some other dimension, partly in the noisy roar of this one.

The tumult of the waves captures our attention, but what the troll knows, he knows in silence.

 

 

 

end

 

 

Confessions of a Part-Time Troll
©1995 Don Berry