THE LOSS OF PARADISE

(From Magic Harbor by Don Berry)

 

 

 

 

It was another typical day in Paradise. The temperature had dropped 20 degrees from the day before. The weather had been spring-like for a week, and suddenly turned winter-hard again. A steady, implacable rain began before dawn and continued all da y.

Though this is Puget Sound's acknowledged image for this time of year, it is actually somewhat unusual. Even when it's raining, the pattern is usually a couple of hours of rain, a couple of hours of nothing much, then rain again. A day when it rains so steadily there's not even a break to go ashore is rare.

We were having a celebratory dinner on OBLIO that night, in honor of Dave and Anka of TERRAPIN. I'd gotten some pork steaks the day before, and Dale of OBLIO marinated them in his own special mix for a day. Because of the unusual steadiness of the r ain, nobody went ashore for last minute supplies.

So we were short on back-up wine, and everybody was soaking wet when we straggled aboard OBLIO about 6:00. (Actually, Dale did have a bottle of back-up wine, and made the mistake of asking Anka to give her opinion of it. She said it tasted sort of l ike greasy milk. I equated that with having no back-up wine, and was not interested in confirming her judgment.)

The party had originally been intended to be larger, because the occasion was important. However, Anka has a limited tolerance for too many people and too much noise. Last Thanksgiving she and Dave had to leave Rod's dinner aboard OPTION when things got a little too frenetic in the small cabin. So this particular pa rty was a quiet dinner for the four of us.

There were two occasions for celebration. Dave and Anka made the last payment on TERRAPIN, and Dave quit the job he'd held at the pizza place in Seattle for the last ten months. The two events were, of course, connected.

What both of them are hoping for now is to get an occasional day job cleaning out a blackberry patch or digging somebody's garden, or doing odd jobs of any available kind. Nothing too regular, of course. The main criterion is that it be a job with a discernible beginning, middle, and end.

Anka is a young, very pretty German girl with Slavic features and a smile that lights up the harbor when she paddles past in the morning, taking her new puppy Scuppers to the shore for a romp on land. She is shy and happy, and TERRAPIN is her first b oat. I learned last night that her nickname as a teenager in Germany was Tiger Anna, for her energy and stamina. Good stuff for a water rat.

Dave is quiet, dark bearded, with wire-frame glasses and something of the air of a Talmudic scholar. I think the stint in the pizza place was hard for him, though he hasn't ever said so. It's a tough commute every day from this island over to the ma inland, adding around three hours to your workday. But the pay in the pizza joint was better than he could find on the island, and they wanted to get TERRAPIN paid off as soon as possible.

I don't know exactly what Dave did before coming into the harbor with TERRAPIN. He's from Southeast Alaska, and was involved in high tech in some capacity. I know at one time he wrote communications network software for Vax computers, working for Di gital Equipment Corporation.

Later he taught a University of Alaska course in Artificial Intelligence, which was conducted Alaska-wide by computer network, using his own communications software. The course was not technical, but on the philosophical underpinnings of the theory o f Artificial Intelligence. We spent part of the evening discussing Marvin Minsky's theories of operator groups and the insights of Hofstadter in Godel, Escher, Bach, which Dave had used as a text in his course.

Working in a pizza joint doesn't seem a completely logical progression from Dave's past, but most water rats have not arrived in their present lifestyle by logical progression.

Dale of OBLIO is another example. His present paying job is nominal. Four hours a week he cleans the kitchen of a local restaurant. He frets under the regularity of it, though he has already told them he's quitting in June or thereabouts to work on his boat. There's still a lot of work to do. Dale has built the scow-schooner OBLIO by hand over the past two years, spiking every timber and plank with a six-pound hammer, shaping every piece of wood with handtools, using no power at all.

In his previous life Dale was a field engineer for NASA, specializing in electronics and communication. From his post (also in Alaska) he managed a satellite tracking station. About the only remnant of his high tech life is a short wave radio high on a shelf in OBLIO's cabin.

It is certainly possible to look at these two men, highly intelligent, highly educated, and wonder at the stubborn perversity that seems to be the core of the water rat life.

From the viewpoint of mainstream values, it is perverse. Where the landbound would celebrate getting a good job, the water rats celebrate losing one.

And it is probably inconceivable to one with normal American values that the big event of the day is taking a puppy for a walk on the beach.

And yet, of all the weirdly various groups I have known and lived with over six decades, ranging from the Maoris of New Zealand to the proud remnants of European aristocracy in Vienna, the water rats have one extraordinary attitude in common. They ac cept as normal that they are living in Paradise.

It reminds me of a conversation I had twenty years ago with Joshu Sasaki Roshi, a Zen master of the Rinzai sect.

Roshi said to me, "Berry, I don't understand Christianity. Adam and Eve lose Paradise."

"Yes," I said.

"Why?" he said, genuinely puzzled. "Zen student never lose Paradise."

I had no answer, (but that is not an unusual condition in conversations with Zen masters.) The exchange remained with me over the years, because the idea of Paradise and the loss of Paradise is not a fashionable one in my century, and it rather glanc es off my rational mind.

In the Western world we assume either that there is no Paradise, or, alternatively, that there is a Paradise and we are not there. Most people are working diligently to progress from the state of non-Paradise to the state of Paradise, which is, by co mmon agreement, never to be achieved.

The three great motivators we have invented in this intentionally endless quest for Paradise are guilt, greed and ambition. On the surface these driving passions appear different, but they are, at root, the same principle; Your Life is Unsatisfactory and You Are Unsatisfactory. You are not doing what you should do, you do not have what you should have, and you have not accomplished what you should accomplish.

Whatever your efforts may be, they are inadequate, because by definition you have not achieved Paradise.

In a culture whose fundamental premise is that Paradise is permanently lost, the most subversive, dangerous, and revolutionary of all principles lies in the simple statement, "I have everything I need."

When we define Paradise as that place where we are not, we dedicate ourselves to lives of perpetual scurrying. We catch a glimpse of Paradise, like a beautiful woman just turning the next corner, and we scurry to catch up, only to find she is just tu rning the next corner, always some unbridgeable distance ahead of our best speed. Only a few dollars more, we think, a few more possessions, a little more Achievement...

And since we never overtake that elusive beauty, we eventually decide that scurrying is somehow good for its own sake, that the goal of all this scurrying is more scurrying. It is The Right Thing to Do, and those who do not scurry are derelict in the ir pursuit of Paradise.

Therein lies the true perversity of the water rats. Mostly, they refuse to scurry, because they think they are already where they ought to be. They have what they ought to have. They are what they ought to be. In the midst of the storm they congra tulate each other on choosing this life, on the beauty of the moon and the water, on the foolishness of puppies.

They live as though they possessed the most secret knowledge of all. They have everything they need. Nothing has been lost.

 

At the celebratory dinner for Dave and Anka of TERRAPIN, I brought up a sailor's rhyme I had just heard

Wind before rain

Sun soon again

Rain before wind

Reef your small sails in.

No one else had ever heard of it, so I resolved to keep track and see if it held good in our waters. We had just had 24 hours of rain with no wind and the barometer was very low. A good test. If the rhyme proved true, we were in for a hell of a win d.

About an hour before dawn the next morning it hit. One sudden gust of 35 knots overturned the little cat shelter on my aft deck, spewing cat litter and shit all over the deck, blowing the molded plastic canopy off into the harbor. I was wakened by t he noise, and saw the canopy silhouetted against the reflection of shore lights, blowing downwind as fast as it could go.

I grabbed my skiff, almost full of water after the night rain, and set off after the canopy in just sweatpants and a shirt, with the rain slashing down in a frigid 25 knot wind. In seconds I was soaked and my hands felt frozen to the oars.

I managed to catch the canopy blowing downwind without any trouble, but when I turned to row back to the boat against the wind, it was a beastly struggle. I cursed the wind, the rain, the cold, the cat, myself, and everything else I could put a bad w ord on.

But, hey. Whoever said the wind would not blow in Paradise, or that there would be no cursing?

 

 

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The Loss of Paradise
©1995 Don Berry '