"Everything Moves" (an excerpt)
The lagoon is dark. This afternoon, Captain Ken and I wrestled La Cuna out of a Pacific gale, into the sweet protection of this Baja Mexico bay. La Cuna means "the cradle" in Spanish and, until a moment ago, she had rocked us peacefully in one corner of a shallow watery maze that includes nurseries for gray whales.
We were drifting toward sleep when we heard the rising sound of a long-drawn shshshshsh-hiss, then thump-thump-thump—soft things hitting our hull. Something hit us! We jump up and scramble through the forehatch. We scan the night. Ken walks around the whole wide deck. We see nothing but La Cuna riding easily and twinkles of light in the fluid dark.
In the past on such nights, we have taken a five-gallon bucket and filled it with water. Often, the water in the bucket sparkles and the sides drip iridescent points of light. When we pour the water out, the stream glows with a milky galaxy of stars. Then the sea is black again but glimmering, like a moonless sky.
These night lights are called "bioluminescence" by scientists, which means "living light." Years ago, walking on wet sand, I saw in my footprints glowing blue dots. This was how I learned that microscopic plants and animals can shine when jostled. Sailing the Pacific from Oregon to Mexico, Ken and I found that bioluminescence is common in the ocean, anywhere organized light does not overpower it.
Offshore, we see tumbling white caps glow pure white, and the wake of a freighter shines brighter than its cabin lights. Once, in a small bay in California, the nearby town lost power as we rowed home late to La Cuna. Every time we dipped our oars, sparkling nebulae bloomed around them and swirled into black water. The wake pushed aside by our prow was so bright, we could read a magazine by the bio-light. Now we have sailed beyond cities into a realm of oil lamp villages and scattered Mexican research stations. We live in places where bioluminescence is routine—though never boring.
When we drop an extra anchor at night, a comet tail streams after it. Fish startle like silent fireworks. Once, dolphins charged into the anchorage, pumping their tails and spiraling water in tumbling tubes of light. For some time after they passed, the underwater eel grass continued to sway, stroking invisible plankton into twinkles.
Tonight, the anchor chain at La Cuna's bow rocks through a misty angle, turning a soft shaft of living dark into light. Wispy wind blows wavelets against the hull where they rebound as short arcs of pure white. Fish moving nearby are blurred torpedoes flickering at the surface, then gone.
Suddenly we hear the shshshshsh-hiss again. A long, uneven blue-white line rushes toward us from the beach, fastfast, crazy tumble of light closercloser, waterfall rogue wave, nothing we can do--thump thump! Some things small and soft slam against the hull. Four or five milky torpedoes rebound toward shore.
We look at one another in wonder and pick up the bucket. The water we dip into it does not sparkle—it glows. Blobs of light drip from the bucket and plop like oil paint into the midnight sea. We fling the water out—a sheet of white flame, glowing light molten, flies out, then gone.
We dip up bucket after bucket from the dark lagoon. We send sheets and ribbons and streamers in every direction. Our faces are radiant, lit by shining life flashing over the sea.
* * *
Several years before this extraordinary bioluminescence, I had stepped onto La Cuna unknowing. I was a college writing teacher and Captain Ken was my student—a mechanical engineer who worked weekends fixing up an old, steel-hulled yawl at a floating dock on the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon. He enrolled in my evening class, he said, so he could write about his adventures when he sailed single-handed around the world like the famous mariner, Joshua Slocum.
I was attracted by his lanky courage and, on a rainy hike after the class was finished, he said his sailing voyage didn't have to be solo. He asked if I'd like to join him on his first leg north to British Columbia, toward the green fjords and passing orcas of the Queen Charlotte Islands. I grew up in a Navy family, never living anywhere more than three years, and kept that habit. My teaching jobs were mostly part-time. I was ready for a nature adventure, so I said yes. My bones knew nothing of what it would mean to balance day and night on the skin of moving waters in the palm of all weathers—but I soon found out.
When I stepped aboard La Cuna, the cradle rocked. You know how Heraclitus wrote, "All is flux, nothing stays still"? On boats this is no metaphor. Water moves. I trained to sail on the river, a live, three-dimensional creature, sheltering otters and sunken snags. Air moves. I struggled with a 35-foot yawl which rose, exposed, above a surface where nothing softened shifting winds. My body strained against the fall of anchors, the pull of flapping sails, the cranky resistance of muddy rope. I discovered I had muscles that get sore all along each finger. Everything moved and was being moved. Literally, it was chaos.
Chaos is what scientists in the 1960s called their field when they decided to study complex change. Chaotic systems, they said, are non-linear (like the sea). They are collections of many forces with no central control (like weather). And they respond to feedback, adapting sensitively to changing conditions (like sand under waves). At a physical level, the universe accepts what comes, adapts, and moves on. I understood this abstraction, but I had never had to deal with its consequences on a daily basis.
I was a North American child of prediction and planning, protected by masses of construction that walled out constant change. I travelled roads to avoid inconvenient fluctuations. Bridges lifted me over troubled waters. But on La Cuna, aiming for some harbor, I had to hold her bellied sail on a moving edge between full and luffing while wind shifted and water slid. I had to adjust muddy ropes and flapping sails to accommodate changing conditions. Adaptively balancing rudder against current so that turbulence pushed us in the right direction became crucial, otherwise--oh, no! We ran aground. When I complained that turbulent powers were putting our lives and La Cuna at risk, Captain Ken got excited.
"That's the challenge of it!" he crowed. "Let's look at some ways to get out of this mud."
How had Ken made peace with constant change? I was used to planning carefully to avoid problems like this. I designed classes for a ten-week term, looked at five-day weather forecasts. Increasingly I doubted my ability to cope with a fluid world, yet I was raised to keep promises. I had signed on for some vague adventure. Would green harbors and flashing orcas be worth it?
Acknowledging my fear, Ken built as many layers of protection into the boat as we could afford. I packed as much food and medical supplies into jars and bags and buckets as La Cuna could hold. We quit our jobs, made our wills, and took La Cuna to the mouth of the Columbia. The river emptied us into the Pacific. . . .
"There is such a magnificent vagueness in the expectations that had driven each of us to sea," wrote mariner-novelist Joseph Conrad in Lord Jim, "such a glorious indefiniteness, . . . that are their own and only reward! What we get—well, we won't talk of that. . . . In no other kind of life is the illusion more wide of reality—in no other is the beginning all illusion—the disenchantment more swift—the subjugation more complete."
What Conrad means is that every first-time mariner prepares for sailing based on their experience. The reality is that no one raised on solid ground can imagine the infinite non-linearity of constantly moving seas, unpredictable storms and calm, the randomness of motor and wire, buoys and rocks. . . . Eventually, I had to accept that everything moves.
* * *
Excerpt from "Everything Moves," an essay published in
Catamaran Literary Reader, issue 30, Fall 2020
Look for more in the forthcoming memoir Sailing Between Sea and Sky:
What I Learned from the Ocean about Life on Earth by Phyllis L. Thompson
Photo Pollen River © Phyllis L. Thompson
Catamaran Literary Reader, issue 30, Fall 2020
Look for more in the forthcoming memoir Sailing Between Sea and Sky:
What I Learned from the Ocean about Life on Earth by Phyllis L. Thompson
Photo Pollen River © Phyllis L. Thompson