After the freeze

After the freeze, a thaw. Rain. Fog. Gusts of wind rattle the frost-bitten branches, toss chunks of ice to the ground. We crush them underfoot. And now another freeze, a breath-stopping chill that icicles your eyelashes. This is the way we will face the new year: swaddled in layers, our cheeks stinging with cold, breath turning to frost as soon as it strikes our scarves.

Last night I dream that everything in my office is burning; there is nothing we can do but get out before the roof collapses. All of my papers, my notebooks, the photos and the books are consumed by flames. In my dream, my only regret concerns the notebooks from last summer, from the trip to Alaska; I've not managed to make anything from them yet. I reach for them, and they whirl apart into cinders. We race from the building, dodge falling beams, and finally stand outside looking up into the night sky. Flames shoot through the roof; we are deafened by the blazing fire.

Suppose indeed, nothing were to be left?
Nothing? What of your memory?

Okay, nothing but my memory.
And the possibilities of imagination.

Yes, that too.
What then?

We'd start over again then, I guess.
Or tell new stories.

Yes.
And what if you were to begin anyway now?

Even without a conflagration?
Yes, even without a conflagration.

I don't know if I could.
You mean you don't know if you could want to.

Yes.
What is old is new again.

The Names of Boats

Westerly Zealot
Reality Symphony

The names of boats are little windows on history, place and contemporary passions. If you cannot guess the character of a boat owner from a boat's name, you may nevertheless gain insight into the kind of community that person inhabits, or the values that matter to them.

Big expensive power boats licensed in the US or Canada tend to have expansive concept names derived from business or some sort of neoliberal ideology: Enterprise, Imagination, Liberty, Emancipation, Free Spirit, Freedom.

Fishing boats are traditionally named after owners' family members--often daughters, sisters and/or mothers (Helene II, Ruby M, Claire Susan, Mary Louise,) although not always--in Alaska they seem often to bear mens' names or place names: West Foreland, Baranoff IV,  Frederick John IV.

Smaller trawlers or sailboat boats may be named, in great seriousness or jest, after songs, poetic or visual lines, animals, place names, or fanciful literary creatures in English or other languages: Moon Dance, Wave Dancer, Breaker's Edge, Salish Sea, Grey Fox, Tula Girl, Blue Pteron, Quoddy's Run, Right Galah, Sacred Goat, Keshkan. Dinghies also have names, which are often small jokes: Minnow, Roo, or Longstory [short] for your shortest boat.

Sometimes a boat name is a statement or a philosophical or activist claim: Our Turn Now, Adventure Now, Sea Shepherd.

Large commercial vessels, ferries, military vessels and Coast Guard ships all have their own naming rules and customs--often after famous places (Lituya) or famous men, or both. 

In British Columbia, many of the ferries on regular inter-island runs are named by combining a place (Port Alberni) with the designation Queen or Princess, depending upon the size of the vessel (Queens are larger than Princesses, and Celebrations are larger still.)

Cruise ships follow similarly precious naming designations--for example, this summer in Alaska we saw the Norwegian Diamond, the Norwegian Pearl, and the Norwegian Jewel, as well as a host of variously bedecked Princesses and Celebrities and Stars.

Sometimes the names of boats docked in a particular place seem to me to form a poem. In fact, years ago, when we had sailed into Puerto Vallarta, Marike started this game by making up silly chants from the names of the larger vessels moored at the marina: Rainmaker Superstar Fearless Great Escape Ruthless Attitude Adjustment Rocket.

Here is one such "found poem," composed from the names of tenders and seiners on the #1 North Dock in Petersburg, Alaska, on the 26th of July, 2013:

Obsession
Adventure
Westerly
Zealot
Reality
Symphony
Saint Janet

The nature of the poem shifts, depending up what sort of punctuation you put where--"Obsession! Adventure! Westerly Zealot" is not the same as "Obsession Adventure Westerly Zealot."  And Reality shifts entirely if it is grouped with Zealot, rather than Saint Janet.

Go down to the docks if you can, and build your own poem. If you do, please share it with me!

Notes
Pictures were all taken during the summer of 2013 in Alaska and British Columbia in Wrangell, Ketchikan,  Van Anda (Texada), Meyer's Chuck, and St. Petersburg. The last photo is of Quoddy's Run, whole, at dock in Petersburg.

A loon, a wolf, the loneliest sound

Why does the cry of a loon affect us so? Why does a wolf's howl, even while it raises hairs on the back of your neck, curl into your heart, slide into your bones and organs and resonate, as if an extension of your own loneliest wail?  Do such cries seem metaphors for our sense of aloneness because we tend to hear them, if we do, in isolated wilderness locations--a cold wind blowing across the water, no one else in sight? Or is there some other reason for the way these calls seem to vibrate in your chest and threaten to carry you away?

This summer, while sailing in Alaska, I began to read a thoughtful, beautiful book entitled The Pine Island Paradox, having met its author, environmental philosopher, Kathleen Dean Moore, in the bathhouse at Tenakee Springs, on Chichagof Island.  Two weeks earlier, I had been listening to and attempting to record the sounds of wolves howling back and forth across a great distance, so I was struck to find Dean Moore had a musical name for the particular haunting quality of a wolf's cry. She writes:

"I [know] the song the wolf [sings]. The first two tones [make] an augmented fourth, a dissonant interval, like the first two notes of 'Maria' in Westside Story. It's an interval of yearning, of hope--the sound of human longing."

Dean Moore writes about going to consult with a colleague who was a musician, a concert pianist. As they are speaking about this sound, her colleague makes a gesture: "both hands together in front of her body, palms skyward, fingers spread, [lifting] the air...'This is a sound that floods the soul,' she said."

Dean Moore recounts something else that her pianist colleague has told her, that in medieval Europe Christians did not sing the augmented fourth. It was considered the "diabolus in musica, the devil's chord--so powerful it could grab a parishioner, drag him to his knees and pull him, scraping on the paving stones, straight to hell."

A wolf's cry feels like this, and so does a loon's. Not the devil's music, but an utterly sorrowful heart-wrenching soul sound; it sings the anxiety of our lonesomeness at the same time as it can fill us with wonder or joy, even peace. Perhaps this is because we live in a time of great dissonance (although we might ask, which time is not?): we prefer the incompletion, the break of the augmented fourth to the harmonic fifth.

The augmented fourth somehow says, without you, I am nowhere, which is, often enough, how existing feels. It is the question posed by Rilke's First Duino Elegy: "If I cry out, who among the company of angels will hear me?"

It is the wail, addressed to the world in the absence of another beside you, of brokenness, of coming undone: myself, I am never enough; I will never add up to anything on my own.

Photo of the loon was taken in northern British Columbia, near Grenville Channel.