November, A Wake…

A stab at a story

Low Tide, oil on canvas, 2021-23

A Wake…

This morning… hard to say when it began. A hidden full moon set behind a heavy overcast that reached all the way across the sky to obscure any signs of sunrise. A bright night merged into a dull day.

The sea… An old swell emerging out of the haze and rolling away beneath us. Its surface smooth, reflecting a misty sky. A perfect fun-house mirror when I looked down over the side. My face contorted, exploding into shards and contracting down to a single dot before slipping out of sight on the rising roll.

We lay at the center of this void reflected in all its emptiness upon this glassy sea. The breeze fell away with last evening’s sunset. After a few hours of fitful slatting we dropped sails and secured the yards and booms. The costs of chafe outweighed any possible benefit of a few feet of fitful progress.

It’s hard to say when we first noticed our companion. I don’t know if it was that faint, slippery rustling sound; almost like labored breathing or the tossing and turning of a fevered sleeper; we heard in the night without being able to pinpoint its source. Or, if it was the slow amplification of its scent as the sweet, oily sea-slick smell… that smell of life, of plankton, and fresh blood and fat. The smell released from small fry cut to pieces in a feeding frenzy. It gathers in wind-slicks as the full, heady exhalation of a healthy, living sea. A musky scent between the smell of food and sex. Always carrying a hint of ammoniac guano. A hint of the other side of this cycle of appetite and decay.

Well before dawn this smell deepened and broadened. It grew to engulf our atmosphere. It penetrated every nook and cranny below decks. On a warm, quiet night like this, we tend to sleep on deck, finding a cozy nest wherever we can. One at a time, waking out of faintly disturbing dreams, we each sought some spot where we might find relief.

To the watch-keeper, sitting aft by the tied-off tiller, this coming and going was a welcome diversion. Something to focus on in all that stillness. Something besides the growing stench….

By the time it was fully light… as far as it got and likely would get all day if this calm went on as it promised to. A slight thump from under our bow brought a lookout forward, soon joined by a tangle of others rising from a sleepless off-watch. We were all still slow to accommodate to this shadow of a day.

At least the mystery was revealed. At least as far as Arthur was concerned. Pushing his way gently forward to the rail, one hand on the forestay and the other on young Thomas’ shoulder, he said, “So that’s it. A dead whale.”

It was news to the younger people who took his proclamation with mixed feelings. In one way it was a relief. This mass of jellied pinks and dirty white bobbing on the swell with frilly, lace-like edges fanning the water; buoyed-up by coils of distended intestines; knotted and swollen and veined in ghastly greens and bruised violet tones. The whole thing had been indecipherable. Its sheer size and broad bulk, the incongruity of its presence, nudging the cutwater; brought an undefined dread. Along with queasiness; first inspired by the smell as it grew stronger through the late night hours and then by this visual confirmation. A confrontation with death and decay on an unimaginable scale. His simple statement, “A dead whale.” Brought the comfort of a name to this inchoate mass spread out before us.

Then, almost immediately, our vague fears as to what this monster might have been were replaced by a gigantic pity for what this misshapen thing had once been; but was no more. We had all had some acquaintance with whales. For most of us these had been brief glimpses of a concentrated agency moving briskly at a distance. Hinted at by a sliver of shiny black or dull gray wheeling across the sea. Punctuated pulses, vaporous spouts, an explosive expulsion and sharp intake of a gigantic breath. These hints: of length, of force, and of breadth; each way beyond anything we had ever encountered before; brought forth an upwelling of joy in us that life on this tremendous scale could; and still does; exist.

As with any confrontation with death close-up, it was hard to connect this putrid mass with such beings. We can speak of a loss of vitality; but at this scale, we could barely conjure this immense loss in our mind’s eye. Our image of a living whale collided with this accumulation of inert, dead, and corrupted matter rising high out of the water at an arm’s length from our deck. It sat much higher than a living whale would; buoyed by gasses distending its membranous cavities to near bursting and filling our nostrils, mouths,… even tainting the exhalations of our own breaths. A truly vertiginous experience.

We stood in silence. Each lost in absorbing our contact with this unexpected and gruesomely fascinating fact laid out before us.

Nausea is never far-off when out at sea. A night and now a day rolling fitfully to an erratic and persistent swell in a flat calm was bad enough. Add this queasy odor, inescapable, bringing the taste of bile to our lips; made it more than a distant possibility. Staring at this undulating mass of putrefaction, and then, in a dizzying moment of recognition, discovering the gross outlines and broad expanse of a liver the size of a cow. A gall bladder the size of a basketball; distended, leaking brown-bile that lapped across tattered and shredded flanks of flesh before diluting and spreading out in a rainbow sheen to cover the surface of the sea and splash dark smears of grease onto our topsides with every roll. It was more than we could take.

In a wretched conviviality of shared nausea; once one of us had leaned out over the side and heaved; it wasn’t long before we were all doing it.

A blessed relief. We all shared. After living so close, so long, we had few compunctions of vain privacy left. We certainly had none after this. As with a brotherhood of drunkards we lay sprawled, arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder, impervious to any concern over sharing our exhausted state.

I don’t know how long we lay there. When I returned to some semblance of torpid consciousness Arthur was gone. And so were most of the others. I found, as the oldest aboard, that I was now left in the company of some of our youngest crew. Sarah and little John sprawled, leaning against the bulwarks. The continuing roll…. I had long-ago given up the wasted effort of ever wishing away anything the sea inflicted on us. It would be a ludicrous conceit. As unprofitable as wishing for the suspension of gravity! Through the gaping eye of Avalon’s hawse-hole I caught sight of white and pink, bruises and bile, as we rolled down. Followed by clean blank glowing mists as we rolled up on the other side of a swell.

I took to avoiding this eye, this vantage on our world, once I broke with its mesmerizing gaze. No one spoke. No one wanted to even acknowledge each others presence.

Time… The phrase, Time heals all. Came to mind, a comforting mantra.

I realized this was what we were doing, spending time. What we’d been doing since our companion’s presence had made itself felt. We officiated at a wake of sorts. A gigantic wake… of the funereal kind. Since lying there wallowing, becalmed; we had no wake of the sailorly sort to speak of.

As with any unbearable pain, or sorrow, or even simply a distasteful circumstance… here magnified to gargantuan proportions so as to overwhelm all our faculties’ attempts to put this event into proportion compared to any physical pain or emotional anguish we had ever had or could ever encounter. This wound in us could only be cured by time.

And not time of our choosing. This would end when it ended and no sooner.

I did hear later from Cara that Abby and Paul, and a few of the other young people, had gone to Arthur proposing to tow Avalon out of range. They were frustrated and even angered by his refusal to consider it.

They didn’t understand his reluctance. I don’t know that I did either….

Maybe it was a recognition that we needed to make an act of penance? Spend a day in contemplation, in nauseated contemplation of life and death, of complicity and accident?

I don’t know.

But we remained in this macabre embrace for the rest of the day.

As dusk fell the setting sun forced its way through a crack in the overcast. Colors, not dissimilar to those of our friend… we did feel a certain closeness by then. What else could we do but embrace what we could not change?

Beginning in a darkened smudge, obscuring the bright mirrored surface of the sea, a breath of air pushed its way in from the North. We jumped to work, resetting sail and trimming to meet a breeze we had wished for for so long to arise.

We pirouetted completely around, carving a full circle to clockwise and then, jibing; made another to counter it before, with a chuckle along our flank, growing ripples seemed to push us into motion.

Our companion held on. He… yes, we knew it was a he…. The proof was hard to mistake once we adjusted our minds to its scale….

Avalon heeled and pressed and eventually, in a series of tears, an abrupt untangling of viscera with echoes of cutting the Gordian Knot; she leapt ahead. Free once more.

In the dying light we left the whale’s remains astern. As we departed, he attracted a halo of sea-birds, drawn to the scent riding down the growing breeze.

It wasn’t until we jibed away; unnecessarily, if judged solely on our need to hold an intended course; that we finally broke free of this final tie and found clean air.

The sun set. Venus fell after it into the sea as stars broke out above with the gathering darkness and the increasing clarity of the sky. The moon; when it rose an hour later; left a glittering white path across a black and well ruffled sea.

But even then, closing my mouth and exhaling through my nose… as though testing some fine vintage…. I could still taste our recent companion on my breath.

Its smell is a taste whose memory I still carry with me. A taste of death, that is certain; but also a taste of the promise of life. So long as there are lives as large as this; there will be vigils such as ours. Wakes to be kept.

A wake is a time to meditate on the sorrows of passing; but also, a time of prodigious appetite. We found it hard to swallow anything that day; but for the birds who gathered over that massive corpse? It was a feast! To them and to the sharks who had and would again tear away at this mass…. And finally, to blind creatures, denizens of the deep-sea-floor who would silently gather over what to them was “manna from heaven!” We had all been invited to a grand celebration, a feast of life.

And so it was. And so it will be. At least that’s my silent prayer. That in our lifetimes, there will continue to be such events. That this… although I may never witness another myself. Not be the last such great passing.

This thought was there too. It’s still here with me now. Along with that taste, that scent, memories of that sight.