We have a phrase in Oldport, "What New-Yorkers call poverty: to be
reduced to a pony phaeton." In consequence of a November gale, I am
reduced To a similar state of destitution, from a sail-boat to a
wherry; and, like others of the deserving poor, I have found many
compensations in my humbler condition. Which is the more enjoyable,
rowing or sailing? If you sail before the wind, there is the glorious
vigor of the breeze that fills your sails; you get all of it you have
room for, and a ship of the line could do no more; indeed, your very
nearness to the water increases the excitement, since the water swirls
and boils up, as it unites in your wake, and seems to clutch at the low
stern of your sail-boat, and to menace the hand that guides the helm.
Or if you beat to windward, it is as if your boat climbed a liquid
hill, but did it with bounding and dancing, like a child; there is the
plash of the lighter ripples against the bow, and the thud of the
heavier waves, while the same blue water is now transformed to a cool
jet of white foam over your face, and now to a dark whirlpool in your
lee. Sailing gives a sense of prompt command, since by a single
movement of the tiller you effect so great a change of direction or
transform motion into rest; there is, therefore, a certain magic in it:
but, on the other hand, there is in rowing a more direct appeal to your
physical powers; you do not evade or cajole the elements by a cunning
device of keel and canvas, you meet them man-fashion and subdue them.
The motion of the oars is like the strong motion of a bird's wings; to
sail a boat is to ride upon an eagle, but to row is to be an eagle. I
prefer rowing,--at least till I can afford another sail-boat.
What is a good day for rowing? Almost any day that is good for living.
Living is not quite agreeable in the midst of a tornado or an
equinoctial storm, neither is rowing. There are days when rowing is as
toilsome and exhausting a process as is Bunyan's idea of virtue; while
there are other days, like the present, when it seems a mere Oriental
passiveness and the forsaking of works,--just an excuse to Nature for
being out among her busy things. For even at this stillest of hours
there is far less repose in Nature than we imagine. What created thing
can seem more patient than yonder kingfisher on the sea-wall? Yet, as
we glide near him, we shall see that no creature can be more full of
concentrated life; all his nervous system seems on edge, every instant
he is rising or lowering on his feet, the tail vibrates, the neck
protrudes or shrinks again, the feathers ruffle, the crest dilates; he
talks to himself with an impatient chirr, then presently hovers and
dives for a fish, then flies back disappointed. We say "free as birds,"
but their lives are given over to arduous labors. And so, when our
condition seems most dreamy, our observing faculties are sometimes
desperately on the alert, and we find afterwards, to our surprise, that
we have missed nothing. The best observer in the end is not he who
works at the microscope or telescope most unceasingly, but he whose
whole nature becomes sensitive and receptive, drinking in everything,
like a sponge that saturates itself with all floating vapors and odors,
though it seems inert and unsuspicious until you press it and it tells
the tale.
Most men do their work out of doors and their dreaming at home; and
those whose work is done at home need something like a wherry in which
to dream out of doors. On a squally day, with the wind northwest, it is
a dream of action, and to round yonder point against an ebbing tide
makes you feel as if you were Grant before Richmond; when you put
about, you gallop like Sheridan, and the winds and waves become a
cavalry escort. On other days all elements are hushed into a dream of
peace, and you look out upon those once stormy distances as Landseer's
sheep look into the mouth of the empty cannon on a dismantled fort.
These are the days for revery, and your thoughts fly forth, gliding
without friction over this smooth expanse; or, rather, they are like
yonder pair of white butterflies that will flutter for an hour just
above the glassy surface, traversing miles of distance before they
alight again.
By a happy trait of our midsummer, these various phases of wind and
water may often be included in a single day. On three mornings out of
four the wind blows northwest down our bay, then dies to a calm before
noon. After an hour or two of perfect stillness, you see the line of
blue ripple coming up from the ocean till it conquers all the paler
water, and the southwest breeze sets in. This middle zone of calm is
like the noonday of the Romans, when they feared to speak, lest the
great god Pan should be awakened. While it lasts, a thin, aerial veil
drops over the distant hills of Conanicut, then draws nearer and nearer
till it seems to touch your boat, the very nearest section of space
being filled with a faint disembodied blueness, like that which fills
on winter days, in colder regions, the hollows of the snow. Sky and sea
show but gradations of the same color, and afford but modifications of
the same element. In this quietness, yonder schooner seems not so much
to lie at anchor in the water as to anchor the water, so that both
cease to move; and though faint ripples may come and go elsewhere on
the surface, the vessel rests in this liquid island of absolute calm.
For there certainly is elsewhere a sort of motionless movement, as
Keats speaks of "a little noiseless noise among the leaves," or as the
summer clouds form and disappear without apparent wind and without
prejudice to the stillness. A man may lie in the profoundest trance and
still be breathing, and the very pulsations of the life of nature, in
these calm hours, are to be read in these changing tints and shadows
and ripples, and in the mirage-bewildered outlines of the islands in
the bay. It is this incessant shifting of relations, this perpetual
substitution of fantastic for real values, this inability to trust your
own eye or ear unless the mind makes its own corrections,--that gives
such an inexhaustible attraction to life beside the ocean. The
sea-change comes to you without your waiting to be drowned. You must
recognize the working of your own imagination and allow for it. When,
for instance, the sea-fog settles down around us at nightfall, it
sometimes grows denser and denser till it apparently becomes more solid
than the pavements of the town, or than the great globe itself; and
when the fog-whistles go wailing on through all the darkened hours,
they seem to be signalling not so much for a lost ship as for a lost
island.
How unlike are those weird and gloomy nights to this sunny noon, when I
rest my oars in this sheltered bay, where a small lagoon makes in
behind Coaster's Harbor Island, and the very last breath and murmur of
the ocean are left outside! The coming tide steals to the shore in
waves so light they are a mere shade upon the surface till they break,
and then die speechless for one that has a voice. And even those rare
voices are the very most confidential and silvery whispers in which
Nature ever spoke to man; the faintest summer insect seems resolute and
assured beside them; and yet it needs but an indefinite multiplication
of these sounds to make up the thunder of the surf. It is so still that
I can let the wherry drift idly along the shore, and can watch the life
beneath the water. The small fry cluster and evade between me and the
brink; the half-translucent shrimp glides gracefully undisturbed, or
glances away like a flash if you but touch the surface; the crabs
waddle or burrow, the smaller species mimicking unconsciously the hue
of the soft green sea-weed, and the larger looking like motionless
stones, covered with barnacles and decked with fringing weeds. I am
acquainted with no better Darwinian than the crab; and however clumsy
he may be when taken from his own element, he has a free and floating
motion which is almost graceful in his own yielding and buoyant home.
It is so with all wild creatures, but especially with those of water
and air. A gull is not reckoned an especially graceful bird, but yonder
I see one, snowy white, that has come to fish in this safe lagoon, and
it dips and rises on its errands as lightly as a butterfly or a
swallow. Beneath that neighboring causeway the water-rats run over the
stones, lithe and eager and alert, the body carried low, the head
raised now and then like a hound's, the tail curving gracefully and
aiding the poise; now they are running to the water as if to drink, now
racing for dear life along the edge, now fairly swimming, then devoting
an interval to reflection, like squirrels, then again searching over a
pile of sea-weed and selecting some especial tuft, which is carried,
with long, sinuous leaps, to the unseen nest. Indeed, man himself is
graceful in his unconscious and direct employments: the poise of a
fisherman, for instance, the play of his arm, the cast of his line or
net,--these take the eye as do the stealthy movements of the hunter,
the fine attitudes of the wood-chopper, the grasp of the sailor on the
helm. A haystack and a boat are always picturesque objects, and so are
the men who are at work to build or use them. So is yonder stake-net,
glistening in the noonday light,--the innumerable meshes drooping in
soft arches from the high stakes, and the line of floats stretching
shoreward, like tiny stepping-stones; two or three row-boats are
gathered round it, with fishermen in red or blue shirts, while one
white sail-boat hovers near. And I have looked down on our beach in
spring, at sunset, and watched them drawing nets for the young herring,
when the rough men looked as graceful as the nets they drew, and the
horseman who directed might have been Redgauntlet on the Solway Sands.
I suppose it is from this look of natural fitness that a windmill is
always such an appropriate object by the sea-shore. It is simply a
four-masted schooner, stranded on a hill-top, and adapting itself to a
new sphere of duty. It can have needed but a slight stretch of
invention in some seaman to combine these lofty vans, and throw over
them a few remodelled sails. The principle of their motion is that by
which a vessel beats to windward; the miller spreads or reefs his
sails, like a sailor,--reducing them in a high wind to a mere
"pigeon-wing" as it is called, two or three feet in length, or in some
cases even scudding under bare poles. The whole structure vibrates and
creaks under rapid motion, like a mast; and the angry vans,
disappointed of progress, are ready to grind to powder all that comes
within their grasp, as they revolve hopelessly in this sea of air.
When the sun grows hot, I like to take refuge in a sheltered nook
beside Goat Island Lighthouse, where the wharf shades me, and the
resonant plash of waters multiplies itself among the dark piles,
increasing the delicious sense of coolness. While the noonday bells
ring twelve, I take my rest. Round the corner of the pier the
fishing-boats come gliding in, generally with a boy asleep forward, and
a weary man at the helm; one can almost fancy that the boat itself
looks weary, having been out since the early summer sunrise. In
contrast to this expression of labor ended, the white pleasure-boats
seem but to be taking a careless stroll by water; while a skiff full of
girls drifts idly along the shore, amid laughter and screaming and much
aimless splash. More resolute and business-like, the boys row their
boat far up the bay; then I see a sudden gleam of white bodies, and
then the boat is empty, and the surrounding water is sprinkled with
black and bobbing heads. The steamboats look busier yet, as they go
puffing by at short intervals, and send long waves up to my retreat;
and then some schooner sails in, full of life, with a white ripple
round her bows, till she suddenly rounds to drops anchor, and is still.
Opposite me, on the landward side of the bay, the green banks slope to
the water; on yonder cool piazza there is a young mother who swings her
baby in the hammock, or a white-robed figure pacing beneath the
trailing vines. Peace and lotus-eating on shore; on the water, even in
the stillest noon, there are life and sparkle and continual change.
One of those fishermen whose boats have just glided to their moorings
is to me a far more interesting person than any of his mates, though he
is perhaps the only one among them with whom I have never yet exchanged
a word. There is good reason for it; he has been deaf and dumb since
boyhood. He is reported to be the boldest sailor among all these daring
men; he is the last to retreat before the coming storm; the first after
the storm to venture through the white and whirling channels, between
dangerous ledges, to which others give a wider berth. I do not wonder
at this, for think how much of the awe and terror of the tempest must
vanish if the ears be closed! The ominous undertone of the waves on the
beach and the muttering thunder pass harmless by him. How infinitely
strange it must be to have the sight of danger, but not the sound!
Fancy such a deprivation in war, for instance, where it is the sounds,
after all, that haunt the memory the longest; the rifle's crack, the
irregular shots of skirmishers, the long roll of alarm, the roar of
great guns. This man would have missed them all. Were a broadside from
an enemy's gunboat to be discharged above his head, he would not hear
it; he would only recognize, by some jarring of his other senses, the
fierce concussion of the air.
How much deeper seems his solitude than that of any other "lone fisher
on the lonely sea"! Yet all such things are comparative; and while the
others contrast that wave-tossed isolation with the cheeriness of home,
his home is silent too. He has a wife and children; they all speak, but
he hears not their prattle or their complaints. He summons them with
his fingers, as he summons the fishes, and they are equally dumb to
him. Has he a special sympathy with those submerged and voiceless
things? Dunfish, in the old newspapers, were often called "dumb'd
fish"; and they perchance come to him as to one of their kindred. They
may have learned, like other innocent things, to accept this defect of
utterance, and even imitate it. I knew a deaf-and-dumb woman whose
children spoke and heard; but while yet too young for words, they had
learned that their mother was not to be reached in that way; they never
cried or complained before her, and when most excited would only
whisper. Her baby ten months old, if disturbed in the night, would
creep to her and touch her lips, to awaken her, but would make no noise.
One might fancy that all men who have an agonizing sorrow or a fearful
secret would be drawn by irresistible attraction into the society of
the deaf and dumb. What awful passions might not be whispered, what
terror safely spoken, in the charmed circle round yonder silent
boat,--a circle whose centre is a human life which has not all the
susceptibilities of life, a confessional where even the priest cannot
hear! Would it not relieve sorrow to express itself, even if unheeded?
What more could one ask than a dumb confidant? and if deaf also, so
much the safer. To be sure, he would give you neither absolution nor
guidance; he could render nothing in return, save a look or a clasp of
the hand; nor can the most gifted or eloquent friendship do much more.
Ah! but suddenly the thought occurs, suppose that the defect of
hearing, as of tongue, were liable to be loosed by an overmastering
emotion, and that by startling him with your hoarded confidence you
were to break the spell! The hint is too perilous; let us row away.
A few strokes take us to the half-submerged wreck of a lime-schooner
that was cut to the water's edge, by a collision in a gale, twelve
months ago. The water kindled the lime, the cable was cut, the vessel
drifted ashore and sunk, still blazing, at this little beach. When I
saw her, at sunset, the masts had been cut away, and the flames held
possession on board. Fire was working away in the cabin, like a live
thing, and sometimes glared out of the hatchway; anon it clambered
along the gunwale, like a school-boy playing, and the waves chased it
as in play; just a flicker of flame, then a wave would reach up to
overtake it; then the flames would be, or seem to be, where the water
had been; and finally, as the vessel lay careened, the waves took
undisturbed possession of the lower gunwale, and the flames of the
upper. So it burned that day and night; part red with fire, part black
with soaking; and now twelve months have made all its visible parts
look dry and white, till it is hard to believe that either fire or
water has ever touched it. It lies over on its bare knees, and a single
knee, torn from the others, rests imploringly on the shore, as if that
had worked its way to land, and perished in act of thanksgiving. At low
tide, one half the frame is lifted high in air, like a dead tree in the
forest.
Perhaps all other elements are tenderer in their dealings with what is
intrusted to them than is the air. Fire, at least, destroys what it has
ruined; earth is warm and loving, and it moreover conceals; water is at
least caressing,--it laps the greater part of this wreck with
protecting waves, covers with sea-weeds all that it can reach, and
protects with incrusting shells. Even beyond its grasp it tosses soft
pendants of moss that twine like vine-tendrils, or sway in the wind. It
mellows harsh colors into beauty, and Ruskin grows eloquent over the
wave-washed tint of some tarry, weather-beaten boat. But air is
pitiless: it dries and stiffens all outline, and bleaches all color
away, so that you can hardly tell whether these ribs belonged to a ship
or an elephant; and yet there is a certain cold purity in the shapes it
leaves, and the birds it sends to perch upon these timbers are a more
graceful company than lobsters or fishes. After all, there is something
sublime in that sepulture of the Parsees, who erect near every village
a dokhma, or Tower of Silence, upon whose summit they may bury their
dead in air.
Thus widely may one's thoughts wander from a summer boat. But the
season for rowing is a long one, and far outlasts in Oldport the stay
of our annual guests. Sometimes in autumnal mornings I glide forth over
water so still, it seems as if saturated by the Indian-summer with its
own indefinable calm. The distant islands lift themselves on white
pedestals of mirage; the cloud-shadows rest softly on Conanicut; and
what seems a similar shadow on the nearer slopes of Fort Adams is in
truth but a mounted battery, drilling, which soon moves and slides
across the hazy hill like a cloud.
I hear across nearly a mile of water the faint, Sharp orders and the
sonorous blare of the trumpet That follows each command; the horsemen
gallop and wheel; suddenly the band within the fort strikes up for
guard-mounting, and I have but to shut my eyes to be carried back to
warlike days that passed by,--was it centuries ago? Meantime, I float
gradually towards Brenton's Cove; the lawns that reach to the water's
edge were never so gorgeously green in any summer, and the departure of
the transient guests gives to these lovely places an air of cool
seclusion; when fashion quits them, the imagination is ready to move
in. An agreeable sense of universal ownership comes over the
winter-staying mind in Oldport. I like to keep up this little semblance
of habitation on the part of our human birds of passage; it is very
pleasant to me, and perhaps even pleasanter to them, that they should
call these emerald slopes their own for a month or two; but when they
lock the doors in autumn, the ideal key reverts into my hands, and it
is evident that they have only been "tenants by the courtesy," in the
fine legal phrase. Provided they stay here long enough to attend to
their lawns and pay their taxes, I am better satisfied than if these
estates were left to me the whole year round.
The tide takes the boat nearer to the fort; the horsemen ride more
conspicuously, with swords and trappings that glisten in the sunlight,
while the white fetlocks of the horses twinkle in unison as they move.
One troop-horse without a rider wheels and gallops with the rest, and
seems to revel in the free motion. Here also the tide reaches or seems
to reach the very edge of the turf; and when the light battery gallops
this way, it is as if it were charging on my floating fortress. Upon
the other side is a scene of peace; and a fisherman sings in his boat
as he examines the floats of his stake-net, hand over hand. A white
gull hovers close above him, and a dark one above the horsemen, fit
emblems of peace and war. The slightest sounds, the rattle of an oar,
the striking of a hoof against a stone, are borne over the water to an
amazing distance, as if the calm bay amid its seeming quiet, were
watchful of the slightest noise. But look! in a moment the surface is
rippled, the sky is clouded, a swift change comes over the fitful mood
of the season; the water looks colder and deeper, the greensward
assumes a chilly darkness, the troopers gallop away to their stables,
and the fisherman rows home. That indefinable expression which
separates autumn from summer creeps almost in an instant over all.
Soon, even upon this Isle of Peace, it will be winter.
Each season, as winter returns, I try in vain to comprehend this
wonderful shifting of expression that touches even a thing so
essentially unchanging as the sea. How delicious to all the senses is
the summer foam above yonder rock; in winter the foam is the same, the
sparkle as radiant, the hue of the water scarcely altered; and yet the
effect is, by comparison, cold, heavy, and leaden. It is like that
mysterious variation which chiefly makes the difference between one
human face and another; we call it by vague names, and cannot tell in
what it lies; we only know that when expression changes, all is gone.
No warmth of color, no perfection of outline can supersede those
subtile influences which make one face so winning that all human
affection gravitates to its spell, and another so cold or repellent
that it dwells forever in loneliness, and no passionate heart draws
near. I can fancy the ocean beating in vague despair against its shores
in winter, and moaning, "I am as beautiful, as restless, as untamable
as ever: why are my cliffs left desolate? why am I not loved as I was
loved in summer?"