the Helmsman in the Storm
The helmsman holds tight to the helm in a burst of sea spray over the ship’s gunwale and glares out over the bow. Through foils of rain, he can see still darker clouds of a thunderhead crest the horizon. He is moved to vexation at the sight before him and runs his hand over his face and beard, brushing away the accumulation of briny mist.
Out in the distance, the burgeoning storm seems to hold there upon the fault between firmament and ocean like a cavalry line awaiting the charge — the riders of whom are mantled in great black cloaks and the sheen upon their black-coated ponies shows like the flashes of lightening across the heaving ocean.
A swell washes over the deck and the few crew members that have not already gone below scramble for the life lines as the ship descends into the void beyond the wave’s peak. “Trice the sails and put out the sea anchor,” cries the helmsman as he catches the chief mate’s gaze. The chief mate looks back with a questioning note in his eye, not out of mistrust. The two men have pared down that cumbersome need of words through long acquaintance with each others peculiarities. The questioning look is itself a question the helmsman grasps at once. “Face her in aweather!” calls back the helmsman, for that is the answer. The chief mate nods and grabs the nearest man by the collar and pulls him to his feet. He is giving him orders, though the helmsman is somewhat surprised that, at little more than a half dozen paces, he can hear nothing beyond the unbated ferocity of the windblown seas.
The two men enlist the remaining crew to their duties as they make their way about the rigging. All the while, the bombardment of thunderclaps grows hard and crisp in the ear as if it were the sound of artillery ordnance pinpointing the ship as a target.
The ocean itself is a dark, inky blue with so little light to reflect back from a dark-turned sky. No sun. No stars. The world of the helmsman and his crew is now no more night than it is day. And yet, the distant apparition of horsemen continue to hold the line awaiting that fateful command in a mad tossing of shapes as they plunge and surge at this goading of strife. For a moment more they remain at the cusp of the charge as if to gather these final loose ends of gravity. But that is a lie, an illusion staged by ocean and distance. It has never stopped and the ocean heaves again and the squall is barreling across the open water.
A bleak world of utter uncertainty awaits the helmsman and his crew. How many hours or days might they be subject to the whims of the ocean? And if they survive, what ship, if any, might there be that awaits them on the other side?
One hundred and twenty days from Nantucket, from Cardiff, from the Ivory Coast. Ah, surely, here a destination is but a figment of the imagination to be mulled over by the light of the sun with map and caliper in hand. Such tableware has little use upon the imminent churning of the storming sea. There is nothing to do but to ride it out and hold the tiller against the rushing currents of that which is greater than he.
How quickly the command of the helmsman’s story is disrupted by the same ocean forces that he would otherwise depend for the traversing of its surfaces. And even in the worst storms, and yet even in the fairest of weather, he will still depend on those very same forces both to secure his survival and to usher him to safety. Alas, the nature of the helmsmen’s will be what is at stake in the crucible of the storm, for no force of will will see him through a storm that could and would stove his ship in at the merest loss of composure and vigilance for the changing undulations of an entire world that has turned on him and threatens to swallow him whole.
The helmsman looks out over the bow, once again, aghast at the rolling ocean before him and, now, takes note of himself because the helmsman knows that he will survive the storm not by being master of the storm but by being master of himself. For the same forces that bare him safe passage to fortune and fortuity are the same forces that threaten his life and by which he depends for his survival.
Although, he could have also just stayed home.
But, perhaps, it is these grim disruptions of a story that would otherwise be so very neatly plotted for which he lives.
