An Account of a Voyage on the Charles W. Morgan. Julia Pistell

Transcription

1 An Account of a Voyage on the Charles W. Morgan Julia Pistell This is an original essay written and recorded for the Mystic Seaport archives. Throughout the piece, you ll hear sounds recorded aboard the ship and passages from Moby-Dick. For most of my childhood, I wore my hair in one long braid. Straight and thick, it sat on my back like an anchor, something other than the girls who left their hair down and messy and play-muddled; something other than the girls whose pep was enforced by ponytails; something other than the gymnasts whose buns seemingly kept their whole bodies rigidly in control; something even other than French braids and fishtails, created by moms with acrobatic fingers and time on their hands. My braid was simple, long, heavy. It gave off the correct signal that I was terribly shy. It gave off the correct signal that I read piles and piles of books. And after a certain time I started to think about cutting it off. Jo March had sold her hair for her family, and Mary Martin had cut off her hair to be Peter Pan. But truly, the person I wanted to be most like was not a household name. I wanted to be the heroine in The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, a children s book by Avi about a girl who sails on a merchant ship and gets involved in a mutiny. At the height of the novel, she climbs the into the rigging with her hands gripping the rigging (her hands soft like bloody cream, says one of the sailors, in a line I never forgot), and not too long after that climb and a knife-handling lesson, she finds herself hacking her hair off when it gets in the way of her task of cutting down the foreyard sail in a hurricane. That is what I wanted to do, when I was nine years old and sitting in an armchair in my TV room in New Jersey. I didn t want to be one of those characters on TV who cut off her hair while locked in a bathroom staring in a mirror. I wanted to find a hurricane, join a mutiny, climb into the sky, wrestle a sail, and become a woman by sawing off the symbol of my constraining femininity and throwing it into the wind.

2 It took me twenty-two years to find a ship worthy of the act. The ship was the Charles W. Morgan, and it had been restored by the Mystic Seaport over the course of five years in preparation for the journey. Well, truly, it was 173 years the ship was built in 1841 and used as a whaleship until After that, she was sat in the docks in Mystic, Connecticut, until restoration in the 1970 s. Eventually, the museum culture of the America began to rotate away from the idea that museums were a place to educate yourself by reading a lot of plaques, and rotate more towards the idea of museums as a place to directly experience history. And the Mystic Seaport began a restoration in 2008 that culminated in the ship s 38 th voyage from Connecticut, up the coast to Rhode Island, up around Cape Cod and back again. I heard about the 38 th Voyage because I am still, in some small way, the girl with the braid. Sitting where I never wanted to be sitting the deck of no ship, a cubicle, not even one with a window I got an from a coworker who knew I loved Moby Dick. At least I d advanced enough not to read it in an armchair but on a beach in China, many years ago, and once in a while I bothered my coworkers by reading the first paragraph aloud at my desk, when the only waves I could hear was the lapping of paper coming out of the copier. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people s hats off then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. It was high time. My preferred method of knocking people s hats off was getting entangled in bitchy discussions. It had been a long time since I got lost somewhere where I had no idea what I was doing. And the Morgan is the perfect ship for a Melville lover it s the closest ship to the Peaquod on the water. It was built in the same shipyard as the ship Melville himself sailed on. So I applied, and got

3 into the program or should I say, onboard the ship, and a few months later, was rowing a replica wooden whaleboat in the rain on the Mystic River. (Sound of water/wind) Stand by the braces! Hard down the helm! brace her! Shiver her! shiver her! So; well that! Boats, boats! Soon all the boats but Starbuck s were dropped; all the boat sails set all the paddles playing; with rippling swiftness, shooting to leeward. Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light provs sped through the sea, but only slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves, seemed a noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. with oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails adrift, the three boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick s appearance. This was my training as a 38 th Voyager climbing into the wet boat and grasping a paddle, pulling apace with scientists and scholars. There were about fifty of us there that day, pretending to be sailors. We wore raincoats and boots and pretended to know something about this historic practice. Some people knew more than others the sailors, for instance, who were there as Tall Ship enthusiasts, or the Melville scholars who had pored over every description of every whaleboat in every Melville work. As 38 th Voyagers went, I was certainly the littlest deckhand who had begged his way onboard, or worse, the female passenger with long hair and hands like bloody cream and no idea what she was getting into. As we learned to row a whaleboat, my oar caught a crab, getting out of synch in the water and lurching me off my seat in the boat. Books had brought me here but books couldn t save me now. That day I walked the Seaport s shelled ground and climbed a bit onto the ship, still a museum exhibit tied up at the docks. We were told about the restoration of the ship and the wood. Over time, so much of the wood had been replaced that only about fifteen percent of the original wood remains on the ship. But that s the life of the ship you have the basic structure, the hull, the deck, the masts, the sails, the crew and they get so beaten up that parts and pieces and people have to be

4 replaced throughout its life. That doesn t make the ship any less alive. It occupies the same space it always did, with new materials. When the time came to sail on my leg of the journey, from Proveincetown to Boston, not just row a whaleboat, I made my way on the ferry out to Provincetown. I would be sailing from P-town down around the outskirts of Stellwagen Bank right into Boston harbor. It was supposed to storm upon our departure, and so we were leaving early. I was to meet my sailors at a deli in Provincetown at which I d pre-ordered a seven dollar sandwich. From Moby-Dick: In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable Seaport will frequently offer to view the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign parts. It was Bear Week in P-town and the nondescripts were pretty descript. I ate a plate of oysters and considered getting an anchor tattoo; then downgraded to the desire to get an airbrushed anchor tattoo; then lost interest and got ice cream. So far, so Ishmael. I walked the crowded streets in the rain as women talked on cell phones and packs of vacationers skittered towards covered roofs. Already soaking wet with few changes of clothes, I knew I was a poor sailor already. As I walked up to the deli, a man lurched at me in the parking lot. He was drunk and bedraggled, and I wondered if this was my Queequeg. No. Just my down drunk. Storm s coming tonight! he said, just like in every movie I ve ever seen. I know, I said, gossiping about weather with a man who wandered in parking lots saying storm s coming. Did he say that every night, and tonight was his lucky day, since a storm actually was coming? My fellow sailors were a high school teacher, two Melville scholars, an expert in historic wood, a descendent of the First Peoples who had recently gone on a legal whale hunt, a charcoal artist, a Mystic Seaport archivist, an expert in nautical instruments, and me. Well, them and all of the real sailors, who were of course on the ship and not at a deli. At sunset we boarded the ship. We walked up the gangway and met our crew, young and hearty-looking and completely without interest in the temporary artist

5 sailors. From the moment we were on board, we were in the way. The deck of the ship was mathematically perfect, like an Othello board every time someone made a move, someone else had to counter. Step off that rope. Step off that doorway. Step off that step. Every inch of the ship was designed not for human idling, but for the ship. It was smaller than I expected; more precise not a big movie set, but a place where you shouldn t be unless you know how it worked. Being on the deck of the ship was being inside a machine. If you put your hand somewhere, it would help you to know how to make that hand useful, or else it might as well get caught in the machinery and cut off. That night I wandered on the deck in my bare feet, feeling the rain on the wood. What did it mean to be only fifteen percent original, I wondered? The original material was mostly in the keel and the hull. The wood under my feet wasn t the Morgan s original planks; and my feet weren t the feet of any original sailor, either. The wood wasn t a direct descendent and neither was I. I was just a girl who s read a lot of books, and not even that young girl any more. But was walking the deck, in some small way, a descendent of experience? What I wanted, of course, what I ve always wanted, like so many people who take to the water, was 100 percent experience. I wanted to be transported to the Never-Never-Land of authenticity. I didn t want to watch the other voyager s power point slide show of hunting a whale-- I wanted to smell the blubber. I hated myself for clicking on my flashlight in my bunk below decks, but I would have hated myself more for lighting a candle in this museum of a ship. When I awoke to the ship at sail I kept my eyes closed and imagined that this water was the same water that rocked the whale hunters awake, but of course it wasn t. It had cycled through the atmosphere and come to this shore, reincarnated as a new ocean. And of course I would not truly want the sailing life with its violent slaughter of whales, or loneliness, or sickness, or all the dangers that come with being a sailor. I didn t want to wash up on shore on a coffin, or go drown chasing

6 some huge white beast. And yet I still cried out for EXPERIENCE. Like every person wanted, I suspected. It didn t matter where experience took me. It was not down on any map. True places never are. I spent our sail watching the sails, mostly rolling down, filling up with wind, creaking forward. The deckhands, who had been at this for a couple of months longer than I had, pulled themselves up the rigging and dangled out on the jib. They sang us songs on deck (insert singing clip here) and communicated in the language of the ship, which I had tried and failed to learn. I was still the greenest of cabin boys. (ship audio clip--- hoisting rope) I hoisted rope and became a part of the machine. I ate hardtack and salt pork, I wandered above and below decks. I watched the other ships going by and the land recede on one side and appear on the other. I wondered what Boston would look like coming in. By the afternoon, it was certain that we d sailed ahead of the storm. Our Captain pulled us to calm waters and allowed us, the 38 th Voyagers, to climb the rigging. I was first in line and probably first in fear. I told myself that this was the only time I d get to do this, in my whole life, and that there would be no more opportunities to climb into the rigging on the open sea on the only remaining historic whaleship in the world. The ropes were not historic ropes. I hauled myself up on the ledge of the ship, pulling myself up with my arms. I put one foot on the little whaleboat tied to the side of the Morgan and turned to the rigging. I climbed the ladder as slowly as I could, leaning forward into it. My hands and clothes were covered in tar. I was not, and wouldn t be for a while, clipped in

7 with the harness I was wearing. I could have leaned back and fallen into the Atlantic. One hand, one foot at a time, I climbed up towards the main mast and the untied sails. I reached the top and clipped myself to the rigging as directed. I stared into the sail, its beautiful, taut skin, like a lung breathing in air. Sail after sail after sail was before me on the ship. I turned around. I could have hacked off my braid at that moment. But I was only fifteen percent of the girl I was when I had that fantasy. I had less of the courage I was high up; in the sky; leaning against the wind. Here was the experience of experience. I was not free to leap wildly into the water. Being on a ship is not actually about freedom. It s about a cramped space on a vast, terrifying plane of water; like being in a pod in outer space. A good ship doesn t make you feel very big and powerful. It makes you feel very small. The tiniest gear on a clock, the smallest rope on the edge of a sail. I needed no gesture. I needed no book and no words, even. Besides, I hadn t brought a knife. I stood for a long time on those ropes, facing the sky. The fifteen percent of myself that still remained of the little girl reading Moby-Dick in the armchair was the girl who, even though none were expected that day, looked out to the water for whales. Oh, man! Admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do though, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter, and like the great whale retain, O man! In all seasons a temperature of thine own.